Worldview and the world (part 1)

When I was quite young, early in elementary school, I ignored my parents strong warning and sat in a hotel auditorium full of chain smoking teenagers (this was probably 1963) watching a movie about Jewish history. The movie was called Let My People Go, it was an argument for a Jewish state being the only solution in a world that was constantly trying to kill the eternally homeless Jews. The idea was that if the Jews had a state like every other nation, it would be a refuge that could be defended against all enemies. Without a state, it was always a matter of time until mobs could be loosed on the Jews — as they had been to murderous effect against most of my own family, just thirteen years before I was born, as I’d later learn.

My parents urged me not to see the movie partly because I was subject to terrible dreams as a boy. Looking back now, I see these dreams as an expression of my fear at being constantly attacked by a prosecutorial father and an emotional mother who generally followed the old man’s lead. Something about the hot seat I often sat in didn’t sit right with me, if I may put it that way. I was left to work out what was wrong with this picture in my fertile imagination, which expressed itself in nightmares back then.

My mother read me a book about Noah’s Ark, and turned the pages of the large picture book where I saw thousands drowning in the swirling flood waters, because they were wicked. I wasn’t consoled by the fact that God found all these millions of creatures wicked, I was upset about all the animals that drowned, every lamb, calf, koala bear, puppy, kitten, along with every child on the earth at that time. I was too young to think “what the fuck kind of insanely vengeful God is this who takes this kind of psycho revenge on evil humans by wiping out virtually all life on the planet?” I didn’t think “how come he spared all the aquatic creatures?”. I had a recurrent nightmare of drowning, especially during thunder storms. Eventually, one rainy day, my mother took me to Far Rockaway where we drove past homes built right on the ocean front. That probably helped.

I lost my fear of dying in another one of God’s angry floods, but then it was a scene from a Tarzan movie I saw one day on the little black and white portable TV with the rabbit ears. Jane and some other white folks were escaping from a tribe of cannibals who had tied them up. I don’t know how this could be true, but I recall vividly the moment when a hurled spear felled Jane from behind as she fled. Must have grazed her, I don’t know how else to explain it. Tarzan eventually saved the day but the image of that cannibal brute hurling that spear into Jane’s back as she ran for her life chilled me to the bone. It wasn’t Jane in my nightmares, who was getting the point of a spear between her shoulder blades, it was my mother. Who was throwing the spear? No idea, but who would do such a thing? Who ate people?

My mother took me to the library where she found a book about Hollywood movie making that had plenty of photos of actors, almost all of them white, being painted black and turned into cannibals for Tarzan movies. In one, a half-black painted cannibal is wearing glasses, reading the paper while a make up artist works on him. He’s smoking a cigarette. “You see?” my mother said, “it’s all fake. These people all go home to their own kids, it’s movie making, it’s fantasy, made up, not real”. I did see. I think it had an effect on my cannibal nightmares. The racist underpinnings of the Tarzan franchise, the nonchalant endorsement of colonialism and the scarcity of actual cannibalism among Africans, were not important to me at that time. I had a way to understand that I’d been sold a tissue of bullshit by a Hollywood movie and the dreams stopped.

“With Tarzan I could show you it was all make believe. This movie will show you things that are worse than any bad dream you ever had, and I can’t show you anything to make them go away because these things actually happened,” my mother told me with tears in her eyes. She cried as she begged me not to see the movie. But I was a tough guy and I insisted. She sobbed, my father attempted to bully me, but I wouldn’t back down so they let me have my way.

I remember a smug feeling as I watched the early scenes, stone carvings, etchings, crude drawings of brutality, somber narration. “This is nothing…” I remember thinking, once again my parents just being jerks, treating me like a baby. As the movie traveled from antiquity to the present day the images got more and more realistic, until there were photographs. That got my attention. “Are those people dead?” I remember thinking as they flashed a photo from the Age of Pogroms in Russia in the early twentieth century, The thought may have occurred to me, “Jesus, my grandparents came from Russia and they must have been alive by then…”

Then there were movies, which really got my attention. I’d heard of Hitler and there he was, dancing that insane fake jig I learned years later had been a neat bit of editing by an American or British propagandist who took a clip of a triumphant Hitler stamping his foot and repeated it several times to make it appear he was doing a mad victory jig. Hitler himself, as he wrote in Mein Kampf, had nothing but admiration for such hate and fear-inspiring propaganda tricks and, as he was sitting on top of the world after the fall of Paris, or maybe it was Poland, I’m sure he wasn’t much bothered by his weak enemies trying to make him look crazy.

I seem to remember my little sister there with me at first, but she was gone by then. All around me the smoking teenagers were crying. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw next. The perhaps ten second black and white film clip is seared in my memory as if it was put there by a branding iron. A short stocky man in a cap, with a cigar or cigarette in his mouth, is wheeling a gigantic wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow is full of naked, jiggling, rubbery looking skeletons covered with skin. He comes to the edge of a gigantic pit, with a chute. He upends the wheelbarrow and the emaciated corpses wriggle down the chute. There was a cherry on top. The guy with the cap throws his cigar in after them and heads back for another load of skeletons.

On the soundtrack violins are weeping and wailing as this hideous action takes place. The teenagers around me are all sobbing. I make a run for it, through the cigarette smoke illuminated by the light of the projector. Make it up to our room in the hotel above, get through the door, see my mother’s crying face and immediately vomit my guts out.

In those moments the beginning of my worldview was sealed. Governments, like people, are capable of good or great evil. When a violent madman is in charge, millions of people will do whatever he tells them to do, no matter how insane. You can disobey the authorities, of course, but they will just torture or kill you, it’s nothing to them. None of us are safe, especially if you belong to a traditionally despised minority group.

As I grew older I was mystified and disgusted by the arguments victim groups seem to constantly have about who suffered the worst. Instead of all victims working together, somehow we became divided into interest groups, suffering lobbies. Blacks and Jews, once allies in the Civil Rights struggle here, wound up turned against each other. The argument over who suffered more is often bitter.

The atrocity of the slave trade lasted for centuries, it was an unspeakably dehumanizing horror involving widespread rape and murder and millions died after being kidnapped from their homes in Africa. In the US, after the official end of slavery, there was a century of white supremacist terrorism the US government did nothing about. There were frequent pogroms in which many blacks, including old people and children, were massacred in what were always misleadingly called “race riots”. There is still widespread racism against the descendants of slaves that half of the country is in violent denial about.

The Jews caught organized hell in Europe where, during a two year-period 1942-1943 virtually my entire family was massacred. It was history’s most prodigious act of mechanized genocide, millions killed on an industrial scale in a few short years. Jews have been hated for two thousand years or more, stubborn, proud, too smart, often defamed as deicides. killers of Jesus.

How are these things — the Holocaust and the Slave Trade — different in their essence? And there have been others, everywhere, just as horrific. What use is the infernal debate about whose suffering is worse? We all need to work together or Hitler and the Klan win, no? This has been in my mind since I disobeyed my parents and saw that awful movie as kid.

(end of part one)

Little Girl Wants to Live

Sekhnet and I have been very sad to see Little Girl, one of the feral cats we care for, seemingly following the progression of her mother’s quick, sudden death a few months back. Little Girl, a skilled hunter, who with her great paw-eye coordination, loves to catch thrown cat treats midair, with both paws and, often pop the treat directly into her mouth, is closely bonded to Sekhet and has lately been much more interactive with me. Now, no longer hunting or seeking to have treats thrown to her, she seems to be dying. The other day Sekhnet put out a box with a rug in it, in the sun, and Little Girl emerged to sun herself there each of the last few days.

