A few minutes of internet research

I’m using my phone as a modem and wireless router to get my computer on-line these days. I was walked through the process the other night by two kind, patient, cheerful women in the Philippines. Using my phone as a “hotspot” eliminates my need to pay a particularly psychopathic “person” called Spectrum $50 a month for very poor, intermittent internet service. A beautiful thing not to have to deal with Spectrum any more.

I’ve been angrily lecturing the kind reps for that psychopath at such length recently (over their defense of an invalid $45 service charge that didn’t resolve my spotty internet service and no internet service going on a week) making so great an effort to denounce a monster clearly and without any unpublishable expletives, that my throat hurts just thinking about those strained lectures to reps powerless to do the simplest things for an irate customer, no matter how right or superficially polite that ranting maniac might have been.

I did have a call back yesterday from a very nice rep for the vicious psychopath. Michele, based in Ontario, Ca. called to make sure I knew the good news that, after only a week or two of arguments about the validity of the invalid charge, they had removed the $45 service charge, since no documentation was produced that I was ever informed of it, let alone that I signed a work order consenting to it.

It was true, she admitted, that I still have no internet service from them, but the good news is that I’ll also be credited more than $9 for the last five days without internet service. I told her that was a truly generous credit, particularly from the personification of psychopathy indistinguishable, in its moral core, from Adolf Hitler himself. I told Michele she sounded like a lovely woman, but that I am very glad to be done doing business with the company she works for. Spectrum is one of the worst of the worst, infamous nationwide among its cheated customers and fired employees.

I did a quick search for Tom Rutledge, CEO of Charter, the parent company of monster baby Spectrum, the entity I have been being abused by for the last few years. As everyone knows, the search took less than a second. I clicked on “images”.

There he is in the Oval Office with the president, there are the protests against the painfully “smiling” sociopath’s ruthlessly self-serving policies, there he is trying to squeeze out another human-looking expression. There he is, with an almost human expression on his face, at a photo op when his company bought Time Warner Cable a few years back for $56,000,000,000. There he is over a caption about his $98,000,000 salary in 2016, which led all of the nations finest CEO’s by more than 100%.

There is the president praising Tom, the union buster who wanted unionized technicians to agree to a new contract without health benefits for their families and without a company pension. Fair is fair, you know? These parasite workers apparently wanted everything. The greedy bastard Spectrum technicians went out on strike, 1,800 of them, rather than agree to Tom’s new work conditions. He hired workers to replace them, guys commies refer to as “scabs”, workers with reasonable, realistic demands, workers who can probably be fired any time on an hour’s notice and who agreed never to strike under any circumstance.

The striking unionized technicians set up a webpage called http://spectrumstrike2017.com/. They set out the several reasonable reasons they were striking and vowed not to be defeated. Then they were defeated, as besieged camps have always been defeated, they were starved out. A visit to their valiant website is a sad reminder of the power of vastly wealthy armies to starve out less powerful resisting armies and civilians with even the most modest of goals, mere survival with dignity.

Dignity. SAD!

Corporate Culture — you’re soaking in it

I often lament that I can’t remember a single line of Shakespeare accurately, or more than a snippet of any poem (“…acrobat, hunchbacked with senseless muscles”[1]), or any of my favorite proverbs from the Old Testament, but I can remember the words and melodies to hundreds of advertising jingles and TV themes. This, I suspect, is largely an American phenomenon, perhaps largely of my specific generation, who came up during the golden age of television advertising.

Whatever the case, it starts young, this inculcation with commercial messages. I can sing you the great Ballantine beer jingle that used to run day after day on Yankees radio broadcasts. I can describe a beautiful Fresca commercial, sing the theme song for Veep, so lemon light (Vee-eeeep never spoils… your appetite), a soft drink like Sprite or Seven Up, now long extinct. When my mother used to take me to the supermarket, when I was barely more than a toddler, she’d send me off looking for some product. I’d race off down the aisle, singing the jingle, recognizing the product at once among the many on the shelf, grabbing it and running back to throw it into the cart.

“People used to be amazed. Sometimes they asked me if you were a midget,” my mother used to tell me.

“Yeah, ‘somebody get that midget a cigar’, a guy in a store once said of you,” said my father.

I suspect many American children could do the same act. The ads ran continuously on TV. They were designed to be catchy and memorable, and they always showed the product in close up for the last few seconds. We were raised literally soaking in it.

What does that mean, “soaking in it”? Every American of a certain age will know the reference. There was an ad with the tag line “you’re soaking in it” that a google search (23,600,000 results in 0.47 seconds) finds for us in the blink of an eye. Apparently the ad ran, in many variations, and with the same actress as the colorful Madge, for literally decades. Wisecracking beautician Madge is giving a woman a pedicure, soaking her hand in a solution to soften it. Madge recommends Palmolive dishwashing liquid to the woman, to keep her hands soft. The woman asks if it really works and Madge informs her, to the comical shock of the woman getting the manicure, that she’s soaking in it now. The woman starts to jerk her hand out of the liquid, but Madge pats it back into place, another wisecrack on her lips. A classic thirty second spot, here you go, from 1967 —> clickez, mes enfants.

