Context from reading history

As far as history, I am like that crusty, plainspoken character played by the late, great Dennis Hopper in True Romance, I find that shit fascinating.  The reverberations of historical events, things that actually happened as opposed to mere stories, haunt me, literally.   Some days I am standing on the edge of that ravine northwest of Vishnevitz in the Ukraine, on that airless night of August 1943, with the rest of my once large family, waiting my turn for the bullet in the back of my head.

Sekhnet says that’s exactly why she avoids the subject of history.  Too horrible!   Too distressing!   Humans suck!

Aside: Years ago I attended a free concert David Bromberg did for WBAI, in the church not far from Rodney Dangerfield’s club where WBAI broadcast from at the time.   In graffiti by the urinal there was some smack about about a popular and witty BAI host “Steve Post sucks.”    Under that someone had written “No he doesn’t.”  Under that, in another handwriting:  “Yes I do.”

Yes, sure, humans suck.   We do.  It’s a large part of what we do.  With razor teeth and a demented, bloody smile.   Still, history is some fascinating shit, as my father would say.  There have been inspiring moments of human courage and creativity, even in the worst chapters of that horrific chronicle [1].  The entire story of our collective sucking, biting and healing is endlessly compelling to me.

A few years back I discovered a great podcast by a guy who also loves history.   Dan Carlin is the guy’s name and his excellent long-form podcast is called Hardcore History (highly recommended).   He tends to focus on wars over the ages, military history, strategy, philosophy, what the wars were like for the civilians, the soldiers who fought them.  He seems to read everything available on a chosen subject and then, over the course of a few months when he’s digested it and thought it over, he puts out a series of long (3-5 hours each) ad-libbed shows on the subject.   This format enables him to go into great depth on the subject, whether its the Roman Empire, the Mongol Empire, the Persian Empire, World War One or his current series, Supernova in the East, the military juggernaut that was modern Japan.

It struck me the other day that Carlin, like the best historians, often provides larger insights into our condition here.  It makes the history rich and alive and resonant with the ongoing events of our times. 

Describing the infamous Rape of Nanking, for example, after the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, barbarous brutality as sickening as anything the Nazis were doing in their theatre of operations, Carlin makes the point that while the Japanese atrocities were indeed horrific there was nothing novel about it, really.  He gives the example of a Roman army, besieging a city, two thousand years earlier.   The Roman law was that if the city surrendered, the spoils all went to the victorious general.  On the other hand, if the legions had to invade to take the city, it was every man for himself.   The city had announced its intention to surrender.  The Roman legions, their bloodlust no doubt pent up, invaded anyway, raping, looting, disemboweling, impaling, beheading, burning their fellow Romans.  The Rape of Nanking had nothing on those motherfuckers many centuries earlier though, of course, as modern-day horrors go, it was impressively sickening.

Not to excuse the Japanese for such brutality, of course.   Carlin later points out that the Japanese made a problematic deal when they allied themselves with Nazi Germany, how it hurt Japan’s ability to diplomatically interact with the rest of the word.  Carlin, on the Germans under Hitler, whose excesses colored the world’s view of their allies:  

“… these people are book burners, they persecute minorities and have government sanctioned pogroms,  like Kristalnacht, they’re against freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, they don’t have any due process, they don’t believe in equality under the law, they have a harsh occupation, they believe in collective punishment… the list goes on and on.”

The cliche that history repeats itself is more accurately rendered as not a repeat as much as a rhyme.   There are signs, and lessons to be taken from the unfolding of events past.    We almost never see the exact replication of events and outcomes, but there are definite trends we can note from the past. It’s become common to call any blustering, hate-spewing, angry demagogue as “Hitler”, though of course Hitler was unique to his time and place and perfectly attuned to the zeitgeist of his imagined Thousand Year Reich   Still, Hitlerian traits can be noted and looked at.

Carlin’s quick list of Hitlerian attributes is striking and resonant.  Book burners hate so-called intellectuals who marshal so-called facts to persuade people of their point of view.  Minorities by definition are at the mercy of majorities, who have no obligation to show them any mercy (unless the minority is politically powerful, of course).   Freedom of thought and expression?  FUCK YOU!   Bands of German youth, in the decade leading up to Hitler’s rise, marched under the slogan “Wir Scheissen Auf die Frieheit!” (we shit on Freedom).  Freedom of religion, yes, of course, as long as practice the sanctioned one.   Due process under the law?  Not possible.   

As for the law, there are truly diabolical ways to wield it.   For example, quite recently our rulers ordered torture they rebranded as “EIT” and deemed it legal, by secret memo, when inflicted on “enemy combatants” not subject to our human rights obligations under the Geneva Conventions.   If you disagree, you may bring a law suit in court, but we are prepared to fight long and hard to have the case dismissed outright and we always win in the end.   We can, for example, legally separate refugee families at our border, send the children to be incarcerated in another state.    The Supreme Court will uphold the legality of certain,  Muslim bans, restrictions on transexuals, forcing laborers to work without pay, etc.    As for your judgments about harsh occupation, my occupied brothers and sisters, if any one of you fucks with us we will bulldoze your entire goddamned village and shoot your livestock, or, how about the Mother of All Bombs, if you like her better?

Carlin’s rattled off list reverberated in my mind after I heard it.   I made a recording of that minute of his four hour Supernova in the East II, transcribed it just now.   If you burn books, friend, you are on your way.   The temperature is already about 451F.   

It is a time for courage and heroes, millions of us.

 

[1]  the following is worth quoting in its entirety.   The full post is here.