A few nights ago, I went out to check on her. I sat next to her insulated sleeping box and saw she was in there and breathing, I didn’t want to bother her. She generally doesn’t like to be petted in there and lets you know with a quick yowl and a flash of her long, sharp claws.

While I sat by her box, her sister Whiteback hopped the fence and wanted to be petted and get a few treats. I obliged and as Whiteback began crunching the treats I saw Little Girl’s paw emerge from the box, reaching toward me as if to tap me on the arm. Her mighty claws were, for once, not extended (see photo below of her mighty claws, when she was a kitten). I put some treats in the palm of my hand and reached inside. Little Girl ate them all, licking my palm when the treats were done. She ate a few more batches. I was glad to see her appetite seemed better. When she was done eating I petted her a few times, until, eventually, she gave me a brief taste of the claw, indicating she’d had enough affection.

Her mother was about six when she died, Little Girl is not yet three. She’s been hanging in there so far, sat on Sekhnet’s lap for a long time yesterday, eating delicacies that Sekhnet brought her. We’re hoping for the best, her recovery, thinking perhaps a younger, healthier cat might be able to fight off whatever killed her mother, unlikely though it seems. We’re encouraged that she’s still eating a bit.

Here are two photos of her with brothers Turtleback and Whitefoot, from June, 2018 (Little Girl center in each). Those two wonderful little souls were gone within a few months of their birth. Little Girl, though she has been folding up her tents for the last week or two, does not seem ready to call it a day yet. It is a hard struggle for survival out there for feral cats, the ones who survive are tough, tough, tough– and lucky.

As I type I got this update on my phone from Sekhnet in the garden, under the caption “cozy dog…”, informing me that she ate a tiny bit more:

Your Mother’s Anger

My mother, who as a girl, and even as an adult, had been brutalized by her domineering mother, was prone to flashes of anger. I learned to avoid provoking my mother’s outrage toward the end of her life. I was generally quite successful, but there were a few slip ups.

One happened not long before she died, in the narrow hallway outside the bathroom of her apartment in Florida, where the short hallway from her bedroom met the rest of the place. She had mentioned her anger at her daughter, and said she felt guilty about it, since her daughter had been taking such excellent care of her in recent years. She loved her, and depended on her, but there were certain issues that just made her furious.

I knew these issues well, from her point of view and from her daughter’s, both sometimes called me to vent. The stories were remarkably consistent, the major issue that drove each other crazy was constant. A good mediator could have helped a lot, their most common area of conflict was straightforward and seemingly easy to fix, but each was absolutely convinced the other would never go for mediation.

In an effort to reassure my mother about the anger she felt guilty about, I said that many mothers and daughters have such issues. It was fairly classic, it seemed to me, and I rattled off a number of these troubled mother-daughter relationships among people we knew. Believing that personal insight is the only key to interpersonal problem-solving, as I do, I misguidedly I pointed out that she had had ongoing conflicts with her own mother, in childhood and throughout the years I saw them together. My mother instantly flew into a rage.

“I had a wonderful relationship with my mother!” she snarled. We were standing very close to each other in that narrow space, her face turned red, her teeth were bared, she could have reached out and started choking me, if she’d been the violent type. I turned on a fucking dime.

“What do you feel like tonight, Lester’s or the Thai place?” I asked, pivoting as nonchalantly as Fred Astaire.

“Ooh, let’s have Thai,” she said, smiling in anticipation, and in great relief that I was immediately shutting the hell up about her difficult childhood.

That was the graceful end of my last attempt to shine any kind of light anywhere my mother didn’t want light shined.

It makes a cute anecdote, like a fortune cookie. Adroit son distracts angry mom with delicious bauble. It’s a little funny. On the other hand, it’s serious as the cancer that was eating at my mother in those final days.

Your mother’s anger?

She may never tell you the reasons for it, even those she knows well, preferring the painful, unpredictably rippling repercussions of repressing painful feelings, especially shameful, humiliating ones (who wants to feel that shit?) to laying out the many reasons she has to feel rightfully angry, especially laying this out to her children. It is the mother’s prerogative whether or not to give any insight into why she is sometimes short-tempered, or flies into a rage. She may know something about it, she may not.

I keep thinking of two of the luckiest breaks I’ve had in my life, both involving gifts of difficult honesty from people who loved my parents and cared deeply for me. The first one came from my parents’ best friend Arlene, when I was in my twenties. There was no doubt of their love for each other, there was never more spirited conversation, laughter and fun than when Arlene and her husband Russ were in the house. She took the trouble, during a long sunset walk across a beautiful hill, when I visited her after Russ died, to make me understand that my parents’ were basically unhappy people and that their unhappiness had nothing to do with me, though I undoubtedly, and understandably, blamed myself, since my parents always did. It was like Arlene had reached up and pulled a string to turn on a light in the darkness. It was the first inkling I had of a mature and beneficial understanding of my life up to that point.

The second lucky break, which I have written about many times, was my father’s first cousin Eli, who, toward the end of his long life, after many, many visits and long discussions deep into the night, finally revealing something that explained a deeply buried mystery about my father’s implacability. Eli and my parents loved each other as much as Arlene and my parents did. There was no motive on Eli’s part, as there had been none on Arlene’s, to in any way hurt or disparage my parents. These things were told to me strictly to help me understand a perplexing mystery they saw me wrestling with.

Eli told me, with limitless sorrow, that Chava, my father’s mother and Eli’s favorite aunt, a woman who loved Eli to death and who had always pampered him, had whipped my infant father in the face from the time he could stand. He’d witnessed it many times.

“How old was he when she started?” I asked Eli.

“However old you are when you can first stand on your two legs, I don’t know, one and a half, two?” he said with infinite sadness.

If those two revelations had never come to me, I have no idea how my life would be today, after the rocky start I had. Arlene’s insight made me begin to realize that trying to please people who could never be pleased, who would always blame me for their frustrations no matter what, was a fool’s errand. Eli’s flooded me with sudden sympathy for my poor bastard of a father. It made me understand how hard he must have struggled not to do the same to my little sister and me, even as he used other means to senselessly punish us. I had to give the man a certain amount of credit, after learning about his own senselessly destructive whippings, for limiting his destructiveness to words and rage. He could have easily started beating the hell out of me when I defied him as an adversarial, highly skilled baby.

Eli’s terrible revelation let directly to me, a few years later, being able to fully understand that my father, a victim of unthinkable abuse, had done his best with the very fucked up hand he’d been dealt. He had to fight to the death, it was that or face the horror of his own mother shamelessly humiliating him from the time he could stand, simply for the crime of being alive. That was how he saw the world, anyway, a bleak place of constant war and unreliable alliances. Fuck. Think about how that kind of treatment from your mother would warp your sense of yourself, your place in the world, your role as a parent. Knowing about my father’s traumatic childhood was essential, it allowed me to finally let go of a lot of anger I’d been carrying around.

I know there are many people, though I’ve met relatively few, who had a wonderful relationship with both parents. To you I say– you are truly blessed, and surely grateful, as you would have learned to be from people who were also grateful for the blessings in their lives, including their children.

