The Opposite of Love

The opposite of love, it is said, is not hate — it’s indifference. I think this states a profound reality– it is a very cruel fate to experience utter indifference to your suffering. There is little difference, to the person suffering, between deliberately inflicted cruelty and that inflicted by nonchalant indifference to your suffering.

Love and hate are related by a strong feeling towards another — indifference is the absence of any human connection whatsoever. Indifference utterly erases the humanity of the subject of its neglect in a way that even hatred does not do. Not to defend hatred, of course, but I’m trying to make this distinction between love and indifference as clear as possible.

It can be illustrated by a famous historical example. The debate took place between former prisoners of the Nazis and former prisoners of the Soviets about which form of cruelty was worse. The Nazis were known for expressing hatred and contempt for their captives, deliberately humiliating prisoners, subjecting them to sadistic treatment. The Soviets were known for their utter indifference — to prisoners freezing in extreme cold, losing digits and limbs to frost bite or gangrene, to prisoners dying of disease or starvation. The Nazi jailers made their hatred known, the Soviets made their indifference plain. The verdict: pick your poison, both will kill you just as dead.

In comparing an administration that singles out a despised class of people for harsh treatment, as in babies ripped from their mothers’ arms at the border and sent to cages far away, with one that actually murders those babies in front of their mothers — well, obviously, the one that actually kills the children in front of the parents is worse.

Though, of course, that’s not a thought that offers much consolation to the mother of the infant who is snatched and sent far away, never to be seen again.

The Unseen Toll of the Plague

I am starting to notice that people, in general, are getting quite emotionally frayed, which is not surprising, given what we are all up against. The emotional strain from our fear and anxiety comes out in a variety of ways as we are cooped up and isolated from each other and from most of our habitual pursuits and distractions. Do not underestimate the effect of having our habits disrupted, particularly having our most beloved distractions taken away from us.

I am expecting the acting out of frayed nerves to hit the public sphere in a big way soon — understandably desperate people doing increasingly crazy things. As worrisome as death from COVID itself is, these sometimes twitchy attempts to cope with pressures virtually no-one alive has ever had to deal with, these changes to our perceptions of the word around us, are another cause for concern.

This already scary, disorienting situation is much more upsetting because we have a terrible two year-old and his hand-picked loyal henchmen spouting an endless fountain of counter-factual … whatever it is that comes out of their “mouths”.

We Americans live in a very competitive society, divided into winners and losers. It is more divided now than at any time since the Gilded Age that followed the great economic devastation in the decades after the Civil War. Our greatest winners have spent fortunes over decades to convince significant numbers of the losers that the most important thing in life is freedom from the tyranny of a coercive government that wants to seize your liberty. It is an easy myth to promote, easy for the average citizen to relate to, since interactions with government bureaucracies are almost always frustrating. I found myself snarling at the screen when I logged on to the IRS website for a couple of simple answers last night.

If you are wealthy you don’t need any help from the government. You need the government to leave you and your wealth alone. If you are threatened by a flood, a fire, an earthquake, an angry mob, lose your home, get cancer — and you are not wealthy — you will reasonably want help from the government you pay taxes to.

We have had a social safety net in our wealthy nation for almost a century. Before we had the New Deal social programs there was no tax-supported retirement system (Social Security), no limits on child labor, no limits on the hours employers could demand of workers, no minimum wage, no protections against sudden impoverishment (Welfare) and so on.

You can argue that having such things, and a much better public health system, are net goods for society. People are less afraid, less insecure, feel more supported and connected when they operate in a system that has some kind of safety net to catch the many who sometimes fall. These social protections would seem a good thing for the wealthy as well: people who are not desperate are much less likely to take to the streets in violent mobs.

Of course, this is all communistic poppycock to most inheritors of vast fortunes, to the outliers who acquire billions by their own initiative. To them the only value is liberty, freedom from coercion. We are fine, just leave us alone. Just do what we do– dream big, work hard and be successful.

Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared are good examples of this winner work ethic. They work hard, are super-confident, and aggressive in pursuing their dreams. It doesn’t hurt that both started with millions of dollars from their parents, and up-and-running business empires to run, but don’t discount their genius! Do not dare discount their genius.

Knowing that great people like Ivanka and Jared are working hard to make sure we’re all safe should be a comfort, if you are an idiot — or insane.

Just sayin’.

Schematic of Psychotic Injustice Barr/Flynn edition

I am not a psychiatrist, so I use “psychotic” in the ordinary, generic way, to mean shockingly sick, destructive and otherwise not susceptible to reasonable discussion.

Check out the schematic of this latest unappealable Trump/Barr Department of Justice reversal of logic and legal fact. Granted, Barr dropped the case against the admittedly guilty Mike Flynn to please the most destructive and unreasonable two year-old ever to hold the world’s most powerful office, but, still. Strikingly disturbing, when you consider it boiled down to it’s essence, the counter-factual way the current “victors” are rewriting history in real time and peddling it to the credulous.

Barr’s reasoning is simple: no Flynn crime/plea/conviction, no need to fire Comey over refusal to drop Flynn probe, no need for Sessions’ recusal, no need for the appointment of a Special Counsel to investigate Trump. No problematic Mueller Report, no grounds for partisan impeachment, end of story. Trump innocent of any and all hints of anything but being the greatest ever.

The facts of the story Barr has tried to rewrite are easy enough to follow:

General Mike Flynn, who led the chants of “Lock Her Up! Lock Her Up!” at Trump rallies (and also at the RNC, if memory serves) was made National Security Advisor by Donald Trump after Trump won the 2016 presidential election.

Prior to Trump’s assumption of power in January 2017, during the transition period when the Obama Administration was still in power, Flynn spoke to the Russian ambassador, assuring him that in spite of Obama’s sanctions and the Justice Department’s ongoing investigation into later well-documented Russian interference for Trump in 2016, that Russia-US relations would be fine once Trump was sworn in.

News of this illegal conversation reached Vice President Mike Pence, who questioned Flynn about it. Flynn lied to Pence, assuring him that he’d never had any contact with the Russians. Pence repeated this lie on national TV. Pence subsequently learned Flynn had lied to him. Trump, with great reluctance, fired Flynn for lying to Pence. He explained the necessity to fire Flynn, a wonderful man and a hero, to a saddened nation via Twitter.

