Worst Case Scenarist

If you are a pessimist, given to worry, and you have any kind of imagination, you have the tools to be a certain kind of novelist. As the disheartening plot turns, everything that can go wrong does go wrong, everything that could easily have been avoided is painfully collided with, every accident is for the worst, complications are always infinite. In the worst case scenario, luck turns inexorably against the doomed protagonist until the reader can read no more, or the reader simply dies, as we all eventually do.

And so it was with your recent medical diagnosis, shocking, suddenly skyrocketing numbers that often indicate cancer. Your own fault! Why was it a year and a half, maybe even two years, all crucial months in catching tumors early, since your last blood test?

Sure there had been a pandemic, but you attempted to get your annual physical on time only to learn, by a form letter from a corporation, that your doctor was no longer participating in your medical insurance plan. Not a problem losing your long time PC, you just pick a new doctor from a list, have an annual check-up, get a blood test, pandemic or no pandemic. Meantime, there were distractions, the pandemic was raging again and a crazed idiot was fomenting an armed insurrection that failed, in its first attempt, to impose a dictatorship in the country you live in.

Later, as people in your city get vaccinated in high numbers and society begins returning to normal, seeking medical records from your former doctor’s office, you learn your longtime doctor is back on the insurance plan, his earliest appointment a few weeks away. You get the blood test.

But, ominously in hindsight, it is now seven crucial months after you originally tried to get your annual physical.

Is the number really so terrifying? It is PSA, prostate specific antigen, a number that roughly correlates with a healthy prostate (yours has been bleeding on and off for months, the urologist told you not to worry about it, just flush the system — and piss out the soft blood clots — by drinking more water). If your PSA is under 4 it is generally considered normal and nothing to worry about. PSA level is roughly correlated with prostate cancer, what they look for is a sudden increase, which sometimes is an early (or late) indication of cancer. The rise in your PSA is what the doctors watch out for, a steady four that is suddenly a five can sometimes indicate the presence of cancer. Your PSA almost tripled in the last year and a half, a long stretch for a tumor to grow undisturbed, the 300% upward leap gets your attention.

Your doctor says “go see your urologist” because it is not his call to tell you “this is something to be very worried about, get to a specialist as fast as you can”. He may feel that way, but he’d rather have a specialist who knows how to treat it break the bad news.

The only problem with seeing the urologist right away is that you will have to provide current insurance information to make an appointment. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act ends, with two weeks’ notice, at the end of the month you turn 65. Should have expected that, shouldn’t you have? Your window to enroll in Medicare suddenly shrinks from three months after your 65th birthday to two weeks after. If you’re about to turn 65 you find yourself, suddenly, with days to navigate a complex and unwieldy bureaucracy to avoid a gap in health insurance.

Naturally, the best way to apply for Medicare is online. It turns out to be quite simple to do. You log into your Social Security account (ssa.gov, medicare.gov cannot help you apply) and within ten minutes your application is done and begins to be processed. The only problem you will encounter is if you have not been on ssa.gov since you last logged in five years ago when you created the account. Personal ID? No idea. assword-pay? Not the foggiest.

Eventually a receptionist at Social Security, after you answer a few questions, tells you your Personal ID, which turns out to be the full name of your girlfriend’s beloved cat — of course. Now they can email you a PIN to reset your password, which they do. Now just answer three simple questions and you’re in. Street you grew up on, favorite teacher, make of first car. Easy.

Except that the computer needs an EXACT match to verify your identity. Did you write Miss Richert, Mary Richert, Miss Mary Richert, Richert? Did you include make and model of the car or just the model? Did you write your street number with or without the “th” at the end of the number? You will never know. At least one of your guesses was wrong and you were locked out after the third try, unable to log in that day back in May, when you could have had Medicare in place before the Patient Protection Act stopped protecting you.

No worries, the kind receptionist tells you, they will send you a new PIN, by US Mail, within ten business days. They do, it arrives the second week in June. Only a few weeks after your previous thwarted attempt you are able to log in. Ten minutes later your application is submitted and being processed. Ten days later it is 2/3 complete, pending final assessments of some kind. There are millions of people applying, there is nothing that can be done to expedite any individual application. The pandemic means that anything that once worked a certain way no longer does, because, the pandemic.