I will end with Howard Zinn’s inspiring message, delivered as an older man, talking about why he studied and taught history, why he wrote A People’s History of the United States:

“I wanted, in writing this book, to awaken a consciousness in my readers, of class conflict, of racial injustice, of sexual inequality and of national arrogance, and I also wanted to bring into light the hidden resistance of the People against the power of the establishment.   

“I thought that to omit these acts of resistance, to omit these victories, however limited, by the people of the United States, was to create the idea that power rests only with those who have the guns, who possess the wealth.  I wanted to point out that people who seem to have no power — working people, people of color, women– once they organize and protest and create national movements, they have a power that no government can suppress.

“I don’t want to invent victories for people’s movements, but to think that history writing must simply recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat.  And if history is to be creative, if it’s to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I think, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win.

“I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in the solid centuries of warfare.”

The power of a word, e.g., anodyne

An unknown word, nonchalantly spoken in context by someone, then looked up (which takes about three seconds in the internet age) can turn on a light to illuminate a place you never had a word for.   Once you have the word, a way of thinking about and discussing the thing emerges. I am having this experience with the word “anodyne” which is usually among the first things that flow after I dip a Speedball C-4 nib into a bottle of black ink and begin to guide it across an expanse of smooth bristol.

What is the deal with anodyne (and why do I seem to prefer it to immiserated?)    It means harmless, often deliberately so, calculated to remove pain.  It explains something I never had the word for.   Anodyne explanations are essential to preserving our way of life here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, and everywhere else in this slightly imperfect world.

Take an otherwise sickening, even intolerable, situation and describe it in an anodyne way, a smooth way that makes the medicine go down.  No reason to get excited…

The richest country in the world has an alarmingly high rate of economic insecurity.  We are often told that most Americans don’t have $400 for an emergency.   The point is underscored over and over in recent days in the human interest stories we hear about struggling federal employees as the president holds almost a million working people and their families (collectively millions, plus the tens of millions affected by the loss of government services)  hostage as leverage to get one of his signature vanity projects done for his angry base.

It’s a little shocking in a nation this wealthy that so many Americans live so close to the edge of ruin, even Americans we consider middle class.   We have billionaires here by the luxury busload, a metaphorical shit ton of ’em, even a few black billionaires (hello Martin Luther King, Jr.).   We can spend a trillion or more on an endless war against a country that posed no threat to us, drummed up by false pretenses (nothing to see there, Saddam was a modern-day Hitler, after all).   We can give a trillion or more to the richest people and companies in the country, as in the GOP’s recent tax breaks.    We can’t manage to provide adequate health care to tens of millions of Americans, nutritious food to hungry children, or decent public education for them, or first class maternity facilities in American communities that have infant mortality rates as high as third world shithole countries.   Not to mention the crisis of affordable housing and  the millions of homeless nationwide, or the thousands of traumatized, hopeless military veterans who kill themselves every year.

Not to worry though.   There is an anodyne answer to this seeming conundrum.   We Americans believe in the Free Market and the power of private entrepreneurial initiative to solve even our most vexing and intractable problems.  You see, here in America we believe in liberty, in freedom for all from coercion of every kind.   Nobody can force you to do anything you don’t want to do in our exceptional democracy.  

Wait, I’m not sure this is really anodyne.  There could be dissent, offense could be taken from this shabbily transparent answer.    Anodyne, after all, means, first and foremost, causing no pain, by design.   It’s noun form means painkiller.

No, actually, I’m sorry, on second thought, this smart answer is good enough to be anodyne.   The thing about anodynes we must not forget is the power of the placebo effect.   The thing is to distract the mind, body and soul from the pain, something that is easily enough done, if the will is there not to feel the pain.  And who wants to feel pain, outside of a masochist? 

So when we say we treat you like family, we don’t mean incest, child-abuse, domestic violence, patricide, fratricide, matricide, all-consuming rivalry, lifelong grudges, the relentless warfare that rages within so many families.   We mean by “family” the unconditional love that always triumphs at the end of the day, as dependably as that anodyne millions of Americans reach for daily, to make them feel that all of this pain is just an illusion, created by those who hate our freedom, who seek to destroy our true belief that we live in the greatest nation, the most exceptional country, upon which God has ever shed His grace.

Good Government

To a person who inherits $300,000,000, like each of the Koch boys and our current president, who actually got more than $400,000,000 from his tough father, good government is one that keeps its hands off their fortunes while protecting them from anybody who wants to rob them.   That government also provides a strong military for general defense, good roads, bridges, electricity, sewage systems, police and fire departments, airports and so forth, the things necessary for all citizens, rich or poor.  The rest: liberty! [1]  

For all other citizens, we expect good government to provide other things.   A free, quality public education, for example.  Affordable health care.  Programs to protect the weak, the disabled, children, the elderly.  Regulations to ensure that the environment is not destroyed and that poison is not piped into our homes.   Laws to protect vulnerable citizens, and enforcement of anti-discrimination and labor laws, among other things.

The long, openly racist rule in the former Confederacy, for example, would never have ended but for federal enforcement of Civil Rights laws (Malcolm X more accurately called these rights Human Rights).   The constitution was amended and laws were made after the Civil War to enforce these new rights for freed slaves (and everybody else), but states and the Supreme Court soon nullified these for a century or so.  During that century of terror and virtual slavery under a new name, lynching was commonly used to enforce Home Rule in states that had rewritten history to make outfits like the Ku Klux Klan heroic protectors of white womanhood in the eyes of angry white citizens who believed in the old ways.

I was amazed to learn, during Constitutional Law class in the first term of law school, that much of the long overdue federal enforcement of Civil Rights in the former Confederacy (and in many other places where racist practices were written into the law) came under the constitution’s Commerce Clause.   The Commerce Clause gives the federal government the right to intervene in state matters when interstate commerce is involved.  The segregated restaurant in Georgia served potatoes from Idaho: commerce clause!