We can’t see it because we are soaking in it.

Now we live in an age when our consumer data, our buying habits down to the things we once thought about buying but didn’t wind up buying, are harvested directly by the companies that market to us. That data is apparently more valuable to corporations than anything else about us. Ain’t that some shit? Corporations, by the way, are just “persons” like every other human you meet. You know, they have rights, and feelings too. The Supreme Court says so, they came to the legally binding opinion that these business entities, created under certain enumerated sections of American law, have a life and rights of personhood as sacred as those of any unborn child in Mississippi.

Yesterday, after literally years of struggle with an extremely customer-hostile ISP with a monopoly in my neighborhood, getting poor internet service and even worse customer service, I learned, from two angels in the Philippines who work for another global corporation, how to use my phone as a modem, for free, and never again have to talk to the hapless reps who work for the inhuman ISP run by smiling multi-millionaire psychopath Tom Rutledge. DONE! A miracle, truly — and about $600 a year back in my pocket.

We have the technology, in our pockets, to create miracles. In less than a second we can have information that would have taken a long time to dig up just ten or fifteen years ago. We have access to an amazing array of things, just by saying a couple of words to our smart phones. We have a lot to be grateful for, even as powerful “persons” recklessly plunge us toward the death of all life on this planet, even as other psychopathic types wield outsized, merciless influence in human affairs, but there is a lot of work to do. Including becoming aware of what we are soaking in, that is the first step, surely.

A lot of work to be done, if the grandchildren are to avoid a dystopian future of famine and cannibalism on a ravaged earth destroyed, in our lifetimes. Scientists are now emphasizing that we have only twelve years to the point of no return, as far as global climate catastrophe. Twelve years and counting down, with every incentive to preserve our beautiful planet, only industrialized human greed standing against us.

Corporate culture changes how we look at the things around us, what we value, how we treat each other. We are soaking in it, friends.

[1]

I’m that played-out, grown-up acrobat,
hunchbacked with senseless muscles,
who knows that advice is a lie,
that sooner or later there’s falling.

(piece of a great poem by Yuvegny Yevtushenko)

link to whole poem (whatever you do, do not click on expressionless robot reading the poem aloud– WTF?)

Note for Phil Trombino

“Write it, print it and send it to Phil, motherfucker,” said the skeleton of my father from his grave off that quiet road north of Peekskill. This struck me as a good indication of his impatience, I don’t ever recall him referring to me as ‘motherfucker’.

Dear Phil:

Eliot Widaen here, son of your former colleague at the Human Relations Unit Irv Widaen. That is, if you are indeed the Phil Trombino who had that magical 1967 season at Iona College when you hit like Ted Williams, torching the league at a .441 clip. I’m hoping you are, and that you’d be willing to talk to me about what you recall of the workings of the Human Relations Unit and any good stories you might have about Irv (I’m writing a memoir of his life). You can reach me at this address, or by email (here), or by phone or text (here). I hope you are well and I look forward to hearing from you.

“Was that so fucking hard? What did that take you, ninety seconds?” said the skeleton.

I wasn’t counting, dad, but it was probably around ninety.

“Shut up, print it and mail it, damn you,” he said, slouching back into his eternal bed.

Kavanaugh letter for Jerrold Nadler

Jerrold Nadler will be the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee when the new congress takes its seats in 2019. He promised, after Kavanaugh was rushed on to the Supreme Court, after displaying a two-year old’s judicial temperament and playing fast and loose with the truth, skating on the edge of perjury with clumsy but effective evasions and other lawyerly dodges, to drag the character-challenged Justice before the judiciary committee for some follow-up questions about his arguably borderline perjury.

I am pretty much out of the letter writing business these days, but I will write to Nadler and remind him of the importance of holding a rash, clearly partisan political hack, now a lifetime member of our highest court, accountable for his behavior during the confirmation process, see if his testimony crossed the line into perjury and take appropriate action to get him off the High Court if he did. This process is a necessary corrective to provocative partisan abuse of the political system. There will be much joy in America, among the 60% or so who do not uncritically support everything the current extremist administration is doing, if Kavanaugh is forced back into his former job, or no job.

There was nothing the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee could do during the Kavanaugh confirmation circus, they simply didn’t have the votes. There was nothing the Senators who opposed Kavanaugh could do when he came up for an up or down vote — the president and Mitch McConnell were shoving the most gracelessly aggressive right wing zealot they could find down American’s throat, 51-49, fair is fair, there wasn’t enough evidence produced at his hearing to convict him in a court of law so he’s cool, his character as a fighter, no matter how ugly it may look to the liberals, is good, democracy in action. USA! USA!!!!

But there is an impeachment process for federal judges, including ones who willfully and knowingly lie during their confirmation hearings. There is a process to determine whether they lied under oath or not. Let’s get on with the process, Jerry.