There had been an ongoing Department of Justice investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, sunce the summer of 2016. Mitch McConnell had successfully intimidated Obama out of making a public announcement about the government’s concern (well-founded, it turned out, and amply documented now, in several official bipartisan reports) with widespread Russian interference in the 2016 election. The news of the DOJ investigation into pro-Trump Russian meddling would not break until after the election was over [1].

Now Trump, as president, asks everyone else to leave the room and asks FBI Director Jim Comey if he has his undivided personal loyalty. He tells the uncomfortable Comey that Flynn is a good guy and that the FBI needs to drop this “Flynn thing,” as a show of good faith toward the new administration. Comey balks. Trump fires and attacks Comey. Comey, according to Trump, is a very sick and dangerous man.

Jeff Sessions, Trump’s Attorney General, is caught lying under oath in the Senate (by then-Senator Al Franken) about his own contacts with the Russian government during that same transition period. Sessions seeks the advice of the DOJ Ethics lawyers and correctly recuses himself from overseeing the Russia election interference investigation. He could not have ethically supervised a probe into a matter he had lied about his participation in. The appearance of impropriety would have cast a foul stench of bias over any investigation. For perhaps the only time in his professional life, Sessions did the right and honorable thing. Trump was furious at this betrayal by the weak, disloyal Sessions and repeatedly attacked him.

Assistant A.G. Rod Rosenstein now headed the DOJ investigation of Russian interference. Within days of the Comey firing he was pretty much forced to appoint a Special Counsel, the well-respected, straight-shooting, devoutly Republican Robert Mueller III. On May 17, 2017, when Trump found out about the appointment of the Special Counsel, he had a shit fit in the Oval Office, saying that he was fucked, his presidency was over, that a president can’t do his job once an investigation like this started. He then lashed Sessions at length for his cowardice under fire, for his failure to loyally protect Trump from the Deep State traitors that surrounded him.

Mueller’s investigators interviewed Flynn. Flynn had already arranged an interview with the FBI, and lied to them essentially the same way he’d lied to Pence. Flynn cooperated with Mueller’s investigators, with the understanding that it would help him avoid the maximum sentence for the crime of lying to the FBI. Flynn was prosecuted for a federal crime and pleaded guilty, twice, under oath.

So, to recap. No Flynn lies about his own misconduct, no demonstrable Pence lie on TV, no firing of Flynn, no need for the special favor from the sick and dangerous Jim Comey, no firing of Comey, no recusal by weak A.G. Jeff Sessions in overseeing the quiet, ongoing Russia investigation — most likely never any Robert Mueller investigation.

Now the game for Trump is, as it was when Mueller concluded he could not exonerate Trump for obstruction of justice (a felony, boys and girls), to take the findings of Robert Mueller and dismiss them as the unprincipled accusations of a partisan coward too weak to do his job, which was to fully uncover the hoax of the false claim that the Trump campaign had actively coordinated and colluded with Russian agents and to completely debunk the scurrilous innuendo that just because Trump was in a fury to end the Mueller probe, tried numerous times to do so, in fact, successfully obstructed justice (due to much perjury and destruction of documents, insufficient evidence of criminal conspiracy uncovered) … well, nothing to actually see here.

In other words, complete and total exoneration by the witch hunters determined to destroy Trump no matter what.

The story Barr and FOX immediately started repeating was that so-called Eagle Scout Mueller and his team turned out to be a Never-Trump sleeper cell working for Obama, the Mexicans, the Muslims, disloyal Jews, Hindus, the Clintons, George Soros, the traitorous Deep State, the Fake News and so on.

So, by dismissing the charges against a man at the center of the Mueller probe, who twice, under oath, admitted his guilt about lying (and lying multiple times, ruling out accidental untruth) about his illegal contacts with Russians, the lynchpin of the whole anti-Trump enterprise falls away leaving: NOTHING.

A big, fat, Bagpiper Bill Barr-sized HOAX. Communists, everywhere, we are upping the danger alert to RED. RED!!! VERY DANGEROUS!!! Buy duct tape! Return to work! Save America from those who hate our freedom!!!!

[1] Note: McConnell has staunchly resisted any and all efforts to protect the 2020 election from this ongoing interference, set out in great detail in Robert Mueller’s report (as well as House and Senate reports) since it was favorable to his party, resulting in the historically great administration of the unimpeachable Donald Trump, the best friend the radical right-wing has ever had in office. Suck it, LOSERS.

Nazi Fuck of the Week

The honor this week goes to one of the smartest, angriest and most contemptuous of this extremist group we have in power right now. He has pushed the justice envelope farther than any before him, demonstrating in the process how smoothly he combines the most salient traits of Hermann Goering (the contemptuous bully) and Josef Goebbels (the cunning, contemptuous propagandist). Bravo, Bagpiper, take a bow, you beefy Nazi fuck.

Barr from politico.jpeg

Barr worked in government alongside fellow right-wing zealots Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in the years after Nixon’s disgraceful resignation under threat of bipartisan impeachment. Congress and the Court put limits on presidential power, because we’d had a president who lied about not being a crook, abused the powers of his office to attempt to brazenly obstruct justice and so forth.

These fine, ideological men, Barr, Rummy, the aptly named Dick Cheney, were among a powerful core of super conservatives who believed it was totally unfair of the other branches, the so-called Checks and Balances, to limit the powers of the Unitary Executive, the most important man in government, the equivalent of the corporate CEO, just because one was unfairly caught in criminal activity, repeatedly lied about it and was unconscionably disgraced and forced to resign.

Barr was as adamant as the others that the powers of the president (if he was of their political persuasion, of course) could not be limited in any way. It was a long-time dream of these hierarchically thinking men of power that in any just system you have an all-powerful boss, and his loyal supporters who are well-rewarded, and the rest just do what they’re fucking told and be happy about it or shut the fuck up. In Germany they had a phrase for this, for life under their infallible CEO boss from 1933-45: fuhrerworte haben Gesetzeskraft: the leader’s word has the force of law.

