Reservoir of Rage — and Silence

Rage is a famously difficult subject, which is why I’m trying to take some ways of expressing it one at a time. Reframing, for example, is an essential technique for angrily dominating someone in an argument. Silence, in the face of a friend or family member’s expressed concern, or in answer to a direct request for a conversation, is one of the most potent weapons in the war of rage. It has the virtues of being subtle and deniable (there are MANY reasons for silence), but it is also highly effective, dramatic and deadly, in my experience.

Silence can be a great blessing, of course, like when an overbearingly loud noise finally stops. When quiet descends we feel our breathing calm, we can focus and concentrate. Silence (as opposed to blurting something) can often be very useful when confronted with vexation, it gives you time to gather yourself, deliberate and react more productively. Silence is golden, as those prone to uttering cliches will sometimes say in a quiet moment.

Silence can also be used as the ultimate, uninterruptible, elegant last word in a spasm of rage. One obvious beauty of using deathly silence this way, (to the practitioner), is that it’s the anger expression technique that keeps giving, the silence will continue to irk the other person until they can forget about it and the meaning of the silence itself can always be debated, ill will denied vehemently.

Silence is just silence, the practitioner will insist if confronted, though it might feel like the “silent treatment” to an oversensitive eternal victim type. “… and, you know, though it might well be possible that my silence actually does express my utter contempt for you, you overweening baby, you will always get an unwinnable argument from me about why you are totally wrong to construe it that way. It’s just silence… no meaning to it whatsoever, it’s all inside your messed up head… and typical of you to blame me for the outpourings of your corroded imagination.”

The genius part of this defense is that it’s often true — people fail to respond for many reasons, including being busy, distracted, overwhelmed, truly not knowing what to say. I used to be offended when I heard nothing back from friends I’d send random bits of gratuitous creativity to. Now I understand there is no intention to be hurtful — most people have no experience with a need to feel creative and simply don’t know what to say when someone sends them a thirty second bit of original music. Musicians know that “nice” is a perfectly satisfying reply if they like the thing, but, most people feel overmatched to respond to a drawing sent out of the blue, an incoherent bit of calligraphy, a poem, or whatever the fucking thing is. “Nice” seems mechanical, I guess, something original probably seems in order, and what to actually say to someone who insists on “sharing”– I have no idea.

For our purposes here I am talking about the silence that is a refusal to speak, after being asked to. If you ever experienced this kind of bruising silence, you know what I’m struggling to bring out here.

It is an integral part of the game of rage to always have an argument ready to justify your anger and the actions it caused you to take. (The passive voice, we note, is always good in this case: righteous anger caused me to do this, it was clearly not my choice to be so provoked by you, asshole!)

The argument an angry person makes doesn’t need to be sound or have any chance of prevailing based on what actually took place, the only point is to contest the other person’s right to their feelings. Anger is a zero-sum game — one winner (innocent, 100% right), one loser (infuriating asshole, 100% wrong.) It’s an angry fool’s reductive way of looking at life, but there it is.

This readiness to fight, and the devilish quickness to justify any harsh action, are hallmarks of the perpetually angry person. That raging reflex to deny, no matter what, is what is so infuriating about people addicted to that intoxicating surge of righteousness anger provides. Compulsive Contrarians will fight you angrily, out of an insatiable need to fight, no matter what the cost, to the death and beyond.

To be clear about the kind of anger I’m talking about, it is an unyielding reflex to remain angry and to win the fight. We all experience anger, it is an inevitable part of our condition here as humans. Unfairness, disappointment, bad luck all make us mad. A mark of maturity is being able to keep these things in perspective, to learn to fix what we can and not dwell forever on everything that makes us angry.

The kind of anger that demands the regular harsh punishment of others is an attitude toward life. It hardens into a stance of eternal grievance, a much different, more destructive force than what is released when we sometimes get pissed off at the ordinary frustrations we all have to deal with.

Martin Luther King Jr. famously said “forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a permanent attitude.” We need to be ready to forgive, when the time is right, we have to stay receptive to another person trying to make amends — hence, the permanent attitude. Being ready to accept an apology is a philosophical stance. The same goes for letting go of, or holding on to, anger. We can stay focused on a grievance forever, and act accordingly, or learn to repair what we can and coexist with things that enrage us but that we can do little about, without being mad and ready to fight all the time.