I will include this succulent detail in my letter to him, from the authors of LikeWars, a recent book about the weaponization of social media. It certainly points out that there was a coordinated effort to support the lying candidate, a right wing conspiracy, if you will, to cover the lying hack’s vulnerable hindquarters. A link to the full interview is below. The pertinent section for Nadler and his committee is this:

The same thing played out during the Kavanaugh hearing where he used a term in his – a high school yearbook that was a sexual term. And during his hearing, he says no, no, no. It’s not a sexual term. It’s about a drinking game. The problem for him is that there’s literally no evidence on the entire Internet of that being a drinking game until someone within the House of Representatives – again, everything is out in the open so we can geolocate it to that.

During the middle of the hearing, someone in the House of Representatives goes to create the evidence on Wikipedia to make it seem as if he is telling the truth. So you have this back-and-forth, back-and-forth. And it’s our contention that every single political debate moving forward is going to see these kind of tactics utilized again because both sides not only use them but believe that they were the key to their effort, including in winning.

A quick gorgle search reveals that Nadler, and millions of other Americans, already know all about this. Here is USA Today on the subject.

Psychopaths Among Us

I know, it’s so easy to dump on poor psychopaths. There is a presidential order to use tear gas at our southern border to repel asylum seekers and their children trying to exercise a lawful right after fleeing monstrous conditions in their home countries. Nothing to see here, why go straight to psychopath? So judgmental!

It turns out Obama did the same thing, using tear gas at the border dozens of times, when he was, fairly, called Deporter-in-Chief (he set a record) and Trump just increased its use, months after infamously separating children from parents and detaining them in desert tent camps, like the ones pardoned criminal comtemptnor Joe Arpaio used to use [1]. Using tear gas against lawful asylum seekers finally made headlines recently, after an escalating series of hysterical claims by the president about the criminality, terrorism and infectious diseases of this horde of filthy asylum seekers.

I’m not saying either man is a psychopath, but I’m not saying they’re not! These American presidents could simply be poor victims too, like the woman gang raped by members of a drug gang in her country and fleeing with her daughters, choking on tear gas near the border of a country promising a better life for victims of persecution, or maybe not!

Everyone can understand, I suppose, that these things are complicated. The U.S. has supported some very vicious leaders in Latin America (let me not call them psychopaths, some are the finest people, people are saying that, they really are, fine people, the finest people) for many years and looked the other way as Death Squads, working for these “strong men”, murdered political opponents including nuns and priests, even an archbishop (now a saint) [2]. Harsh American drug laws, and a militarized war on mood-altering medicines not synthesized by American pharmaceutical giants, play a large role in much of this deadly violence south of our border. People are fleeing from those violence and poverty ravaged countries now, toward political asylum in the US. Complicated!

Psychopaths are often highly intelligent, we hear, known for their cunning. Intelligence unrestrained by conscience or ethical consideration of any kind is a scary thing. Which brings us to the most successful and profitable exemplars of this type, the fictive “persons” known as corporations. Corporations, today, have almost universal influence over everything that happens on this endangered planet.

The examples of corporate barbarity are too many to even summarize here. Tax subsidies for oil companies, a relatively benign seeming thing, comes to mind. A highly profitable, outmoded, biosphere destroying way of producing energy– reaping huge tax breaks from a pliable American government, along with record profits. Let’s be honest though, the oil companies are no worse than the tobacco companies, the fast food/diabetes and heart disease industry, the industrialized hormone-rich meat industry or many other highly lucrative industries that merely provide what people want and need. I am one judgmental motherfucker– what next, attacking the life-saving pharmaceutical industry? Maybe I am the psychopath.

I offer this one recent example and I’m out of here. I had a robocall from Spectrum, a monopoly provider of internet service in my area, demanding payment of some overdue fees. When I called back the robot informed me that the minimum payment I had to make was twice my monthly rate. Thirty minutes on the phone with their representatives and nobody was able to inform me exactly what this giant charge was for. All they could tell me was that if I didn’t pay every penny of the entire amount my service would be terminated, automatically, by some kind of automated process.

I called back late last night, spoke to the night crew. Rebecca was very nice. She pulled up my record and saw at once that half of that charge was for a “trouble call” on October 3. A technician had been sent to my apartment, after I’d protested that the previous technician, a month earlier, had found no problem with the line or the modem. “It’s the only thing we can do if your intermittent service continues to be an issue is to send another technician out to you,” I was told.

The $45 was a “valid charge” Rebecca told me. She said the technician must present me with a work order, inform me of the charge and have me sign. I told her none of that had happened. Rebecca told me she couldn’t remove the charge because it was a valid charge.

How was it a valid charge, without notice, without my knowledge, without anyone following the company’s own rules for charging a customer for a repair visit he resisted and was told was his only option? Here we have the beauty of the corporate “mind” at work.

It’s a valid charge, Rebecca explained, because it is the company’s policy to allow the technician to determine whether the customer should be charged or not. If there is no problem found the technician has the discretion to assess the $45 fee.

The technician, I told her, had not informed me of any fee, only warning me that a future visit might include a fee and that I should be careful and check in advance to find out if I was going to be billed for the visit.

“It’s a valid fee,” said Rebecca pleasantly. “You don’t have a contract, but look at the terms and conditions on-line. You would not be receiving internet service if you had not agreed to the terms and conditions. It is set out in the terms and conditions as a valid charge.”

