Why Do You Write? (2)

The world comes into focus when I sit down to write. As I write, and rewrite, what I mean to say becomes clearer and clearer, to me and to anyone who reads the words. Writing feels very much like having a meaningful conversation with another person, an unhurried exchange with no regretted, blurted word, as little ambiguity as possible, the endless chance to make things as clear as they can be made, nothing that can’t be fixed before it’s a problem. Writing and careful editing can make everything more understandable, which in itself is a beautiful thing.

Writing feels like a talk where everyone is listened to, all confusion is heard and responded to thoughtfully, every complexity clarified. This is rare in conversation, sadly, and we fondly recall those conversations where we take the time to really hear and are listened to this way. I feel the embrace of this kind of intimate talk virtually every time I sit down to write. It matters little to me, as I write, that very few people, or no people, will read a particular piece. The conversation goes on in any case, ready to be joined at any time.

What is it, exactly, that is spurring me to write today? What do I want to talk with you about? Once you give your thoughts a title (an excellent suggestion from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. I read, and took to heart, as a sprout) it becomes much easier to follow them, to corral them, to get the flow of them to make sense. Today I am writing about why we write, though, of course, I have little insight into why YOU write.

I speak for myself, obviously, as I write these words. I’m certain that many of you experience a similar feeling of connection to others when you sit down to write. This feeling is particularly precious in our atomized, virtual world where much of our communication is done in short text bursts or other digitized interactions, without the nuances of eye contact or body language. The conversational/connection angle of writing and rewriting will resonate with those of you who are motivated the same way I am.

Vonnegut said he always wrote imagining his bright, well-read sister’s reaction. If he could picture her shaking her head over something he wrote, that passage would have to be rewritten until it met her high standards, or tossed. When I write, I sometimes picture a literate stranger, in India, China, or the Ukraine, and strive to make my prose as clear and my train of thought as focused as I can. I also sometimes picture my mother’s reactions when I write, she was a keen appreciator of good writing.

When I was a boy, I used to write much more emotionally, driven by the mistaken belief that I could include everything I’d ever felt, thought or learned in the piece I was writing. I was driven by a strong need to sum everything up every time I sat down to write. I have heard this impulse compared to trying to hit a mammoth home run every time up. It took time to adjust my expectations, get better control of my swing, to learn that making good contact is the point of this game. It took time to learn to choose one thing to focus on at a time. That’s where Vonnegut’s advice comes in so handy. The universe swirls, an infinite multi-dimensional kaleidoscope, in constant, frenetic motion, making it impossible to focus on the giant themes we often feel up against. Unless you focus on one specific thing at a time, and naming that one thing up top helps. Which, of course, is not always as simple a matter as it seems.

For example, I heard a few snippets of some of the speeches at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (mein kampference [1]) in Dallas. The former president, a compulsive liar loved by 39% of Americans, continues to lie about his second term being treacherously stolen from him in a fake election. The faithful do not doubt that his lie (which would, of course, require a national, bipartisan conspiracy against him) is true — if not literally true, based only on evidence, then true in the higher, faith-based sense that true believers believe is a higher truth than the earthly, limited fact-based variant. To verify that his endlessly repeated claim of a stolen election is an audacious, incendiary lie, we need look no further than the many Republicans and Trump-appointed judges who found there was no fraud in the election the Orange Polyp still claims was rigged to steal from the rightful winner, him. To see how provocative and dangerous this lie is, we need look no further than the deadly January 6 riot and the GOP’s continued far-fetched defense of a stirred up insurrectionist mob that violently stormed the Capitol and successfully stopped the peaceful transfer of power for several hours, at the exhortation of the former president and his faithful, like his son Junior, Rudy and Alabama Representative Mo Brooks. Yet, the CPAC crowd [2] drowned the lying speakers in adulation, chose the ex-president by 70% in a poll of who these extremists want to represent their party in 2024. This paragraph would become the seed of a post, after I called it something like “Nazi rallies had nothing on these cute pups!”.

So I realize another reason I write is to digest things that are otherwise indigestible to me and to make my point of view known. Most people I know have little tolerance for discussing the depressing battle over our nation’s soul, they want to relax, enjoy life, be out in nature, eat good food together, not be tortured by someone making an all-too convincing case that we are living in Berlin, 1932. Or the soon to be violently sundered United States of 1860. I can gently judge them without blaming them, I understand their point of view, nobody likes a fucking party pooper, I hate them myself. Here, on the other hand, I can lay things out that would otherwise suffocate me, if left unvented. Writing it out here helps me process things and leaves me able to say much less to friends about the details of this ongoing horror movie we are all living in.

Thoughts lead where they do, and if we follow them carefully we can make the path of those thoughts intelligible. It gives some comfort, at least to me, to be able to see things in perspective. In the case of the paragraph about CPAC, it leads, invariably to certain related thoughts and questions. The MAGA riot actually stopped the function of government, as it was intended to, which is the legal definition of an insurrection, so why is nobody on trial for inciting insurrection? Why have none of the funders ($50,000,000 on advertising alone), organizers and promoters of the attack on the Capitol been indicted for anything? Why are there no senate investigations into senators who actively spread the Big Lie and then actively contested the counting of uncontroversial votes, based on the prevalent Republican belief in the Lie they had helped to spread (Lying’ Ted, you brazen little vampire!)? Same in the House, why no ethics investigations if members were seen conducting tours of the building for the rioters in the days before January 6? Is Merrick Garland, a thoughtful, decent man who cried at his confirmation hearing recounting how this country had saved his family from the Nazis, the right man to face off against our home-grown American Nazis? I’d have loved the even-tempered, fair-minded jurist on the Supreme Court, but I don’t know that he has the stomach to do what must be done to face down the virulent antidemocratic threat we are up against.