There is also the matter of your kidneys, since you had a sometimes fatal (not in your case) kidney disease, you need to track certain things. Your last appointment with the nephrologist showed no sign of the disease, you breathed a sigh of relief and the doctor bid you goodbye. But you should still continue to track certain things.

One of those things is Vitamin D level, since excessively high Vitamin D levels can damage the kidneys, apparently. Sunshine and dairy products provide most people with enough Vitamin D, but if you’ve had five cancer cells removed from your nose, and avoid dairy, you may also avoid walking in the sunshine. Doctor gives you a prescription Vitamin D supplement, a mega-dose, once a week. The nephrologist, who had been tracking your Vitamin D, noted that it was a bit high when he tested it two or three years ago (the private, third-party lab, for whatever reason, didn’t follow his order and test it in the most recent, pandemic blood test…). He advised you to take it only twice a month. Latest blood test shows your Vitamin D level is excessively high, which is bad for the kidneys and other tissues and most commonly causes hypercalcemia [1] — none of which you are aware of.

Doctor tells you your recent blood work shows your blood calcium level is also high (hypercalcemia, which you learn about the next day). When you ask what could cause that he tells you it may sometimes indicate a benign pituitary tumor.

Five minutes on the internet tells you the six most common side effects of excessive levels of Vitamin D — elevated blood calcium levels checks in at the top of the list. Look, nobody is blaming you for not knowing any of this shit, it just is what it is.

Why was your Vitamin D level not tested during your last physical in November 2019, by the private third-party lab (ignoring the nephrologist’s request, which was always done at the hospital lab) in 2020? Anybody’s guess. The pandemic, it was probably at least partly because of the pandemic.

Best case scenario, Medicare is in place in time to make the appointments you need to make and you learn, to your great relief, that you have neither cancer nor the return of that sometimes deadly idiopathic (“cause unknown” from Greek ἴδιος idios “one’s own” and πάθος pathos “suffering”) kidney disease you underwent chemo for a few years back.

Of course, doctors go on vacation this time of year. Plus, the pandemic. Could be a few months before you can see the busy urologist, the busy nephrologist, a competent dermatologist, etc. Nobody’s fault that you didn’t get everything in order months ago, pandemic or no, just in case the worst case scenario was the one that was going to unfold, especially during a pandemic, which messed so many things up, was itself a worst case scenario.

And, seriously, why wouldn’t the worst case scenario be the one that is already unfolding? Hope is good, unless it’s dumb hope. Look at the signs and you will understand that you are most likely fucked. It’s been a good ride, bumpy but good. No complaints, no regrets. Try not to think of your prostate every time you urinate, ignore that slight stinging, it can be anything. Do NOT google warning signs of prostate cancer. Check your Medicare progress bar every other day, maybe it will move from 2/3 done to complete. Try to get some rest and forget those nightmares, things are never as bad as in your worst fears, until they are — which might not happen, except, of course, in the worst case scenario.

[1]

source

Worth Remembering

“Given Mr. Trump’s reckless actions after losing the 2020 vote [1], and the violence they spurred, the newly released emails are unsurprising. But consider that fact for a moment:

It is unsurprising that the president of the United States leaned on the Justice Department to help him try to steal an election.

The country cannot forget that Mr. Trump betrayed his oath, that most Republican officeholders remain loyal to him nonetheless — and that it could be worse next time.”

source

you people are all fucking losers, you deserve “president” Biden

[1]

Among these reckless actions:

repeating the baseless, infuriating lie that the election was rigged against him and riddled with bipartisan fraud, spending $50,000,000 in advertising to promote this lie, denouncing the numerous courts that found he’d produced no evidence of voter fraud or irregularity, firing the federal appointee who certified the election as fair and clean, attacking Republicans in various states he lost for not overturning election results, leaning on state voting commissions to overturn the election, making calls (18) to at least one Republican state Secretary of State asking him to give him a break and just “find” a total of one more vote than he lost by, calling for and promoting a Stop the Steal rally in front of the White House, with a march to the Capitol to “Stop the Steal,” on the day a joint session of Congress would ceremonially award the Electoral College votes to Biden, and officially make him winner of the presidential election, encouraging anger at the “cowardly” “traitor” Mike Pence who was refusing to be bold, break the “law” and declare Trump the winner, as his crowd stormed the Capitol and chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” with a gallows erected outside, Trump, watching the mob advance inside the Capitol on live TV, tweeted:

etcetera

When he was impeached for these dangerous, unconstitutional actions, he denounced the “partisan” impeachment as a desperate ploy by partisan, witch hunting fraudulent [cannibal pedophile] losers. etc.