Prior to the new president’s inauguration in 2017, the incoming National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, contacted the Russian government and told them not to worry about Obama’s sanctions for their election interference, that they’d work things out once Trump was in power. Then he lied to Vice President Pence, told him he’d had no contact with the Russian ambassador or anyone else. Pence repeated the lie on national television. Pence later confirmed Flynn had lied to him. Trump fired Flynn, with regret, for lying to Pence.

Meanwhile, it turned out, Flynn had also lied to the FBI when they questioned him in connection with their investigation into now well-documented Russian interference on behalf of Trump in the 2016 election. Flynn was referred for prosecution by Robert Mueller III (Bobby Three Sticks), and twice pleaded guilty in federal court, under oath, to lying to the FBI.

He stated while making his pleas that God had told him he must take responsibility for his actions, plead guilty, make amends and move forward with his life. Then Trump started having regular shit fits on twitter, FOX got involved.

Sean Hannity made the case that even though Flynn volunteered to be interviewed by the FBI, that it was arranged days in advance, and conducted in Flynn’s office, that Flynn had been viciously trapped. The FBI, FOX argued, had set Flynn up. For one thing, they never told him lying to the FBI was a federal crime, and they deprived him of the right to counsel. Every skel and scumbag in the world, charged with a crime, gets the right to a lawyer, but not Flynn. The irrational hatred of Trump, you see, went so deep in the Deep State, they were berserk and venegefully determined to get Flynn, no matter what. Made sense to Hannity, to Trump, to Barr, to Flynn. Trump began randomly tweeting about what a great, unfairly victimized man Flynn was.

This outpouring of support, rational or not, caused Flynn to stiffen his spine. He got a new legal team, and attempted to withdraw his two guilty pleas. He’d apparently heard further from the God he prayed to, the one who at first told him he had to be accountable for the crime he’d committed, and that God, on reconsidering, apparently, told him the Deep State had persecuted and trapped him, like Judas and the Romans did to Jesus Himself, and Flynn resolved that he’d go to hell before allowing himself to be sentenced to prison for a “crime” he realized now he did not even commit. He wanted to withdraw both of his guilty pleas. After all, is loyalty a crime? Is love of country a crime? Is protecting the president a crime?

Barr recently decided Flynn had been crucified long enough. He directed a motion be made to the court that was about to sentence Flynn. the DOJ moved to dismiss the case “in the interests of justice.” Hermann Goering is high-fiving our attorney general from his grave. What a ballsy move, comrade! In your fucking faces, Social Justice losers!

Then comes the real kicker, Barr’s in-your-face contempt of everything he claims to stand for:

Barr told CBS News he believes the Justice Department’s “duty, we think, is to dismiss the case.”

“A crime cannot be established here. They did not have a basis for the counterintelligence investigation against Flynn at that stage,” Barr said.

When asked if Flynn lied to the FBI, Barr responded, “Well, you know, people sometimes plead to things that turn out not to be crimes.” [2]

Barr insisted Thursday that he wanted the dismissed charges to “restore confidence in the system” and show people “there’s only one standard of justice.”

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Barr also said, with his trademark pugnacious smirk — ah, I’ll let the Daily Beast tell it, they put it nicely:

Trump had previously hinted that he was considering a pardon for Flynn. After denying he was doing Trump’s bidding, Barr was asked how history would remember this move.

“History is written by the winners, so it largely depends on who is writing the history,” he said with a sly smile.

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Naturally, Barr, who has never been able to refrain from gloating as his evil enemies fume, also said other provocative things, with a glint in his steely eye, which is one more reason he is our top Nazi Fuck of the Week:

Barr insisted Thursday night that he was not dragging politics into his decisions, suggesting the real bias at work was against Flynn, who had pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to FBI agents in an interview about his conversations with the Russian ambassador.

“I want to make sure that we restore confidence in the system. There’s only one standard of justice,” Barr told CBS News. “It’s sad that nowadays these partisan feelings are so strong that people have lost any sense of justice.”

Asked whether he was doing Trump’s bidding, Barr said: “I’m doing the law’s bidding.”

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“Sad,” you understand, “that nowadays these partisan feelings are so strong that people have lost any sense of justice.” And, by people, of course, I refer to you eternally angry, damned to hell godless evildoing partisan losers.

Barr decided the interests of justice detemined that Flynn was the victim, as Trump is always the victim, as Barr himself has always been the victim. Their type are understandably sick and fucking tired of being victimized by merciless partsan hacks just because they answer to a much higher calling than the average powerless loser. They will not stand for it! NOT ANY MORE!

I will give Neal Katyal the last word, the piece he wrote with fellow Georgetown law professor Joshua Geltzer, really puts Barr’s latest atrocity against justice into stark perspective. They call it THE APPALLING DAMAGE OF DROPPING THE MICHAEL FLYNN CASE. Appalling it truly is. Our experiment in democracy has now been concluded, please continue to hold…

[1] The legal basis for the interview with Flynn, was laid out with irrefutable legal precision by Mary McCord, the acting assistant attorney general who reviewed all the paperwork in the case. Her clear, concise Op Ed is entitled BILL BARR TWISTED MY WORDS IN DROPPING THE FLYNN CASE. HERE’S THE TRUTH.

[2] As for Fuckface himself:

Trump has also naturally praised the DOJ’s decision, telling reporters Thursday that Flynn is an “innocent man” who is now “an even greater warrior.” “He is a great gentleman. He was targeted by the Obama administration and he was targeted in order to try and take down a president, and what they’ve done is a disgrace, and I hope a big price is going to be paid,” Trump said.

Welcome to the Fourth Reich

Looking back in history, with that keen vision hindsight sometimes provides, it’s often easy to find the moment when the deal was sealed, the signal event that made what happened next appear inevitable. In Nazi Germany, I’d say that moment was eighteen months in, when Hitler sent out goon squads to kill his enemies all over Germany on the last night of June 1934. One of the dead, in that Night of the Long Knives, was General Kurt von Schleicher, Hitler’s predecessor as chancellor, the German equivalent of a more right-wing Colin Powell. The initial claim in State media was that the “traitor” was shot dead in a gun battle while resisting arrest for his crimes. Within a very short time they dropped the lie, the Fuhrer was nonchalantly telling Germany about the night “when I had Schleicher shot.” Of course, the whole point of that coordinated, murderous purge was to demonstrate that even a popular right-wing celebrity politician wasn’t safe from summary execution if Hitler perceived disloyalty or threat.