I see I’ll have to go where these thoughts lead me today, but I’ll go there later, in another post. Another great feature of writing is that you can leave off wherever it makes sense to leave off, and hours, even days later, pick right up after reading everything you wrote in the previous session. What you have already written leads you directly to your next thought.

Which is a magical thing about reading and writing, along with our human ability to string letter symbols into words which can then be fashioned into expressions of even our most complicated thoughts and feelings. Wow.

Another beautiful thing, you can go back, proof-read, trim, fix, reorganize, restate, clarify, polish, as many times as you need to. I’ll no doubt be back to this post a few times in the next day or two, making little tweaks.

Hey, stop me if I asked you this before: why do you write?

[1]

An obnoxious little (parenthetical) darling, adding nothing, likely subtracting, that I should almost certainly murder …

[2]

reads a bit like it was written by Dr. Bronner, but surely the work of a true patriot:

Why do you write?

People write for different reasons, just like we play music for different reasons. Thinking of music, I know some people who play music for the applause, in hope of fame, dreaming of playing to and impressing large, appreciative audiences and being thought of by others as a real musician. In writing it that way, I see I am passing judgment on them, just for doing the normal, natural thing in a competitive society where all we are is what we can prove to others we do better than most. It also suggests there is another way to think about making beautiful sounds, about writing, about doing anything we love. I will explain.

When you play an instrument to produce the best possible sounds you can on it, you are attuned to it, related to it, and you will always play as well as possible. When you pay attention to your intonation, the dynamics of your notes, how you produce different sounds, which sounds most make you love the instrument in your hands, how you bend the note, or slide to the note, or hammer it from a lower note, you are playing in a universe that has nothing to do with others appreciating it. You play for love of what you are doing, love of the sounds your fingers (or breath) and the instrument are making.

I suspect every great instrumentalist plays because they love the sounds they begin to master, love the instrument that produces the sounds, love the way it interacts with other instruments in the mix. When you are in this zone, nothing else really matters to you. When you play out of this kind of love, you naturally get better and better, because it’s not a matter of practicing to attain a goal, it’s always a matter of joyful play. There are few better feelings than making a beautiful melody sound as beautiful as you can, laying in a harmony or counterpoint line as creatively as you can. There really is no better work.

You play a note on the piano. You can bang it hard, stepping on the sustain pedal, and have it ring like a gong. The instrument is called the pianoforte because it is capable of playing pianissimo (quietly) or forte (strong!). A good player can make a piano whisper too, whenever needed. You can sound some notes loudly and others quietly to achieve all kinds of subtle effects. There is a range of things you can do with the piano’s palette of dynamics that were impossible to do on the instruments that preceded the piano, like its direct ancestor the harpsichord. Writing is the same thing, the range of what you can do with words, lining them up in different ways, loud and soft, for different effects, is limitless.

I’ve been writing since I was a kid, and I’m officially an old man now. I often wrote when I couldn’t understand something, or make myself understood. Though I always spoke well enough, writing was needed. There were things I struggled to express, things I didn’t understand, that only writing, thinking, rewriting, editing, clarifying, could help me grasp. Writing led me to understand things that perplexed me and it allowed me to share what I learned, through the writing itself or talking, in light of what I’d worked out on the page.

What struck me more and more as I wrote every day was the incomparable beauty of clarity. The writers I admire most set things out clearly. If you don’t give the reader all the necessary background, set out concisely so as not to waste her time, you’re not doing anybody any favors. If the context needed to understand a point is missing, ambiguity floods in. There’s enough of that in life; confusion, muddiness and incoherence are the enemies of clear thinking and good expository writing.

My goal when I write is clear exposition, showing what I’m talking about. I cut away anything that interferes with clarity. I sometimes have to murder a darling, resist the impulse to make the words dance, or shimmy, or call attention to themselves. My main thought when I’m reviewing and revising my words is to eliminate ambiguity and misunderstanding. This is particularly important when dealing with a difficult, perplexing subject.

For example, and this example stretches over decades, you are perplexed at an unresolvable contradiction about a parent. In my case my father was very smart, very funny, his politics always favored the underdog, the oppressed, he loved animals and treated them with great tenderness, he was insightful, keenly interested in the world and could be very reassuring when he wanted to be. A wonderful man. At the same time, he was very often irritable, angry, critical and mean. He was an abusive prick to my little sister and a determined enemy to me for most of my life. How do you reconcile these things? How is it possible not to take your father’s seething anger at you personally?

If you internalize this kind of parent’s view of you, the world makes no sense, your life is a painful jumble. A devoted friend of the underdog, a man who believes deep in his soul in human equality, in the right to be free of tyranny, who teaches you to be kind to others, to treat animals with tenderness, snarling over dinner that you’re a venomous snake … WTF?

How do you understand this? You take an insight, like George Grosz’s comment that in order to understand how someone can behave brutally you have to study the humiliation they underwent. You read this line in a biography of Grosz you are reading as you research how this political artist used his talent as a weapon, how he was forced to flee by the Nazis, who would have happily made a gruesome example of him, how he struggled in the US. You started reading about Grosz because your father once compared your drawings to Grosz’s, a compliment you did not take to heart at the time, but one you cherish in hindsight.

You have to study the humiliation that makes a man act with brutality. How do you do this? You can’t really ask the man. One kind of writer would write a novel, create a character she could interrogate, put in different situations, see how he acted, what made him brutal, fill in the imagined humiliation that made the story make sense. I am not this kind of writer, though I love good fiction I’m not drawn to writing it, my attempts over the year have been sketchy. I need actual details to work with directly, things I’ve lived and observed to describe as accurately as I am able.