Now there are a bunch of new voter suppression laws, in states Trump lost, to make sure what he demanded be done by Trump-loyal state legislators to reverse the election results last time can now all be legally done next time.

Where is the moderate, judicious Attorney General Merrick Garland on all of this? On the obstruction of justice case laid out by Robert Mueller? He hasn’t really taken a public position on the seriousness of this threat to democracy.

NO Debate!

My father, who had his soul broken as a very young child, always insisted that we can do nothing to change our innate, fundamental natures. Some people are born angry, for example, and if you are, my father argued, you will always have the reflex to rage (even if you succeed in controlling its expression) that people born with milder dispositions will never have. They may get angry, everyone does, but they will never have the innate readiness and the quickness to respond with anger that someone born with the anger tic does. As far as that simple proposition goes, I can make an argument for it, if pressed.

My father’s firm, conclusory argument, which melded nature and nurture and foreclosed the idea of ever learning from our mistakes, ever changing to experience less pain, to cause others less pain, had a larger purpose which just occurred to me. It cut off painful debate. You think you can change, I can change, but you are wrong, a sadly deluded fool, as you will learn more and more deeply, the older you get.

Framed in this narrow way, the conversation would never veer into the difficult (but crucial) subjects of what harm was done to you that you can work to fix, how you can react with less anger and violence — particularly when confronted with unfairness, the biological damage abuse does to the brain and the body, the elasticity of the human brain, the resilience of the human spirit, our powers of regeneration, how we physically and emotionally recover from our wounds, how we can learn to treat others with more care and tenderness, etc.

My father could usually argue his positions well, lay out both sides of the argument, or even several sides, in detail. It was part of his skill set, and perhaps it is part of a particularly Jewish skill set, to be able to turn an issue from several angles and make the case, with all the strengths (and admitted weaknesses), that an honest debater seeing it from each perspective would. In the matter of whether we can change ourselves to improve our lives and the lives of those we love he resorted to NO debate.

I woke up today thinking that when you fear the way a debate will turn out, or the pain the discussion will bring up (and my father was terrified of the painful can of worms this conversation would open), when you know that laying out the entire argument leaves you on the short end, an end so fragile you can crush it with a finger, you resort to NO debate. My father always filibustered to prevent discussing issues that were so difficult for him to talk about, so painful for him to consider. In the end, as he was dying, during his last night on earth, he expressed deep regrets about this kind of zero-sum thinking and behavior.

Picture any problem you can imagine. In every case I can think of now, sharing it with a thoughtful friend or family member, who knows how to listen, is helpful. Speaking aloud to another person allows you to sum up and describe a problem in a way that is difficult to do with yourself (outside of writing it out, another helpful practice, I’ve found) and often your friend or family member will have a memory, a story, an insight that will ease your mind a bit, sometimes actually help you out of your trouble.

Of course, this NO debate jazz goes for politics, as we see every day. The filibuster is not only a way to torpedo a policy your party doesn’t like, it’s a way to prevent any and all meaningful public discussion about how to solve a vexing problem we all face. Say the problem is that in some parts of the country violent mobs regularly kidnap, torture and kill people to intimidate their ethnic or racial group and keep them powerless over their lives. The solution is a national law designed to deter this murderous behavior by surely trying and strictly punishing those who take part in lynch mobs, pogroms, massacres. There is not, strictly speaking, a good argument against making the law, except that it would exact a political price for the side that has long used terror and violence to maintain political control in many areas. It is not a winning argument (except to a select few) to honestly point out that lynching helps your political party stay in power. The solution when the anti-lynching bill reaches the Senate? NO debate. Filibuster.