Each technician visit, she informed me, costs the company about $200. I told her the visit lasted fifteen minutes and it was hard to believe the technicians, even the scab technicians the company currently employs after the CEO refused to negotiate with the union, made anything like $800 an hour. She agreed that they probably made less, and I realized she was talking for the recording of our call, playing to her masters who would hear the tape if there was any question about what this pain-in-the-ass customer had said and whether she’d been loyal to the company bottom line.

I told her that the 5,000 words of legalize in the terms and conditions, a document nobody reads as they agree to the take it or leave it terms, used to be known as a ‘contract of adhesion’. That is a one-sided “take it or leave it” deal giving all rights to one party, the more powerful one, and no choice to the other party. Thirty years ago courts could still invalidate contracts of adhesion. Now it is simply the way every corporate “agreement” is written and the courts don’t care any more. John Roberts, Chief Justice of our Supreme Court, was a trailblazing genius of corporate law who innovated many of the devilish now perfectly legal details of our new corporate age.

I told Rebecca I was disputing the charge. Rebecca told me that I could not dispute a valid charge. I asked her if she understood how maddening that circular logic was. She told me she was sorry that I feel that way. I told her I was aware that we were being recorded, that she had to be careful about what she said, but that she would feel exactly the way I feel if the same thing was done to her. I laid it out concisely, with extreme patience. In the end she admitted she would probably feel exactly the same way I did, which gave me the only victory I would have in that call.

Alex, the supervisor, called me a half hour later. He explained that because this charge had been assessed by “technical” that he had no ability to override it since he worked in “billing”. You dig the genius of this? Same company, different walled off areas of the corporate brain. Alex and I spoke for a long while, and he was even more sympathetic than Rebecca. He could see the two service calls, and the credits for intermittent internet service before and after each call.

Alex offered his theory for why internet service in New York City sucks so much, and it made some sense to me. He lives in suburban Colorado, gets his internet from Comcast and because of the lack of density and interference, he rarely experiences the intermittent outages that plague customers in congested places like New York City. He could not have been nicer, more sympathetic, more conversational. But as for the question of the arguably unfair valid charge, he was, unfortunately, powerless to remove the charge.

I told him I was disputing it, but that I was prepared to pay the rest of my outstanding bill to avoid an interruption in service. He told me not to bother, if every penny of every valid charge is not paid, literally down to the penny, the service will be automatically cut off at a date certain, a certain number of days after the past due time bomb goes off and the automated disconnect signal goes out.

He told me he could “escalate” my challenge of the charge by emailing the technician, a scab named Stan (who left me his cell phone number), Stan’s supervisor, and the supervisor one level above the technician’s supervisor. They would have to produce a work order, signed by me, that showed I’d been informed of the valid charge. It could take a week or so to get it sorted out, he said he’d call me between 8 and 10 pm on Monday. I thanked him. Alex asked if I had any other questions.

I did, and for once I got a quick, straight answer that made complete sense. My service will be automatically cut off at 4 a.m. on December 14th if all valid charges are not paid before then.

I’d better renew my health insurance before that date, is all I can say.

Fun fact:

Charter Communications (Spectrum) chairman and CEO Thomas Rutledge received compensation worth $7.8 million in 2017, following his $98.5 million take for 2016 and $16.4 million in 2015, according to a regulatory filing. (this comes straight off a google search).

The smiling sociopath’s $98,500,000 in 2016 was the top pay for an American CEO in 2016, more than twice the runner-up’s, Este Lauder CEO who took in only $48,000,000.

And a handsome rascal too!

Tom Rutledge.jpeg

Would you negotiate with a striking technician’s union, determined to keep all of their health plan benefits, if you were as rich and handsome as Tom? I think not! No fucking way!

USA! USA!!!!

[1] from today’s Democracy Now! report:

As the Trump administration continues to defend firing tear gas into crowds of asylum-seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border, we spend the rest of the hour looking at the history of tear gas, which is banned in warfare but legal for federal authorities and police to turn on civilians. Border authorities’ use of tear gas has spiked under the Trump administration, with the agency’s own data revealing it has deployed tear gas over two dozen times this year alone. Customs and Border Protection told Newsweek Tuesday it began using tear gas under the Obama administration in 2010 and has released the substance 126 times since the year 2012. The agency’s use of tear gas has now reached a seven-year record high under the Trump administration. On Monday, President Trump was asked about the tear-gassing of women and children migrants.

REPORTER: How did you feel when you saw the images of the women and children running from the tear gas yesterday?

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: Well I do say, why are they there? I mean, I have to start off—first of all, the tear gas is a very minor form of the tear gas itself. It’s very safe. The ones that were suffering to a certain extent were the people that were putting it out there.

[2] from the New Yorker article linked above:

In December of 1980, less than a year after Romero’s death, members of the National Guard raped and killed three American nuns and a Catholic lay worker. Over the course of the civil war, more than a dozen priests were murdered.