So I spent many, many hours conversing with my father’s beloved seventeen years older first cousin, Eli. The man was mostly estranged from his own three children and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, the result of his tyrannical insistence on raising them as he saw fit, not as they might have liked to have been raised. He could be very difficult, flew into a rage easily, but also, as with my mother, was very easy for me to placate when he jumped up in anger, backing off just a bit, like I was easing up on the gas pedal.

As easily as Eli’s face turned purple, spittle formed on his lips and he became savage as a leaping panther, he would calm down and return to being a warm, funny, wonderful story-teller. I suppose it was the same dynamic between him and me as the one between my mother and him. They loved each other enthusiastically and fought just as passionately.

As often as he was blind to the needs of others, to his own role in making people miserable, he also had frequent moments of great insight. It was fascinating to watch these two contradictory things marching forward side by side in our conversations. If I’d spent 40 hours talking to him, I’d never have learned what I needed to know. It took hundreds of hours, over the course of dozens of drives up the twisting Sawmill River Parkway to visit him, before he thought to reveal the difficult truth I needed to know about how my father was humiliated, from the time he could stand.

It was a crushing revelation of a mother’s violent abuse of an infant and he made it with all appropriate hesitation and regret to have to tell me, but describing it to me was an act of love that turned a light on in the universe and enabled me to start to let go of much of the pain and anger that had been building in me for decades. It allowed my father, a few years later, to have a son standing next to his deathbed who knew exactly why he felt his life was over by the time he was two. In a sense, it is a miracle my father did only as much damage to my sister and me as he did.

I have mused about this, and Eli’s gift, over the course of a thousand page first draft that is sitting on this blahg, needing another pass to start turning it into a book you could read and extract lessons from for your own life. Click on the subject “Book of Irv” to the right of this post and you will see what I’m talking about.

A word about “by Oinsketta” instead of publicizing my name, Eliot Widaen, as any normal writer would do. When I started this blahg it was to get access to a supposed archive of research on Malcolm X compiled by Manning Marable a scholar who died shortly after (or maybe right before) the publication of his biography of Malcolm X, El Hadj Malik el Shabbaz. I’d read the book in fascination, thinking it was a great and insightful work, and then the critical shit hit the fan. People who loved Malcolm (as my father had, as I do) were outraged by some of Marable’s assertions in the book. I’d seen a reference to an online archive of Marable’s research, went looking for it, found it, logged in and found virtually nothing of use there.

I remember feeling quite disgusted at the “archive”, that the sources of the controversial parts of what Marable had written had apparently gone with him to the grave. Before being able to access the Malcolm research archive site, I had to log in to something called WordPress. I logged in as my late, beloved cat, Oinsketta, created a PIN and was given a blog. That was about ten years ago. I don’t think I can change the author’s name at this point, on the other hand, I never really checked it out. On the other hand, I suppose I don’t really care enough to research it. At the same time, the clock is ticking, and I’m trying to get some of the best of my thousands of pages of writing into publishable form.

Why do you write?

Nazi talking point: there is no systemic racism in American law

A favorite technique of abusers, and their admirers, is to blame the victim. This happens literally all the time. Nobody wants to feel they’re doing something for a shitty reason, we need to feel justified in our actions. So if I beat you to a pulp I have to believe, and convince everybody else, that you richly deserved your beating. My story will include a host of provocations that would have tried the equanimity of Buddha. Sure, you got hit, but look what you did to me over and over leading up to it.

We hear this in defense of deadly police shootings and chokings — “the video doesn’t show what happened right before the officer justifiably reacted with deadly force!” Part of this syndrome is claiming the other party has no right to feel upset or angry about how things are — that they are, in fact, ungrateful fucks who deserve whatever punishment they provoke.

It is easiest to make the argument that there is no systemic racism in America (and therefor it is the fault of angry Blacks when they are met with deadly force) by attacking a theory that lays out how racism is not only an individual belief system, but has long been embedded in American law and law enforcement. A theory making the case that racism in American institutions is not an aberration, it’s the norm.

If you look at disparate results by race (street stops, arrests, police killings of unarmed civilians, long prison sentences, death sentences) you will not win many arguments on this score, based on data, based on the facts.

So it is much better, before the largely uninformed (or deliberately misinformed) jury of public opinion, to attack a law school theory that says our institutions are, to a largely unacknowledged extent, marred by racist assumptions and practices (see, e.g., bloviating Bagpiper Bill Barr‘s asinine ‘argument’ to refute this self-evident truth — a “small handful” of unarmed Blacks are killed by police every year, what’s the big deal?).

The theory’s name plays into the talking point that this theory critiquing racism in American law is itself racist. Critical (mean, carping, negative, often unfair, nobody likes a critic) Race (mentioning race is itself an indication of racism, we’re colorblind!) Theory (an argument supported by facts, a very unfair way to make a point!).

Here is a capsule description of the controversial graduate school theory:

As Nazi piece of shit, pardoned immaterial perjurer Mike “Lock Her UP!” Flynn, caller for martial law to overturn the presidential election, follower of the rabid QAnon conspiracy “theory”, urges his people “where we go one, we go all” — take over all local school boards and stop this BLM/antifa/Commie bullshit in its goddamn tracks before it poisons more of our white Christian youth !!!! The problem is the goddamned colored people who hate us for no reason! They are the racists, not us! That’s why they must not be allowed to vote, and if they do vote, why their votes should not be counted! USA! USA!!!

Makes me wanna holler, it really does.

