Corruption, according to our Attorney General

The professorial looking madman who auditioned for his position as top law enforcement officer for the most litigious and lawless president in history, lectured his questioner on the definition of the squishy word “corruption.” First, an excerpt from his audition for Attorney General:

This is an expression of Barr’s wildly extreme view of the powers of the Unitary Executive. Presidential accountability for ‘corrupt’ acts committed while in office? Balderdash! Nothing the president does under his limitless Article II powers can be scrutinized for corruption if the president does not want it to be.

During his confirmation hearing, Barr patiently gave Senator Dianne Feinstein one of his trademarked circular lectures on the definition of “corruptly” (while running out the clock on substantive questions, like an expert college basketball team freezing the ball in the old days):

What it means is using it in the nineteenth century sense, it meant ‘to influence in a way that changes something that’s good and fit to something that’s bad and unfit’, namely the ‘corruption of evidence’, or ‘the corruption of a decision maker’. That’s what the word “corruptly” means, because once you dissociate it from that it really means, very hard to discern what it means. It means “bad”… what does “bad” mean?

source

Fair point, Bill. Who among us can really define a word like “bad”? It’s almost meaninglessly vague, like the world “corruptly” itself, as used in the twenty-first century sense. Presumably even the nineteenth century mind would have had trouble comprehending something as abstract as “corruption of the Department of Justice.” It’s all such a matter of opinion!

And so it is with the Law and Order president, who lost thirty legal challenges to the orderly election that decisively ousted him. He will not be thwarted by an election he knows was rigged (he himself did his best to rig it, after all), by mere law as applied by so-called “judges”, when there are “bad” things he can still do to cling to power that he will never be held accountable for.

Michigan, a state he lost by 155,000 votes (15 times Trump’s 2016 margin in Michigan, twice the total 78,000 combined margin that gave him the Electoral College when he narrowly won Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania) has a process for a final statewide vote certification, after each county certifies the votes (which they’ve already done). No problemo — after you lose in court to stop the counties, which all legally certify their results, here’s what you do:

Fly the Republican members of the Michigan state canvassing board, along with top Republican state legislators, to Washington D.C. where you meet them at the White House, treat them to a lavish meal at the four-star Trump Hotel (the RNC will pay) and unleash the famous charm/terror offensive on them, convince BOTH canvassing board members to “illegally” contest the certification results in every county in Michigan. Stall things, to throw the election results, known to everybody and recounted in several places, into chaos.

After all, as Mr. Barr argues, along with nonpartisan legal geniuses like Alan Dershowitz, the president is the only one with the power to decide, if he honestly (even if delusionally — or delusively, which we learn is a more proper, if more obscure, statement of the same thing) believes something is in the best interests of the nation, whether that thing is, to be crude, “good” or “bad.” Simple, right?

Nothing wrong with wining and dining Republican state officials at your luxurious hotel to influence them to refuse to do their sworn legal duty so you can hopefully throw out an election result, delay, delay, delay the official certification of your corrupt enemy as president and hopefully find a way to game the constitutional system. Article II says so — there’s nothing about a president’s obligation to “obey” so-called election results in there. Nothing!

Reasons to remain optimistic

Because a friend called me Mr. Sunshine the other day, with some irony (for one thing, I avoid the sun, I hate that life source which has caused me multiple operations to remove cancers from my nose) I feel an obligation to set out a few reasons to feel hopeful and to act with optimism and determination.   Particularly about taking those two senate seats in Georgia, the ones that will allow the democratic process to move forward without the deliberate, cynical obstruction that McConnell and his 51-49 will insist upon.

Terror is scary as hell — obviously, it’s terror. The threat of terror can be terrifying, as it is intended to be.   When an angry, powerful person promises an army of 50,000 armed loyalists making sure there’s no (wink wink) “voter fraud” at certain polling places — it’s very scary.   It didn’t happen, anywhere really.  There were no crowds of Proud Boys standing by, or Bugaloo Boys, or Game Boys, few of the best members of the Klan, very few of the finest of American Nazis.   The goon squads, the death squads, the terrifying, bellowing armies of the night did not appear.   A beautiful thing, speaking well of our nation, and something to be happy about.   

ONE:  We withstood the threat of goon squads intimidating voters to support a would-be tyrant (and tens of millions lined up to vote in spite of the threats)

The goon squads were as absent as the predicted rioting, invocation of the Insurrection Act, martial law, counter-insurgency forces deployed in “anarchist jurisdictions” and the rest of a would-be dictator’s terrifying fever dreams.  Of course Trump is going to do everything possible to set a thousand shit fires before he leaves office, and will certainly set hundreds, but the very worst did not come to pass, which speaks well of our experiment in democracy here.