Back to the angry use of silence in situations where dialogue is needed. Political examples of this, the brazen refusal to honestly answer a straight question, for example, are ubiquitous. No point to cite specific cases, there are too many every day, every hour, to start naming. Besides, our current political idiocy is too sickening and bringing it into the discussion is a distraction that will take us off course. I’ll stick to the personal here, keep it clean and straightforward, in hopes of making a point worth making.

The epoch we’re living in now is a worldwide Age of Anger, (or Age of Rage, if ya like a rhyme on yer page) to an extent not seen on this scale in almost a century. Since we’re all forced into offense so much of the time, by news designed to make us angry (and watch the ads [1]), it is best to see anger as the personal thing it always is. Anger is personal, totally, for every person who feels it.

Working to understand our own relationship to our personal anger, and what specifically makes us mad, is probably the best we can do, and a first step toward making our own lives, and the lives of those around us, less contentious. It’s also one of the hardest things to do, especially if you’re prone to getting pissed off. We live in a world of constant provocation at a historical moment when the dial is turned up to 10 all day long (and all through the night).

Here are a couple of examples of angry uses of silence from my life, as succinctly as I can lay them out (I’ve written about each of these vexing kerfuffles here when they happened.)

Let’s recognize first that silence can have different meanings, depending on how we were raised. These meanings determine our feelings about silence and our sensitivity to it. In some households silence may be a proper initial response to a perplexing question. It can indicate respect, the person is thinking deeply about your question and will give a considered opinion after they have thought things through. In another home you’ll be taught that silence as a reply means “never,” the silence about your expressed concern will go on until the next time you bring it up, when it will be answered by an identical pointed silence and so forth, ad infinitum.

Nobody who expresses a concern likes to be ignored (nobody that I’ve ever met, anyway). It is a cruel thing to do to a child (or a person of any age, actually). It amounts to neglecting them emotionally by ignoring their fears, desires, questions and concerns. Is it as cruel as daily beatings, making the child go to bed hungry, humiliating the kid publicly? That depends on how diligently silence by way of response is wielded.

In my own life I’ve come to understand, as a fairly old man, that what I thought of as my father’s relentless cruelty (he made very effective use of strategic silence as a weapon) was in large part his relentless inability to do any better than he did. He was the victim of unspeakable abuse in a home ravaged by poverty, ignorance and rage. He did the best he could, I understood finally, though his best did a good deal of damage. This understanding of my father’s helplessness against his pain and anger came only after a lot of pain and conflict in my own life. My eventual understanding of his limitations erased virtually none of it, but it makes the world make much more sense to me.

As he was dying my father made a seemingly incomprehensible request, asking me to understand that, in a real sense, our long war was “nothing personal”. I thought about this Zen koan for a long time before its meaning emerged. His mistreatment of me had nothing to do with me personally — he would have done the same thing to any child of his, no matter who he or she had been. He was reiterating what he’d said earlier that last night of his life: it had been him, not me, who created most of the intractable problems between us. Our endless war had little to do with me personally.

If I was traumatized, as a young kid, to suddenly learn about the Nazi death machine, by seeing black and white film clips of a guy wheeling a wheelbarrow of jiggling skeletons and dumping them into a pit of corpses (an image that caused me to vomit), and agitatedly asked my father about it, what did I really expect him to say? He was not emotionally equipped to say what he probably wished he had:

“You saw some of the most horrible images in human history and you’re asking a terrible question that the greatest minds in the world can’t really answer. You’ll learn about racism, scapegoating, the terrible violence angry mobs are capable of when whipped up by hate-filled maniacs. You’re right to be upset, especially at age eight when you have no way to put any of this into context. I’m sorry you saw those clips that I tried to spare you from seeing, I know you can’t unsee them, but believe me, a lot of the horror you’re feeling right now will start to fade pretty soon. We humans are very adaptable, you’ll feel much better tomorrow, I guarantee. I understand why you vomited, you were right to vomit. You’re safe now, and we can talk more about this later. As you have questions, just ask and I’ll do my best to explain what I can.”

Instead, frustrated and overwhelmed, my father snapped that he’d warned me not to see that goddamned movie, forbade me, in fact, but I never fucking listen to him, that I’m a drama queen always trying to claim a special right to feel like a victim. He told me angrily that just because many members of our family died (people he referred to as “mere abstractions!”) at the hands of Nazis and their helpers, it gave me no special right to feel in any way like a holocaust survivor, and so on.

He was overwhelmed, upset, not at his best, would have felt shame if I played a recording of what he had said to “console” his young son. Obviously he’d much rather have said something along the lines of the more humane response I set out above. On the bright side for him, it was years before I asked again about the slaughter of at least 15 great aunts and uncles and their entire extended families.