For virtually everybody I’ve met, usually one or the other parent was better, sometimes just by virtue of being less monstrous than the other. We are lucky to get love and admiration from one parent, or if not a parent, another adult we meet early on. Even in the worst of situations, we humans always look to rationalize a bad situation, especially when we are young, inexperienced, and at the mercy of things and people we have little hope of understanding. We need to develop this ability to rationalize pain or be destroyed. If it was your father who was more openly at war with you, welcome to the club, there’s half a world full of members. To those whose mother was the more ruthless caregiver, and there are many millions there with you, you have my sympathy.

My point here, as I struggle to clarify and fully understand the quicksand I am gently splashing in, is that, if my troubled life is any indication of what’s good or bad for anyone else’s, the more we understand, the more insight we have into troubling things that happened to our parents, the better our chances of resolving conflicts within ourselves that are utterly hopeless when everything remains resolutely hidden and all personal life is a matter of pretending that the shame behind anger and self-loathing is nothing. The formulation of those who hide this way is intolerable, but I will reduce it to a footnote, so as not to ruin an otherwise reasonable piece with a tell-tale snarl of my own at the end [1].

[1] The formulation of the abusive insister on secrecy, the provider and hider of shame, goes something like this:

“Nothing at all to see here, history is overrated. Shit happens, life looks forward, not backwards. The past is prologue to nothing. Trust me, just be happy, don’t be a judgmental, angry, vindictive person like your insane uncle. Don’t worry about your mother’s pain, your father’s. It helps nobody. I already told you, for the thousandth time, the check’s in the mail and I won’t come in your mouth, so stop struggling so much, would you?”

American Healthcare under the unamended, serially challenged ACA

I got a notice on Sunday from the New York State of Health, the state entity that administers the Affordable Care Act Marketplace in NYS, selling various plans and being the final arbiter of all things health insurance for millions of otherwise uninsured New Yorkers. It has been run, since its inception, by a marginally competent and apparently energetic Cuomo appointee named Donna Frescatore. Under her stewardship, you can get the New York State of Health to fix their own errors (if they result in denial of coverage or denial of the subsidy the law says your income provides for) only after arbitration, a process that takes just three months or so. I’ve had to do this twice over the years (while having no health insurance the second time). Fair is fair. Frescatore has been promoted for her excellent work at the NYS of Health and now also runs New York State Medicaid, because, why not? Albany is known as a corrupt town and Cuomo is suddenly looking every bit as obnoxious and autocratic as many of us long felt he is.

Anyway, because the New York State of Health gave me no notice last March that I needed to upload a document I’d forgotten to maintain my insurance coverage (though they sent a timely notice to my insurance company, informing them to cancel my insurance effective April 1) I found myself without affordable health care during the first full month of the pandemic’s initial surge in New York City, where I live.

I found out when a doctor’s office called me to tell me there was a problem with my upcoming visit, my insurance had been rejected. In disbelief, since I’d paid premiums for the entire year, I contacted my insurance company and learned it was true. This time, they informed me with regret, NYS had cancelled it. The insurance company apparently has no legal obligation to pass on such notice to the consumer under the PPACA. So sorry!

Infuriating, yes, scary too, particularly during a massive public health emergency that has now killed about 525, 000 Americans. Fortunately for me, I didn’t need to seek arbitration last April, and since I learned my insurance had been cancelled a few days before the deadline for getting it back in May, I was able to complete the ten minute on-line fix before the April 15 deadline for coverage in May. A friend advised me to go the the NY State of Health website and see why I’d be terminated. I uploaded the document they’d requested, the whole thing took a few minutes. If I’d had notice (NYS of Health claimed, falsely, that I had) I would have done this the day my insurance company was ordered by NYS of Health to cancel my insurance in 20 days. Last year my insurance was restored effective May 1. Slight harm, slight foul. I was glad to have health insurance again during lockdown.

When I went to renew my plan for 2021, in the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when all New Yorkers are required to re-enroll, I was surprised to learn that my renewal was not due until May 1, 2021 (or April 15th, I guess). I verified this, paid my first six months’ premiums and have had no problem with services under my insurance since.

I’ve often questioned why the overwhelmed NYS of Health makes everyone re-certify in these hectic weeks at the end of the year, when phone lines are jammed, mistakes are routinely made, the website crashes, instead of on a rolling basis, say, by birthdate which would allow everyone to be better served. One characteristic of a great, unaccountable bureaucrat is inviolable rigidity.

I had a notice from NY State of Health on Sunday night, in their typical opaque bureaurcratese it notified me:

I suspected it had to do with my obligation to re-certify before the fifteenth of the month prior to the first month of coverage, on pain of losing health insurance with likely arbitration looming if I wanted help paying for ongoing health care. The arbitration is great, by the way, after only a month or two wait, you get a formal hearing over the phone, where a lawyer/arbitrator grills you and you present your side of the story complete with all evidence you may want to submit. A few weeks later you receive an arbitrator’s decision in the mail. I’m two for two in these, although, in fairness to everyone, I practiced law for fifteen years or so.

I keep thinking of the tens of thousands of poor bastards who lose insurance or premium subsidies every year who may not be up to putting on a legal showing of NYS of Health’s errors resulted in their loss of affordable health care. An experienced lawyer who doggedly searched the law for months, calling every state and federal (and NYC) office I could fine, spending hours on-line, I never found the law my insurance company had violated when they’d illegally terminated my insurance the previous (and instantly restored it when I filed an on-line complaint at the NYS Department of Finance– of course it was DOF!). I think, what chance does the average low-income New Yorker stand against the opaque Patient Protection Act?

Typical of all fucking notices from the NY State of Health, they bury the lede, (after informing the reader in the annual notice of notice email that the customer may have received the message in error). The notice is usually many pages long, and what you need to do is often set out on page eight or ten, like they want to make sure to fuck your brain good and proper before coming to the point, informing you of your inviolable obligation. Of course, this could be succinctly stated at the top of the notice, but… what the hey? I assume Donna Frescatore (who does not allow her subordinates at NYS of Health to give out her name) has something to do with this oppressive approach to informing low-income citizens of their rights and obligations. What you need to do to keep your health insurance could be up top, on page one of the important notice, but, you know, fuck it.

Much as I despise her type, Donna probably had nothing to do with this next bit, which is surely part of the Patient Protection Act itself (the communist inspired one passed on a party-line vote by the last illegitimate president before the present illegitimate one, inserted after massive, obvious but unprovable fraud — the very worst, most insidious kind of fraud!!):

IMPORTANT: When you end coverage with one plan and start a new one in the same year, all
of your cost-sharing responsibilities start over. For example, any payments that went toward the
annual deductible for your old plan will not apply to the new plan. This is true even if the new
plan is with the same company.

Which only stands to reason, you know, because, why not? Corporations are people too.

I remind all Americans that this shit is an exclusively American sickness– advertising medications — “ask your doetor!”, excluding eyes and teeth from the definition of “health care”, buying health insurance rather than health care itself, a trillion dollar industry with a million wealthy middle men demanding Americans pay way more for health care than citizens of any other civilized, wealthy nation in the world. Every “moderate” Democrat in Congress will defend each of these self-evident things as right, just as ordained by Jesus Christ Himself.