TWO:  In spite of the relentless pressure on millions of our fellow citizens, there has been no wave of crime during this awful pandemic

The pandemic is terrifying.  Under the best government control, it would be a hard road protecting millions from a worldwide disease that is airborne, highly contagious, incurable and potentially deadly.  Under our federal government’s laissez-faire approach (that’s French for “let the powerless fuck themselves, ehn?“) a quarter of a million of our fellow citizens who didn’t need to die horrible deaths died unspeakably awful deaths.   Our neighbors and loved ones continue to get sick, thousands die.  The stress of it is sometimes hard to bear. 

We have an administration coming in that will make every effort to have us all follow the best medical advice to control the spread until everyone can be vaccinated, but the beginning of their work could be another 100,000 deaths from now, as the disease continues surging uncontrolled in many parts of the country.   

There is only this reason to be hopeful at this moment in regard to the pandemic (yes, the vaccines will be great, too, but in a few months, at the earliest — if you and your loved ones live that long):  under incredible pressure, terror and increasing desperation, Americans, particularly ones forced into official poverty and threatened with imminent homeless, have not been committing violent crimes of desperation. 

 Think of that for a minute, this lack of wild lawlessness says something very good about the basic humanity of our people here.   A corollary — people tend to help each other during public emergencies, after catastrophes, when trouble is worst, Americans always have too.  

THREE:   The incumbent Republican president lost the race in faithfully Republican Georgia.   We can get two senators to make it 50-50.

Trump’s open (and clandestine) attempts at nationwide voter suppression, although many and mighty, did not manage to swing the election to the unhinged would-be strong man.  In spite of an open criminal conspiracy to suppress mail-in voting, and widely stoked fear about intimidating in-person voters, record numbers lined up, sometimes for 8 hours, to personally cast enough votes to indisputably vote the “You’re Fired” guy out by the largest margin since incumbent Herbert Hoover lost to Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.   

In Georgia, where the current governor was elected by a 55,000 vote margin (after purging 107,000 eligible voters who were likely to vote against him — among the more than 500,000 voters he’d purged prior to the gubernatorial election he supervised), where voter suppression is practiced fairly openly, the anti-Trump candidate managed to eke out a victory. 

 Reason to be optimistic: Americans, including a large contingent of Georgians understand exactly how crucial a 50-50 senate is to the continuation of democracy.  Every reactionary, evangelical and racist in the great state of Georgia will be driving people to the polls to vote Republican– millions will go to cast their votes for Jon Ossoff and Reverend Raphael Warnock.   Warnock led Loeffler by 7 points on Nov. 3, though he didn’t approach the 50% needed to win in Georgia [1]. Ossoff and Perdue were close, Perdue had a 2% lead (and thankfully 2/10ths of a percent less than the required 50%). 

Democracy can win this close runoff in Georgia.  There are activists, led by Stacey Abrams (who registered tens of thousands of voters in Georgia) who is mobilizing many of them, bringing out the vote, particularly those voters who never registered.  It’s going to be close in Georgia, two votes crucial for democracy or continued corrupt government dysfunction and obstruction.   

More on what you and I can do to bring out the vote in Georgia tomorrow. 

Love beats hate in the end.  Believe it, because subscribing to the opposing view leads inexorably to the end of all hope for anything better, ever.   Things that look hopeless often get better, if enough work is done.  The work starts now.

[1] 

On Nov. 3, Warnock topped a field of 20 candidates running in a “jungle primary” special election that included Loeffler, who Gov. Brian Kemp appointed to fill the Senate seat vacated by Johnny Isakson in late 2019. Warnock received 32.9 percent of the vote, while Loeffler got 25.9 percent. Her main Republican challenger, Rep. Doug Collins, received 19.9 percent.

source

How To Be Right, No Matter What

There is a way to be right no matter what. Declare yourself right and walk away, or simply stand your ground and keep insisting you’re right.

It won’t work in every situation, granted. A policeman or judge (or jury) does not necessarily have to agree with your assertion that you are right. But in many, many situations, you’re free to simply argue “I’m right and fuck you!” and be done with it. If you get away with it, many people will applaud you for this ballsy “take no prisoners” attitude. Who cares what anybody thinks, based on whatever supposed evidence, when you know beyond any doubt that you’re right?!

The price for employing this technique? You’re pretty much an asshole who doesn’t listen to reason, cannot be persuaded, believes only your will has weight or value, no matter how terrible the consequences of your insistence. It marks you as a person for whom being right is the only acceptable outcome, no matter how idiotic and/or destructive what you’re insisting on might be.