A few definitions

Some, I’m sure, will recoil from my use of the term Nazi for the public facing Republican party, with the lockstep obstructionist unity we are seeing these days. Highly partisan, sure, taking names and kicking ass, OK, sometimes a bit unfair, even unscrupulous, for sure, using the law to protect friends and prosecute, even persecute, enemies, fair enough, vindictive, all right, lying about an organized, well-financed riot to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, bad, sure, deliberately spreading a deranged lie about a “stolen” election and fundraising on that lie, not good, admittedly. Nazis though? Do I realize what Nazis actually did?

I know very well what Nazis did. They calculatingly used the rage of a suffering populace to fuel a right wing revolution in Germany and install an anti-democratic one-party government. Nazis were pioneers in the now popular technique of the Big Lie — an audacious and incendiary lie (Biden, the Clintons and Tom Hanks all fuck children and drink their blood, BLM and antifa stole your president from you!!!) to keep the rage and fear levels high. They employed street violence (brown shirt squads, kicking ass and taking names) which they defended as necessary to save the nation from radical leftists who wanted to destroy Germany. They called for the execution of all critics of Nazism (and soon got around to doing it). They had the backing of many of Germany’s top industries, who feared socialist reforms in poverty-stricken post-WWI Germany more than they did street violence in the name of the free market, militarization and, soon, vastly increased profit from Nazi government slave labor programs and the like. They instituted loyalty pledges and purged all non-Nazis from public positions, civil service, professorships, medicine, law. They went along, step by step, first “euthanizing” people in mental hospitals, then conducting nationwide pogroms against a hated minority, then taking the citizenship away from classes of citizens, then detaining them, confiscating their property, deporting now stateless “resident aliens”, etc. It was years until they had everyone ready for what they became famous for during the last three years of the war, high tech mechanized mass murder of hated subhumans. The Nazi one-party police state advanced step by step, with the support of millions of purposefully deluded Germans and the willing connivance of a fully Nazi judiciary.

So when I refer to these motherfuckers, fond of calling their Democratic colleagues “brown shirts” and Nazis (for crimes like trying to force people to take safety precautions during a highly infectious pandemic), well, I have to call a party committed to a series of absolute falsehoods (no systemic racism in US, bipartisan conspiracy to defraud the never defeated president who lost, witch hunts with no basis in law or fact, Capitol riot was a totally legal peaceful protest, taxation of the rich kills jobs, a screaming need to pass restrictive voting laws to defend “election integrity,” mask mandate = tyranny, vaccine = Nazism, etc.) and slavishly devoted to a deranged leader what they actually are: Nazis.

Some of them (Stephen Miller, for example) are literally the same as their Nazi forebears, driven by hatred and a radical desire to reshape the world according to their passionate prejudices. Most of the others, the moral mediocrities who make this scary moment possible, like many of the original Nazi party members, are simply ambitious careerists who calculate that the Nazi juggernaut is worth getting on if they want to attain and keep power.

Though he has lied about it, the former president’s first wife (he paid women he cheated on his third wife with to dummy up — no crime, no crime! His first wife retracted the claim that he raped her toward the end of their doomed marriage, retracted!!) revealed that he kept a book of Hitler’s collected speeches in a special cabinet near his bed. A friend always said his speeches, including his use of derisive, biting “humor” to reduce his many enemies to subhuman status, were remarkably similar to Hitler speeches he’d heard. I always said the clown was more like Mussolini, a strutting, posing, incompetent braggart who regards himself as a genius. Events have proved my friend was closer to the truth than I was.

In fairness to the former president, his ambitious rags to riches German born grandfather’s nationality and criminal instincts (he wound up deported from Germany) do not suggest any Nazi tendencies and, besides, he died in 1918 (of the last pandemic) before the formation of the National German Socialist Workers Party (NSDAP).

The same applies to his driven father, there is no proof that he attended a Klan rally in Queens as a young man because he agreed with their racist worldview. He may have gone as a mere spectator, the police arrest report is sketchy on which it was. It may be pure coincidence that as a wealthy builder of government subsidized (he made millions on tax breaks) middle class housing he refused to rent to Blacks and Hispanics, a practice that was not illegal until the Fair Housing Act of 1968 made it so. Roy Cohn got him out of that case, by settling the federal discrimination lawsuit with no admission of deliberate wrongdoing in trying to honestly preserve the segregation of his working class apartment complexes. So, you know, fair is fair.

Who are the most hated enemies of the modern Republican party and the armed militants who support the former president? Anti-fascists. I rest my case, boys and girls. And God bless these United Shaysssssh.

Hiding the truth

Every shameful practice, done by individuals or governments, is generally denied, hidden, explained away, recast as something else, blamed on “leakers” and vicious disloyalty. Often the exact opposite of what actually happened is promoted as the true story. This new false story can become a galvanizing battle cry, or the last stand of personal integrity (by the liar).

“Remember the Alamo!” is a great battle cry from American history, it mobilized the nation to fight a war against tyranny. In that story two hundred brave freedom loving Americans made a valiant stand, outnumbered ten to one by the Mexican tyrant’s army, and fought to the last man (except for Davy Crockett, who surrendered and was later barbarously executed by the Mexicans). The Americans who died at the Alamo mission became martyrs for the cause of a war against Mexico to conquer and seize a giant tract of Mexican land for the United States.

The real story of what actually led up to the doomed stand-off at the Alamo is a bit different from the myth. Americans were allowed by Mexico to settle in the northern Mexican area known as Texas. Mexico liked having a buffer against hostile Indian tribes, the Americans liked free land. They brought slaves, grew cotton, grew wealthy, everything was fine. Until 1830 when Mexico outlawed slavery. Americans reacted violently to this outrage against freedom. You see how this is going?