I learned recently that the Commerce Clause had been a compromise with slaveholders, they received a guarantee that slaves could be imported from Africa for at least twenty more years in exchange for the Commerce Clause. Good on you, you murdering racist motherfuckers, sealing your own eventual doom with that sweet deal.

I have an old friend who worked as a corporate lawyer for a few years until his conscience got the better of him.   He became a lead lawyer for the earth, constantly arguing in federal court on behalf of endangered species, poisoned land and water, destructive policies pursued for profit, often in violation of existing regulations.   His job was to convince a federal judge to force the responsible government agency to step in and enforce its own laws.  Ain’t dat some shit?   His organization would bring lawsuits to force the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to enforce its own rules against a massively powerful company like Monsanto, whose chemicals do great damage to the ecosystem.  Monsanto would send an army of the best lawyers money can buy.  My friend fought them toe to toe for years.   He won quite a few cases, though many were also lost.   He is leaving that job after many years pretty exhausted, as you can imagine.

When our current president took office he hired, as head of the EPA, a climate change denier who, as governor, had sued the EPA many times, on behalf of toxic polluters like his good friends and political backers.   His brief as EPA Administrator was to get meddlesome government regulators off the backs of job creators.    Fuck nontoxic drinking water, mercury, arsenic, toxins in the air, destruction of the biosphere… CLEAN COAL!   FOSSIL FUEL!  USA! USA!!!  [2]

I’m reading Juan Gonzalez’s fascinating book on progressive politicians struggling to remake America’s cities.   He concedes that the jury is out on all of them, including Bill de Blasio, the main politician he discusses in Reclaiming Gotham,  but the chapter detailing de Blasio’s first hundred days lays out a lot of admirable moves from the administration that promised an end to the Tale of Two cities that has long been life in New York City, increasingly the playground and safety deposit box for the international rich.

In contrast to Trump’s picks to head agencies (with an eye toward disabling them), de Blasio picked as head of the Human Resources Administration, the organization that provides all services to the city’s poor, the disabled, the elderly, and many services to children, a Legal Aid lawyer who had sued the HRA many times over its many abuses and shoddy practices.   Who better to run the agency, if your intent is to make it serve its public mandate better? 

The argument rages, between those who view fairness and justice as the same thing, who believe the weakest among us deserve society’s protection, as does the earth we all live on, and those who believe only in infinite, unmolested wealth for themselves.   The sides are drawn, between those who consider basic fairness an aim of human society and those who believe justice means preserving existing privileges for the few at all costs, at any cost.  

Untold millions are spent every year by the super-wealthy to advance the idea that liberty means a government that coerces nobody to do anything they don’t want, a government small enough to drown in a bathtub.   These determined fucks are at it around the clock, with dozens of well-funded think tanks, where the only thought is how to change the public dialogue to convince at least 40% of citizens of a philosophy that cares nothing for them, for the earth they live on, for the future of their children’s children.

There is no price too high, for most inheritors of vast fortunes (and most self-made billionaires, for that matter, in my ruthless opinion), to make sure the government keeps its hands off their fortunes.   Pave the goddamned roads, keep the planes running on time, have cops to protect me, a fire department, top notch sewage disposal, all the rest of those basic services of civilization, just keep your fucking hands off my wealth.  In fact, stop fucking looking at it, you entitled, class-war stoking social justice warrior fucks!

 

[1] The “ideology” these oligarch-types have devised, to make themselves appear morally upright, is called “libertarianism” which we can all agree sounds much better than “greedy assholism” or “fuck y’all, I got mine, bitches!”.

[2]  Quick hit on google:

President Trump’s first EPA Administrator, Scott Pruitt, resigned effective July 6, 2018, amid a series of scandals. Deputy Administrator Andrew Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, started serving as acting administrator on July 9, 2018.

 

 

Encouraging Development in the fight to prosecute the profiteers behind the opioid crisis

It seems callous of me, perhaps, to call the philanthropic Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, the makers and purveyors of highly addictive (and lucrative, oh my GOD!) OxyContin, the profiteers behind the opioid crisis, though the attorney general of Massachusetts makes a pretty compelling case.   You can read about it here.  [1]

 

[1]  And NOTHING TO SEE HERE (from the piece linked above):  

Purdue Pharma has in the past attempted to shield documents from becoming public.

Four years ago the Kentucky attorney general agreed to Purdue Pharma’s demand that the prosecutor destroy millions of pages of documents in exchange for a $24 million settlement.

Our Corporate Democracy

Democracy is never perfect, of course, even in a majority-ruled society of twenty people somebody is always going to be unhappy with the final vote.   On the other hand, ideally, the minority gets a fair chance to persuade the others of their point of view, influence the conversation so that compromises can be made to protect their interests before the final vote.   An important element of democracy is protection of the rights of minorities, those who lose the vote.   Democracy is not supposed to be a zero sum game where 51-49 always wins and those with the 51 votes get everything and the side with 49 votes gets to simply suck it, losers.   That’s democracy by schoolyard bullying.

Rule by the people, in America, is done through elected representatives who are supposed to advocate for us.  It is far from a perfect system, we know.   In New York City, where I live, a billionaire who was mayor for the first eight years of the decade decided he wanted four more years.  In NYC mayors are limited to two terms by law. This super-wealthy businessman turned politician was intent on a third term.   He enlisted key ambitious city politicians to overrule the will of New Yorkers that mayors be limited to two terms, a will expressed twice in recent years, so that he could run for a third term.   It was to be a one shot deal, special for him, because of the Great Recession of 2008, a steely billionaire genius of business was needed, he argued.   He outspent his Democratic opponent $108,371,688 to $9,352,416 and narrowly won his third term. [1]  Money talks, bullshit walks, it was the rich fuck’s own money, nothing to see here, freedom of speech, blah, blah, blah.