It is a prerogative more easily used by a wealthy person than a poor person. A poor person can use this time-tested technique too, but there is a higher likelihood of problems flowing from it, if you are poor. Being wealthy carries some perks most people don’t have. It’s why they call having more money than you can spend in your lifetime “fuck you money.” Have enough money, you can tell anyone to take a hike, or take a long, luxurious one yourself.

It seems obvious to note that we’ve seen this hardline approach to right and wrong up close for the last four years, playing out many times every day IN ALL CAPS on our televisions, computers, phones. It’s about all everyone has been talking and texting about lately because of our dynamic social media president, a man who knows only one move: “double down”. Mr. Trump, a self-made billionaire business genius who was a millionaire by age eight, a multimillionaire by his teen years, is about the greatest example of what you can do, if you are rich and confident enough and only want to be right, no matter what.

His election mandate in 2016 was a slim 78,000 votes, in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, combined, (not much over 1% total in those three states) that gave him the Electoral College landslide of 306 votes. The large margin for his opponent in the popular vote, Crooked Hillary, was the result of Mexican zombie votes, three million cases of voter fraud. His Presidential Voter Fraud Commission would prove it. They were unable to prove that even 10 dead Mexicans voted illegally for Hillary (or one, for that matter), though they successfully referred six people for prosecution for voting fraud before disbanding after a diligent six month search. Then, goddamn it, wouldn’t you know it? In 2020, another rigged, fraudulent election, this time outright stolen from him!

Just a few of Donnie T’s greatest hits: abuse of power is not an offense for which a public official can be legally impeached (though quietly carrying out one’s duties, like Alexander Vindman’s brother, is more than adequate grounds for firing), the pandemic is fake, a mere attempt by radical Socialist Democrat partisans to hurt his presidency; asking a foreign leader for dirt on your political opponent– if they want the weapons you’re holding back– is perfectly fine; ditto engaging in a four year pattern of contempt of Congress, defying legal subpoenas, using litigation, and multiple appeals, to prolong debates over one issue after another you know you will lose, delay is the ticket in U.S. Courts as every skilled litigant (who has a lot of money) knows.

You can get upset about US government workers ripping babies from their refugee mother’s arms at our Southern border, but only if you forget that those babies are illegal alien babies, most of them mere props of terrorists, rapists and worse. Firing career public servants is perfectly legal, as is making the entire Civil Service “at will” employees who can be fired at any time, with or without cause; ditto the so-called environment– we need jobs more than we need anything else. If 250,000 more of us have to die during this pandemic, it is the will of God, the God who gave us the brave, brilliant flawed vessel of Mr. Trump, an unlikely but uncanny champion, to tirelessly fight America’s real secret enemies who would steal, rape and murder all white, Christian, children (so as to drink their blood).

Am I right, or am I right?

Another word on Truth

One or two more thoughts about the search for truth, after learning just now from Healthfirst (sic) that my Primary Care Doctor is no longer in my health insurance network and that I need to find a new one, pronto, if I want my “free” annual check up by December 31. Life in America, boys and girls, no reason to get excited… just add finding a new PC to the other doctor I need to find for an unrelated medical situation. The Free Market knows the best way to marginalize these sorts of inevitable externalties, no worries.

I, for example, am not worried (though I am fucking disgusted).

In yesterday’s far-ranging “philosophical” post I may have created some unintended ambiguity about my view of the nature of truth. I said at one point that both faith-based and fact-based arguments are both essentially based on faith, the latter on the faith that facts are necessary to an intelligent debate. The way I left it could leave the impression that I feel there is no difference in how one approaches the question of truth– a narrative that follows as logically as possible from what we can observe and verify or a story based entirely on what we strongly believe. I’d like to clear up any confusion about that now.

While approaching capital “T” truth is a lifetime’s dedicated work, and we each only get as close as we are capable of getting, there are many things in life that are simply true or false. If you are 5’9” and you claim to be 6’3”, there are ways to know (including direct observation) whether your claim is true or false. You can use a tape measure, or we can stand you next to Clyde Frazier, or John Mayer, for example.

It is our human ability to say things that are to our advantage, that are provably not true, that gives rise to the word “liar” and our frequent shunning of such people. There are liars big and small among us, sad to say, and that is something to consider while pursuing truth, if it is your lot to pursue such things. I tried to explain yesterday why it is my sad lot to do this and why my search, my best theories, are based, as much as possible, on demonstrable events and verifiable facts. Arguments I can lay out without distorting the facts I have learned.

It isn’t true, as I may have given the misimpression, that an opinion based on pure faith and an opinion based on logical conclusions drawn from our best observation, verifiable data and controlled experiment, are equally valid. Not at all. The old “you’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts” comes into play.