A full-blown war with Mexico a decade or so later, to the rallying cry of “Remember the Alamo!”, territory seized for the USA, slavery continues in Texas, Texas secedes from the union 15 years later and Texans fight the US government in their glorious ongoing campaign for freedom and human dignity.

I once loaned a guy a large sum of money, a short term loan he promised to repay within days. He didn’t pay it back, as promised, and I pressed him, by then needing the money myself. Unknown to me was that he’d borrowed money from all of his friends (most soon to become former friends), including a very wealthy guy I knew well. He explained that the rich guy insisted on being paid back first, and that he was working his way down the list, to me. I told him I’d talk to the rich guy, explain that I needed to be repaid before him. I was pretty sure the wealthy guy would understand my situation (it turned out he didn’t, being a wealthy guy).

The reaction of the guy who owed me the money should have told me the whole story about him. “I can’t believe you’d be such a rat, such a fucking pussy, to embarrass me like that. You have no respect for privacy, you have no character. What a fucking whiner you are. Do not talk to him about this, it’s between you and me. If you tell him, if you betray my trust, I’ll be really pissed off.”

Years later he would max out his dead father’s credit cards for cash, bringing his wife his “pay” every week, pretending for a year to be going to work every morning when he was actually living off his dead father’s credit cards. As you can imagine, he made every attempt to hide his scam, make it look like he was actually working. When it was discovered by his wife, he had many incoherent reasons for his criminality.

A true story can be talked about, learned from. A fake story, or a buried story, is a dead end. The details of what actually happened can be discussed and the issues they raise can be resolved. The details of a myth that never remotely happened lead only to ignorant opinions and stupid decisions based on the need to keep telling the lie.

Every abuser tells his victim a story that shifts blame from himself to the person abused. “If you didn’t have such a big fucking mouth, I wouldn’t have to shut it for you.” “You want to blame me, but you should look at your own infuriating behavior, then you’ll see who’s really at fault” and so on. As long as the true details of exactly what happened are never discussed, as long as I don’t mention an inconvenient detail like you bloodied my head with a stick because you flew into a rage, we don’t have a problem. “How is it my fault that you fell down and hit yourself in the face with the ground six or seven times? Fucking grow up…”

So we have pugnacious culture warriors, the Bill Barr types (fuck that fucking bagpiping fucking windbag), who smugly insist that angry blacks have nothing to be angry or even upset about, that statistically more unarmed whites than blacks are killed every year by cops, only a small handful of unarmed blacks are killed by police anyway, and whatever other freshly pulled out of the ass talking points his type can spout. “Why talk about police violence against those murderous fucking savages when they’re killing each other like the fucking animals they are? Let’s be honest, isn’t the real problem Blacks?”

In the telling of this type, American history has been one long, unblemished march toward a more perfect nation, based on the unalienable human rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of wealth. To them a simple answer suffices for all the carping, unAmerican critics of how we, as a nation, conduct, and have conducted, ourselves. The self-evident truth that “all men are created equal” should be the end of this Communist propaganda about a country that supposedly oppressed Blacks (it was the Democrats!), making racist laws for a century after the end of slavery that shamed even Mr. Hitler’s top lawyers, slaughtered indigenous people (they attacked us first!), villainized immigrants (dirty!) marginalized women (“all MEN are created equal, duh!”) fought a series of wars on the shakiest of grounds (freedom on the march!), etc.

Now we have non-profit “think tanks”, funded by a handful of right wing billionaires, who, in order to mainstream a narrative more friendly to them, write model legislation to make history denial enforceable by law. If teachers are critical of some of the counterfactual claims of America’s most powerful, well, maybe those teachers shouldn’t be working with young people. Slavery ended 156 years ago, why are we still talking about slavery? The Nazis were defeated 76 years ago, why are we still talking about Nazism? Hitler wasn’t all bad anyway, he had a great economic plan while he was getting the German war economy up and running again, he was a brilliant job creator. Sure, he may have killed a few too many Jews, but look at them… they hated Hitler without mercy…

Now we read that wealthy right wingers, who are furious that the tax records of their fellow billionaires — showing many pay virtually no income tax– were illegally “leaked.” The scandal is not the often legal tax avoidance of the very wealthy and corporations, the scandal is that some piece of shit made it public. You cannot raise taxes on the rich. You also can’t give more money to the IRS for enforcement, to catch wealthy tax cheats and put more money into the public coffers because… that’s Communism, and partisan, racist fuckery, and… uh, it’s unAmerican to start witch hunts against innocent job creators, philanthropists, the best of the best… and… uh… [1]

The main thing is, if you have a story that makes you look bad, rewrite that shit to make yourself look good. The only alternative is the things you have carefully hidden coming to light, inducing shame, and anger, even violence (not to mention accountability, God forbid!), and who needs any of that shit?

Investigators who looked into the use of federal force against peaceful protesters right before Trump’s photo op at the church didn’t interview the man who ordered the use of force.
Nothing to fucking see here!

[1] from accursed Jeff Bezos’s mouthpiece:

Over the past decade, persistent budget cuts have hurt the IRS’s ability to conduct audits, including those targeting wealthy and large corporations. Tax experts have expressed alarm that the weakening of the IRS has helped fuel the increase in U.S. income inequality, in part because the rich have more tools to dodge the increasingly weak tax collection agency . . .

. . . “Reports of increased audits, enforcement and reporting requirements raise red flags with our members,” Kuhlman said. “We would urge and encourage instead increased compliance assistance, better customer service and remedying the processing delays.” . . .