Healthcare update: no update

The quality of the healthcare you receive in the United States is determined by your income and the terms of your employment contract. Why not? It is delivered by for-profit corporations for the benefit of executives and shareholders. Again, why not? American healthcare outcomes are not among the best in the world, though they are pretty good for many Americans who have decent health insurance plans through work. American healthcare is, far and away, the most expensive, and the most profitable in the world, so that’s something to be proud of, isn’t it?

I got the good news and the bad news yesterday about my kidney disease and the $88,000 treatment I might need in a few months. The nephrologist’s receptionist called with good news that my recent tests came back rosy and that I don’t need another round of the fancy drug at this time. The bad news is that the doctor won’t be picking up the phone, he told his receptionist to tell me he’ll give me all the details when I see him in a few weeks– three days after my deadline for purchasing health insurance for 2019 — and that we’ll test again in three months. He emphasized to me at the beginning that this idiopathic disease is unpredictable and little understood, numbers can go up or down dramatically at any time and we cannot put much faith in patterns like the steady downward tic of the concerning numbers.

I called back today to ask to speak to the doctor for a minute. Sadly, not possible. I explained my insurance dilemma to the receptionist, that my deadline for choosing insurance for 2019 is three days before my appointment. I told her I didn’t want to put her to any extra work but that I needed to know if they were likely to get pre-authorization for a drug that would cost me $88,000 “out of pocket” if it wasn’t pre-approved. The alternative, the longtime standard protocol for my disease until this new wonder drug came along, is a much cheaper but more debilitating twelve month course of intravenous steroids and infusions of a more harmful immunosuppressive agent (as opposed to two infusions a month apart). I’ll ask the doctor for you, she said. I hope to hear back in the next few days, though, of course, one never knows. Only the weak and fretful worry about these sorts of things…

I called the insurance company and punched in the option for pharmaceuticals. Spoke to a very knowledgable rep there at the third party that pays drug claims for my insurance company (and many others), explained my dilemma. She told me, after a long investigation, that since this drug is not sent directly to the patient but administered in a hospital, I had to go through the medical department of my insurance company, that this drug did not fall under “pharmaceuticals”.

I explained to her that during my previous hour long call the medical department had referred me to her company, the third party that approves all pharmaceuticals, including hospital administered ones. She told me this was not the case, that somebody at the insurance company had made a mistake. I read her back the provider-side 800 number I was given by her company for pre-authorization. She agreed it was the proper number, the number my doctor would have to call to get pre-authorization for this drug. I told her it had taken me almost an hour to get that number but that it was not one I could call myself, being a patient, not a provider. I was patient as hell itself. She gave me an 800 number for patients to call for “Speciality Drugs” and then noted that I seem to have spoken to someone there last week.

I explained to her again that my worry and my question both appeared to be fairly straightforward. In 2017 I had a QHP and Rituxan, the $88,000 drug, had been approved. In 2018 I was on a lower tier plan, and it was uncertain whether Rituxan could be approved, particularly since it was on the “excluded list”. “Unless the hospital gets pre-authorization,” pointed out the helpful rep. She was unable to determine whether it was also on the excluded list for the QHP.

She simply could not tell me if in 2017 the drug was on the “excluded list” and had to be pre-authorized. If that was the case, it would give me some comfort. In other words, I was trying to determine whether the insurance product I was about to be forced to buy for 2019 would cover the expensive drug I might well need in 2019. Not a very tricky question, outside of an unregulated corporate environment where the primary concern is maximizing profits and the health and well-being of patients is on an as-needed basis.

The confusing labyrinth of disconnected and walled off corporate sub-offices is perfectly allowable (and virtually unregulated) under the terms of Obamacare and under the “Business Judgment Rule” (a given business is in the best position to make judgments about how it should be run). These internal walls make it impossible for anyone within the corporation (or outside of it, for that matter) to have a global view that would allow them to answer a fairly straightforward question about what products and services are covered under a given plan. The rep seemed a little offended, telling me she’d been working there for many years and had a pretty global view, but that I was asking a question that was just impossible to answer.

The bottom line, it will take a lot longer than two hours, if ever, to get the answer to this simple enough question. The helpful rep who tried to help was sorry she couldn’t give me the answer I was seeking, but it was simply impossible. She could take a grievance from me, if I liked. I declined her kind offer and thanked her for her time, somehow not giving vent to the bitter sarcasm that was flowing over my tongue like battery acid.

The Conventions at Hampton Bays

I have reached the stage in trying to write a complete life of my father when I need the insights of other people who knew and loved him. It’s time to put on my journalist hat and reach out to them for corroborating details and information I don’t have any other way of getting. There is Phil Trombino, a younger colleague of my father’s from the Human Relations Unit (I don’t know how close they actually were, or how long they worked together, though I know my father liked him very much), there is his close friend of many years Benjy and a fellow in the East Bay named Rom who knew and very much dug my father’s routines when Irv was the director of Nassau-Suffolk Young Judaea and this guy was a teenaged member of the youth movement. I will attempt now to write a door for this man to walk through, into my telling of the story of Irv Widaen’s life, by way of introducing this narrative to him.

“You’ll send it to him, presumably, and then call, meaning many more weeks will probably pass before you actually get your head out of your ass and contact him,” said the skeleton of my father from his grave in Westchester County.