The argument of a paid spokesman for an oil company must never be given equal weight to the argument of thousands of government and private industry scientists on whether the burning of fossil fuel is a good thing or a destructive thing for the earth. Sadly, in our great American “marketplace of ideas” such, eh, arguments are often fought to a “draw” (let’s all agree to disagree and, now, a word from our sponsor) in the mass media.

Faith is a great thing, a comfort to millions. In addition. no difficult task could ever be sustained, no hope for better days kept alive, particularly during the worst of times, without faith. Life itself, you could argue, is impossible without a certain amount of faith. Of course, faith is also one of those squishy words that mean a few distinctly different things. Much depends on what your faith is based on.

You can have faith in your physical strength, based on your life experience, real comparisons with the strength of others, and know, with perfect faith, that you can carry a load most other people couldn’t lift. If you have done something many times and are comfortable doing it, even if others would be fearful before trying it, your faith is founded in fact-based confidence.

I saw an eight year-old launch himself off a bannister, over concrete, and gracefully complete a backflip in the air, upside down, the top of his little skull pointing directly at the pavement, before flipping to land on his feet, graceful as a cat. It was probably the greatest demonstration of confident faith I’ve ever seen. It is faith based on the proof of direct experience, on the knowledge that you can do this daunting thing. It is a mighty thing. It is different than faith based on pure belief.

Faith, in the sense of a faith-based religious belief, is obedience to a higher will, a surrender, based on a spiritual longing, to a power far greater than yourself, infinitely greater than any human power. I get the appeal of this idea, even as I see, over and over, the dangers this kind of faithful faith in pure faith can lead to.

If you obey a higher power, a power whose mysterious will is often unknowable, and acknowledge your own lowliness, you’ll require an earthly authority of some kind to tell you what this higher power wants of you. It is a central tenet of your faith that obedience and surrender to this power are the highest values in life, and you will willingly do whatever is required, as set out by a faithful intermediary.

Such devoted faith is a beautiful idea if you are directly following the teachings of, say, Jesus Christ. Jesus teaches us to love the meek, be kind to our enemies, wary of the rulers, a generous friend to the helpless and so on. I read on Brett Kavanaugh’s alma mater Georgetown Prep’s website that Jesuits believe that when two people meet it is the spark of the divine in each one that recognizes the divine spark in the other. Two particles of God, infinitely precious, communicating in divine unity, a very beautiful idea of how to treat one another.

My Corsican friend snorted when I repeated that to him and told me to look up the origin of the fucking Jesuits on the internet. Oops. They started as Defenders of the Faith (the One True Faith), the faithful lawyers for the faithful torturers of the Spanish Inquisition. They conclusively explained, with learned legal arguments of great sophistication, the legality, indeed the righteousness, of the auto de fe, the strapado, the rack, Divinely endorsed methods of inflicting agony on infidels. They expertly cited chapter and verse of religious texts and related law, fully justifying torturing and killing in the name of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace. Apparently, if you buy their arguments, Jesus loves the screams of despised and terrified heretics as they are burned to death. Who knew?

The civic problem with religious faith is not hard to see looking around at the political activities of various churches in the USA. The American Baptist church split in two in the years before the Civil War. There was a northern, anti-slavery Baptist church and a southern, pro-slavery Baptist church. Each church defended its views based on Biblical verse and Christ’s teachings. You figure that one out. Anyway, after slavery was abolished under secular law, Baptists north and south shook hands and became one church again, as far as I recall.

There are many wonderful things about many people of true religious faith. They are among the most caring people in the world, the best of them. At the same time, honesty requires us to acknowledge that there are many horrible things tolerated in the name of true faith. More blood has been spilled in clashes of faiths than for any other reason.

So when I wrote that on one level a passionate argument based on pure faith and one based on verifiable facts are both, in one way, based on faith, I did not intend to imply that these arguments are somehow equal. You either have faith that facts matter, and the truth is a supreme value that may never be sacrificed in order to win a point, or you have faith that if somebody lies for a greater purpose there is no real sin to that little untruth. There is nothing remotely equivalent about those two kinds of “faith”, though in one sense, yes, they are both based on faith.

The faith that gives someone the right to kill someone else for violating the first person’s faith? We need another word for that kind of “faith”. The Framers of our democracy were wary of this kind of misuse of sacred principles, while they winked at slavery, they built a wall between church and state. The kind of depraved individuals who believe it benefits them to make sure hundreds of thousands more die of this pandemic, in order to weaken the hand of their political enemies in the future — well, any of their millions of devoutly religious Christian political allies, a considerable chunk of the 73,000,000 who, knowing this, turned out to vote for it in record numbers recently — they’re on their way to hell, no matter what they may believe about the righteousness of protecting the unborn and other pious acts.