. . . The groups leading the opposition to the IRS budget increase include those that have received funds from major conservative donors, including the Mercer Family Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation and Donors Trust, a donor-advised fund that gives to conservative and libertarian causes. One signatory of the letter, Phil Kerpen of American Commitment, worked for five years at Americans for Prosperity, the main political arm of the influential Koch network.

source

Authoritative authoritarianism

This concise definition of “authoritarian” is not as delightful as my all-time favorite definition — squeamish: exhibiting a prudish readiness to be nauseated — but it’s pretty good:

favoring or enforcing strict obedience to authority, especially that of the government, at the expense of personal freedom.

Synonyms are autocratic, despotic, tyrannical, totalitarian, rigid, oppressive, inflexible, and things like that.

I had a friend who was raised by a father who was openly autocratic, the mother fawningly loyal and obedient to her husband’s every firm opinion and summary dictate. The boy never had a chance, he obeyed his father resentfully, feeling helpless to do otherwise. Anger at the way his life had been dominated by his never wrong father drove him to be very much the same way in his own adult life.

I think it’s a fairly typical scenario, which is why you see graphics like this in your internet search results:

Stereotyping, Prejudice & Discrimination - ppt download

The authoritarian personality, in the crudest sense the “bully,” is described this way (as per exhaustive five second internet search):

The authoritarian personality is a personality type characterized by extreme obedience and unquestioning respect for and submission to the authority of a person external to the self, which is realized through the oppression of subordinate people.

Mod 3 authoritarian personality

One of history’s most infamous infallible authoritarians was Germany’s Mr. Hitler, whose word was German law (Fuhrer worte haben Gesetzeskraft!) during the twelve years of his Thousand Year Reich. As a boy he’d been famously abused by his father, a vicious, drunken, petty bureaucrat authoritarian who beat young Adolf regularly, and without mercy, for sport. The same goes for the current leader of the radical right in the USA, our golden-haired poster boy for authoritarian infallibility. He was raised by a certified piece of shit, and it doesn’t appear he got much love from his gold digger mother, either. No severe beatings that we know of, in fact, he seems to have been spoiled as a child, except for the endless psychological torment of being judged harshly as unqualified by the demanding, driven father who groomed you, his reluctant second choice, to take over his empire.

The authoritarian depends on his subjects viewing the world as divided neatly into good and evil with no gray area in between. This black and white worldview makes things easier, and much simpler, for everybody. You can tell at a glance who is friend, and a good person, and who is foe, and a very bad person you can do whatever you want to. Obedience to the wise leader is good, defiance of the leader’s will is evil. Also, any rule the authoritarian makes, he can change at any time, with or without notice.

There are groups whose members can obey and praise the wise leader as much as they like, they will remain hated since they are members of an out-group that can never be equal to the ideal subjects of the authoritarian. The fascist worldview depends on this hated out-group being seen as an existential threat, beyond redemption, an enemy to be treated harshly and pointed to as the reason for the autocrat’s rule. Having a few token members of these despised groups march with the authoritarian is seen as a good thing, since it has the effect of making the authoritarian’s undeniable appeal seem to cross even to the hated out-group.

Not all authoritarians are on the right, by the way, though most of them seem to be. You can have rigid, inflexible, overbearing, bossy types on the right, the left or anywhere in between. They will not allow debate unless all of their rules for debate are followed. You must use certain words only, using the wrong phrases will end the possibility of debate before it begins. Tolerance of opposing views, or views expressed differently than required, is seen as a kind of moral weakness. There are Nazi types among us, as we can see on TV every day, and there are also the same rigidly self-righteous types on the extremest edge of the left.

For the ones on the left, the phrase I like is “there is a guillotine waiting” whenever they fall afoul of the newest orthodoxy. Unlike on the right, autocratic types on the left are subject to being hoisted on their own stinking petards when the political winds change.

They may not be there in the same proportions (American acceptance of autocracy is very high among those who consider themselves conservatives, it is not widely accepted on the left) but there are these intolerant motherfuckers on both sides, often dictating the terms of debate, as this type often seems to, down to the language that may be used in these debates. Some very fine intolerant motherfuckers on both sides, on both sides…

She likes a cozy box

Little Girl, who was Mama Kitten‘s shadow and fellow Driveway Bitch (mother and look-alike daughter were always in the driveway, by the door, ready to shake Sekhnet and me down for treats whenever we came or went) had a brush with death not long ago. She’s fine again now, back to hunting, and nonchalantly dominating her sisters, and seems to prefer a cozy box to the larger ones, sometimes.

July Fourth Masterpiece

Historian Heather Cox Richardson:

And on July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, declaring: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

For all the fact that the congressmen got around the sticky problem of Black and Indigenous enslavement by defining “men” as “white men,” and for all that it never crossed their minds that women might also have rights, the Declaration of Independence was an astonishingly radical document. In a world that had been dominated by a small class of rich men for so long that most people simply accepted that they should be forever tied to their status at birth, a group of upstart legislators clinging to the edge of a continent declared that no man was born better than any other. America was founded on the radical idea that all men are created equal.

What the founders declared self-evident was not so clear eighty-seven years later, when southern white men went to war to guarantee that Black Americans, Indigenous Americans, Chinese, Mexicans, and Irish would be permanently locked into a lower status than whites. In that era, equality had become a “proposition,” rather than “self-evident.” “Four score and seven years ago,” Abraham Lincoln reminded Americans, “our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” In 1863, Lincoln explained, the Civil War was “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

It did, of course. The Confederate rebellion failed. The United States endured, and as people of different races, incomes, genders, and abilities began to demand that the nation honor its founding principles, Americans began to expand the idea that all men are created equal.