Democracy, as it is explained in American civics class, is rule by the majority respecting the rights and needs of the minorities.  Democracy is an imperfect and messy system, as prone to corruption as any, but in theory and practice it is superior to having a king, a dictator, military rule.   

Sadly we have some very privileged people, born into obscene wealth and believing, no doubt, their high birth reflects the will of God, who have worked hard and shrewdly the last forty or fifty years to change our political system, to move it away from democracy and toward something else, a system that protects their super-precious liberty above all else.   They have moved America toward a system that actively and increasingly protects the liberty of a few to have everything, to destroy the earth itself in pursuit of even more wealth, the liberty to do whatever they want with nobody to tell them no.  An end to government coercion and tyranny, so-called health, safety and environmental regulations that kill the initiative of our most valuable citizens, the “job creators”.  

After all, poor people who do dirty and dangerous jobs have taken on the risk themselves– liberty!   Assumption of risk!   Why should a coal mine owner be forced to pay if a careless miner is dismembered?   Liberty.   Same goes for so-called health regulations — everyone has the liberty to guard their own health.   Drinking water, the tap water piped into your house is unsafe to drink you say?   Have bottles of it flown in from Fiji, that artisanal water is said to be the best in the world.   As for the earth, it is ours to do with as we please, in the name of liberty and unlimited profit, just as Jesus himself drew it up.

These ultra-wealthy “libertarians” have been organizing and spending pallets of money to advance their extremist views, with increasing success in recent years.  In addition to spending billions on electoral advertising they have formed numerous “think tanks”, some of which have become prestigious, funded academic programs, created a corporate entity that writes laws for state legislators (ALEC) established a nationwide, ideologically pure right-wing business network for law students and prospective federal judges (The Federalist Society) and taken dozens of other intelligent steps to influence public policy.  The fucking Koch Brothers, the main architects of this political revolution, have recently crawled out from under their $100,000,000,000 rock to take a few victory laps before they die (they are both around 80).  

I have to touch up this piece about the history of their movement, with its roots in the lunatic fringe John Birch Society (Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower was a Commie, so was the Republican Earl Warren) but you can get more details of their successful long game here. 

I encountered this great quote from one of our incompetent president’s most manifestly incompetent cabinet secretaries, Betsey DeVos.   The controversial Ms. DeVos won confirmation as Secretary of Education by a single vote — the tiebreaker cast by fellow Christian zealot Vice President Mike Pence. [2]   51-50, fair is fair, Ms. DeVos, who gave so many of her family’s millions to extreme right wing causes over the years, got her reward.  She is currently in charge of the educational policies of our great nation.   Here is what she said about her family’s political generosity (from Wikipedia):

The Atlantic noted that DeVos had indicated in a 1997 op-ed that she expects results from her political contributions. “My family is the largest single contributor of soft money to the national Republican Party. I have decided to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence,” she wrote. “Now I simply concede the point. They are right.”[39]She also stated in the op-ed, “We expect to foster a conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government and respect for traditional American virtues … We expect a return on our investment; we expect a good and honest government. Furthermore, we expect the Republican Party to use the money to promote these policies and, yes, to win elections.”[40]

Her expectations have certainly not been disappointed, even though she supported first Jeb Bush and Carly Fiorina, before switching to another Republican loser Marco Rubio.   As the Wiki on this fine woman points out, she may have hesitated for a moment, before throwing her support to the candidate the Republicans eventually chose in 2016: 

In March 2016, DeVos described Donald Trump as an “interloper” and said that he “does not represent the Republican Party”.[14]

But now Trump is the Republican Party.  Look, Betsey, you get what you pay for.  She’s not kicking, she and her husband are currently saving tens of millions in taxes every year and she is in charge of American educational policy, 51-50, fair is fair. Plus, they got Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, two extremely conservative Catholic lads from the finest Christian prep school in the nation.   Not bad!  Soon poor women may not be able to get abortions in America anymore.  Won’t Jesus be happy!

 

 

[1] Juan Gonzalez, Reclaiming Gotham, Bill De Blasio and the Movement to End America’s Tale of Two Cities, 2017, p. 154.

[2]  Wikipedia:

As expected, there was a 50–50 tie on the final vote, with all Democrats and independents, along with two Republicans (Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski), voting in opposition to DeVos, while the other fifty Republican senators voted in support of the confirmation, including Senator Jeff Sessions, who himself had been nominated by the Trump administration for the post of United States Attorney General. Republicans scheduled Sessions’s confirmation vote after DeVos’s so that he would be able to cast his vote in support of DeVos. Had his confirmation vote been earlier than hers, he would have been forced to resign from the Senate, therefore losing a vital vote for the Republicans on the confirmation.[74][75][76] Since there was a tie, Vice President Mike Pence had to step in to decide the vote as the President of the Senate.[77] He cast his tie-breaking vote in favor of DeVos to officially confirm her as education secretary.[78] This was the first tie decided by a vice president on any vote in the Senate since theGeorge W. Bush administration.[79][80]

You Are Not Allowed Those Feelings

This ongoing denial of human feelings is like a stubborn fiber, stuck between my molars.  I think about it in relation to someone I was good friends with, who, without explanation (beyond a reference to “and other things”) has stopped communicating with me.   He frequently suffers from Tension Myoneural Syndrome, a condition he introduced me to, intense physical suffering related to repressed rage.   He cannot process all the rage he has, I understand that completely now.   Still, his silence irks and baffles me, whenever I think about it.   It appears to be an angry reaction to my attempts to escape and stay out of the trap of my own anger.