Medicare, the popular health insurance program for Americans over 65, had many problems when it was first passed under LBJ. Those problems were addressed and many were fixed over the next few years. In contrast, the ACA, a highly conservative plan (brainchild of the Heritage Foundation — deniers of climate science, promoters of the myth of voter fraud and so forth) that left the profits of large health corporations intact, has been attacked by angry Republicans since its passage, many attempts to repeal it launched (recall, it was only the dying John McCain’s dramatic thumbs down that saved it under Trumpie) and so all of its original warts and infirmities remain. When it works, it’s fine. When you hit any kind of snag, you’re pretty much fucked, patient protections or no.

Now I’m going to go back to read the rest of the fucking thing, the informative and entirely reasonable gem above was on page three or four.

Whew, further down the notice we learn:

Please Note: Changing your coverage is different than ending your coverage. If you want to switch
plans and do not want to make any other changes to your account, call NY State of Health to find out if
you are eligible to switch plans and to pick a different plan. Enrollment in Child Health Plus and the
Essential Plan can be changed at any time during the year.

I just read all seven pages of this important notice (that may have been sent to me in error), doesn’t seem to be any action I need to take at this time. Here are just some of the other languages one can request this important document in:

Getting Help in a Language Other than English

This is an important document. If you need help to understand it, please call 1-855-355-5777. We can
give you an interpreter for free in the language you speak.

Español (Spanish)
Este es un documento importante. Si necesita ayuda para entenderlo, llame al 1-855-355-5777. Podemos proporcionarle gratuitamente un intérprete en el idioma que habla.

繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
這是一份重要文件。如果您在理解這份文件上需要幫助，請撥打電話：1-855-355-5777。 我們可為您免費
提供一名會講您的語言的口譯人員。


简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
这是一份重要文件。如果您在理解这份文件上需要帮助，请拨打电话：1-855-355-5777。 我们可为您免费
提供一名会讲您的语言的口译人员。


Русский (Russian)
Это важный документ. Если вам нужна помощь, чтобы понять его, позвоните по телефону
1-855-355-5777. Мы можем бесплатно предоставить вам переводчика на ваш родной язык.

Kreyòl Ayisyen (Haitian Creole)
Sa a se yon dokiman enpòtan. Si ou bezwen èd pou w konprann li, tanpri rele 1-855-355-5777. Nou ka
ba ou yon entèprèt gratis nan lang ou pale a.

বাংলা (Bengali)
এ􀎜ট এক􀎜ট গুরুত্বপূণ ন􀎺িথ। যিদ এ􀎜ট বুঝেত আপনার সাহােয􀒝র প্রেয়াজন হয় তেব অনুগ্রহ কের 1-855-355-5777
এ কল করুন। আপিন􀎭য ভাষায় কথা বেলন আমরা আপনােক িবনামূেল􀒝􀎭স ভাষায়􀎭দাভাষী প্রদান করেত পাির।

اللغة العربية (Arabic(
هذه الوثيقة مهمة. وإذا كنت بحاجة إلى مساعدة لفهم الوثيقة، يُرجى الاتصال على الرقم 5777-355-855-1 .ويمكننا أن
نوفر لك مترجمًا فوريًا باللغة التي تتحدثها مجانًا.

한국어 (Korean)
중요 문서입니다. 이해하는 데 도움이 필요하시면, 1-855-355-5777번으로 전화하십시오. 귀하가 사용하는
언어의 무료 통역사를 제공해드릴 수 있습니다.

Français (French)
Ceci est un document important. Si vous avez besoin d’aide pour le comprendre, appelez le
1-855-355-5777. Nous pouvons vous offrir gratuitement les services d’un interprète qui parle votre
langue.


Polski (Polish)
Ten dokument jest ważny. Jeśli potrzebuje Pan(i) pomocy w jego zrozumieniu, proszę zadzwonić pod
numer 1-855-355-5777. Możemy zapewnić bezpłatne usługi tłumacza w Pana(i) języku.

􁤖हन्दी (Hindi)
यह एक महत्वपूण􁭅दस्तावेज ह।ै य􁳰द आपको इसेसमझनेकेिलए सहायता क􁳱आवश्यकता हो, तो कृपया 1-855-355-5777 पर
कॉल कर􁱶। हम आपको आप जो भाषा (􁳲हदी) बोलतेह􁱹उसम􁱶िनःशुल्क दभु ािषया सेवा प्रदान कर सकतेह।􁱹

اردو (Urdu(
یہ اہم دستاویز ہے۔ اگر آپ کو اسے سمجھنے میں مدد درکار ہے، تو براہِ کرم 5777-355-855-1پر کال کریں۔ ہم آپ کو
آپ کی زبان میں مُفت ترجمان فراہم کر سکتے ہیں

And I think to myself, what a wonderful world! It really is amazing how varied and adaptable we brilliant (and sometimes irrational and brutal) wise apes are. Can you say that in Urdu?

Irv’s deathbed dilemma

This is becoming a terrible irony I can’t seem to overcome. I didn’t agree with my father about certain things, but this indigestible thing that he found so maddening I can’t seem to get past either. On his deathbed, when the subject of a family member came up, my father, Irv Widaen, was fixated on an insoluble vexation.

I tried, unsuccessfully, to lead him past it. This single issue seemed to blot out everything else about that family member. My father simply could not get over this one thing, he returned to it over and over. After a more than twenty year wrestling match with the issue, I find myself stopped by the same thing that confounded Irv.

It’s unfair, perhaps, to write anything about this here, but it is burning me daily so I’ll do a delicate dance to set out the dilemma in the abstract. I must describe it without revealing any of the many details that would cause shame. Try that one on sometime, it is a good workout.

This is the larger problem– when you are forbidden to speak of a dark thing there is no way toward the light. You might be totally reasonable seeking to put a troubling issue on the table, but those who feel their very souls will be jeopardized by disclosure will fight you, literally, to the death. Many find it infinitely better to pretend than to face a painful thing, especially if they believe people can’t change anyway.

My father was pessimistic in this regard, always arguing that while people might make superficial changes to their behavior, their innate, fundamental natures could never be changed. If you make strides in controlling a temper that has gotten you in trouble many times, you are only pretending you are not angry, each time you restrain yourself, but you are still prone to it in a way that others, born less angry, are not.

To me that position made little sense, since learning to control your temper is a great stride forward in life. Either you can work to improve something important or not. But many are as pessimistic as my father was about our emotional elasticity, our ability to learn from our painful mistakes and do better. That pessimism itself prevents growth, since the pessimist feels that growth is an illusion.

So, I cannot mention the thing that is eating at me, not here, certainly not with the people involved, not anywhere really. It’s like the “disappearance” of the bulk of my family, on my mother’s side, in August, 1943, all led to a ravine on the northwestern edge of town for a bullet in the back of the head in that sloping mass grave. On my father’s side, there is no clue how they were all murdered or what happened to their corpses, all we know is that every one of them was killed. It was always a subject too terrible to discuss. What would have been the point?

My grandfather, the sole survivor of his large family (recently I discovered a younger brother or a nephew who had an amazing, harrowing adventure escaping death over and over as a draftee in the Soviet Army– the reason he was not in town when its Jewish population was liquidated) liked violent movies, “shooting pictures” he called them, and lived a quiet life of fear and prejudice. My grandmother swung between great cheerfulness and despair, drinking sizable quantities of vodka along the way. She lost all six of her siblings, her parents, all but one aunt and uncle, everybody she’d ever loved back home, but never said a word about it.