A conservative public-private policy to allow millions of uninsured Americans to have health insurance becomes wildly popular among the millions who were never able to afford decent healthcare. The actual argument for stopping the policy is weak, but when you see the policy about to be introduced into law there is one thing you can do– stop debate. Filibuster! NO debate. There will be no pros and cons laid out for people to consider, no back and forth on this issue, no winning the argument on the merits, you bitches don’t have the votes to stop us so we are using a legitimate parliamentary tool to insist on our right for you to have NO debate.

This was exactly what my father did whenever I tried to talk about the breaking of our souls and our hopes of doing better. There are millions of us walking around with broken souls, in various states of repair. It is very easy to break off part of someone’s soul, particularly if the victim is young. At that tender stage breaking a soul is as simple as hurting a young plant, just calmly withhold adequate water and sunlight.

Had I known the extent of the cruel abuse my father suffered from long before he could talk, I’d have had a good clue how to proceed in this difficult conversation about change, healing, doing better. Sadly for us both, I was born without this innate emotional wisdom about how to proceed with a difficult, broken person. My emotional intelligence lagged far behind what I could grasp intellectually. This is true for many of us, and I don’t raise even the tiniest whip over myself for seeing this trait in myself.

It is easier to understand facts when they are separated from strong emotions. Many of us reach higher levels of book learning than we do life learning. That second kind of knowledge comes from no book, it comes from the faces of the people we hold dear. Back to my father’s innate idea, some people are born with a better grasp of how to correctly read the people around them, and adjust appropriately, than others.

This subject of change/no change is like peeling an infinitely regrowing onion. What is “appropriate” adjustment? Your parents are angry, childish, ill-equipped to provide the water and sunshine you need to grow and thrive. Is an appropriate adjustment to try to make sure they have no reason to be angry, no cause to act childishly? Give it up, kid, they will be the way they are no matter what you try to do. I spoke to a cousin who is moving gracefully toward ninety, she is still tightly gripped by anger at her long-dead tyrannical father, her mother who passively sat by, with a frozen smile, letting the intolerable horrors of my cousin’s long ago childhood proceed.

So we can’t change our lives in any meaningful way, Dad, is that still your position?

“No, Elie, now that I’m dead, and have had sixteen long years — and they go by in a flash, as I’m sure you’ve noticed — I’ve had time to calmly consider the matter and evolve in my thinking. I think you were closer to the truth. If you regularly exhibit a behavior that harms others, and causes pain, and you examine it, and find out what causes you to act that way, you can take steps to, as you say, do better. It’s hard work, though, and painful as hell and there are good reasons many people avoid getting into the whole fucking thing.”

That was the voice of my father’s highly evolved skeleton.

“A tiresome device, Elie, seriously. I mean, that’s one thing you really have to wrestle with as you, hopefully, write a second draft of my story,” the skeleton craned his neck to watch some birds riding the thermals in the perfect blue sky over the First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill graveyard.

It’s all tiresome, Dad. Watching the way the world is, exhausting. Arguing things that seem so self-evident, like weighing the right to have a voice in your own affairs vs. another person’s right to make you shut the fuck up — phew… The newspaper leads you down a dark path, if you take a wrong step, like reading the headlines. It is all Devils vs. Angels, insane shit, as the world literally burns.

“I’m afraid I have no answer to any of that. The smartest among us, as you suggest, may also be the most destructively ignorant about the larger truths in life. Is anything more important than the ability to truly love and be loved? I offer that to your giants of the Senate and your various lifetime appointees. This world of violently shifting moods is a frustrating mess, as your friend Hendrix sang, and, in a way, I’m glad to be done with it. For you, though, I urge you to keep struggling as long as you can. Keep working on my story. My story is not important because of me, I’m not personally important at all, except maybe to you and your sister. My story should be told for the light it can shed on the human ability to change, the powerful role emotional understanding plays in forgiveness, the real change for the better even the most broken of us is capable of, all the rest of that infinitely succulent jive.”

Ain’t that an ironic mouthful, coming from you?

“Yeah, ain’t dassum shit?” said the skeleton, grinning his manic eternal grin and making a puckish two-fingered hand gesture that conjured a gang sign.

A word on the NY County DA race

Alvin Bragg and Tali Farhadian Weinstein are in the lead as the votes are being counted several hours after the polls closed. We learn, with a key new fact unreported by the New York Times:

Farhadian Weinstein recently made waves by donating $8.2 million to her own campaign, more than all the other candidates have raised, combined.

source

more than all the other candidates have raised, combined.