Yes, quite possibly.

“You still haven’t sent that postcard to that Trombino you found, about an hour from your apartment, to see if he is indeed the Phil Trombino who hit around .400 that year in college baseball at Iona, to find out, if he is, if he’d be willing to talk about his time at the long defunct Human Relations Unit.”

No.

“Needless to say, you haven’t reached out to Benjy since the night before mom died,” he added, needlessly.

Needless to say. Now back to this portal I am trying to construct today for Rom, who you knew as Bruce and later Peanuts, a guy I was always much closer to (I never recall even meeting Phil) that I also need to contact.

Nassau-Suffolk Young Judaea, like all the other Young Judaea regions around the country, held periodic conventions. A convention of as many kids as they could convene would be held at a camp or hotel and would take place over a weekend. Buses and cars would bring members of the youth movement together from clubs all over the region and an executive committee (the exec) would make a schedule of lectures, discussions, speakers, films, proposals, entertainments for the weekend. When my sister and I were little we attended a couple of these conventions at a hotel in a place called Hampton Bays. It was at one of these conventions that I first encountered the guy I am talking about, a young teenager called Bruce at that time.

Here is what I recall, from November 22, 1963, which must have been a Friday. We were driving out to Hampton Bays for the “convention”. My little sister and I had no idea what a convention was, we were about to see. My mother was in the passenger seat, most likely with the brilliant mutt Patches on her lap, and my sister and I were in the back. I was seven years old, though it’s hard for me to believe I could have been that young at the time. We stopped at a diner for lunch and the kid at the counter, who looked uncannily like a skinny version of JFK, thrust his face forward, a weird, pained smile on his face, and asked if we had heard. I guess everyone else in the place was in shock and we didn’t seem to be. The president had just been shot! The soda jerk was crying, as were many others in the diner.

My memory of that convention was mostly of sitting by the hotel office in the cavernous front hall, staring at a black and white television at the end of a long extension cord. I could not stop watching. I believe I was watching the live broadcast from Dallas on Sunday when they brought Lee Harvey Oswald out and a bull-backed Jack Ruby lunged forward and pumped a couple of pistol shots into Oswald’s abdomen, a moment captured in a famous still photo of Oswald’s sudden mortal agony. One of the cops holding Oswald’s arm recoils too, with an arresting expression of shock on his face too.

Ten years later I would be on a new kibbutz in the Aravah desert in Israel, volunteering to help pick their first bumper crop of tomatoes. It was common for kibbutz volunteers at that time to be assigned a family, a kibbutz mother and father to visit and hang out with. The kibbutz was brand new, and the members, most formerly American Young Judaeans, were only five or six years older than me. The kibbutz parents I was assigned were Ruthie, a kibbutznik on loan from another kibbutz, originally from Brazil, and a guy from Maryland, Howie Katz, a bright shining soul of infinite good cheer. Howie spent much of his time on the kibbutz naked, streaking from place to place, sometimes slipping on a pair of shorts.

The teenager I knew as Bruce, then Peanuts, now Rom, had served in the army with Howie, survived the explosion of their tank in Sinai, was also a member of the kibbutz. Rom was still on active duty somewhere, I think, I don’t recall seeing him on the kibbutz when I lived there.

Howie and I both returned to the US a few months later and we remained good friends for the rest of his life. Howie’s best friend, it turned out, was Rom, this fellow I am carving the portal for.

Rom corrected me, shortly after Howie’s sudden death in 2010, about Howie being my father though he was only three years older than me. He was actually five years older than me. Rom knew this because they were the same age and because his first image of me, Irv’s son, was at a convention in Hampton Bays when he was a in high school and I was a little kid, maybe in second or third grade. I am assuming that convention must have been in 1964, when I would have been eight and Rom, then still Bruce, would have been thirteen, probably the youngest Young Judaean at the convention.

Which would help explain why I noticed him by himself several times during that convention, outside the dining room, with his cane (hockey injury), imitating Eddie Giocamin as he narrated his game winning slap shot over and over, using the cane as a hockey stick. “Giacomin, slap shot, score!!!” he said as my sister and I laughed. (I discover now that Giacomin was a goalie, thus it is unlikely that my memory is correct, though I do remember him saying “slap shot, score!” and “Giocamin!!” several times as he slapped the imaginary puck toward the goal. Giacomin must have been saving all those attempted goals. I’ve never been a hockey fan.)

By 1964 the Beatles had landed in America and I was a big fan, especially of the irreverent John Lennon. This guy looked a bit like John, had the longish hair (as did I, in a child’s Beatle haircut), the wire frame glasses, the longish nose, the wry expression. He was also funny. Standing up shakily, using the cane as much as a prop as for support, he slurred “sure didn’t taste like tomato juice”, a reference to an ad for V-8 then common on TV about someone slipping the actor a spiked tomato juice. Well, you will say, that’s not what the ad was suggesting, it was about the superior taste of V-8, made with eight delicious vegetables. Still, I recall the line, recited in a drunken manner, and it made my sister and me laugh, as he took a couple of exaggeratedly drunken steps, glancing at us from the corner of his eye. Each time we passed him he would put on a little show for us. Whenever my father passed he’d say “get your ass back in the dining room, Bruce,” in passing, in that sly, breezily hassling way of his, not really seeming to care whether Bruce actually did it or not.