The underlying mechanism of most human tragedy, of course, flows from a lack of empathy, or from extremely selective empathy (which allows ruthlessness toward anyone outside the selected group).    Unhappy people believe themselves doomed to never get a fair hearing anywhere and it makes them understandably angry.   As a result of this unfair sentence upon them they cannot tolerate the expression of certain feelings by others.   They are not allowed to express anger, too much sorrow, discontentment, voice meaningful complaint that will be taken seriously — so why the fuck should anyone else be allowed their fucking feelings?

How hateful is it, to somebody angrily resigned to being caught in a trap, to hear somebody else struggling against their own cage?

If you have some time, and patience, you can read the background story about a group of problematically married men, often angry, and the roles their unhappy, demanding wives play in their endless, embattled unhappiness.   The piece is here.

One of the wives called me, a week or so after “a bad day” for her husband.   It was a day I’d spent five hours with the guy walking and talking, waiting for him, pressing him at times, to acknowledge that he had treated me in ways that he would hate to be treated.   He had accused me of deliberately trying to destroy his marriage, for one thing.   He bobbed and weaved, told me he’d already apologized for everything, including “that thing in the car” (when he told me our friendship was on death row and I’d better come up with something good if I wanted a reprieve) and that I was being an unreasonable hard-ass who would not accept his multiple expressions of regret.

His wife called (yes, I can hear you, Sekhnet– “flush!”) and told me she was very upset that I was refusing to forgive her husband, who told her his apology apparently wasn’t good enough for me.  I began to explain to her that if you tell someone they’re hurting you, and that they owe you an apology, and they then apologize and keep doing the same bad things, then the apology is an apology in form only.   She brushed past this.  “We are family,” she told me, “and we love you.   You can’t stop being friends with us!  We love you.  Our children love you.”

Here is what I’m trying to capture: that moment when you express your feelings as clearly as possible and are given an anodyne statement in response: but we love you, stop complaining, you big jerk!    Anodyne, no controversy, who could argue with the idea that a family fights but in the end loves each other in a love that conquers everything else.

People who love each other certainly hurt each other from time to time, it’s part of the human condition.  Love means, above most things, empathy, and in my mind love demands that you make peace as soon as possible after becoming aware that you’ve hurt a person you love.   Love involves a certain amount of conscious work to keep it free of sabotaging, inchoate grievance.   Love doesn’t avoid the hard questions by saying “but you can’t be hurt, because I love you, you crazy asshole!”

To underscore the absurdity, and destructiveness, of not acknowledging you’ve caused somebody pain– and claiming they should just pipe down about it because you love them– the woman telling me I had to forgive her hapless husband spends much of her time enraged at the guy.   SHE KNOWS EXACTLY HOW AGGRAVATING THE FELLOW IS.   They are now attending marriage counseling, after deciding to divorce and reconsidering.   She rages at him herself regularly, they both fear the psychic harm they’ve done to their two children by violently screaming at each other in front of them over the course of the boys’ lives.  

So a better strategy, on her part, if she’d really been intent on making peace, would have started by acknowledging what a maddeningly frustrating opponent her husband is.   “Look, we both know how infuriating he can be, you know I struggle with it every day, I want to kill him a lot of the time, for sure.   All I can tell you is that he really is going to therapy twice a week, and he’s working hard, and I ask you to keep an open mind about him.   There are great things about him that become hard to see when he provokes us, as you know better than most people.   I’m asking you to remember all the reasons you and he have been friends for more than fifty years.” 

But that was not part of our conversation.  Instead the wife’s call was a referendum on love– either you love us, because we love you, or YOU’RE FUCKING DEAD TO US.

I had to breathe deeply a few times in that frustrating hour of talk, to keep my anger in check each time it flared up.  I was being blamed, over and over, for not being loving enough, for not forgiving, even if the apologies I received had been extracted, strained, and ultimately false.  I was the one who was being unforgiving, unloving.   No matter what the provocation, I had no right to remain angry at her husband.  He really can’t help himself, and. after all, she had still not divorced him, and he’d done far worse to her.

This is how it is done in the zero sum world of damaged souls who truly believe they have no hope of anything better.   Accept whatever it is, you can be as angry as you want about it, but you have to keep that in anger check as much as possible.  Yes, it will spill out in rage from time to time.  Merely the price for love, I suppose, is how their reasoning goes.

In that conversation with the guy’s wife I was not trying to score any points, I was trying to be as clear as possible about my feelings and the reasons I now have to stay away from her husband.  If I’d been intent on racking up points there would have been an easy moment, right at the start, to put some points on the board.  “We are family, we love you, you have to forgive him,” gave me an open shot on goal.  I’d have pointed out that she was permanently estranged from both her brother and her sister, that her relationship with her high-strung mother was extremely tense and that she had described in detail some of the harms her morally upright macho father had inflicted when he smacked her around when she was a girl and made sure she admired him and emulated his example of toughness.

You can win an argument, in a way, by pointing out such things, but in the end there is nothing productive about it.   Empty stats, like buckets scored in garbage time.   If you are trying to come to an understanding with somebody, forget about keeping score.  

All I wanted was for her, a friend of many years, to understand why I felt the way I do.   She initiated a call I would not have made, and I restrained myself several times, as my feelings were being constantly dismissed, or challenged, because I hoped I could make her understand.   I could not.   The call went on and on.  Suddenly I heard a small voice in the background and she screamed.