Going back to the old bit about freedom of speech, you get as much of it as you can afford to pay for… campaign finance reform, anyone?

Paid for by Friends of Tali

We got a ton of large format campaign cards from Tali Farhadian Weinstein, one of the Democratic Primary candidates for Manhattan District Attorney. That is the office that will be hopefully prosecuting the former president and present danger, Mr. Trump in the coming months. It’s also the office that let Ivanka and Don Jr. skate a few years ago for some arguable fraud in connection with the Trump SoHo.

Tali has the bones of a compelling story, her family having fled tyranny and oppression in Iran. The Voter Guide gives us this capsule biography:

Tali Farhadian Weinstein (D)

Farhadian Weinstein, who came to New York from Iran as a child, is a professor of law and most recently served as general counsel for the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office. Previously, she worked as a federal prosecutor.

Then I learned the reason she was able to send us so many glossy campaign ads (and show up daily in ads in the New York Times) is that she is married to a hedge fund guy and he and his friends have a shit ton of money. The NY Times:

Ms. Farhadian Weinstein has raised more money than any of her competitors, including $8.2 million she gave to her own campaign.

source

Asked if she would recuse herself from any case involving one of her donors, she said she would not. Presumably there is no reason to, since she is scrupulously fair, having escaped oppression as a girl.

The standard for recusal, of course, is “the appearance of impropriety”, though it is often interpreted as a subjective standard with plenty of wiggle room — it is difficult to force anyone to recuse themselves. A big warning flag went up for me when she told the interviewer there was no reason for her not to oversee the prosecution of one of her big donors, if it came to that.

Then we learned the 45 year-old first registered as a Democrat in 2017.

Then we got this mysterious attack ad, aimed at knocking out the two men running for Manhattan DA, one of whom happens to be apparent co-front runner Alvin Bragg.

In politics, increasingly, people do whatever they need to do to win, to gain and retain power. Attack ads seem to work, particularly when they arrive close to election day. They scare people, make them angry, make them go to the polls to vote against the sick, sneaky bastard who was attacked.

The strategy is tried and true, but it was not clear that Tali Farhadian Weinstein had sent the card savaging the two men in the DA race. Sekhnet and I read the card several times before the eagle-eyed Sekhnet found what we suspected was likely the case (it is in fairly small print under the address, extreme right above): Paid for By New Yorkers for Tali.

The People rest. Get the fuck out of here, Tali.

Poetry is also this

This is from the end of an interview with a writer named Clint Smith about Juneteenth that Amy Goodman conducted on Democracy Now! on Friday. Juneteenth recently became a federal holiday, over the nay votes of fourteen GOP sticklers . Though, in fairness to them, it was fewer than the number (21) who opposed gold medals for the outnumbered officers who defended the Capitol on January 6 and FAR less than the number (all but six of them in the Senate) who opposed the formation of a bipartisan commission to investigate the MAGA riot. The new national holiday commemorates the day in June 1865, two months after the Confederacy surrendered — and two months after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln — that enslaved Blacks in Galveston, Texas learned that they’d been freed more than two years earlier.

AMY GOODMAN: Clint, before we end, you are an author, you’re a writer, you’re a teacher, and you are a poet. Can you share a poem with us?

CLINT SMITH: I’d be happy to. And so, when you’re a poet writing nonfiction, that very much animates the way that I approach the text. And so, this is part of the — this is an adaptation or an except from the end of one of my chapters, that originally began as a poem that I wrote when I was trying to think about some of these issues that I brought up.

[reading] Growing up, the iconography of the Confederacy was an ever-present fixture of my daily life. Every day on the way to school, I passed a statue of P.G.T. Beauregard riding on horseback, his Confederate uniform flung over his shoulder and his military cap pulled far down over his eyes. As a child, I did not know who P.G.T. Beauregard was. I did not know he was the man who ordered the first attack that opened the Civil War. I did not know he was one of the architects who designed the Confederate battle flag. I did not know he led an army predicated on maintaining the institution of slavery. What I knew is that he looked like so many of the other statues that ornamented the edges of this city, these copper garlands of a past that saw truth as something that should be buried underground and silenced by the soil.