You grow up, reach an understanding of things that hurt you and hope to do much better yourself treating other people well. As Hillel said: what is hateful to you, don’t do to others. As you also learn — it is best to avoid people who can’t do this.

If you send a professional writer friend a piece you talked about, something you hope to publish, pages he said he’d be happy to read and comment on, and you never hear back? Shades of that hurtful silence, especially after two or three follow-ups when you still don’t hear back from him. In the end, if the guy claims you’re the asshole for being upset after only three or four tries for feedback, that anyone but a schmuck would have persisted, that, in fact, he probably did read the piece, likely even replied at the time (it made no impression on him either way, understand) you know the story with him. It’s not personal, in a true sense.

If an old friend offers legal help with a painful legal situation you find yourself entangled in and winds up playing devil’s advocate throughout the aggravating weeks and months, then loses his temper a few times that you keep getting upset, then apologizes, but later feels compelled to tell you he only apologized because you are such an irrationally angry person that groveling was the only way he could get you to calm down — you have learned who your old friend is, on a primal level. He operates within a very narrow empathetic bandwidth, to put it charitably. When he claims to have carefully considered every point you raised about the sad pass things have come to, while responding to none of them (and insisting he’s still been given no clue), his hurt silence is predictable, and finally welcome.

On down the line, I have other examples from my own life but I think the point is made. Again, as the sage Hillel told the man challenging him to put his Jewish faith into a single sentence: what is hateful to you don’t do to someone else. We all know what is hateful to us. It’s a good principle to try our best not do it to others. When we know we’ve failed, we should be quick to express our genuine regret.

When you know your personal kryptonite (in my case silence wielded as a final response to an expressed concern) all you can do is tell the people in your life, when you feel them doing that, YOW! THAT SHIT IS MY KRYPTONITE, please don’t wave it near my face! When they know what hurts you most, they have the final choice about whether they will deploy it against you or not. They will decide what the silence at the end means.

Almost never is that silence the blessed kind that restores calm, unless they are silently figuring out how to take care of another person’s hurt feelings and are going to get back to you.

At the same time, with deathlike silence there is something healthy and refreshing about the way the ugly noise finally stops. In fact, there are few things better, when things have already turned ugly, than the peace that comes when somebody who sincerely doesn’t know how to treat people finally shuts the fuck up.

[1]

Thought for a future post:

The mass media has long known that “if it bleeds, it leads”– all the research has shown executives that a larger audience will tune in to breaking news about violence, murder, mayhem, teased loudly in an alarming headline. The more recent refinement to this theory was among Mark Zuckerberg’s great innovations in monetizing the universal human desire for connection: rage is contagious, spreads like wildfire and there’s fucking GOLD IN THEM THAR FUCKING HILLS!!!

Speaking of rage and gratuitous best-selling violence, I would love to punch that particular noxious piece of shit in his smug, grotesquely monetized face. I’m pretty sure Mark would like it, too. And if not, it will be nothing personal, I assure you.

Evil Morons and “Herd Mentality”

The story is now out, with details (and documentary evidence), about how Mr. Trump and his unqualified appointees chosen for their unquestioning personal loyalty to the tyrannical asshat from Queens (along with their skill at stroking his delicate ego), continually lied about their efforts to control the deadly pandemic that is now raging out of control in the US.

The Trump administration’s regular attacks on the pandemic mitigation advice given by all medical experts were apparently motivated by their united embrace of an alternative “theory” (remember “Birtherism” is also a theory, as is “Libertarianism”) about how to beat the pandemic: infect everyone to bring about herd immunity (or “herd mentality” as a Trump Freudian slip rendered it on live TV).

Stupid people blindly ambitious and loyal to the stupidest, vainest, most vindictive man ever to be president, deliberately pursued a strategy of mass infection. Mass infection with a deadly, highly contagious disease science currently has no cure for. Because, you know, politics, power, prestige, career, obscene, untouchable wealth, DUH!

We set new records yesterday here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, for infections and deaths from this monster, COVID-19. As reported in the Lyin’ New York Times (official enemy of the people):

Officials across the United States on Wednesday reported the highest daily number for new coronavirus since the pandemic began, as well as the most deaths in a single day.

New infections were put at 244,365, and deaths at 3,607 — nearly 500 more than the record set only a week ago. The previous case record, 236,800, was set last Friday (though a reporting anomaly in Texas made it appear still higher.)