You know what I’m sayin’?

Searching for the Truth

“I’m searching for truth,” I admitted.

“You poor bastard, I did that to you,” said the skeleton of my father.

Things that make no sense to us can sometimes be explained after enough research and pondering. When you can lay out and understand the reasons behind something perplexing it becomes a little easier to deal with. That’s my belief, anyway. In my experience, there often seems to be a certain relief in understanding how a terrible thing actually works.

I feel like the recent years I spent, hours each day, considering and sorting through every aspect of my father’s troubling life that I could, finally gave me useful insights into his life, into my own. Many of my waking hours, during this present shit-storm of propaganda-directed anger, are spent gathering as many verifiable facts as I can. I use this information to try to construct some kind of reasonable meaning for truly awful things that otherwise make little or no sense.

History, my own and our common human heritage, is indispensable to me in this project. Our lives here are fleeting and often seem meaningless, millions of lives are regularly written off as disposable, but there is a long human history to learn from, as well as our own personal histories. Learning history can lead to the desire to try to do better, become better humans. Which is something, a considerable thing, it seems to me.

I’m aware that my long habit of “study” and pontificating may make me insufferable at times, because not only am I as opinionated in my certainty as my mother was, I feel that keeping myself closely informed (as my father always did) gives my opinions a certain weight. It also creates impatience in me for opinions based on less, or false, information. It’s hard to have a productive discussion, or influence anyone’s thinking, if your own thinking betrays any kind of feeling of superiority. “I know more than you about this so I’m definitely right” is a very weak, invariably maddening, line of persuasion.

A real search for truth requires challenging yourself from time to time, placing your own ideas into the uncomfortable position that they may be wrong. It requires, most difficult for me, considerable humility. A sense that the deeper mystery may never be revealed, no matter how much you come to understand the layers above those deepest ones.

We homo sapiens are fundamentally irrational beings, it would appear, geniuses though we are at self-justification and self-deception. Our lives here are not, as much as we may want to believe it, based mainly on rational considerations taken for reasons we fully understand. To test the proof of this — look at the passionate American fight over the use of personal protective gear during a pandemic.

As for strong opinions based on hard fact — on some level these are not fundamentally all that different from strong opinions based on faith alone. The person of deep religious faith will cite the deep benefits of spiritual faith while the believer in a world ruled by empirical fact will cite the undeniable clarity science and Reason provide. Both human opinion systems, in the end, are matters of faith, on one level. (To be clear, on another level, they are not remotely the same thing)

Do I know, for example, based on logic, with examples for proof of my argument, that there is a workable large-scale economic system better and more humane than the eternal growth model of the “Free Market” system of capitalism that rules the world today? It is not hard to find a dozen contemporary books making excellent, detailed cases for how inhumane this problematic concept of economic freedom really is in practice, how barbarous it is in many of its demonstrable outcomes.

But as I spout my fact-based outrage at a deeply flawed, unsustainable, extractive system that leaves hundreds of millions in desperate poverty so that others can be unimaginably wealthy, do I have a better idea that is actually possible? Our lives here, on many levels, are a mystery. As for someone who will challenge my dissection of the so-called Free Market and demand my better idea (one that comports with human nature, a crucial caveat in any such discussion) — I cannot point to a large scale system that works in the world today that is not based on this idea, on this transactional assessment of human nature and what motivates our behavior. My actual alternative?

“You don’t really have one, do you? Outside of your fond dream of greater justice and a more ‘fair’ distribution of resources and wealth, elimination of poverty and so on, which is a very high-minded idea, and for which I salute you– the world you dream of living in is superior to this one, I’ll grant you,” a kindly neoliberal will counter, when I am done reciting my facts. “But, sadly for us, time is money and both are short at the moment, so, back to your books, genius, back to your idealistic echo chamber with you. Unfortunately for me, I’ve got to go make some money now, so you’ll have to continue enlightening me some other time.”

I can see clearly, in my own case, that a world that made no sense to me — my family life during childhood and beyond — was my initial motivation to seek what was behind a rigid insistence on the demonstrably insane. My sister and I were frequently warned by our angry father that however much we thought we might be winning certain battles, we would inevitably lose the war.

“The war, father? Don’t you always tell us that family is the most important thing in life, the place where we are always safe, the only love we have that we will never lose? How can we four be in permanent war, around the family dinner table, father? Please explain, I’m only a boy, but I truly don’t understand.”