It became clear in that instant.   Her husband was home.   She didn’t want him to know she was calling me.   She had gone into her son’s room, closed the door, and called me from there, sitting on the edge of his bed.  Her son came home, found his door closed, opened it to find his mother talking to somebody in hushed tones.  He must have been startled, startled her, said “mom, what the fuck?” or words to that effect and all the anger she was withholding talking to an intractable apparent former good friend she poured out onto her son.

The lesson: nobody has any right to any feelings that fucking piss me the fuck off you goddamned fucking fuck!

 

 

Counting on the FBI and CIA to save us?

Do you believe the FBI and CIA will protect us from an autocratic president’s impulse toward tyranny?   Read any biography of J. Edgar Hoover, long-time Czar of the FBI and hardly a good man. Browse any history of the CIA, the agency of American spooks which dates to the beginning of the Cold War when actual high ranking Nazis were recruited and given new identities in the US to help us fight the Communists (and keep the world safe for democracy).

Or read this (from Wikipedia on the JFK assassination), which contains no surprises:

The Church Committee is the common term referring to the 1975 United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, a U.S. Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church, to investigate the illegal intelligence gathering by the Central Intelligence Agency(CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) after the Watergate incident. It also investigated the CIA and FBI conduct relating to the JFK assassination.

Their report concluded that the investigation on the assassination by FBI and CIA were fundamentally deficient and the facts that have greatly affected the investigation had not been forwarded to the Warren Commission by the agencies. The report hinted that there was a possibility that senior officials in both agencies made conscious decisions not to disclose potentially important information.[135]

[emphasis mine]

Just a hint, you dig, a soupcon, a scintilla of an odor that the FBI, the same agency who had bugged the hotel rooms of Martin Luther King and attempted to get him to commit suicide with blackmail letters, the masterminds of COINTELPRO, had decided to withhold certain key facts about who was involved in the killing of an American president.    Who’da thunk it?

You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to notice certain things simply by their bad smell.   Trump meets with Vladimir Putin last July– nobody in the room but the two of them and their interpreters.    We hear the president confiscated his interpreter’s notes at the end of the meeting.   Nothing to see here.   Why would anybody think differently?   It’s not as if there are any allegations that the current American president, say, offered Mr. Putin a $50,000,000 penthouse apartment as an incentive to move things along with the Trump Moscow project in the months before the 2016 presidential election?

Note:    I incorrectly corrected the price of the penthouse in the previous paragraph to five million dollars.   I’d initially written fifty million, which seemed like an absurd price for an apartment.   The Moscow penthouse Trump’s people apparently talked about offering Putin (and in fairness to fuckface, he may have lacked the “actual knowledge” that would have put him in violation of American law) was indeed a fifty million (FIFTY MILLION) dollar inducement.   Yow.                

source 

When Cheney and Bush resisted the formation of the 9/11 Commission, and then agreed to testify only on the condition that they appear together, secretly, with no record of any kind made of their testimony and no oaths to testify truthfully taken by the president and vice president of the United States?   Nothing to fucking SEE HERE!

The CIA, to give just one illustration, gained a certain notoriety during the Vietnam war for taking captured Vietcong up in helicopters to interrogate them and tossing them to their deaths.    The CIA works the “dark side” and has done serious, er, mischief in every corner of the globe during the seven decades of its operation.   The less said about them, in this instance, the better.   No reason to even provide a link to something like this, or this (passionately written by a non-native English speaker, possibly a high school student, and containing this comical bit, at the bottom: This is the website of the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU Foundation © All Right Reserved) [1]  

It’s not like the CIA ever refused to cooperate in a lawful investigation or did anything any patriotic American would not have done, in spite of this kind of facty thing from Democrat Diane Feinstein:

The 2008 review [of the CIA torture program and destruction of videotaped evidence of that torture– ed] was complicated by the existence of a Department of Justice investigation, opened by Attorney General Michael Mukasey, into the destruction of the videotapes and expanded by Attorney General Holder in August 2009. In particular, CIA employees and contractors who would otherwise have been interviewed by the Committee staff were under potential legal jeopardy, and therefore the CIA would not compel its workforce to appear before the Committee. This constraint lasted until the Committee’s research and documentary review were completed and the Committee Study had largely been finalized.   source

Here is anti-Trump former CIA director John Brennan on the Senate Torture Report (keep this in mind, next time you see him speaking on TV about Trump being a clear and present danger to our nation):

CIA Director John Brennan – “It is our considered view that the detainees who were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques provided information that was useful and was used in the ultimate operation to go against [Osama] bin Laden.”

The personification of evil, Dick Cheney, channeling his inner schoolyard bully at age nine, called the Senate Torture Report “a bunch of hooey”.

source

Ah, my friends, this is a rabbit hole with no bottom.   You can fall into this, and keep falling, until history itself, even very recent history, the history of last summer, or last month, for example, begins swirling around you in an incoherent churning whoosh that will eventually have you chanting “Build that wall!  Lock her up! Block that Kick!  They all suck!  Fuck them up!  Eat my ass!” and pumping your fist as you fall.  

All to say, do not put too much faith in the guardians of democracy to actually guard democracy, the worst form of government, except for all the others.  (Churchill?)

 

[1]  From Diane Feinstein’s foreword to her Senate Committee’s 2014 report on the CIA Torture Program:

As the Study describes, prior to the attacks of September 2001, the CIA itself determined from its own experience with coercive interrogations, that such techniques “do not produce intelligence,” “will probably result in false answers,” and had historically proven to be ineffective. Yet these conclusions were ignored. We cannot again allow history to be forgotten and grievous past mistakes to be repeated.

Our fully transparent government has a PDF of the report here (further proof that Mr. Trump’s chaotic administration remains severely understaffed, since he is, personally and professionally, a big fan of tough guy torture).