But just as in the 1850s, we are now, once again, facing a rebellion against the idea of equality, as a few wealthy men seek to reshape America into a nation in which certain people are better than others.

The men who adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, pledged their “Lives, [their] Fortunes and [their] sacred Honor” to defend the idea of human equality, however limited they were in executing it. Ever since then, Americans from all walks of life have sacrificed their own fortunes, honor, and even their lives for that principle. Lincoln reminded Civil War Americans of those sacrifices when he urged the people of his era to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Words to live by in 2021.

Happy Independence Day, everyone.

source

Why do they keep attacking the guy?

Unscrupulous prosecutors are now going after the small family business of the former president, the Orange Polyp, for allegedly cutting corners (and keeping two sets of books) the way any hugely successful business does to pay less tax. The man is out of office, out of power, all he does now is appear at rallies to continue insisting that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that he will ruin anyone in his party who says otherwise.

He is still immensely popular among his solid 39% base, he works closely with the RNC (who supported him in him in his literally hundreds of fruitless anti-voting suits) and his party leaders and foot soldiers obey him unconditionally, but otherwise, it’s not like he’s an active threat to democracy, unless the laws passed in many states based on his transparent but galvanizing lie about rigged elections work as designed and his candidates win majorities in both houses in 2022. Of course, that scenario is about as likely to happen as thousands descending on, and hundreds overrunning, the US Capitol building in the belief that they’ve been deputized to stop an injustice in progress by their lawful president.

Look, to be honest, the only thing they actually have on him are that his “university” was a fraud, though he didn’t have to admit it when he shut it down and paid only $25,000,000 to settle the case. They also have the fraudulent charity he ran, a charitable foundation that gave almost no money to charitable causes and was shut down after negotiations with vengeful NY State authorities.

Paying off a porn star for silence about having sex with her right after your wife gives birth? Nothing, at worst a technical violation of some kind of campaign finance law nobody ever heard of. Hundreds of pious Christian pastors defend him for that bit of prudent adultery, not nearly as bad as what God’s other flawed vessel, Kind David, did when he sent Bathsheba’s husband off to die in battle so he could possess the woman he coveted. And the union between King David and Queen Bathsheba gave us King Solomon, so, God indeed works in mysterious ways!

The rest of the accusations agains the Orange Polyp are all just allegations: his perfect call to Ukrainian president Zelensky asking for a political favor, arguably a tiny bit imperfect, his call to Georgia Secretary of State Raffensberger to get him to “find” 11,780 votes, that might have crossed a line, even violated a local Georgia law that makes it a crime to try to influence an election outcome. The fact is, they have nothing really concrete and airtight on the guy. Sure he’s on tape doing everything possible to get Raffensberger to change electoral results that have already been recounted and certified, but why wouldn’t he do that?

Sure, some “evidence”-based court may find differently at some point, after other indictments begin rolling out (hello, Fania Willis in Fulton County, GA!) but at least 74,000,000 of our fellow Americans believe that these cases will all be witch hunts, like the toothless witch hunt Mueller headed (he found nothing, less than 140 points of collusion with Russia, no collusion!), and the second so-called impeachment over simply making a speech that supposedly set off an “insurrection”, because when you’re a big star they let you get away with all these nickel and dime “offenses” they are trying to throw at the former celebrity pussy-grabber.

The rule of law is crucial to the administration of justice. Which is why these partisans have no business trying to come up with supposedly legal ways to get this guy. His trial, if any, should only be in the court of public opinion. If the public repudiates him, his ratings will go down and he will have less influence, that’s the way Free Market democracy is supposed to work, after all.

It’s not like he actually did shoot somebody in the face on Fifth Avenue (which, by the way, the law would have allowed him to do, without consequences, had Pence done his fucking job and made him president for life). People are always so brutally unfair to the true prophets of their age! They crucified Jesus, just for speaking God’s truth, and they’re trying to crucify this guy, just because he may have lied a few thousand times. Sheesh.

NY Times fact-finding on the Jaunary 6 MAGA riot

The New Yorks Times writes:

Day of Rage: An In-Depth Look at How a Mob Stormed the Capitol By Dmitriy Khavin, Haley Willis, Evan Hill, Natalie Reneau, Drew Jordan, Cora Engelbrecht, Christiaan Triebert, Stella Cooper, Malachy Browne and David Botti  

A six-month Times investigation has synchronized and mapped out thousands of videos and police radio communications from the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, providing the most complete picture to date of what happened — and why.

By The New York Times June 30, 2021

In the six months since an angry pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, immense efforts have been made not only to find the rioters and hold them accountable, but also — and perhaps more important — to dig into the details of Jan. 6 and slowly piece together what actually happened that day.

Congressional committees have looked into police and intelligence failures. The Justice Department has launched a nationwide investigation that has now resulted in more than 500 arrests. And while Republicans in Congress blocked the formation of a blue-ribbon bipartisan committee, House Democrats are poised to appoint a smaller select committee.

Even now, however, Republican politicians and their allies in the media are still playing down the most brazen attack on a seat of power in modern American history. Some have sought to paint the assault as the work of mere tourists. Others, going further, have accused the F.B.I. of planning the attack in what they have described — wildly — as a false-flag operation.

The work of understanding Jan. 6 has been hard enough without this barrage of disinformation and, hoping to get to the bottom of the riot, The Times’s Visual Investigations team spent several months reviewing thousands of videos, many filmed by the rioters themselves and since deleted from social media. We filed motions to unseal police body-camera footage, scoured law enforcement radio communications, and synchronized and mapped the visual evidence

Here are some of the major revelations.