Again, thinking about it now, what can anyone really have said about such an atrocity, the hideous details of which I only confirmed recently? Maybe they should have been in therapy or something, but I can understand how they never discussed this indigestible horror with their grandson. I get why my parents kept their silence.

The thing that tormented my father as he was dying, the thing that torments me now, is an ongoing situation that nobody is allowed to talk about. Since nobody is allowed to talk about this individual’s long pattern of shameful deception and abuse, done and hidden year after year after year, unrepentantly, the only alternative is to pretend none of it ever happened. We do this for the sake of a loved one, I suppose, not that this pretend really helps anyone.

The price we pay for doing this is participating in a lie — pretending these awful things, real betrayals that have changed lives, never actually happened. The price we pay for continuing to be perplexed by this is that we make ourselves dangerous enemies of those who want to leave others in the dark, out of shame.

I remember sighing when my father kept bringing this situation up as he was dying. I was hoping he had another message I could play back to our family member, who’d had a troubling relationship with Irv — as we all did. I hoped in vain, I could never play the little digital recording to the family member — it would not have helped anyone. Now, almost sixteen years later, I find myself behind the same immovable rock my father was pinned by as he lay dying.

I can say only a few more things about it. My father, by his harmful behavior and his outright emotional abuse, kind of made this outcome inevitable. There’s a fucking irony for you, one I couldn’t go into when I was trying to comfort the complicated man as he was dying. I could have made an irrefutable case of direct cause and effect, but what would have been the point when the guy was trying so hard to make amends, to go in peace, when that was truly all I wanted for him?

We have all met people so damaged that they insist on things that make absolutely no sense. We see national figures making such ridiculous, lying pronouncements in the media every day. Someone I knew told me a few years back that she loved me, and her family loved me, that they considered me part of the family, but that if I didn’t immediately forgive someone who would not yield in his insistence that his many provocations were figments of my easily angered imagination, that there would not be a second chance. Love us now or you’re dead to us all, she told me. And so I was dead, because people who loved me now saw that I was a totally unforgiving fucking asshole, no matter about any actual apology or show of contrition that would have allowed me to do the thing I wanted to do, forgive a childhood friend.

This is a very important piece, often overlooked in the widespread belief that all forgiveness is good and any failure to forgive is a fault– true forgiveness can only happen when the person who has done the damage is contrite, expresses an understanding of the hurtfulness of their acts, promises to try to do better. Without contrition and seeking forgiveness reconciliation is a brittle sham, waiting for the next offense to shatter it. Some are able to empathize and make amends, others reflexively vilify the unforgiving person they were unable to apologize to. I don’t understand this, but it always strikes me as an indication of severe damage when someone tells me they love me, but that they’ll kill me if I don’t let go of all hurt instantly.

These things go back to our upbringing. Some people are raised by emotionally mature parents and they get the benefit of a parent who is able to keep the child’s best interest front and center and not confuse their own needs with the need to show their child the right way to deal with life’s challenges. In my case, sadly, both of my parents, although very intelligent, decent, with good senses of humor, had survived brutal childhoods that left them emotionally unable to not react with frustration and rage at times when a much better reaction would have been silence, more thought, and a reasonable response that actually dealt with the issue in a way that taught the right lesson. It did not help me greatly when I first realized this about my parents, but it helps me now.

Again, pain and fear will stop us in our tracks. “Why didn’t my mother love me?” is a painful question. The answer is bad too: she did, as best she could, in her fucked up, damaged, damaging way. This is hard to understand, hard to make any good use of. The only thing that can lead to any kind of useful insight is understanding how they became this way, what happened to make them monsters. In the case of this family member, that kind of inquiry is strictly forbidden. To even pose the question makes you an enemy, since it presupposes that this person should change, should be able to make amends to the people he hurts. The false image of this person as emotionally whole, and good, and always loving, needs to be fostered at all costs. And maintaining that false image requires lying.

As I was writing the draft of my intended book about my father, I was careful to make no mention of this person, or the dramatic dynamic that illustrated a side of my father so clearly. I did not want to lose any members of my small family by divulging what I knew they kept secret (those who even knew of it) at all costs. We agree to disagree (an odious concept), simply don’t talk about it, everybody knows where everybody stands, it’s fucked up, possibly emotionally indefensible, intellectually dishonest, but it is what it is and no philosophical wiseass fuck insisting on the abstraction of “truth” and its great value in understanding our place in the world is going to make any difference. Forgive and love or, at least pretend to do those things, simply play along with the long con, or else you are the fucking problem, Jack.

I am the fucking problem, no doubt about it. Which leaves me in the same untenable position I often found myself in as a boy– you may be absolutely correct, you may be righteous, your position might even be mature and the most helpful one around– but you are the fucking problem, you sick bastard. In the case of my troubled, damaged parents, I was able to finally come to a helpful understanding. This one, man, it’s just sodomizing me around the clock and trying to make me swear it’s doing nothing of the fucking kind, a demand such things typically make of us.

A Thousand Cuts

The dermatologist does a volume business, so the surgeon cuts deep, to cut only once and be done — he can see many more patients this way. Mohs surgery is designed to leave a minimal scar, particularly when removing a cancer on the face invisible to the naked eye, as this latest one (unseen by the dermatologist, diagnosed by me) was. But it takes time to remove the cells a few layers at a time, examine the cutting under a microscope, scrape a little more if needed. In a volume practice you simply cut down to the cartilage of the nose, examine the cutting under a microscope to verify you got the whole thing and you’re done.

As the patient, if you don’t want a deep scar, you can pay out of pocket to have your nose cut again, differently, stitches put in, etc. Or you can stop being a crybaby, this is the fourth or fifth scar on your nose anyway. Every other Mohs surgery you’ve had took hours, with this one you were in and out, after having the wound cauterized, in about thirty minutes.

You learn new words as you get older. Nocturia, waking at night to urinate. You hope to wake, anyway (so far, so good). Crepitate, the cracking sound your arthritic knee makes when you get up from a chair or the bed, the snap and pop accompanying the pain. Venous ablation — the process of inserting a wire into the veins of your leg to cauterize them from the inside to allow normal blood flow to return and reduce the odds of a stroke from pooled blood in the lower legs. Hematuria, blood in the urine, sometimes dribbling out in a dark brown stream, before the clot can finally be pushed through and get spit out.

Sometimes this shit just seems to come in a flood. You get up for nocturia, crepitate with a wince of sharp pain, feel a throb from where the next vein needs to be ablated, et voila, gross hematuria, a thin stream of prune juice and an impressive clot in the toilet bowl. Then you break a tooth.

These things can have an effect on your mood, like angry people claiming that because they love you they can do whatever they want to you and you just have to accept it — Ahimsa Boy. Especially hard to take as you watch the suffering of tens of millions, the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands and the embrace by tens of millions of a brazen, partisan denial of this suffering. Things being done to solve massive, societal problems, things supported by 3/4 of our citizens, are countered by lies and irrelevant talking points told to undermine every effort to ameliorate mass suffering. The proposed budget for pediatric psychiatric services in the American Rescue Plan, for aid to suffering children during an unprecedented (in a hundred years) pandemic is countered by a snarl of “cancel culture” when a private publisher decides to stop printing books with a few hilariously racist characters in them [1].