The latest figures capped day [sic] on which health experts warned Americans, buoyed by the rollout of a vaccination campaign, that it is far too soon to abandon common-sense precautions for halting the spread of the virus.

source

Now we know, with emails in their own words, to confirm our worst suspicions, that these imbeciles appointed by our petulant blob of unaccountable presidential prerogative actually pursued a secret, deliberate mass infection agenda. These accursed cretins actually wrote to each other spelling out their master plan to ignore science and let the vast majority of Americans go for broke.

I am not trying to insult unintelligent people, there are many who are kind, gentle, generous, loving. Intelligence, goodness and decency have no direct correlation. Many very smart people are vicious pieces of shit (Bill Barr pops to mind, though he may also be mentally ill [1]). The kinds of supremely ambitious idiots I have in mind are those who are just smart enough to know how to ingratiate themselves to corrupt and powerful idiots who will lavishly reward them with unearned positions of power and prestige far beyond their competence (Betsy DeVos, honey, I’m seeing your dazzling smile).

Someone observed recently, comparing increasingly foolish and deluded highly placed Trump dead-enders to high Nazi officials, that few would have had any chance of promotion except in a regime where blind loyalty to a barking mad leader, and the ability to shamelessly gratify The Leader’s ego, were the chief prerequisites for advancement. Trump does not have the best people. He does not even seem to have average people.

Now, the reservoir of rage inside threatens to overflow its banks and wash over me. I read about these stupid bastards and their blind, murderous idiocy and it fills me with anger, and despair over the cultivated stupidity of millions of my fellow Americans — and an individual’s powerless to have any effect on any of this.

An election cannot change any of these ugly facts. Not when the national leaders of the party that won the election keep expressing the high-minded, simplistic idea that we just need to get back to “normal” and everything will be fine.

Everything won’t be fine, not without constant organizing, mobilization and activism by those of us who believe in more than just an increasingly corrupt status quo that makes millions more feel comfortable while leaving millions of children hungry every night as the earth continues to be destroyed and our citizenry immiserated for the profit of supremely deserving men like Charles Koch, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.

The election of Biden will not bring back any of the 300,000 dead (and rapidly counting — 3,607 means 2.5 dead of COVID EVERY MINUTE yesterday), many of whom, perhaps half or more, did not have to die horrible, solitary deaths, but for the depraved indifference of Mr. Trump and his idiot lackeys.

Let us also remember that this is an oligarchic administration that truly had no business being in office, and would not have in an actual democracy. Trumpism was narrowly elected in the Electoral College (78,000 votes in MI, WI and PA combined gave Trump the presidency), the Electoral College being the electoral savior of otherwise defeated minoritarian right-wing candidates. That archaic memento of the Peculiar Institution gave us two bloody, destructive imbecile presidents within sixteen recent years, both of whom lost the vote of citizens by considerable margins (the former by less than half a million, the latter by almost 3,000,000).

We are relieved, those of us who embrace the label anti-fascist, that our great nation did not descend into autocracy. The president is still trying to bring that about, but it’s not happening, not yet, not under this unfunny clown, anyway (Pompeo and Christie are the new hopes for a one-party Leader, I suppose — at least in their own grasping minds).

Trump abdicated and disclaims any and all responsibility for the mass death on his watch, especially now that he’s lost, as his party blocks monetary and food relief for millions of suffering Americans. Trump, Pompeo and company continue to actively spread the deadly infectious pandemic with holiday super-spreader parties. Republican leaders are also actively sabotaging Biden’s presidency as they hatch a comeback in a RED WAVE in 2022, based on Biden’s Socialistic failures and the many thousands more who will die of COVID, hunger and homelessness on his watch.

We must take solace in the consolation that our “institutions” have held.

It is some consolation (and nothing to sneeze at) that courts did not renounce the rule of law, as the Senate majority, the majority of Republicans in the House, the president and his remaining myrmidons all have. Fortunately, the election was not close enough for Amy Coney Barrett to be able to cast the deciding vote, or for other Trump appointees to the federal bench to do anything for their benefactor but follow the actual laws of our “nation of law”. Laws under which the lawless, even if supremely powerful, must sometimes lose.

It is some consolation that numerous Republican state officials across the country did what the majority of House Republicans did not — accept the election results after certifying (and in some cases recounting, more than once) the votes in what they confirmed was a fair election. They risked the rage of a vicious madman and should be acknowledged.

But is there any real consolation in people simply doing what they swore a public oath to do? Isn’t that the minimum we should demand of public servants? This is how far we have slipped as an experiment in democracy, we are much closer to an experiment in fascism.