So it is with this lawless, insecure, bullying reality-TV con-man president we have up at the podium now. He also uses fear of angry reprisal, demonstrated in consistent threats and public acts of vilification and revenge, to rule by fear. Riding the ample ass of his deeply religious, fanatical Attorney General who believes, and always has, that the ends justify the means, he would appear infallible. The ends, for Bagpiper Bill Barr, are a moral nation-state as Jesus would have wanted it (as Barr fervidly imagines his messiah would want it, anyway). Barr wields the law as a righteous sword, the way the original Jesuits, Defenders of the Faith and lawyers for the Spanish Inquisition, did.

You fervently want justice, God’s justice on earth. To get Divine justice, to be righteous instruments of His will, you must put heretics to the flames, to the sword, the strappado, the water-board, the rack. It’s just what the Prince of Peace would wish for us sinners here on this troubled earth, to bring Jesus’s mercy to mankind by any means necessary. So, as a lawyer for God’s representatives on earth, you reason backwards from the result you want, and craft your legal rationale to make the practice legal, permissible, and even highly moral, no matter how perverse or obscene what you are advocating might otherwise seem.

Barr has always been supremely creative this way, an innovator, really. He crafted the first-ever preemptive presidential pardon on the eve of a felony trial (Caspar Weinberger’s) that would have spilled the toxic beans on lame-duck president HW Bush and destroyed his legacy. He substituted his overbearing and demonstrably false interpretation for the damning facts of a careful report that explicitly did not exonerate his boss of a seamless (and ongoing) pattern of Obstruction of Justice, smearing a highly respected Eagle Scout colleague, and political fellow-traveler, in the process. Since exonerating his guilty boss he has empaneled a zealous criminal investigation into the “HOAX” investigation of what both parties have concluded in official reports was massive Russian interference in the 2016 election, with the active connivance of Trump’s campaign, and on and on. Thus:

Granted, I should not have clicked on the NY Times at 4:13 a.m. — one of the dangers of having a phone next to your bed. Hell of an hour to get the bracing news that I was now living in the Fourth Reich. I read the Grey Lady’s analysis the next day, measured, well-written, a range of experts expressing dismay, alarm, a hint of outrage. You can read it here, nicely done, I suppose, as far as it goes.

You will not get what you need from the New York Times, of course. It’s not their job to get you into the streets, mobilized against the subjugation of our legal system to advance the corruptions of the most evil among us. That is the job of the millions of professional and freelance canaries in the coal mine [1] — to raise the alarm.

The Department of Justice was created under the Fourteenth Amendment, enacted after the Civil War. The Fourteenth Amendment was the needed improvement to the Constitution that now guaranteed the rights, privileges and immunities of citizenship to the recently freed slaves, to ensure that outfits like the Ku Klux Klan could not continue to impose their enraged will through brutality and terror, that former slaves and their defenders would be protected from mob violence. In the antebellum days when you could own other human beings as chattels, you didn’t need a Department of Justice to enforce the rights of these human mules, cows, goats — such persons had no rights under our laws.

The Department of Justice has been at the center of every important advance in social justice, certainly in terms of enforcing federal laws against in-your-face racism and other hate crimes. It has also been a bulwark against government corruption and a protecter of those who risk exposing government corruption. It is no longer in those businesses anymore.

The Department of Justice is currently in the hands of a zealous, angry man who believes that Abuse of Power, when the righteous wield it, or when it is expedient to righteous goals, anyway, is neither a crime nor a vice. The ability to vastly expand his existing powers, even abuse them (if you want to quibble) is a gift he no doubt believes he has received directly from Christ Himself, that His will may be done here upon the earth as it is done in heaven.

Heaven help us all here in the Fourth Reich. The Third one did not go well for millions and millions of people. If these power-worshipping fanatics wind up in power again after November 2020, and they certainly have a puncher’s chance to be there, no matter how much more they fuck up (a far from stellar first term didn’t hurt Bush and Cheney in 2004) when you and I get to the camp, after that long, crowded train ride, remind me to ask you again if you still believe I’m being hyperbolic in my concerns about these Nazi-emulating motherfuckers.

[1] Kurt Vonnegut compared creative types to the canaries British coal miners used to carry into the mines to detect odorless poison gases like carbon monoxide. When the tiny-lunged bird keeled over in his cage the miners knew it was time to get out of there. (This practice was apparently stopped in 1986 when electronic sniffers replaced the wee birds). Vonnegut meant by this comparison that those who fret and worry about communicating to others are often more prone than the rest to succumbing to the invisible deadly gases that are looming to kill everyone.

What is wrong with us, America?

The New York Times, a highly literate, aspirational outlet for its liberal-minded, well-to-do demographic, sometimes publishes extremely well-researched, important stories. I have serious concerns with the many things they do not report, their reflexive decision to couch every story, no matter how outrageous, in reasonable-sounding terms, the way they have sometimes directly colluded with the worst things our government does (often simply by agreeing to silence), the massive influence they exert in allowing a murderous status quo to function smoothly and efficiently, but I appreciate that they are also a vital and important news source. They ran this headline yesterday:

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This widespread child hunger, among young children, in the wealthiest country in human history, is happening as American farmers are destroying massive quantities of food, plowing it into the ground, dumping it, trashing it. Thousands of tons of edible crops, eggs, dairy products, disposed of because the market for these foods has been eroded by the mass closures necessitated by our efforts to control the pandemic.

A caller to a radio show recently asked a supremely reasonable question on-air: can’t the military or the national guard send trucks to collect this food and get it to hungry Americans who are already lined up, waiting for it? The earnest politician she was asking spoke of a few related matters, but they ran out of time for him to answer that specific, excellent question. I’d love to hear a good answer to why that isn’t being done, as at least one in five young children in America is malnourished and farmers are destroying vast quantities of food.

Presumably shipping that food directly to poor people would be Communism, an unAmerican affront to freedom and liberty. Indecent, unAmerican, to distribute free food it is much more cost-effective to simply destroy on the spot since it can’t be profitably sold.