Then we throw this deep, cunning cut into the mix, just to complete the picture mood-wise:

This feral cat’s affectionate, fierce mother, Mama Kitten, died in October of an undiagnosed disease. It took a few months after her mother’s death for Little Girl, her mother’s shadow, a good hunter who had always been second in command to her dominant mother, to get comfortable in her new role as the alpha cat. In time she became almost as trusting and affectionate as her mother had been. Her coat is silky and she loves to be scratched and petted (when she feels like it, being a cat). She and her sister Whiteback are the only survivors of the litter with their brothers Whitefoot and Turtleback.

Lately she has shown the same signs of approaching death that her mother displayed before she died. A curious asymmetrical thickening of her abdomen (similar to her mother and older sibling Grey Guy right before they died) and a loss of energy, appetite and status. Her dopey little sister Whiteback recently stepped up to take her food the way Little Girl had done to her mother right before the end. Little Girl took to the same warm, insulated box her mother stayed in before she died and she didn’t come out for meals yesterday.

I offered her a treat, which she declined. I reached in to pet her and she reminded me she is a feral cat, giving me a nice long slash on the thumb with her sharp claws. Sekhnet was more persistent, and more persuasive, and she spent a long time petting and comforting the doomed cat, virtually immobile in her warm box. As fate would have it, it was frigid last night. We both expected to find a beautiful little corpse this morning.

Sekhnet sent me the picture above, from earlier today, reported that the cat who hadn’t eaten yesterday was very happy to eat a new kind of fish shaped cat cookie, as well as some sardines. “Her last supper,” Sekhnet said fighting back tears.

Later I went out to the garden and saw Sekhnet, comically bent in half, Little Girl lounging on Sekhnet’s back, one of her favorite places. Little Girl was massaging Sekhnet’s back.

As a kitten she’d often perched like a parrot on Sekhnet’s shoulder as the human went about her work in the garden. As Sekhnet maintained her bent pose and tried to resist crying I petted and scratched Little Girl for a long time. She inclined her head to indicate the angle she wanted her face massaged from.

She seemed happy for the attention and showed no inclination to leave her comfortable spot on Sekhnet’s back. After a time I lifted her to a nearby perch where, after revealing how wobbly she was on her legs, she had a few more fish-shaped treats and drank some water.

It appears there will be another feral cat funeral very soon. I hope I’m able to carry her to her final resting place after my fourth goddamned venous ablation tomorrow.

[1] fucking politics:

What does one thing (helping people in deep jeopardy) have to do with the other (“cancel culture”)? FUCK YOU! The so-called facts of an organized, well-funded months’ long campaign to convince Americans of a lie, that Joe Biden was elected by massive fraud, with the collusion of countless Republican traitors in several states, are met by a cry that Biden is the fucking liar and a tool of vicious radical N-word terrorists! Irrationality is just as valid as so-called rational analysis! In other words: FUCK YOU!!

You have a brazen zealot like Ron Johnson from Wisconsin, who insists it wasn’t Trump’s people who ran amok in the Capitol after months of Trump fomenting a lie, after the “Stop the Steal” rally was shown an incendiary propaganda video blaming thieving, violent libtard cucks, inflammatory speeches delivered right before the riled up mob headed to the Capitol to “stop the steal”– the angry mob had every right to be angry, first of all, because they truly believed a fucking infuriating alternative fact– and second of all, it was leftists, posing as Trump supporters, who smeared feces and attacked cops on January 6th.

Prior to party-line passage of the American Rescue Act Johnson somehow was able to force hapless clerks to read the 628 page Democrat [sic] aloud to an empty chamber, until the wee hours of the night. A clever leftie (Sarah Lazarus at Crooked Media) will observe of this kind of stunt:

Senators finally began debating the coronavirus-relief bill on Friday, after Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) forced a handful of innocent clerks to read the full text out loud to him all night as a stalling tactic. Democrats immediately made up for the lost time by shortening the debate from 20 hours to three hours when no Republicans were there to object, but hopefully Ron had a nice time at his tyrannical, coronavirus-themed slumber party!

source

And then we learn that the GOP managed to extend the “debate” to 24 hours of bipartisanship anyway. To demonstrate that you can win an election, by a signifiant margin, and still be regularly pantsed by the minority party, a unified, lockstep party with no compunction about justifying anything their mad leader says or does, no matter how wild, insane or demonstrably false. Many people I know tune out politics because, it only aggravates us and there’s nothing anyone in a democracy can actually do to hold anyone else accountable for anything.

Centrist Democrat

What is “centrist” or “moderate” about a Democrat who believes Americans should not be guaranteed a living wage for full-time work? Every news outlet I’ve seen refers to conservative Democrat Joe Manchin (Trump won his state by 40 points in 2020, so there’s that) as moderate or centrist. According to Mr. Manchin $440 a week is more than fair pay for an unskilled worker, and, as you’ll hear reported everywhere, it is the position of a moderate centrist.

“Times that $400 by 50 weeks (we’ll give her two weeks vacation, unpaid) and that’s a nice, let’s see… $22,000. NOT BAD for someone without a high school diploma! A nice raise from her current $14,500! I’d like that kind of 30% raise myself!! And, yes, I know you can look on google and find out the median American income last year was around $34,000, but that’s factoring in all those folks making $14,500, so you can kind of throw out those numbers.”

What could be more moderate than that? Particularly when the left wing of your party keeps pointing out that adjusted for the cost of living, the federal minimum wage, (which hasn’t been raised since 2009, when it was increased by 70 cents an hour [1]) should be raised to an outrageous $24 an hour. So, radicals want $24. The president wants $15. The GOP presumably wants to keep it at $7.25. So a moderate centrist proposes a compromise of $11. You see?

I can understand FOX news calling Manchin a “centrist” and a “moderate” or a “voice of reason” since he’s basically a Republican in most things — but the NY Times, Washington Post, NPR, CNN, MSNBC? What the fuck? Call the thing what it is.

He’s from West Virginia, an impoverished state that voted for Trump by a 40% margin, even after his disastrous first term, a state that recently had a Ku Klux Klansman as one of its senators. He may be independent, he may be a maverick, he may be as politically shrewd as Mitch McConnell, it may be perfectly understandable that he is enjoying his sudden, outsized power and the way everybody is bowing down to him, but one thing he isn’t is a centrist or a moderate. Words fucking matter.

[1]

Check out this handy chart of the federal minimum wage (established under FDR in 1938) at the Department of Labor and see how it changed over the decades.

Moderates in America

Democratic senators like Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema are invariably called “moderates” for their stances on things like not increasing the federal minimum wage to a living wage and their vows to protect the filibuster, to preserve its “bipartisan” spirit. They are only “moderates” in a senate where half of the members reflexively refuse to debate anything at all proposed by the Democrat [sic] party.

They can be seen as moderates only in a world where not publicly voicing the idea that their fellow Democrats actually do like to have sex with children and drink their blood and that the rigged 2020 election was clearly stolen from the incumbent in a way too obvious to need any so-called “proof” counts as being “reasonable” and “moderate”.

It is the moderation of a wealthy person who believes that someone demanding $600 a week pay is a greedy, entitled, lazy fuck who will destroy the economy with unreasonably selfish demands.