Sadly for my younger sister and me, I somehow did not have this enlightened dispassion within me as a seven year-old. Few of us do. People experience constant, irrational anger from demanding parents all the time. Many convert it into self-doubt, self-hatred and, in some notable cases, a driving ambition to succeed. If a brutal parent doesn’t crush you, you can sometimes convert the restless energy they’ve instilled in you into a billion dollar enterprise, as history shows. Particularly if you have limitless financial help from the tyrant parent that insisted you become a killer instead of the piece of shit you already are.

This search for “truth” is increasingly lonely work for me. Destructive things that are easily seen in others can be impossible to see in ourselves. I lost an old friendship a few years ago because a friend since fourth grade was unable to stop provoking me. He believed I was wrong to feel provoked by his actions, which he always could justify as motivated by his love for me. He believed that as sincerely as I found it intolerable to be constantly provoked.

Each of us eventually took our hurt, and our belief that we had acted with integrity, and went our own ways in the end. There is not that much solace in that kind of “resolution”, but it is better than being pissed on by someone who angrily insists you’re whining about the rain. As I say, we are all masters at self-justification, with a strong bias toward seeing ourselves as right.

I can clearly see the pathology of my recently deceased former longtime friend Mark’s life. I mention it from time to time as the clearest example I know the Repetition Compulsion-– the endless reflexive replaying of an unresolved primal battle. In Mark’s case the form was the identical three act tragedy each time, though superficial details varied. Act one: idealizing an object of love, Act two: mounting disappointment as imperfections are revealed, Act three: an unforgivable betrayal by the one time object of perfect love.

Mark was unable to recognize this inevitable story arc of every relationship he ever had. He relived it over and over, with the same hurt and anger every time. It was painfully frustrating to me that he couldn’t see it, even as we played out a years-long Act two, as my imperfections as a friend became more apparent, more galling, my betrayals more and more inevitable.

“Is this slimy?” Mark’s ex asked me, drawing back slightly, as my heart pounded against her chest. This was several months after he’d rejected her, along with the rest of his small circle of neurotic New York City loser friends, and moved across the country in search of the superior people he dreamed of meeting. The first time she’d stayed over at my place she sent me into my own bed to deal with my youthful passion on my own timetable. The second time, for some reason, she showed up in a clingy, transparent shirt, with no bra.

When she asked if what we were about to do was wrong, what choice did I really have but to reassure her with an immediate, definitive, only slightly quivering “no-o-o-o…”? Few choices I have ever made in life have been so unequivocally right. Still, you know, this was an unmistakable step into act three of Mark’s eternal play.

In each case of a long, close friendship that is no more, I can tell you exactly, step by step, how we came to the impasse that ended it. Most people simply mutually lose touch with people from the distant past they have grown apart from, I kept quite a few in my life. With predictable results, it seems. If you have a circle of fond acquaintances, updated periodically, it is easier not to fall into the illusion that you are intimate friends with somebody just because you’ve known them for decades. True lifelong friends are rare for most of us.

In every case of a friendship that is no more, I can give you a sixty second overview of why I was right to write them off, why they behaved with an unconscionable lack of self-knowledge and empathy. Does this certainty about right and wrong, and what is tolerable and what intolerable, enrich my life in any way? Is it different than Mark’s hideously repeated three act tragedy?

Clearly, I am not the ultimate judge of that — as you wouldn’t be based strictly on my account. On the other hand, nobody else is the ultimate judge, either. We can only do what we believe is right, and almost always will.

If I was writing these kinds of pieces for a sizable book or magazine-buying audience, perhaps reading this to you in a bookstore (all of us wearing masks, and keeping our distance), this daily work of mine would be rational and completely understandable. I’d be a writer, after all, perhaps even some kind of thinker as well, and a reader here or there might be moved or even awakened by some of the ideas I present. On the other hand, a guy with a blahg, who refines a piece for a couple of hours and then hits “publish” … well, you know, literally anybody could do that.

On the other hand, to me, I’m not just anybody, you understand.

America, America…

As the president continues to block a rational transition to the Biden administration, at the height of the pandemic, President Trump’s top pandemic advisor, Dr. Charles Atlas, urged the citizens of the great state of Michigan to “rise up”– another incitement to violent overthrow of Democrat Tyranny, in the form of a mask mandate and the closing of businesses to protect residents against a new surge of COVID. (No call to behead the traitorous Republican governors of North Dakota and Utah who imposed similar mandates? Come on, Atlas!)

Atlas is right, of course, about one part of that: we only get what we accept. Bill Moyers published this piece, with the clever “Dr. Atlas Shrugs” (a tip of the cap to the grande dame of sanitized fascists, Ayn Rand) in the headline, which gives more detail for any egghead who might want to go beyond the good doctor’s tweet (which Atlas, shrugging, later denied was any kind of incitement to violence, “rise up”, you know, like “stand by,” LOL!) [1].