A recent rampage by “Proud Boys” on the streets of our nation’s capitol, raising hell over a “stolen election” that every official everywhere has confirmed and certified, was a frustrated attempt at a pogrom. They’d probably have loved to do more killing, hoping to stir up a justifiably violent reaction by anti-racists that would have allowed their Leader to declare an insurrection, invoke the Insurrection Act, martial law and a Trump seizure of absolute power.

Even Trump’s hero, Mr. Hitler [2], could not have pulled that one off in the US in 2020. Hitler could not have come to power with only a small contingent of this kind of violent asshole willing to break heads for him. We just got lucky with that one.

Germany during Hitler’s rise had literal armies of angry veterans (freikorps), right-wing students and humiliated nationalistic sons of the unemployed, on the streets, everywhere, by the hundreds of thousands, ready to violently disrupt protests, bash people in the face, bloody their fists, stab, shoot, string up political enemies. As in similar situations here, the cops often stood by in sympathy, allowing them free rein to intimidate and beat up their hated pro-democracy enemies. In that climate of regular street battles, it was a matter, for the shrewd Mr. Hitler, of making sure his shock troops were more violent than anyone else and seizing leadership of this gigantic mass of enraged, violent Germans. Within a short time, they were all Nazis, marching under the swastika, winners. Seig Heil!

We don’t currently have that widespread, wildly popular ground game by disaffected, enraged men, feeling hopeless except when taking up arms and banding together to put some hurt on people they hate. If big changes are not made by this incoming administration, starting with prosecuting sedition and other high crimes by highly placed Trumpist democracy deniers, we can expect the forces of reaction to keep reacting, more and more violently.

We also need government programs, like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) that FDR put into place (by executive order), to give meaningful jobs, a decent future and a real connection to the larger community to millions of potential troops for the next would be American autocrat.

If we don’t learn to work together, and look out for each other and our common interests, the future is violent.

Clearly, crimes against democracy have to be vigorously prosecuted, and new laws put on the books to prevent the unaccountable corruption of a man like the “totally exonerated” Mr. Trump (so what if he abused power and acted in contempt of Congress? 51-49, suck it, cucks!), and other future fascistic shenanigans by narrowly elected officials and their unqualified interim appointees.

Biden won the Electoral College by a comfortable margin and the popular vote by 7,000,000 — margins not seen by any candidate defeating an incumbent since FDR ousted Herbert Hoover in 1932. A solid win, a mandate for democracy, you might say.

Half the country, and the vast majority of Republicans, believe that Biden is as illegitimate as the Kenyan secret-Muslim that he worked for, the corrupt and evil spying divider that Trump’s DOJ is still investigating with Bill Barr’s ongoing John Durham Investigation into “Russiagate”.

These loathsome creatures do not sleep. They plan, they create and fund ideological think tanks and employment societies, buy TV and radio stations, newspapers, airwaves, bandwidth, buy political candidates, “primary” moderates out of office, fund astroturf “mass movements” like the “grassroots” Tea Party that brought many maniacs into Congress (and more recently, Q-Anon adherents and a religious cult member Supreme Court justice).

The bulk of these folks are some of the stupidest and most selfish motherfuckers the world has ever known, but their sheer numbers, and determination, make them a force to reckon with. Ask any of the 3,607 Americans who died yesterday, at a rate of better than two a minute, on the Loser-in-Chief’s petulant lame duck watch.

[1]

[2]

The only book we are relatively sure our reading-challenged top student president ever read (or at least browsed) was the collection of Hitler’s speeches he kept by his bedside at his triplex penthouse apartment atop Trump Tower.

A dip in the reservoir of rage

Years ago a friend of mine from high school was arrested for swimming in the reservoir up in the Bronx. At the time it didn’t seem fair, to arrest somebody simply for dunking his dirty ass in everyone’s drinking water. After all, the reservoir is huge in comparison to one person’s sweat and funk — they drained it years later and the sanitation trucks parked on its vast, dry bottom looked like tiny matchbox toys. There was a principle involved, I realize now, when cops pulled my hippie friend from the drinking water of everyone he knew and charged him with a misdemeanor.

Arguments can always be made for every possible position, that’s the thing to keep in mind. When you take someone to court, it is not essential that you believe your argument is better than your adversary’s, that you will almost certainly win. All you need is what lawyers call a colorable claim — you know, theoretically it is possible, if the court can be persuaded, to interpret this particular law this particular way to prove — or, if not prove, at least credibly allege — that the person I’m dragging into court is a fucking asshole!