After the war, the sons and daughters of the Confederacy reshaped the contours of treason into something they could name as honorable. We called it the Lost Cause. And it crept its way into textbooks that attempted to cover up a crime that was still unfolding; that told us that Robert E. Lee was an honorable man, guilty of nothing but fighting for the state and the people that he loved; that the Southern flag was about heritage and remembering those slain fighting to preserve their way of life. But, see, the thing about the Lost Cause is that it’s only lost if you’re not actually looking. The thing about heritage is that it’s a word that also means “I’m ignoring what we did to you.”

I was taught the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, but I was never taught how the declarations of Confederate secession had the promise of human bondage carved into its stone. I was taught the war was about economics, but I was never taught that in 1860 the 4 million enslaved Black people were worth more than every bank, factory and railroad combined. I was taught that the Civil War was about states’ rights, but I was never taught how the Fugitive Slave Act could care less about a border and spelled Georgia and Massachusetts the exact same way.

It’s easy to look at a flag and call it heritage when you don’t see the Black bodies buried behind it. It’s easy to look at a statue and call it history when you ignore the laws written in its wake.

I come from a city abounding with statues of white men on pedestals and Black children playing beneath them, where we played trumpets and trombones to drown out the Dixie song that’s still whistled in the wind. In New Orleans, there are over 100 schools, roads and buildings named for Confederates and slaveholders. Every day, Black children walk into buildings named after people who never wanted them to be there. Every time I would return home, I would drive on streets named for those who would have wanted me in chains.

Go straight for two miles on Robert E. Lee, take a left on Jefferson Davis, make the first right on Claiborne. Translation: Go straight for two miles on the general who slaughtered hundreds of Black soldiers who were trying to surrender, take a left on the president of the Confederacy who made the torture of Black bodies the cornerstone of his new nation, make the first right on the man who permitted the heads of rebelling slaves to be put on stakes and spread across the city in order to prevent the others from getting any ideas.

What name is there for this sort of violence? What do you call it when the road you walk on is named for those who imagined you under a noose? What do you call it when the roof over your head is named after people who would have wanted the bricks to crush you?

source

Uncanny echoes of Nazism

It is an unsettling thing to watch a right-wing movement move to an extreme position and appropriate so many of the tactical tics of, say, the Nazis.

When the Nazis controlled the mass media in Germany it was easy enough for the party to get their unchallengeable message across to every citizen. They had a network of spies who informed on disloyal citizens, anyone privately critical of the one-party narrative. These traitors met with harsh, often gruesome fates. In many cases, they were turned in by their own true believer Nazi children, loyal members of the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend).

An example of a debatable Nazi talking point, Jews had to be destroyed because they were responsible for the war. Hitler had invaded Poland, unprovoked, because of the Jews. The Jews, you see, were said to be a highly infectious disease that had to be eradicated. Every vice in the great German nation you could think of was a result of poisonous Jewish devilry. The only way to purify the blood of the Aryan Reich and make Germany great again was to exterminate this Judaic bacillus. The news was dispensed day after day in a way that made this controversial “theory” seem not only entirely reasonable but in urgent need of immediate action (or “aktion” in Nazi-speak).

If you get your news from FOX (Rupert Murdoch), or from even more extreme right-wing sources, One America News Network (OANN) or Newsmax, you get a version of reality very much at odds with the facts that can actually be established by things like court verdicts, bipartisan election certifications, real-time videos, written statements, spoken statements, sworn statements made under the penalty of perjury.

In the MAGA telling, the January 6 MAGA riot, for example, was not the result of a long, well-funded, long-planned campaign based on the lie that Trump won in a landslide and that communists, anarchists, anti-fascists (imagine how sick that is!) insane lying, violently rioting Blacks, angry radical Democrats and disloyal, lying Republicans had rigged the election against him, it was a spontaneous show of completely understandable patriotic fervor.

The 140 Capitol Police officers supposedly injured by this crowd of peaceful protesters? Never happened, radical left propaganda. OK, injured cops are speaking up, showing up in Congress to testify. Well, it may have happened, but it was not Trump fans but terrorists from antifa and BLM who did all the damage, viciously attacked the police, who all supported Trump 100% and kissed and hugged the actual peaceful Trump supporters, who behaved like normal tourists (who’d smoked crack or crystal meth a moment earlier). Actually, wait, it was an FBI false flag operation to make Trump, who actually won in a landslide, look like the inglorious loser he will never be!