In any case, the president clearly does not care how many low-income Americans have to die, as long as his ratings stay above 38%, the stock market remains upbeat and his chances of winning reelection are viable. Don’t forget, he registered his 2020 re-election campaign on the day of his inauguration in January, 2017.

One in five young American children are hungry in our land of food abundance, reports the New York Times.

What is wrong with us as a people?

Low-paid workers, many of them migrants, are recently ordered by the president, by scrawled Executive Order (as he refuses to use the Defense Production Act to order companies to produce needed personal protective equipment, tests, ventilators and other things vital for combating the plague), to show up for their shifts in American meat processing plants. Never mind safety, never mind health, to hell with the pandemic — the nation needs warriors, says the president, to hack up those slaughtered animals and turn them into meat! No matter, really, if he winds up having to walk back this or that particular order, edict or pronouncement, he will announce he was being sarcastic, or meant the exact opposite of what he said. He’s playful as a puppy!

The same cannot be said for the strongman of the Senate, the man who takes grim pride in his nickname, The Grim Reaper. He is the proud, rictus-faced murderer of any humane bill that reaches his desk, he simply leaves them on his desk to die of neglect. No vote, no nothing, make me do it, loser! This well-married son of a couple of non-entities is not going to let any Commie-style legislation past him. Getting a law past him that favors the average person over the extraordinary persons he represents, those well-funded corporate persons who keep him in power, is harder than getting a pork chop past a hungry wolf.

You can read about what motivates this sick, destructive, unprincipled, soulless fuck in great detail in How Mitch McConnell Became Trump’s Enabler-in-Chief an exhaustively researched article by the great Jane Mayer. He is presently seeking to pass legislation to protect our largest corporate persons from that fearsome army of aggressive plaintiff’s lawyers always ready to frivolously sue any business who negligently kills anyone or doesn’t protect their imagined health or rights sufficiently. Shades of the legislation, at the dawn of the eternal War on Terror, to immunize mercenaries and other military contractors for things like torture and collateral damage.

Lewis Black got several of the last great laughs out of my mother that she ever had, in his one man show from the Kennedy Center, which we watched together on TV in the spring of 2010. A big laugh came when he aptly described our electoral process. He asked the audience: when was the last time you went into the voting booth and cast your vote for somebody you really believed was an excellent person for the job? (For my parents it might have been Adlai Stevenson, who lost against Eisenhower a couple of times and then lost the 1960 Democratic primary to JFK) No, said Black, you don’t get to vote for that person, ever. You go into the voting booth, pull the curtain AND IT’S TWO BOWLS OF SHIT, YOU GOTTA PICK ONE!

Our current reality TV-star, largely ignorant, compulsively “sarcastic” president ran against Hillary Clinton, a highly competent but problematic politician. The Democrats went with her because it was “her turn”. During the lead-up to the 2016 election I heard that Donald and Hillary were the first and second most hated politicians in America. Sounded about right to me. I don’t recall which was number one most hated and which was number two, (both smell like number two to me) but, apparently, the best man won, by 78,000 surgically applied votes in every county in the three or four states the big man needed to win the Electoral College.

The bowl of shit the corporate Democrats are proposing as their candidate to beat Trump “like a drum” in 2020 is a vain, surgically enhanced old man with a famously winning televangelist smile and a dodgy political past featuring a lot of right-wing compromises. He was the long-time senator from Delaware, the corporate incorporation capital of America, after all.

To be clear, as I did with Ms. Clinton in 2016 (and her husband before that), I will vote for the clear lesser of two evils, hold my nose and choose the bowl of shit not labeled “Trump”. I will urge everyone I talk to to do the same. I won’t pretend, though, as the New York Times will, that President Biden will bring about a return to decency, make everything normal again here in the land of the feee and the home of the brave. He will be a better president than Trump, without a doubt, but so would almost anybody. After all, Trump is the worst president in American history by a country mile. How bad? He makes people, even on the left, nostalgic for his runner up as worst-ever president, George W. Bush.

May we be objective here for a moment? The smiling blue collar Biden is something of an unapologetic jerk. He charms his way out of the worst accusations thrown at him, using folksy, workingman’s humor. After he was publicly admonished for touching women who didn’t want him to touch them he made a joke, putting his arm around a male on the stage with him. “Look, I asked his consent, he said it was OK,” Biden said to the crowd, who gave him a hearty laugh. It was probably less funny to any woman he’d been inappropriately handsy with. Listen to Jeremy Scahill’s excellent analysis of the giant turd in the Biden/Democratic punch bowl.

Trump is an absolute pig who takes pride in being that way and has threatened to sue every woman who ever accused him of being what he undoubtedly is, (particularly the ones who are not his type, women he wouldn’t rub against with Mike Pence’s dick). He was lying about suing them all, it turns out, but then, that’s just his way, he’s litigious, full of puffery. On a more sincere note, he nonchalantly indicated he’d like to have sex with his daughter Ivanka, you know, if he could get away with it. He said it like a joke. “I’d definitely date her,” he said, as his favorite daughter cooed uncomfortably next to him during the TV interview. He said many other things about women much worse than that. If you have no problem with a guy like him, he’s probably your man. Join that solid 38% who love him no matter what he does.

But Joe Biden, self-proclaimed champion of women, has got some serious credibility problems of his own in the matter of his treatment of women, including his occasional unwanted shows of physical affection to women he interacts with. I thought Jeremy Scahill’s was the best presentation of this truly perplexing situation that I’ve heard yet. His recent interviews with journalist Melissa Gira Grant and former Nevada lawmaker Lucy Flores were detailed and thought-provoking.

We don’t always stop to think that when a powerful man says, of an accuser’s allegation, “it never happened” it also means “she’s lying.” Joe Biden says, unequivocally that it never happened, that he never pushed his aide up against the wall and shoved his hand up her skirt and down her panties; therefore, the then young aide, Tara Reade, is lying, she’s a vicious liar.

The Democrats have been insisting loudly, especially during the administration of a proud serial sexual violator, that we must give women who complain of mistreatment by powerful men the presumption of credibility (ask former Senator Al Franken, lynched by zealous members of his own party). As Biden himself said during the Boof Kavanaugh hearings:

“For a woman to come forward in the glaring lights of focus, nationally, you’ve got to start off with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real.”