The long-delayed COVID relief bill, The American Rescue Plan, is now finally going to be debated in the Senate, debated, after Democrats agreed to take the $15/hr federal minimum wage out of it, reduced proposed unemployment payments and Vice President Kamala Harris cast the 51st and deciding vote to HAVE A DEBATE on this crucial legislation, anxiously awaited by literally millions of suffering Americans. The Democratic “moderates,” with their indispensable votes, got on board, once the offensive living wage provision (an artificially low wage — though more than twice the current one — which would be phased in over four long years) was removed from legislation favored by more than 75% of Americans.

All fifty Republican Senators voted against debating this wildly popular, sorely overdue relief bill during a time of massive national suffering. The bipartisan party of Lincoln voted, in a unanimous block, to block debate on a relief bill needed by millions, measures favored by 77% of Americans including 60% of Republicans. They took this united stand because, according to their most vocal fringe, fundraising dynamos one and all, Biden, an illegitimate president, is fake — he pretends to want bipartisanism but look at how he’s already acting like a dictator, just like his N-word buddy the Muslim. If they are not obstructing passage of this legislation for that reason, it is for something equally compelling, I’m sure — like the absolute parliamentary right to obstruct a vote on virtually anything without any debate whatsoever.

The Senate Parliamentarian [1], who serves at the pleasure of the Senate Majority Leader (who appoints the parliamentarian) gave the “moderate” Democrats cover by ruling that the $15/hr. minimum wage is not properly within the ambit of a budget bill about to be passed by reconciliation (bypassing the 60 vote threshold imposed by the filibuster). The same parliamentarian had no problem ruling that a provision of Trump’s massive tax cut to the wealthy that allowed for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve [2] — clearly had to do with the budget and the economy and so could permissibly be passed by a simple majority.

Leaving aside the fact that Elizabeth MacDonough, our nation’s SIXTH Senate Parliamentarian (do the math), currently serves at the pleasure of Chuck Schumer– her decision is not binding. But abiding by her ruling on the minimum wage allows Manchin and Sinema, and any other “moderates” who find a $600 a week wage too extravagant for people who don’t deserve shit and don’t contribute a dime to their political campaigns, to sign on without abandoning their principles (for lack of a better word).

If moderates Manchin and Sinema won’t vote to get rid of the filibuster (and their votes would be needed overcome the 60 vote filibuster mountain to allow the Biden administration to pass anything at all), here are two ideas from a fine discussion by Norm Ornstein on ways to make the filibuster comport with the purpose Machin and Sinema both claim to support.

Ornstein makes the entirely reasonable point that if the minority party wants to obstruct a bill and prevent debate, it should carry the burden of taking strenuous action to do it, rather than forcing the majority to peel off ten votes from the minority (this could not even be done in the recent open and shut impeachment where numerous Republicans admitted they took refuge in a contrived procedural dodge to acquit their leader without actually ruling on the merits). Ornstein accepts the Manchin/Sinema rationale (for purposes of this argument, at least) that the original intent of the filibuster was not to protect slavery or block voting rights and other civil rights, but to increase bipartisanism in the Senate.

One way to restore the filibuster’s original intent would be requiring at least two-fifths of the full Senate, or 40 senators, to keep debating instead requiring 60 to end debate. The burden would fall to the minority, who’d have to be prepared for several votes, potentially over several days and nights, including weekends and all-night sessions, and if only once they couldn’t muster 40 — the equivalent of cloture — debate would end, making way for a vote on final passage of the bill in question.

If you find that too onerous, Democratic “moderates”, how about this?

Go back to the “present and voting” standard. 

A shift to three-fifths of the Senate “present and voting” would similarly require the minority to keep most of its members around the Senate when in session. If, for example, the issue in question were voting rights, a Senate deliberating on the floor, 24 hours a day for several days, would put a sharp spotlight on the issue, forcing Republicans to publicly justify opposition to legislation aimed at protecting the voting rights of minorities. Weekend Senate sessions would cause Republicans up for reelection in 2022 to remain in Washington instead of freeing them to go home to campaign. In a three-fifths present and voting scenario, if only 80 senators showed up, only 48 votes would be needed to get to cloture. Add to that a requirement that at all times, a member of the minority party would have to be on the floor, actually debating, and the burden would be even greater, while delivering what Manchin and Sinema say they want — more debate.

Fair enough for you, eh, moderates?

Presently, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, or anyone on his side of the aisle, merely has to have somebody send an email to the appropriate person announcing his party’s intention to filibuster and letting Democrats know they have to find ten brave GOP Senators willing to be censured by their party for consorting with the enemy. Then, the bill unrevivably dead before a word of debate in the Senate, they can go about their business, being bipartisan.

With the end, or reasonable limitation, of the filibuster, we might also be spared the sickening spectacle of yesterday’s late afternoon stunt by Ron Johnson, from Wisconsin, forcing clerks to read the 628 page American Rescue Plan bill aloud, over the course of ten hours, in a virtually empty Senate chamber, vacated but for a single Republican (to ensure the clerks’ compliance) and one Democrat (for some reason or another). Seriously? I wonder what the Parliamentarian would have ruled on the permissibility of that one.

[1]

The parliamentarian is appointed by and serves at the pleasure of the Senate Majority Leader. Traditionally, the parliamentarian is chosen from senior staff in the parliamentarian office, which helps ensure consistency in the application of the Senate’s complex rules.

Term length: Pleasure of the Senate Majority Leader

Constituting instrument: Standing Rules of the Senate


Parliamentarian of the United States Senate – Wikipedia

[2]

In January 2017, MacDonough controversially ruled that a provision in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 that would open the 1002 area of ANWR to oil and gas drilling, met the conditions of the Byrd Rule under budget reconciliation.[14]

source

Mike Pence’s new job

Same as his old job (outside of the danger of being lynched for cowardice), he’s a paid right-wing “scholar” and celebrity talking point mouthpiece at the influential right wing think tank The Heritage Foundation [1]. News broke yesterday, like a foul wind, that Pence authored an opinion piece in his employer’s news letter that is being called an “op ed” — a thoughtful discussion of “election integrity” published by the prestigious on-line journal Daily Signal, a publication of … whoa! The Heritage Foundation [2]. Every headline tells their story:

Pence’s scholarly theory, and he’s sticking to it, is that even though the short-lived Trump Presidential Advisory Commission for Electoral Integrity he headed with Voter Suppression champion Kris Koback, found virtually no electoral fraud of any kind in 2016 (when Trump claimed millions of Mexican zombies illegally inflated Hillary Clinton’s large victory among American voters) — the PERCEPTION OF WIDESPREAD FRAUD in 2020 and the attendant lack of faith in the integrity of American elections is the real problem for our democracy. Pence stressed that we must clamp down on states illegally trying to let more people vote without the proper supervision because some voters, in fact millions of them are — may I be politically correct here? — N-WORDS and the people who, falsely, believe that such people should be allowed to vote just like old, angry, wealthy (and/or stupid) white people in rural and strategically gerrymandered enclaves.

The massive Heritage Foundation database on voting fraud, maintained by discredited conspiracy theorist Hans von Spakovsky (leader of coordinated pre-2020 election attempts by GOP secretaries of state to suppress voting in their states) documents fewer than 1 case of voter fraud in every 2,000,000 votes cast since the 1980s.