A logical question I heard some pundit ask the other day: if the FBI staged this evil thing to make Trump look like a treasonous, seditious loser, wouldn’t you want a complete and thorough bipartisan investigation into the fucking FBI? Not the case with the lockstep GOP — they have learned from recent Trump/McConnell/Barr history. They want any finding about the January 6 “riot” to be dismissible as a complete and total “partisan witch hunt” and they know their solid 39% will believe that theory no matter what the radical partisan Democrat liars try to produce as “evidence”.

It is, of course, a mistake to look for logic in any of this. Just like the average disgruntled German who listened to Nazi media broadcasting every evening and came to believe as indisputable fact whatever was confidently repeated several times, the average American who gets only one political opinion, the same talking points echoed endlessly, will never even consider the likely notion that, if Trump indeed was lying about all the traitors who rigged the election against him, the dozens of lost lawsuits dismissed for lack of evidence of the rigged election, the expenditure of $50,000,000 to advertise the lie that he’d actually won, organizing a mass gathering to physically Stop the Steal and prevent the peaceful transition of power, and gave a fiery speech immediately before the riot that incited an already angry crowd to break through police barricades, fight the police and storm the Capitol, forcing legislators and their staffs to run for their lives, as the law abiding mob did $1,400,000 worth of damage to the building, maybe . . . Trump didn’t actually win in a landslide.

No matter. As we see from history, authoritarians rely on certain things, primarily blind obedience from their followers, who are inclined to believe whatever supports their view of a world run by vicious enemies who are mercilessly screwing them and need to be fought without mercy. Another common feature of authoritarian mobs is ready, justifiable, righteous violence against these rightfully hated enemies. This violence encourages obedience, or fearful silence, which also helps.

The one thing that every right-wing movement has in common is an unshakable belief in a strongman, an infallible leader with the will to destroy all of their despicable, dangerous enemies. In the case of Trumpism, that leader is Trump. As Trump’s German born grandfather [1] might have said:

The leader is always right.

The Führerprinzip (German: [ˈfyːʀɐpʀɪnˌtsiːp] (listen); German for ‘leader principle’) prescribed the fundamental basis of political authority in the Government of Nazi Germany. This principle can be most succinctly understood to mean that “the Führer‘s word is above all written law” and that governmental policies, decisions, and offices ought to work toward the realization of this end.[1] In actual political usage, it refers mainly to the practice of dictatorship within the ranks of a political party itself, and as such, it has become an earmark of political fascism.

source
Amen to that, morons

[1]

Trump’s entrepreneurial grandfather, Friedrich Trump, trained as a barber, was deported from Germany for fleeing to avoid military service (and tax evasion when bringing in his American-made fortune). Interesting bit from Wikipedia:

During the Klondike Gold Rush, Trump travelled to the Yukon Territory and made his fortune by operating a restaurant and a brothel for miners in the boomtown of Whitehorse.[1][2] Trump then returned to Bavaria and married Elisabeth Christ, the daughter of a former neighbor.

As he had emigrated to America in order to evade conscription, the Bavarian Government stripped Trump of his citizenship and permanently banished him following an investigation. As a result, Trump and his family returned to the United States. He became a U.S. citizen in 1892.

Trump worked as a hotel manager and was beginning to acquire real estate in Queens when he died in the 1918 flu pandemic. He was the father of Frederick Christ Trump and John G. Trump, and the paternal grandfather of former 45th U.S. president Donald Trump.

source

The poor man died during a pandemic from a lack of hydroxychloroquine . . . an eerie echo of history.

The sometimes shady details of how he made his fortune are fascinating to read (see the article above), and another eerie echo of history.