Anyway, fuck Atlas and the whores he rode in on. He’s just another incendiary device in Mr. Trump’s unrelenting blitzkrieg on objective fact, evidence, all that unfair Communist claptrap and folderol. I mean, just look at these complete lies from yesterday’s New York Times!

The “Times” makes it seem as if the Republican Secretary of State of Georgia is being pressured by his own party to resign, or to throw out the fraudulent signature-mismatched votes that gave Biden the stolen, rigged election in Georgia. Well, he is being pressured, sure, OK, that’s just hardball party politics, but it’s not like he’s getting death threats, though, naturally, he reports he is. Which, of course, he would. He’s clearly in on the Biden scam! Another traitor!

OF COURSE THESE “EXPERTS” WOULD SAY THAT! They wouldn’t know fraud it if came right up and DID NOTHING TO THEM!

I’m hoping we don’t have blood in the streets as this FAKE electoral dispute senselessly continues while administration loyalists stand proudly, manfully working up passions for the violent end of electoral democracy in the USA. As things stand at the moment, I don’t think there will be a Second Civil War, but, objectively, it is Mr. Trump’s only path to staying in power after losing the election. Worth a shot, no?

Georgia’s Republican officials disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of voters since 2017 — purged at least 107,000 eligible voters before their current governor (the man who, as Georgia Secretary of State, unilateraly ordered and oversaw the voter purge) won a 55,000 vote victory over Democrat Stacey Abrams. Soon to be preemptively pardoned Louis DeJoy deliberately slowed mail delivery in 2020 from places like Atlanta, where Democratic voters outnumber Republicans. How many votes were undelivered? We’ll find out in the coming months, perhaps.

The Republican party did everything possible to suppress the hated “Democrat” vote in Georgia, including outright cheating, and Biden still managed to squeak out a 14,000 vote win in the great state of Georgia, thanks to the dedication of millions of voters in Georgia who would not be deterred, not take what they were being forced to accept.

I thought of these dedicated voters fleetingly yesterday, as I posed these two candy bars on the cashier’s conveyor belt for their portrait.

The cashier looked confused at first, as I fussed lining up the shot, trying to get an angle that reduced the glare enough to make the labels readable. Then she read the labels. “It’s everything now,” I said to her, “you can’t buy a fucking candy bar without having to pick a side…” She told me, as she announced her register closed, that she’d never noticed that about the Twix bars, until now. I shook my head, tight smile mostly a smirk, turned to put the candy bars back on the rack.

The expression on her face, the cashier was what we in the U.S. call a “black woman” or “African-American”, was that unique mixture of bemusement and bottomless sadness, plus a bit of resolve. Sekhnet and I nodded in agreement. We all wished each other a cheerful “be safe,” and Sekhnet and I went to find the car in the Target parking lot.

[1]

Here’s one nice slice, to give you the general flavor of both sides of this “argument” about wearing masks during a deadly pandemic:

During his interview, Dr. Atlas railed against those who refuse to accept facts that contradict what they want to believe. He lambasted people unable to admit that they’re wrong. But when asked about Dr. Fauci’s comment that Dr. Atlas is an outlier on epidemiological and public health issues relating to the pandemic, he said, “I’m proud to be an outlier, especially when the ‘in-liers’ are completely wrong…I’m not afraid to be a contrarian because I know I’m right.”

source

Buffeted by Moods?

I woke up today fighting off a strong feeling to just stay in bed, even though I knew that wouldn’t help me at all. I could think of little else that might help me today, as I started going about my day. My reaction to stressful feelings (which I neither endorse nor reccomend), things some experience as acute anxiety, is to think of something else, focus on something that makes me feel engaged and “productive” (like tapping out these words, to organize the thoughts behind them) and worry about the anxiety-producing tasks later (three or four medical appointments — one involves finding a new doctor– and spending a few hours on the phone to take care of paying some old tax penalties).

I began thinking about a recent conversation between Lewis Black and Marc Maron (on Maron’s WTF podcast) I heard the other day. They covered a profound point about the disorienting situation we find ourselves in, and the required American response to it. Profound, but obvious, once you think about it for a moment.

Lewis Black is famous for his angry rants. He got one of the last big laughs my mother had before she died in 2010, answering his own question about whether the voting booth is a place where you ever find the name of a candidate you truly believe will do a great job representing your beliefs. “No! you pull the curtain closed and it’s two bowls of shit! And you have to pick one!”