We pinpointed at least eight locations where rioters breached and entered the Capitol building — more than were previously known. The scenes revealed the extent of the rioters’ disregard for the law as they surged violently around the building’s perimeter and, eventually, inside.

The police were outnumbered and responded differently at various breach points, allowing rioters to break through doors using weapons like crowbars or, in some places, to simply walk through as the police stepped aside.

The multiple breaches also revealed the Capitol’s vulnerability. Despite locked doors and, in certain places, thick windows, rioters without specialized equipment were able to break in instantly in some places.

In the Senate, proceedings to certify the election results were halted almost immediately when a building-wide lockdown was called after the first breach by rioters. But we found that it took much longer for the House of Representatives to do the same. This delay appeared to have contributed to a rioter’s death.

Instead of evacuating, members of the House sheltered in place and resumed their work even as rioters overran the building. Speaker Nancy Pelosi was rushed to safety, but Representative Jim McGovern took her place presiding over the session. He told us that Capitol building security staff had said it was safe to resume.

Eventually, the House session was halted and members began streaming out of a rear door guided by security personnel. Rioters had arrived at almost the same moment, just on the other side of a hallway door with glass panels. They became incensed at the sight of the evacuating lawmakers — a situation that could have been avoided if the lawmakers had left before the mob arrived.

Ashli Babbitt, a Trump supporter and follower of the QAnon conspiracy theory, tried to climb through one of the door’s broken windows toward the lawmakers. A plainclothes Capitol Police officer charged with protecting the House shot her once through the upper chest. The wound was fatal.

One of the biggest questions hanging over the aftermath of Jan. 6 was whether the riot was planned and carried out by organized groups.

By identifying and tracking key players throughout the day, we found that most — even some at the forefront of the action — were ardent, but disorganized Trump supporters swept up in the moment and acting individually.

The first person to enter the Capitol building, for example, was a 43-year-old husband and father from Kentucky named Michael Sparks. He has no known affiliation with any organized groups. Ray Epps, an Arizona man seen in widely-circulated videos telling Trump supporters on multiple occasions to go into the Capitol, also seemed to have acted on his own.

Yet we also found that the crowd did include members of groups who seemed eager for a confrontation, like well-organized militias and far-right groups including the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. This proved to be a combustible mix. In the videos we analyzed, they can be seen with baseball bats and body armor, and coordinating with one another using radios. On several occasions, a calculated move by a more organized actor — for example, a Proud Boy identifying a weakness in the police line near a set of stairs — set off a surge by the mob.

Evidence collected by the F.B.I. suggests that the Proud Boys in particular were aware that they had inflamed the mob of ordinary people — and may have intended to do so in advance. Just before the assault, one Proud Boy leader wrote on a group chat on Telegram that he was hoping his men could incite the “normies” to “burn that city to ash today” and “smash some pigs to dust.” Then, after the riot, another Proud Boy leader wrote on Telegram: “This is NOT what I expected to happen. All from us showing up and starting some chants and getting the normies all riled up.”VISUAL INVESTIGATIONS: Our investigative journalists use evidence that’s hidden in plain sight to present a definitive account of the news. Get an email as soon as our next Visual Investigation is published.Sign Up

By synchronizing footage from both sides of the Capitol building, we were able to establish how crowds on each side interacted with one another.

We tracked the movement of a group of rioters from the west side of the Capitol — which faces the National Mall and absorbed most of the attendees arriving from Mr. Trump’s speech — to the opposite eastern side.

The eastern crowd had remained largely behind the barricades, but all that changed with the arrival of rioters from around the side of the building. This more violent group was the trigger that put the entire mob over the edge, spurring them to push easily through a line of officers and surround the Capitol on every front.

Most of the videos we analyzed were filmed by the rioters. By carefully listening to the unfiltered chatter within the crowd, we found a clear feedback loop between President Trump and his supporters.

As Mr. Trump spoke near the White House, supporters who had already gathered at the Capitol building hoping to disrupt the certification responded. Hearing his message to “walk down to the Capitol,” they interpreted it as the president sending reinforcements. “There’s about a million people on their way now,” we heard a man in the crowd say, as Mr. Trump’s speech played from a loudspeaker.

The call and response didn’t stop there. We found evidence of his influence once the violence was well underway. In one moment, a woman with a megaphone urged rioters to climb through a broken window by asking them to “stand up for our country and Constitution” — echoing the language in an earlier tweet from Mr. Trump. In another, as the police were pushing to clear the mob off the building, a rioter screamed at officers: “I was invited here by the president.”

One unanswered question when we began this investigation was how the police managed to reclaim the Capitol building from the mob. We found that once officers increased their numbers, armor and crowd-control weapons, clearing the rioters happened quickly and effectively.

The footage revealed that officers cleared several locations in less than an hour after being reinforced by local Metropolitan Police, Virginia State Police and other local and federal agencies that arrived with more manpower and authorization to use more powerful crowd-control weapons.

It’s a stark contrast to what we saw during the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, when federal officers were on scene from the start, already equipped with riot gear and authorized to use higher levels of force. Law enforcement’s relatively quick success in clearing the Capitol building once reinforcements arrived shows how the rioters might have been stopped far earlier with a different level of preparation — possibly preventing fatalities, countless officer injuries, over $30 million in damages.

There was another difference between the Capitol riot and those connected to this summer’s racial justice protests: Very few people who broke into the Capitol were arrested at the scene. Most were allowed to leave the building, forcing the F.B.I. to track them down later and take them into custody — a process that is still continuing today.

Continue reading the main story