My father and the Jewish Babe Ruth

My father, once a skinny Jewish kid growing up in Peekskill, NY, was a lifelong Detroit Tiger fan. That’s because when he was a boy the Tigers had a big, slugging first baseman named Hank Greenberg. Greenberg was a large, powerful Jew who hit home runs like Babe Ruth, one season almost breaking Ruth’s record. Jews reportedly went into shock when the 6’3″ athlete ducked into Yom Kippur services in Detroit — nobody had ever seen a Jew that big. I was surprised to see, after my father died, that his 1941 Peekskill High School yearbook, under a picture of my father’s thin, bespectacled face, had printed his name as Irving “Hank” Widem. I always knew he’d idolized Greenberg, I never knew he’d gone by that name in High School.

Babe Ruth was by far the greatest Major League baseball player ever. As a pitcher he was among the best to ever play the game, though he is famous for his batting. Before switching to full-time right fielder and setter of mind boggling home run records (he famously hit more home runs by himself, a couple of seasons, than other full teams hit), he also set pitching records that stood for decades.

As a home run hitter, there was really nobody to compare to him. If he’d been up as many times as Hank Aaron, who decades later broke Ruth’s career home run record in four thousand more at bats than Ruth had, he’d have hit hundreds more home runs. The current record holder, asterisk Barry Bonds, batted 1,448 more times (about three seasons for the Babe) and hit 48 more home runs. Plus, Babe Ruth hit .342 for his career (tied for sixth highest lifetime batting average among modern players).

When my father was fourteen, a decade after Ruth set the 60 home runs in a season record that would last 34 years, Hank Greenberg hit 58 in a season. I suspect anti-semitism probably played a role in Greenberg getting nothing to hit the last few weeks of that season, when he could have hit home runs 59 and 60, but, if so, that is not something that should be taught in American classrooms (as it would only serve to undermine American Exceptionalism and make beleaguered white Christian patriots feel bad…).

Maybe the most impressive number Babe Ruth left behind was his lifetime slugging percentage of .690. Slugging percentage measures how well a player hits for power, how many extra base hits (doubles, triples and home runs) he gets. Ruth averaged that gaudy number, over his long career. For comparison, superstars Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle, two great Hall of Fame sluggers, 20 and 21 on the all-time list, had career slugging percentages of .5575 and .5568.

When a current player is red hot, hitting home runs in bunches, his slugging percentage may soar to approach Ruth’s lifetime average for a short time, but by the end of the season it will almost always be below .600. Many modern-day sluggers in the Hall of Fame never approached Ruth’s .690 average slugging percentage in even a single season.

Here is the top of the all-time slugging percentage list. Turkey Stearnes, Mule Suttles and Oscar Charleston, belated (posthumous) Hall of Famers, superstars of the Negro Leagues and victims of the racial segregation of baseball until after their careers were over, have recently been added to the list, as I learned last night after a few minutes of computer querying [1]. Check out where Hank Greenberg winds up on the very short list of baseball power hitters who have slugged at least .600 for their careers. And what company he is in!

To put that in perspective, five “white” major league Hall of Famers, Ruth, Williams, Gehrig, Foxx and Greenberg have had lifetime slugging percentages of .600 or more. (Eight, if you include the other three Hall of Famers, which you should, it’s an American sin that they were forbidden play with the other greatest players of their time by a hallowed racist tradition, see FN 1; nine if you include Barry Bonds, who is creeping toward induction into the Hall of Fame after an amazing career).

* Barry Bonds, is the sixth major league player to slug over .600 for his major league career, and he had some out of the world slugging percentages in his older years .863 when he was 36 (higher than Ruth’s best one season slugging percentage), .799 when he was 37, .749 at 38 and .812 at 39, after he went on his special, controversial asterisk fitness regime. Without those final few superhuman seasons, including the 73 home run season, at an age when most baseball players are slowing down, he would havie been under .600 for his career. For those who like eye-popping stats, here are the remarkable numbers Bonds put up for his career.

[1]

Suttles, Stearnes and Charleston were three superstars of the Negro Leagues, from the openly racist decades before Major League Baseball became racially integrated. All three are now in the Baseball Hall of Fame, inducted decades after each of their deaths, posthumously honored among baseball’s immortals, as they say.

Mule Suttles was a power-hitting first baseman in the Negro Leagues from 1923-1944.

Turkey Stearnes was a five-tool centerfielder who played in the Negro Leagues from 1923-40.

Oscar Charleston, another slugging centerfielder from the Negro Leagues played from 1915-1941.