At one point Maron says that lately, in his isolated state, in these crazy times, when the latest infuriating news story unfolds, he just feels like crawling off and dying. Black chuckles sympathetically and says “you missed the anger exit! You drove right past the anger off-ramp.”

Black tells Maron that he had never much experienced anxiety or depression in his life, but that during his first ten weeks in solitary in his New York City apartment he became familiar with both, acutely, daily, hourly, for the first time in his life.

He realized why: anxiety is an appropriate response to the terror of an uncontrollable pandemic that kills tens of thousands, especially when you’re in the epicenter of the American outbreak and in the top risk group for death (Black is 72). He noted that depression is also a natural and understandable feeling, when you’re suddenly prevented — by a legitimate fear of death — from doing many of the things that made your life enjoyable, even bearable, before the pandemic. Then Black points out the great American disconnect.

Here in the good old USA, of course, we’re pretty much required to pretend everything is pretty much fine. How are you holding up, man? “I’m fine, all things considered.”

You’re not fine, really, even if you mostly are safe. You’re also more than usually isolated, anxious, disoriented, depressed, angry, many things are legitimately buffeting your moods these days. You’re right to feel all those feelings. Sure, you’re not intubated in a hospital like thousands of Americans, not dead in a portable morgue outside an overflowing hospital, not beaten up or shot to death by white nationalists violently overthrowing the results of the most recent US election, acting to defend a president who continues to show depraved indifference to the unchecked mass death of his citizens, but are you really “fine”?

I ask you to consider the question again — are you really fucking fine?

I try to give everybody I know a wide emotional berth these days. We are all in a very, very tough emotional situation, a do-or-die daily struggle. Nobody knows how to handle this, though we manage to put together coping strategies for a very difficult situation as best we can. I spend a couple of hours writing every day, take in the news, read an article, a court decision or two, cook a meal, play the guitar, learn something on the piano, walk 4.5 miles in 75 active minutes or so. Good for me, most days. Most people I know have much different routines. Those routines are good for them, most days.

This is not in anyone’s experience, how to emotionally adapt to a quick spreading incurable worldwide airborne killer disease that appears intent on infecting people for the foreseeable future. We’re now eight months into this semi-lockdown, with no end in sight. Places that have not tried to reasonably control the spread of this horrible disease have seen huge surges in infections — those places continue to infect every place else. The federal government washes its hands of the whole deadly situation as its leader defiantly hosts super-spreader events that infect dozens of his own inner circle.

Add to it that half of our country is militant in insisting that scientists and politicians urging safety precautions based on science, are a bunch of lying, tyrannical, traitorous liberal weenie douche bags whose lying, self-serving heads should — in a more just world than this one — be on pikes. Wearing a mask is a sign of contemptible cowardice to a sizable proportion of our fellow citizens. Anthony Fauci requires government security protection due to the many death threats against him and his family.

Add to it that we have a stridently divisive president, who lost the election decisively and trials in the Electoral College 306-232, and still insists he won the rigged election while his most ardent lackeys (and more than 73,000,000 of our fellow citizens) passionately defend his decision to not give up until it’s actually indisputably proven that he actually lost the election — which many of them believe he hasn’t actually lost.

These are not any way close to “normal” times, which, lest we forget, always provide most of us many reasons to be sad, stressed, anxious, angry, depressed. These trying days are about the furthest thing from “normal” time. Conjuring this coordinated constellation of shit would challenge the imagination of an inspired writer of dystopian future novels.

If you love Trump, you’re outraged because he got robbed by corrupt lying liberals and an army of his enemies in the lying liberal media. If you hate Trump, well, you have reason for outrage, too.

Entitlement to our feelings is always in dispute, often very hotly. Much human energy is spent contesting the strong feelings of others, “unreasonable” feelings we don’t feel, relate to or agree with.

People we love, when they have strong feelings, need to be heard — it’s the very first thing they need. When they are hurt, we need to soothe them. To pretend everything’s fine so you can feel like you’re not a “loser” (whatever the hell that is) well, it may be characteristically American, but that don’t make it… I don’t know… right.

Yes, it is always good to feel gratefulness, as we all should, if we have our health, are not in danger of eviction and homelessness, are not being forced into poverty (as millions of Americans are and have been in recent months), are not mourning for dead loved ones, like millions of our fellow Americans who lost the 246,000 American loved ones already recently dead of COVID-19. If we are not directly in danger, or grieving soul-tearing loss, we should be grateful, of course. Gratefulness is a great blessing we can give ourselves.

Remember, though, you have every right to feel what you are feeling in these scarily maddening days. Seriously, if you are not, at least sometimes, feeling anxious, depressed, angry, discouraged, oppressed, disoriented– what the hell is the matter with you?

Have a blessed day.