Growing up with an adversarial father, who framed our arguments around the dinner table as a war that my sister and I would inevitably lose (how right he was!) I came to recognize specific techniques he used over and over to browbeat his overmatched little adversaries. A big one was reframing. It is such an important technique, and so ubiquitous in daily life and in politics, that I feel obliged to lay it out clearly today, for whatever use seeing it in black and white may have for you.

Framing an issue the way you want gives you a distinct advantage in any argument since it lets you choose the precise battlefield you prefer to fight on. A good frame provides the instant moral and strategic high ground. It is easy to do. Just tell your adversary “while you may feel that we are arguing over (choose whatever is actually bothering the person) what we are really talking about is (substitute the larger, different, more important issue that you want to discuss).”

You feel hurt by what you claim I did to you? Well, you hurt me much more than I ever hurt you! Do you hear me whining about your incessant, blind, “innocent” cruelty? No, what we’re really talking about is your need to always play the victim, your prudish readiness to be morally nauseated, your petulant penchant for punkish whimpering. Your essential weakness.

You may not “win” the argument, assuming there are dispassionate observers to assign a final score based on the soundness of each side’s claims, as in a high school debate tournament, but, well, there are rarely, almost never, neutral parties who will decide who won or lost a given debate. Much will depend on how well you frame and reframe the discussion, how calmly you seem to argue versus how upset the other person seems. As a general rule, the person who winds up screaming in frustration is considered the loser.

Your adversary will not like having their concern reframed into what you prefer to talk about, not at all. Use this natural aversion to being misrepresented to your advantage. When you see them becoming upset by your framing and reframing you will know you’ve gained the upper hand. In politics this is often referred to as “triggering” — you frame something in a provocative way to get the indignant squeal that proves you’re right. Well, maybe “prove” is too strong a word, in this context, as is “right”, but, who cares? Fuck the enemy, right?

A good preemptive blanket framing technique is to characterize your opponent a certain way and stick to that characterization, no matter what is said. Have your talking point ready — my opponent is a (fill in any derogatory term you like) and frame everything in the context of what that kind of person will predictably say and do. The main thing is to keep hammering this one note hard and steady: what would you expect from a (blank)? If this is done correctly, everything they try to argue must be seen through the lens of a (blank) arguing (blank) because they are so completely, idiotically (blank).

The reservoir of human rage is impossibly immense. We cannot imagine the limits of it. The quiet waters we swim in can easily be sucked into this bottomless reservoir by enraged actors, always lurking nearby. Once you are swimming in rage, the limits of what you may have believed you are capable of will be expanded to things you may later shudder to revisit. Such is our life here, among our fellow “wise apes”. May your better and better ability to not get sucked into anger be a blessing to you, and to the people you care about.

Well-said, Heather

From Heather Cox Richardson’s most recent Letters from an American:

But, although 62% of American voters say the election is “over and settled” and it’s “time to move on,” Trump continues to insist that he won the election. In the face of the Electoral College confirmation of Biden’s win, this position increasingly seems a ploy to raise money. Even as the Electoral College was voting, the Trump campaign filed yet another lawsuit challenging the outcome of the election.

It has lost 59 of 60 court cases, and the Supreme Court last week refused to hear a case in which Trump planned to argue that mail-in voting in swing states that voted for Biden—but not the states that voted for him—injured Republican voters in Texas.

He loves the taste of Donald!

Perhaps not completely surprisingly, the most shamelessly corrupt AG in history got in a few last long, loving ass-licks in the resignation letter he wrote to his beloved boss, taking leave of the most shamelessly corrupt American president ever to soil the office. Here’s an excerpt, which can serve as a super effective emetic:

…I am proud to have played a role in the many successes and unprecedented achievements you have delivered for the American people. Your 2016 victory speech in which you reached out to your opponents and called for working together for the benefit of the American people was immediately met by a partisan onslaught against you in which no tactic, no matter how abusive and deceitful, was out of bounds. The nadir of this campaign was the effort to cripple, if not oust, your administration with frenzied and baseless accusations of collusion with Russia.