There is nothing surprising in Pence echoing the lies of his former boss, after all, voter suppression has been a longtime goal of Pence’s party. In fairness to them, their policies (giving tax breaks to the wealthiest, stressing that the poor should shut the fuck up) are widely unpopular. They might be correct in their belief that their only hope for maintaining a stranglehold on power is by trickery, lying, exploiting the raging grievance of masses of evangelized supporters, and cleverly constructed discriminatory voting restrictions to maximize their votes and minimize “DEMOCRAT” [sic] votes. Hell with cleverly constructed voter suppression laws, now that we think of it, even in- your-face ones ought to work with a 6-3 SCOTUS no worries, LOL! They already have the brains of the group, John Roberts, on board!

Is Pence simply calculating and spineless, you ask? The answer is yes, both. Nothing surprising there either– he was one of the heads of Trump’s crack (smoking) White House Corona Virus Task Force, making the announcement last June that his leader had kicked COVID-19 right in the pussy and that the crisis was now over, 400,000 additional US deaths of COVID-19 (and counting) notwithstanding. The real plan, largely successful, was to ignore the uncontrolled spread of the disease to establish herd mentality, as the president stated. They gave it a scientific-sounding rationale by calling their efforts to politicize the infectious air-born pathogen an effort to gain what sticklers call herd IMMUNITY, such as the absolute herd immunity enjoyed by the alpha male in nature who may, even if herbivorous, eat his entire herd for his own survival. In fairness to Pence, science has never been the strong suit of religious bigots.

I keep wondering what would have happened if even more of the Capitol Police force openly sided with the rioters on January 6th. If instead of a hero cop like Eugene Goodman leading guys like Romney and Pence away from the surging, violent mob they’d led the mob to Romney and Pence and others the rioters wanted to fuck up. There might have simply been a good beat down of these cucks and traitors to the Big Lie, there’s no proof that anyone chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” would actually have strung him up. But what if they had? Would anything about the GOP’s continued lockstep march behind Trump’s obscenely naked lie have changed?

I wonder about this the same way I wonder what would happen if the former president who always singles out Black women for special abuse (a two-fer for a misogynistic racist) who angrily called them bitches when denouncing their thug sons who took a knee in protest during the National Anthem, had ever been caught on mic simply saying the word he must have said a million times over the years, to wit: “nigger.” I wonder — would that have been his undoing? Or just another example of Liberal Cancel Culture [3] shutting down God’s Imperfect Vessel merely for giving voice to what everyone of us is constantly thinking. Particularly about spoiled, entitled Black sons of bitch mothers who don’t even have the decency to pretend there’s nothing wrong with unarmed blacks being regularly killed by law enforcement in this country.

What are these enraged son of a bitch maniacs going to do next? Beat cops with flagpoles bearing American flags while chanting “blue lives matter?”

All this said, I have been relieved in recent days at the lack of relevance any of this Big Lie shit seems to have beyond the confines of the Trump/Pence dead-enders ecosphere. Not that his extremist party, strictly speaking, needs him at this point, their fundraising off the Big Lie (stolen election he won in a landslide) is robust. Still, it’s nice that Pence’s master is finally mostly silent.

Even among the extremest of these moneyed fucks, those who attended CPAC’s annual county fair, only 55% percent want Trump to run for president for life in 2024. Even Trump seemed ambivalent about running in 2024. His niece Mary, who seemingly got the brains Trump and his offspring were unfairly denied, predicted that Trump’s decisive loss in 2020 (the election he keeps claiming he won IN A LANDSLIDE) means he will never risk such a humiliation again.

Now we just have to let the many prosecutions and investigations take their courses, and watch to see which ambulance chasers step up to ineptly defend Trump in those suits. The jury in these court cases will unfairly exclude Trump’s co-conspirators and enablers, unlike when he was POTUS. In Georgia, the Extremely Stable Genius’s perfect phone call (his eighteenth try– he doesn’t give up and neither should you!) to his former supporter Brad Raffensberger is being played for a Grand Jury, even as we speak.

Pence? N-word, please!!

[1]

The prestigious right wing think tank has an annual budget of about $80,000,000 (as of 2011) and, though it is a tax exempt non-profit that is not required to disclose its donors, it has a number of right wing luminaries on its board of trustees. These include Rebekah Mercer, Ed Meese and Jim DeMint. Not surprisingly, their position on Climate Change is that it’s bullshit:

The Heritage Foundation rejects the scientific consensus on climate change.[69][70] The Heritage Foundation is one of many climate change denial organizations that have been funded by ExxonMobil.[69][71] The Heritage Foundation strongly criticized the Kyoto Agreement, which was intended to curb climate change, saying American participation in the treaty would “result in lower economic growth in every state and nearly every sector of the economy.”[72] The Heritage Foundation projected that the 2009 cap-and-trade bill, the American Clean Energy and Security Act, would result in a cost of $1,870 per family in 2025 and $6,800 by 2035; on the other hand, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office projected that it would only cost the average family $175 in 2020.[73]

and, as for electoral fraud bearing the need for strict measures to prevent:

The Heritage Foundation has promoted false claims of voter fraud. Hans von Spakovsky who heads the Election Law Reform Initiative at the Heritage Foundation has played an influential role in making alarmism about voter fraud mainstream in the Republican Party, despite no evidence of widespread voter fraud.[74][75] His work, which claims voting fraud is rampant, has been discredited.[76]

and, now, a word from their anonymous sponsors:

In 1973, businessman Joseph Coors contributed $250,000 to establish The Heritage Foundation and continued to fund it through the Adolph Coors Foundation.[77][78] In 1973, it had trustees from Chase Manhattan Bank, Dow Chemical, General Motors, Pfizer, Sears and Mobil.[79]

Heritage is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization as well as a BBB Wise Giving Alliance accredited charity funded by donations from private individuals, corporations and charitable foundations.[80][81][82] As a 501(c)(3), Heritage is not required to disclose its donors and donations to the foundation are tax-deductible.[81] According to a MediaTransparency report in 2006, donors have included John M. Olin Foundation, the Castle Rock Foundation, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation and the Bradley Foundation.[83][unreliable source?][importance?] Other financing as of 2016 includes $28.129 million from the combined Scaife Foundations of the late billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife.[84][85][unreliable source?] Heritage is a grantee of the Donors Trust, a nonprofit donor-advised fund.[86][87][importance?][88] As of 2010, Heritage reported 710,000 supporters.[89]

For the fiscal year ending December 31, 2011, Charity Watch reported that Edwin Feulner, past president of The Heritage Foundation, received the highest compensation in its top 25 list of compensation received by charity members. According to Charity Watch, Feulner received $2,702,687 in 2013. This sum includes investment earnings of $1,656,230 accrued over a period of 33 years.[90]

Heritage’s total revenue for 2011 was $72,170,983 and its expenses were $80,033,828.[91][92]

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The Daily Signal is a conservative American political media news website founded in June 2014. The publication focuses on politics, policy, and culture and offers political commentary from a conservative perspective. It is published by conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation.Owner: The Heritage Foundation Editor: Robert Bluey Launched: 2014

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Ask GOP stalwart Liz Cheney, John McCain’s widow, former Senator Jeff Flake and anybody else in the GOP who found inciting a violent attack on the Capitol on the day the final, ceremonial certification of the election to be a high crime for a president to commit, about the fucking libtards and our vicious, zero-sum cancel culture.