Years later I ran into him again as Howie’s best friend, in San Francisco. He’d been entrusted with filling Howie’s new waterbed, in the second floor walk up, and seeing how slowly it was filling, he took a stroll. When he came back he did his best to deal with the waterfall he’d accidentally caused. Howie laughed telling me the story. Rom is a great musician, keyboard and harmonica player extraordinaire, and I would get a chance to play a bit with him over the years. His dry sense of humor was intact, along with his humanism and sense of fair play. A very decent and likable fellow.

I called him when Howie died, to warn him that I’d inadvertently informed (through his mother) a former friend of Howie’s death. This guy was a famously difficult fellow who had angrily (and unfairly) written Howie off as a pussy-whipped wimp and was now headed to the funeral, and that I was so sorry. Rom reassured me that it would be fine and also recounted picking up Howie’s daughter at the airport, knowing he had to be the adult for her, and be strong, and then sobbing all the way back to Howie’s widow’s place by the Old Highway and the waves of the Pacific Ocean.

We had talked briefly after my father died, five years earlier. He told me my father was a great guy. I started to describe another side to the old man, the tremendous obstacles he labored long and hard to construct in the paths of his children, in this world of stumbling blocks, but Rom gently brushed it aside. He had nothing but fond memories of Irv, who was a great guy, and funny as hell. I was a great guy, too, for that matter, he pointed out. And that was the end of our discussion of Irv.

It would be interesting, and perhaps illuminating, to hear details from Rom, about his memories of the great guy who was my old man. How Irv looked from the point of view of a thirteen and fourteen year old kid who was not his own son. Their paths crossed a few years later at the camp my father directed, where Bruce, now Peanuts, was seriously injured in another accident. I can see that clearly too, how Irv must have looked to someone he simply affectionately shot the shit with, but details from Rom could add flavor to this telling.

“Good enough, motherfucker, now send it off to him,” said the skeleton of my father, encouraged to see things moved forward 1/4 of an inch in the endless telling of his tale, before it’s too late.

The Difficulty of Apologizing in America

We live in a litigious society here in the USA! USA!!! We are raised to be competitive (cooperation is for the weak) and if things do not go our way– bring a lawsuit. One of Shakespeare’s characters insults another as a coward, an “action taking knave”. Here in America taking legal action is not shameful or cowardly in the least, it’s what the powerful do to dominate challengers. In fact, we have here what’s known in other places as “The American Rule”– each side pays its own legal fees, virtually no matter how the parties found themselves in court. If I have money to burn I can sue you over virtually nothing, and if you don’t pay thousands of dollars to a competent lawyer, guess what: you lose.

What the American Rule means in practice is that a very rich person (or “person”) can have lawyers make out a case with just enough substance not to be dismissed outright. They can often bludgeon the other side into submission with the threat of bankrupting their adversary with huge legal fees. The less wealthy party will have to hire a lawyer who will make a motion to dismiss the flimsy case outright, based on the papers themselves. The judge will not be able to do that, if the pleadings are well-drafted, because certain issues of fact raised in the pleadings must be decided in court first. It could take years in court to resolve all these issues, if the rich man’s lawyer is proactive enough. Run out of money? You lose, asshole. The American rule says so.

Along with this zeal for combat in court comes a moral code that includes never admitting fault, culpability, responsibility, wrongdoing, malfeasance, misfeasance, nonfeasance, anything that could lead to legal liability. This code comes down from corporate “persons”, these powerful, conscience-free legal fictions understand very well that an apology is an admission of wrongdoing that can come back to bite them in the ass in court. This “don’t admit shit” ethos trickles down to the masses — when someone accuses you of something, concede nothing, throw it back on them, fuck them. They are the asshole!

It’s easy to understand how this works in the context of the law. What is harder to grasp is the reflex to do this among your closest personal relations. My father was traumatized as a kid by an insane and violent mother, I understand that he was disabled in a fundamental way. Apologizing was very difficult for him, as was forgiving. He simply did not trust people enough, including himself, to engage in the vulnerability that is required for a real apology, for real forgiveness. Most people are not handicapped this way, or seemingly should not be, based on not having lived childhoods of extreme abuse and deprivation.

It occurred to me just now, in the context of a friendship of almost 55 years I had to finally pronounce dead, that if my old friend had simply been able to apologize the long friendship could have probably been saved. When, during our last talk, I recounted some of the worst instances of the behavior I find intolerable, things he would have very much hated being done to him, he was silent. It was a last chance to admit, yes, I would have very much hated that if someone did it to me, I was wrong to do it, I am very sorry and will try to do better, I can promise you that.

Instead he made distinctions, disputed details, suggested that nobody can promise anything, really, about the future, asked what about me, the things I do, like calling him a “moral retard” and saying I wanted to sock him, offered excuses, used the passive voice to describe how things, indeed, went badly that day in the car, how it was a bad day for him, the last time we saw each other, when, instead of apologizing outright he defended himself, his good nature, his good character, his love of peace, his inability to hurt anyone, his love.