Few could have weathered these attacks, much less forge ahead with a positive program for the country. You built the strongest and most resilient economy in American history – one that has brought unprecedented progress to those previously left out. You have restored American military strength. By brokering historic peace deals in the Mideast you have achieved what most thought impossible. You have curbed illegal immigration and enhanced the security of our nation’s borders. You have advanced the rule of law by appointing a record number of judges committed to constitutional principles. With Operation Warp Speed, you delivered a vaccine for coronavirus on a schedule no one thought conceivable – a feat that will undoubtedly save millions of lives…

Your 2016 victory speech (followed shortly by the American Carnage speech) in which you reached out to your opponents and called for working together for the benefit of the American people was immediately met by a partisan onslaught against you in which no tactic, NO MATTER HOW ABUSIVE OR DECEITFUL, was out of bounds. The nadir of this campaign was the effort to cripple, if not oust, your administration with

“frenzied and baseless accusations of collusion with Russia“

Barr’s hopefully last official words on the well-documented collusion detailed in several government reports, including the five volume, Republican-chaired, senate intel committee report, perhaps the most deliberate and devastating catalogue of coordination between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence of them all.

Impressive, how many lies this zealot can pack into a few sentences!

I suspect I’ll have a few more thoughts about this consummate motherfucker and bootlicker in the coming days.

Reservoir of Rage

The Age of Reason was an age of optimism, unfounded in many ways, as an insightful psychiatrist named Frank Yeomans observed. We like to believe that we “wise apes” act based on the intelligent use of actual knowledge — the wisdom gained through experience. We also like to believe that Death will never actually come for us. Look at any newspaper for a glimpse into the role of Reason in our world today and compare its effect to the workings of terror and anger.

In these days of increased isolation caused by this raging pandemic I sometimes find myself thinking back to a series of lost friendships, looking for a common denominator. The common trait in every friendship of mine that went to shit, I can easily see now, is rage — anger and disappointment that wound up being mutual. Good luck reasoning with that force of nature.

My friend Mark, one of the first close friends I finally had to cast over the side, was frequently in an agitated depression but if you pointed out that he was angry, as shown by the harshness of his judgments of himself and others, he’d hotly deny it, quickly become enraged. I am prone to expressing my anger when it flashes, a trait I’m not proud of, but my anger is often there to be seen by others when I am hurt.

Most people do not readily display this unseemly emotion, carefully covering the embarrassing lack of control it reveals. It doesn’t mean they don’t get angry, of course, they just don’t readily express it most of the time. I’ve done better, recently, sometimes, not reacting with anger when something irks me beyond endurance, but the strong reflex is always there.

What I’ve learned, at great expense, is the value of breathing and keeping quiet when the impulse to say something cruel is strong. Quickly apologizing is also a necessity after angrily expressing harshness toward someone, I’ve found, not that it will always be the healing balm it is intended to be. One or two sincere apologies will often be accepted, and I quickly accept the sincere apologies of others, but once the need to apologize becomes a pattern, it indicates something deeper and, well, good luck to you and your friendship.

My father, a man prone to outbursts of anger, always insisted that we cannot change our fundamental nature, our reflex to act a certain way. He’d point to babies born with an easygoing nature, placid and easily contented from day one, and others, like me, that fussed all the time, rarely satisfied, defiant from the day they first focused their eyes to glare accusingly. There is a certain amount of truth in this, the over-the-top surrealism of the description of the second baby aside.

You can see the truth of this principle illustrated in every new litter of feral kittens. Some baby cats are bolder and more trusting than others, others more prone to flee, to bite, to cower. This behavior was not learned, they were born with a certain predilection, a fundamental nature that will not change that much. The reflex to be petted or to cower will always be there to a certain extent, no matter how much they may learn about the tender intentions of the people who take care of them.

A friend of mine cheerfully reported on an article she’d read about the discovery of a suspected “happiness gene”, a bit of DNA that predisposes one to optimism and contentment. She looked across the table with her sly smile and observed to her fellow happiness gene recipient, Sekhnet, that her husband and I sadly did not seem to have much of this gene. I told her to fuck her so-called fucking happiness gene. But the point is made again, we are born with certain traits that are then pounded into more or less permanent form by how we are treated while we are malleable little lumps of clay.

I think back to the list, now considerable, of former friends, people with whom I shared confidences and a love of badinage [1]. All affable, smart people, articulate, many quick with a witty comeback, most of them connoisseurs of dark humor. One other common factor I saw only too late: each had a deep reservoir of rage and an inability to forgive.

I understand the workings of the Repetition Compulsion, to some extent. Some of us are compelled to recast and repeat painful relationships, the dynamics of which we don’t understand, in an unconscious effort to have a better outcome. It’s called a compulsion because it is not something we choose, those of us who do this must do it. I saw it clearly in my old friend Mark’s life– he endlessly repeated variations on the identical three act drama: idealizing, being disappointed by, violent betrayal. Easy to see in someone else, if you are around long enough. In our own case, it’s hard to see if we’re behaving reasonably or out of some kind of compulsion.