Speaking of lying piles of shit, let us not forget what president George W. Bush said of the 2006 Military Commissions Act that authorized the continued use of the torture that the Senate Torture Report would eventually, once again, find does not produce valuable intelligence of any kind:

“This program has been one of the most successful intelligence efforts in American history.  It has helped prevent attacks on our country.  And the bill I sign today will ensure that we can continue using this vital tool to protect the American people for years to come.  The Military Commissions Act will also allow us to prosecute captured terrorists for war crimes through a full and fair trial.”  source

Here are the Senate Torture Report’s conclusions, by the way, collected from the PDF on the intelligence.senate.gov website:

The Committee makes the following findings and conclusions:

#1: The CIA’s use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.

#2: The CIA’s justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.

#3: The interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.

#4: The conditions of confinement for CIA detainees were harsher than the CIA had represented to policymakers and others.

#5: The CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice, impeding a proper legal analysis of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.

#6: The CIA has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program.

#7: The CIA impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making.

#8: The CIA’s operation and management of the program complicated, and in some cases impeded, the national security missions of other Executive Branch agencies.

#9: The CIA impeded oversight by the CIA’s Office of Inspector General.

#10: The CIA coordinated the release of classified information to the media, including inaccurate information concerning the effectiveness of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.

#11: The CIA was unprepared as it began operating its Detention and Interrogation Program more than six months after being granted detention authorities.

#12: The CIA’s management and operation of its Detention and Interrogation Program was deeply flawed throughout the program’s duration, particularly so in 2002 and early 2003.

#13: Two contract psychologists devised the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques and played a central role in the operation, assessments, and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program. By 2005, the CIA had overwhelmingly outsourced operations related to the program.   [Neither psychologist had any experience as an interrogator, nor did either have specialized knowledge of al-Qa’ida, a background in counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural or linguistic expertise.]

(Note:  The two fucks– Jessen and Mitchell, were nonetheless paid $81,000,000 by US taxpayers.)

#14: CIA detainees were subjected to coercive interrogation techniques that had not been approved by the Department of Justice or had not been authorized by CIA Headquarters.

#15: The CIA did not conduct a comprehensive or accurate accounting of the number of individuals it detained, and held individuals who did not meet the legal standard for detention. The CIA’s claims about the number of detainees held and subjected to its enhanced interrogation techniques were inaccurate.

#16: The CIA failed to adequately evaluate the effectiveness of its enhanced interrogation techniques.

#17: The CIA rarely reprimanded or held personnel accountable for serious and significant violations, inappropriate activities, and systemic and individual management failures.

#18: The CIA marginalized and ignored numerous internal critiques, criticisms, and objections concerning the operation and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.

#19: The CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program was inherently unsustainable and had effectively ended by 2006 due to unauthorized press disclosures, reduced cooperation from other nations, and legal and oversight concerns.

#20: The CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program damaged the United States’ standing in the world, and resulted in other significant monetary and non-monetary costs.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE!!!!

 

My New Sunday Routine

I pretend now, on Sundays,
that I did what all my friends did years ago:
went to work, for good pay
bought a house in a nice place,
four walls, a roof,  a staircase
A place where nobody can stomp on my ceiling
petulant to find themselves living in a shithole
rented too dearly from an evil entity
in a neighborhood about to be gentrified
with nothing to say about anything.

I pretend, on Sundays, now,
alone in this old house,
as I play the guitar as loud and long as I want,
that I have always lived in the land of the free
and the home of the brave.

The Democrats Have No Narrative…

This article from The Intercept really nails  a crucial truth corporate Democrats consistently miss.  It lays out the reasons Pelosi and Schumer’s awkward  response to the president’s untruthful prime-time address blaming Democrats for his own shutdown (while throwing red meat to his base ) was a strategic and narrative nullity for the opposition party.

Trump, for all his doddering and his idiotic compulsive lying, consistently tells a grim and angering story that galvanizes the pain of  many of his non-wealthy supporters.  He always passionately points the finger (dishonestly, of course) at who is to blame (and away from those who are really to blame).   His narrative speaks to these desperate Americans in a visceral way that resonates strongly with what they are living: you are being fucked, BIG TIME.

The establishment Democrats, in contrast, are busy fact-checking and pointing out the worst of the president’s almost uncountable lies.   As with Hillary Clinton’s lackluster and self-satisfied campaign, they have no consistent counter-narrative (understandable because they can’t alienate their biggest donors who benefit handsomely from the status quo).  The leading Democrats are neoliberals, comfortable with the setup that makes them rich and powerful while, on Main Street and every side street, that same setup completely screws millions, even the vast majority, of working class Americans.

Trump is, of course, lying when he insists, moronically, that illegal immigrants are the biggest threat to America and that a caravan of dangerous murderers can only be restrained by a multibillion dollar wall and military force.   It doesn’t matter that he’s lying about facts when he pokes effectively at the helpless rage of millions of Americans struggling with abject despair, killing themselves in increasing, record-breaking numbers with drugs and guns, not to mention by drunk driving and self-inflicted diseases of hopelessness like obesity.  He always gives them a story, coherent or not, that enables them to focus their rage at being disposable.

Read this article, it is a clear and insightful analysis of what the fucking Democrats should be doing, the story they need to tell and how a couple of the more courageous leftist ones are already clearly setting out that reality-based story.

 

The Limited Reach of Government Reports

Our 45th president is erratic, impulsive, wanton, vain, untruthful.  Still, 40% of the country, polls tell us, think he’s the greatest thing since the flush toilet.  Nothing the former eight year-old millionaire can do will deter his base from believing that he speaks for the little people and is actively making America great again (whatever the hell that glittering slogan might mean).