Which, of course, is quite different from what he’s saying now, about Tara Reade’s allegation — in her case, she’s simply lying.

Recall his words and actions as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee when Anita Hill made allegations against now Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Note that Biden did not even support Thomas’s nomination, he was among the 48 who voted “nay” in the 52-48 confirmation [1]. He chaired that committee around the time he is accused of feeling up his young aide in the rudest possible manner.

He allowed Anita Hill no corroborating witnesses, allowed her to be roughed up by the men of the committee who were allowed to ask her to tell them repeatedly exactly what she claimed Clarence Thomas had said about her lovely breasts and the pubic hair on the Coke can, and how she felt, (was she really humiliated or just flirtatious and later feeling scorned, as women do?) and why she made no complaint, and then was forced to tell the same shameful things again, and grilled about why she continued to have a professional relationship with her former boss if he had actually sexually harassed her and made her feel so humiliated, why she didn’t use the brand new sexual harassment laws to bring him to court and humiliate herself … etc. Biden chaired the circus, which Thomas indignantly called a “high tech lynching”, Biden held the gavel, had the power to make the abuse of Anita Hill stop at any time [2].

Biden never apologized to Anita Hill, beyond saying, around the time he threw his hat into the ring to be the 2020 Democratic bowl of shit, that he wished there was more he could have done to stop what was done to her. (Note the lawyer’s use of the passive voice– what was done to her– not what he, or anyone else did– nobody actually did anything, it was simply done, shit happens, gosh…). It’s not as though he had the power to do more than he did … it isn’t like he was the chairman of the committee, representing the majority on it, or anything like that…

Besides, as he points out, this lying woman, Tara Reade, is talking about something that never happened twenty-seven years ago! Where was she with her false claim all these years when he was being vetted over and over again? Since she said nothing all those years, why believe her now when it’s very politically convenient to suddenly come out with this smear? Biden’s most visible female surrogates, vice presidential hopefuls all, are forced to point out that they believe Joe and that the New York Times reported, about Tara Reade, well, she, there were some holes in her story, and other reasons to doubt she was the most reliable historian… and… and… the New York Times did a thorough investigation several weeks ago and determined…

Get ready to hold your nose, folks. Joe Biden is the man Tom Perez, Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic brain trust have chosen for you, brought back from the dead on the eve of his defeat, by the coordinated Super-Tuesday eve efforts of a united national party intent on not allowing a vigorous debate about the future of America, the minimum standard of decency we citizens actually deserve, what protections for human citizens are actually needed against merciless corporate persons. We’ll chose the bowl of shit the Democratic party puts in front of us, if we know what’s good for us. What choice do we really have? Do we really want to wake up in November living in the Fourth Reich? I don’t think so.

What is wrong with us, America?

[1] The ultra-conservative Thomas received 8 confirmation votes from Democrats; one each from Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Virginia; he got both motherfuckers from Louisiana and Georgia. Proving how much times have changed her in American race relations, even white southerners recognize the value of putting a black klansman on the nation’s highest court for his lifetime.

[2] The Republicans who confirmed temperamentally unsuited right-wing extremist Boof Kavanaugh to his lifetime post on our highest court, learned a valuable lesson from the Thomas/Hill shit show. They enlisted a woman to sympathetically grill Kavanaugh’s main accuser, Christine Blasey-Ford. As a result, Blasey-Ford’s testimony was heard in full, and believed by most Americans who heard it. During the break FOX news was in despair, it appeared to be over for choir boy Brett. It would be up to the angry white Republican men on the committee, led by a crying Lindsey Graham, to support the indignant, snorting, crying Kavanaugh so he could be confirmed. Fucking babies.

American Exceptionalism (pandemic version)

When it comes to glittering generalities pulled out of a wordsmith’s talented ass, grand-sounding but largely meaningless, American Exceptionalism is no exception. What it actually means … well, it’s similar to The Free Market, Manifest Destiny or Making the World Safe for Democracy. I offer a humble example here, of how profit-driven private industry is the most exceptional possible answer to American health care needs [1].

I went to a lab for a blood test today, in preparation for next week’s telephone appointment with a nephrologist to find out if my rare kidney disease is still in remission, as it was seven or eight months ago, when we last checked. I was supposed to have checked in with the doctor last month, but as I found out on the eve of the visit, I had no health insurance, though I’d paid my premiums through June. Nobody had bothered to inform me that my health coverage had been summarily cancelled a few weeks earlier. Oh, well. Apparently no law requires it.

No worries, problem fixed, a few short weeks later I have my affordable health insurance back. I call the lab yesterday to make sure they have the digital paperwork, but because of COVID-19 nobody at the lab can pick up the phone to confirm this. No appointment needed, come on in, short waiting times, says the recording. So I take a ride over today. Pleasant place, everyone very nice, short wait, plenty of hand sanitizer available, they call me in and ask for my paperwork.

I explain that it was digitally transmitted, on April 10, according to a note on my phone. The lab has no paperwork on the computer for me. Perhaps there was a paper file faxed over? I am asked. They open the file cabinet, check the hanging folders of paper files. Nada. Can I have them fax over the paperwork? I call the hospital where the nephrologist’s office is, navigate the phone tree, get connected to the person I need to speak with.

Carmen at the nephrologist’s assures me they uploaded the document on April 10, it’s in the lab’s database, she’s looking right at it on her computer. I give her the fax number and she tells me she’ll fax it right away. No fax arrives. I call Carmen again and she informs me the lab’s fax machine is not receiving faxes. She reads me a requisition number 0062216, this should allow them to pull it right up on the network. Only it doesn’t, as I find out a few moments later.

Crystal, a lovely phlebotomist with whom I am starting to become friendly by now, asks me to spell my name. I do. She is surprised. Somehow they had my name as a long, hard to pronounce one, starting with a P, not a W, something like Pidelszkfflmm. Crystal asks if I could have typed it in wrong when I signed in on the iPad.