So, take my case, say you were raised in a long war with your parents. Your father is angry just about every evening at the dinner table, raging, making ugly pronouncements, baleful predictions. Your mother, for the most part, indignantly takes your father’s side. Her mother once famously said of her, in Yiddish, “you stick to his ass like a wet rag!” Both parents, at the same time, are smart, avid readers, expressive, love to laugh, enjoy the old badinage, are connoisseurs of dark humor. When searching out friends to commiserate with about your often painful life at home, it is not surprising that you would always be attracted to people who had these fine, cherished qualities.

It may seem funny to write this, but witty repartee with friends, which used to mean so much to me, now means little. I like to laugh, of course, I’ll often toss off an absurd take on something ridiculous (the menu of such things is comically gigantic), but whether you are a wit or not means little to me these days. My friends are funny, sure, but that back and forth of smart rapid-fire commentary doesn’t seem to play a large role in my life these days. The release of humor, it seems to me, was necessary in those years to protect me from the painful darkness all around me. Now that I’ve emerged from the worst of that darkness (for the moment) that need for banter just seems funny, if you follow me.

What we want in a friend is a person who will give us the benefit of the doubt. If a friend snaps at us, they will immediately express their sorrow as soon as they calm down. The larger world does not operate this way, neither does nature. This good will is what separates our friends from everyone else. The loss of good will, the benefit of the doubt, the lost impulse to quickly overlook a friend’s bad moment, is painful. Once good will is gone it is almost never coming back.

When I go down the list of people I once shared intimacies with I see that despite variations in their personal styles, they were all capable of titanic anger (maybe everyone is, but each of these bastards sure was).

The more introverted, quiet ones were no less given to implacable fury than the more extroverted ones. In fact, the reservoirs of rage in those who rarely expressed any sort of displeasure was perhaps the deepest of all. Keeping that existentially threatening anger inside at all times means that when it finally explodes, it’s going to cause an avalanche, helpless villagers running in terror.

Then silence again, which in friendship is the deadliest and most final expression of eternal anger.

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Reality Check, maybe

The world’s single nation record for COVID-19 infections in a day was set not long after the presidential election. The NY Times reported:

A little more than a week earlier we’d broken the 100,000 case a day barrier (and they said it couldn’t be done!). I attribute this shattered record to all the contact, all over the US, that resulted from the Trump/Kremlin lie that mail-in ballots were tickets to widespread fraud and all the propaganda and Republican voter suppression that sent millions to stand on lines to cast vote in person. In places like Texas, poll workers were not required to wear masks and they could force voters to take off their masks in order to vote. Freedom, you know…

Today we nonchalantly eclipsed that sad-ass record again with a non-record 207,000 new cases (and an impressive 2,259 deaths from COVID, not a record but nothing to sneeze at!)

Check out this graph and think of how hard this dangerous, lying child, our Winner-in-chief, is still fighting to make this skyrocketing mass death on his heedless watch simply go away as he scrambles, hideous as a late stage Roy Cohn, to avoid all responsibility for anything in his long, narcissistic life of unlearned lessons.

During the years of the Cheney/Bush administration the octogenarian mother of a friend showed up at dinner one night sporting a BUCK FUSH button. Right on, sister! TRUCK FUMP!

Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

I rarely take corporate surveys, particularly if there is a long wait involved to talk to one of the underpaid representatives who are busy helping other customers (which there almost always is). It was my pleasure to fill out the survey from the CISA website (the one debunking “rumors” about the thousand ways sick Commies were going to steal the presidency from Mr. Trump).

They also had a nice form that showed my whole survey, which is here:

My comment: This information is really great. Everything is clearly presented and sources are given. It is a wonderful public service and a great resource. I salute you for it all. I wish it was more widely disseminated.

This is the way it should be for all information crucial to the public. Lay it out clearly, give us the proof that what you are saying is not pulled out of a random, powerful psychopath’s ass. This is called transparency. Without transparency we have only a set of facts, no matter how convincing, versus an even louder FUCK YOU YOU GODDAMNED GODLESS FUCKING FUCK!

Or, to put it more politely: reasonable compromise based on reality-based debate versus arguments based exclusively on the necessity of “LIBERTY’s” defense against “TYRANNY”: the liberty to infect others during a deadly pandemic vs. the tyranny of mandated public safety measures, for example.

It goes without saying that that kind of idiotic FREEDOM vs. TYRANNY debate is no way to run a democracy.