Presumably more than 50% of the nation is anxiously awaiting the report by former FBI director Robert Mueller that will be written at the end of a now almost two year investigation into Trump’s alleged ties with Russian election meddlers and his octopus-like business relations with many shady characters.  Mueller has indicted several of Trump’s close associates as well as a raft of Russians, got guilty pleas, a conviction or two, several are cooperating with Mueller, a few of these close Trump associates were actually sentenced to prison time for serious crimes.  

The majority of Americans who are waiting for Mueller’s report are hoping that Mueller will drop the hammer on the president and force Congress to end his reign.   This is probably a hope that will be disappointed.  There is an even chance that Americans will never get to even read the report or learn more than a summary of its contents.   There are undoubtedly many reasons for millions of us to want this president out of office;  keep in mind that it is probably a mistake to put too much faith in the silver hammer of the Mueller report, no matter how often liberal pundits and people like Nancy Pelosi tell us “wait for it… wait for it… here it comes…. wait for it!!!”

Millions of us are distressed by the way Trump constantly attacks others,  peddles a stream of wildly shifting untruths, openly admires dictators, defends vicious policies like family separation, applauds racists as fine people, appoints right wing extremists to lifetime judicial posts, wealthy incompetents like Betsey DeVos to cabinet positions,  ignores real national and world crises while creating false emergencies, takes heroic steps to increase income and wealth inequality, recently took almost a million US government workers and their families hostage (in addition to millions more who depend on government services and are being fucked big time while the most powerful man in the world throws his tantrum) and too many other bad things to jam into one long sentence.

These words of warning should come as no surprise: faith in government reports is often a recipe for cruel disappointment.   A few years ago a long belated, vast report on America’s torture policy under Cheney-Bush was compiled and read by members of Congress.   The 6,700 page report detailed a widespread American government-sanctioned practice of medieval horrors committed by Americans and American proxies, sometimes against “rendered” (kidnapped) persons innocent of any connection to any crime [1].    Cheney’s lawyers crafted a secret memo that laid out the legal defense for the torture program.    The report notes that the CIA lied about the extent of the program [2].  The brutalities described in the report should have landed the architects of the program in front of Congressional committees, if not prosecuted for war crimes.   Nothing of the sort ever happened.  In fact, one of the most enthusiastic participants in the program, a CIA agent known by her colleagues as “Bloody Gina”, an agent known to have destroyed video evidence of the “enhanced interrogations” she oversaw, was appointed by this president, and confirmed by his party’s Senate, as CIA director.   She’s hard at work right now.

Where is this gigantic torture report now, you ask?   There is one copy we know of that has not been destroyed, it is preserved in Barack Obama’s presidential library, but it is under seal for the next twelve years.  It is unclear how many of its heavily redacted pages will be made public in 2028.

One of the most famous government reports ever was the investigation into John F. Kennedy’s assassination.   The commission that investigated it was headed by Supreme Court justice Earl Warren.  As Chief Justice, Earl Warren, an Eisenhower appointee, was a force for social justice during his term (October 5, 1953 – June 23, 1969).   He was hated by the extreme right, the John Birch Society (including Fred Koch, father of the two far right billionaire zombies who have done so much to make America great again for liberty) screamed for his impeachment.   He was widely seen as a man of integrity, but his Warren Commission Report concludes that one former marine, acting completely on his own, with a faulty rifle, fired three shots into the moving target of  JFK’s head, bullets that magically made all kinds of twists and turns, including into the body of Texas Governor John Connally.   Woody Allen referred to the Warren Commission Report as a work of fiction, playing it for laughs.  It is unlikely we will ever get closer to the truth of who else was working with the ‘lone gunman’ who was killed a couple of days later while in police custody by another lone gunman, though a later Congressional investigation nobody today recalls found evidence of conspiracy. [3]

Donald J. Trump, with his gut instinct for survival, is doing everything  he can to put people in place to make sure any damage from Mueller’s findings is blunted, kept in the shadows, kept from public view.   Who knows what will be included in the report, or how hard Mueller will bring the magical hammer down on this amoral president?  My only point here is that there is an even chance that we will never know.  

My larger point is that it is upon every one of us whose consciences are most enflamed to organize to become part of the change we’d like to see in the world.   “Hope and Change” ain’t going to do it, any more than “MAGA”, even though Obama may or may not have preserved the last copy of the torture report.

 

[1] The case of Maher Arar, a Canadian architect grabbed in an American airport and rendered to Syria where he was tortured for over a year, on completely mistaken intel, is one every school child should learn (but one I fear none will learn).  Talk about the unlearned lessons of fucking history.

[2]  The Guardian article linked above includes this nice paragraph:

 Through an investigation that lasted more than six years, the Senate intelligence committee found that the CIA’s torture was far more brutal than the agency had told the Bush administration or Congress, and that the agency had lied about the program’s contours and effectiveness. It found unequivocally that torture produced no valuable counter-terrorism intelligence. President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly expressed a desire to make the CIA engage in torture once again.   (link)

[3]  Wikipedia:  

A later investigation, the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) agreed with the Warren Commission that the injuries that Kennedy and Connally sustained were caused by Oswald’s three rifle shots, but they also concluded that Kennedy was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy”[4] as analysis of a dictabelt audio recording pointed to the existence of an additional gunshot and therefore “… a high probability that two gunmen fired at [the] President.”[5][6] The Committee was not able to identify any individuals or groups involved with the possible conspiracy. In addition, the HSCA found that the original federal investigations were “seriously flawed” with respect to information-sharing and the possibility of conspiracy.[7] As recommended by the HSCA, the acoustic evidence indicating conspiracy was subsequently re-examined and rejected.[8]