I look at the keyboard on my phone and notice that P is all the way on the other side of the keyboard from W, the first letter of my last name. Not likely I typed in my own name as Pidelszkfflmm, I’ve typed my name many times, never anything like that. Never mind. There must be some work-around. Yes, Crystal says brightly, I can ask them to email it to me, go home, print it out, bring back the paper copy. When I explain the many extra steps involved for me, and how I want to leave time for the results to come back, and remind her I’m still fasting and ready to have my blood drawn, Crystal gives me her email address. I call Carmen a third time, we repeat the email address to each other a few times, she tells me she’s emailing it, she waits with me on the line until the email arrives.

“You got any jokes?” I ask Carmen after a while. She finds this funny, but can’t think of one.

“I watch the news conferences every evening,” she says, and we do a kind of sickly pseudo-laugh together.

Crystal gets the email from Carmen, she does the blood test, all very pleasant, all within an hour or so of walking in to the place. I am ready to leave, take off my N95 mask, find some food, break my fast.

“I hope you didn’t just use the bathroom,” Crystal says to me after my blood is drawn. I’m thinking of COVID, but it’s not that, she also needs some urine to send to the lab. I shake my head, three minutes ago I could have filled up two of those little cups, but…

While I’m waiting for a tall cup of cold water to do its thing, thinking about Crystal’s warning to me that the PSA test (prostate-specific antigen — a screen for prostate cancer) included in the kidney doctor’s blood test might not be covered and I may be billed separately (I assure her I throw such bills in the recycling bin) I ask her if she knew that in Iraq, under the brutal dictator Saddam Hussein, Iraqis had universal health care. She is non-committal. I continue: after the US liberated Iraq from the dictator and brought democracy, after destroying hospitals and so on, they instituted American-style health care, with the result that today many Iraqis no longer have health care at all.

Crystal nods. “Of course, of course we did that, ” she says, her eyes smiling savagely over her mask, “American Exceptionalism.” I give a little chuckle, have to hand it to her. Great girl, and the way she slipped the needle in, with barely a prick, also most exceptional. We talk about how it is exceptionally American that teeth, vision and care in our old age are not considered part of basic health care, not covered by most American health insurance. I nip off to the bathroom for a moment with the little plastic cup. She calls me Mr. Eliot again as I hand her the little cup of warm urine. As I’m leaving, her last customer of the day, she fondly calls me Mr. Eliot again. Very likable young woman, Crystal.

If you have a “Free Market” where the fittest bring the best product to market for the cheapest price for the invisible hand of the marketplace to place in front of wise consumers, why wouldn’t you commoditize every aspect of human life? Health, you understand, is just a commodity like everything else. Life itself, you can actually put a price to it, make a pretty exact valuation based on net-worth and earning potential, easily calculated by actuaries. There’s actually no guesswork involved, it’s practically science, fixed and elemental as the stones themselves; that’s the exceptional thing about American Exceptionalism!

[1] I think of the Grey Lady, America’s second finest news source (The Onion is America’s finest news source), whose distinctive, objective style of reporting harkens back to an earlier time, when the status quo was not questioned in any fundamental way by decent people. She fittingly got her nickname in a more proper era when we still had firm notions about what was ladylike and what was gentlemanly, when an unruly girl was admonished to act like a lady. The Grey Lady, now a stately, dignified, respected old matriarch, was, in her earlier days, a hard-working, discreet and strictly upper-class sex worker. You can look it up.

I’m Lovin’ It! (pandemic edition)

There’s a plague raging in New York City. We try to stay indoors as much as we can, those of us who have the option. We avoid being near people when we go out (again, those of us who don’t live outdoors). We wear masks and wash our hands frequently. Stores are doing their best to keep people safe, marking the sidewalk outside to let people line up at least six feet apart. Some places, the smart ones, require customers to come in a very few at a time, wearing masks, touching only what they purchase, or having people with gloves select the items they point out.

This is a highly contagious, sometimes deadly disease without a cure at this time. The death caused by this virus is a terrible one. The best course, though not without its obvious problems and frustrations, is keeping this deadly pathogen off your hands, your face, out of your lungs and not spreading it to others if you are an asymptomatic carrier.

Since New Yorkers can’t get to fast food, and cravings don’t stop just because there’s a pandemic, fast food will come to you. Underpaid workers who need the cash (now deemed essential workers by our mad King who uses the War Powers Act to order low-paid meat processing plant workers to go to work) deliver things like fast food hamburgers and fruit punch, on demand. This bag was on our stoop a few nights ago, two cheeseburgers and a fruit punch, an order we didn’t order.

20200429_222003

For many years I loved McDonald’s hamburgers, though I tried not to eat them very often. They were not designed for healthy eating, they were simply delicious. They were engineered to have the perfect balance of the addictive: salt, fat, sweet. I haven’t eaten meat in many years (though a few shrimps I encountered recently would probably contest that) but I still clearly remember the taste of a McDonald’s cheeseburger. I recall all the flavors combined into a Big Mac too. As they say, just because you become a vegetarian doesn’t mean bacon suddenly stops smelling delicious.

There was no address on the receipt stapled to the bag, where it listed the two burgers and the fruit punch. (At least I was relieved of the thought of McDonald’s fries being in the bag). The house next door is rented to college students, and as there was a light on upstairs, I brought the bag of food over to their stoop and left it there.

The light stayed on in the student house day after day, I guess the last one out just forgot to turn it off. Two or three days later I gripped the bag’s handle with two fingers I later disinfected (I had no ultraviolet light source to introduce under the skin) and walked the bag over to a garbage bin down the street.

Here is the part I am lovin’ —

We have hungry raccoons who patrol the area regularly, as well as the occasional large possum and a couple of colonies of constantly prowling feral cats. All of them hungry, all constantly on the hunt, all meat eaters. Not one of them touched the bag of fast food.

I’m lovin’ it!

Keeping It In Perspective

These are extraordinarily scary times, an historically realistic multi-dimensional horror show going on all around us. It is good to keep that firmly in mind and then not dwell on it. What was already hard has been made monumentally harder by this plague, a plague of deadly disease on top of the devastation already done by hellbent deadly maniacs. It’s good to remember how disorienting this imposed self-isolation is. A few of us may have already crossed the line toward real paranoia. We must remember to be very gentle with each other in these times.

It’s easy, after weeks of isolation, out walking on a mild night in early May (the streets here in the epicenter have been virtually deserted for weeks), to see the small clusters of approaching people as threats, infectious carriers of gruesome suffocating death. The reflex to fear others turns out to be quick to acquire.

“Oh, no!” Lucy says and points to a group of silhouettes moving closer and closer, some, we see can already see, are not even wearing masks.

“Christ,” I say, suddenly in a full-blown zombie movie, “there must be twenty of them, it looks like they’re trying to keep six feet apart.”

They are walking slowly, stiffly, in a loose phalanx across the wide street, spreading from sidewalk to sidewalk. As we approach it becomes clear we’ll have to pass right through them, within breathing distance, as they rotate in every direction to wish each other well, calling out with big exhalations of breath that are visible as plumes in the humid night air. Looks like a scene out of that plague movie with Dustin Hoffman where you see the green cough cloud travel into all the surrounding lungs in that crowded movie theatre.

It is easy to see them as zombies, shambling closer, unsteady on their legs, many in masks, others without masks, wearing strange, alienated expressions, not making eye contact. In other states, we hear, hoards of them have massed at the capitol, carrying guns, demanding the right to return to normal life during this time of a massively infectious, deadly plague without a cure.

The zombie president urges them on. Real Americans need to be free, freedom means normal life, going outside, going to work, buying things, voting in person, eating in restaurants, going to the movies and the beach, getting your hair done, getting an “I Survived COVID-19” tattoo, before it’s too late. The urge to go about your normal life is quite understandable. The angry, lemming-like drive to raise your gun and scream “fuck Fauci and so-called Science! We demand FREEDOM!” maybe a little less so.

These people on the street in Queens are just regular folks, out getting some fresh air on our first real Spring evening, greeting neighbors they haven’t seen in weeks.

Anyway, because you can’t be too careful during a deadly plague, my love and I slip on our N95 masks as the hoard approaches. N-95s are the ones that not only protect others from anything we might exhale but also protect us from airborne pathogens that might be swarming toward us in the night air. As we get close, we reach under our long coats, take out our baseball bats and begin swinging with all we’ve got. As everyone knows from the zombie movies, the only way to kill one is by busting their head open. There’s a loud wet pop, then another one, they begin quickly dispersing, making their dismay loudly known as they scatter.

“Shit,” Lucy says to me, her eyes suddenly wet, “I guess they weren’t zombies.”

“True,” I say, looking down at the two unmoving at our feet, the others rushing off in all directions “zombies keep coming no matter what, don’t they?” . I’m suddenly seized with regret.

The wail of a police siren breaks my train of thought and we take off at a good clip, Lucy verbally googling the closest Trump 2020 campaign office as we run. Our thinking is that this is a place we might realistically seek sanctuary, particularly if we give a large donation. They’ll protect us, we stood our ground, Stand Your Ground, right? Plus we honestly believed those old zombies threatening us were actual zombies. If we truly believed it, it’s OK, then, how could they really not protect us? The Alan Dershowitz Principle from the impeachment show. It’s worth a shot, anyway!

Pschyopath vs. Sociopath

Now there’s a pay-per-view cage match we’d like to see!

We wise apes now have an authoritative professional catalogue of psychological and emotional disorders, currently in its bigger than ever fifth edition, over nine-hundred pages. This tome contains all the things our top psychologists and other mental health professionals have categorized as shades of crazy that can be diagnosed, treated and the treatment covered by private health insurance once the proper numbers from the thousands of diagnostic and treatment codes are inputted into medical invoices.

An imperfect system for treating widespread mental health troubles that effect virtually all of us one way or another, you say? Many of these identifiable maladies can also be thought of as challenging problems of the soul imposed and exacerbated by a particularly merciless social system? Some of the categories reflect our limited social evolution and the prevailing arguments of the day — homosexuality, for example, was listed as a pathological disorder in the first two editions of the DSM (removed in 1973)– no? We are also dealing, in most cases, with a fairly wide spectrum of symptoms and disabilities, are we not?

Those may all be valid questions, but, undeniably this system, for all its admitted imperfections, is also an inexhaustible gold mine for professional wielders of this invaluable book, the DSM. So let us look to that book for our definitions.

Plus, none of that quibbling has anything to do with our Sociopaths and Psychopaths. Some things never go out of fashion. Let’s get on with the show!

Let’s meet our contestants for tonight’s heavily sponsored heavy-weight battle– the psychopath vs. the sociopath. Both are listed members of the APD community of mentally ill persons. Antisocial Personality Disorder — people who have serious difficulty relating to others; might be unusually aggressive, might make a habit of violating personal space, might just get a thrill from making other people uncomfortable. People with APD lack major social skills that most humans acquire in childhood. This type of alarming, aggressive behavior is common in junior high school and high school-aged kids, mainly boys, but most normal (if we may use the word) people will grow out of it. If you don’t, a diagnosis of APD might be in the cards for you.

Look, honestly, it’s hard to tell a psychopath from a sociopath without a scorecard. On the actual scorecard, the popular DSM checklists, both will score high on the preliminary tests.

Distorted sense of self, a void in the identity that must be filled with external things like power (check); Lack of empathy, a deficit in emotional intelligence, an unwavering self-focus (check); Pathological personality traits– attention seeking behavior, manipulation, exhibiting a high degree of most or all of the famous Seven Deadly Sins — envy, gluttony, greed, lust, pride, sloth, and wrath (check).

Now comes the question that separates the average toxic asshole from the APD — are these traits normal for your stage of life or the common, unique requirements of your particular social position? If not, you could have APD.

A psychopath, we learn, is born with a certain genetic set-up, the sociopath is programmed to act out anti-socially by a very bad upbringing. Get it? Sociopaths are often reckless, haphazard and passionate; psychopaths are generally cool, calm and calculating. Sociopaths form emotional attachments, toxic ones, yes, but genuine relationships. Psychopaths enter relationships only for the advantages they can provide.

This dream bout will be harder to stage than I originally thought. Crap, I was so looking forward to it.

Probing this distinction makes me wonder about some of our more ubiquitous public speakers these days. Where, for example, does the son-in-law of the most powerful man in the world fit into this scheme?

Merely a deluded, toxic asshole, ruthless super-wealthy slumlord, confident exemplar of supreme entitlement, or actually… oh never mind. What difference does it make?

You know, some days, I’m pretty much just typing here.