Then, of course, having not been able to take responsibility for the results his own actions had ensured, and seeing me unmoved, he took a few moments to demonstrate that I was as blameworthy as him, my intransigent demand for a better apology, when a perfectly good one had already been given, and would be given again, for what it was worth, in the most general possible terms of regret, without any promise of anything being different, because, as we all know, some promises are pointless to make.

I wonder now why it is so hard for some people to admit fault, even when a consequence they say they very much don’t want is staring them in the face. There is no court proceeding involved, no police or FBI investigation, no job at stake. The stakes are saving a personal relationship you claim to deeply value. I seriously don’t understand the impulse to defend yourself at all costs. Why? How does it help you?

Although it is still my reflex to snarl and defend my choices whenever Sekhnet is either confused by something I’ve written, or thinks what I’ve written should not be posted on-line, I usually change the offensive lines after a moment’s reflection. If a sentence is confusing to a reader, it is not written well. It needs to be rewritten more clearly. If putting the otherwise well-written sentences on-line could cause some harm, to me or somebody else, I usually wind up seeing it from her point of view and changing the lines to remove the offending parts. In each case, the change is for the best and the writing is better for me not resisting the editorial input. How much does it take for me to listen to criticism from an intelligent reader? Doesn’t feel like it takes much at all.

To some people, they would rather, it seems, torment and kill everyone they claim to love rather than admit that they have some bad impulses sometimes, impulses that consistently do harm to others and to themselves, that they find impossible to control. Is it harder to say “I hurt you and I’m very sorry, I’ll try to do better” than to “double down” with the self-justification, no matter how incoherent? Insight, well, that’s really in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it?

American Politics 101 (part 67)

This is what it comes down to in the great state of Mississippi which has NEVER elected any sort of racist to Congress, going back to the days of slavery (and what if they did? what if they did?!). They are having a run-off election tomorrow.

I went to have a look at the predictions for that vote, where a black Democratic candidate, Mike Espy [1] is running in a tight race with short-time incumbent Republican senator Cindy Hyde-Smith, appointed by Mississippi’s governor in April 2018 when Mississippi’s long-serving senator, 81 year-old Thad Cochran [2] left the job due to health concerns. This popped up in the middle of the first page of search results:

Screen shot 2018-11-26 at 1.00.17 PM.png

read all about it

The president, who won Mississippi by a comfortable margin of almost 20%, is down there whipping up enthusiasm for his candidate at big rallies in Biloxi and Tupelo. He has touted Hyde-Smith’s loyal support for all his initiatives at the rallies and made this powerful argument in an ad Hyde-Smith’s campaign is running:

“If Democrats get control, they will raise your taxes, flood your streets with criminal aliens, weaken our military, outlaw private health insurance and replace freedom with socialism,” Trump says in an ad paid for by Hyde-Smith and the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Jeez, what a nightmare!

Let the best ad team win! [3]

[1] from Mike Espy’s Wikipedia page (the Republican ad campaign is hammering corruption charges against Espy):

Corruption trial and acquittal[edit]

Espy trial[edit]

On August 27, 1997, Espy was indicted on charges of receiving improper gifts, including sports tickets, lodging, and airfare. Espy refused to plea bargain and on December 2, 1998, he was acquitted of all 30 criminal charges in the trial. Independent Counsel Donald Smaltz presented more than 70 witnesses during the trial and spent more than $20 million preparing and trying the case.^[28]

During testimony before the jury, the prosecution’s star witness told Smaltz: “God knows, if I had $30 million, I could find dirt on you, sir.”^[29] During the trial, Smaltz protested that the defense was injecting race into the trial in what he saw as an appeal to a mostly black jury.

The defense rested without calling any witnesses, arguing simply that the prosecution had not proved its case. The jury deliberated less than 10 hours before finding Espy not guilty on all charges. One of the jurors said, “This was the weakest, most bogus thing I ever saw. I can’t believe Mr. Smaltz ever brought this to trial.” At least four other jurors echoed this view, though less pointedly.^[30] Barbara Bisoni, the only white juror, said Smaltz’s case “had holes” and that race never entered into the deliberations.^[30]

[2] from the Thad Cochran Wikipedia page:

Anti-lynching law[edit]

On June 13, 2005, the U.S. Senate formally apologized for its failure to enact a federal anti-lynching law in the early 20th century, “when it was most needed”. The resolution was passed on a voice vote with 80 Senators cosponsoring. Cochran and fellow Mississippian Trent Lott were among the 20 Senators who did not join as cosponsors.^[30] Cochran said, “I’m not in the business of apologizing for what someone else did or didn’t do. I deplore and regret that lynching occurred and that those committing them weren’t punished, but I’m not culpable.”^[31]

[3] In Mississippi federal elections race lines are rarely crossed (no black senator from there since Reconstruction) in a state where blacks make up 37% of the population (highest percentage in the country). The black candidate in the recent Senate election got more than 90% of the black vote, the white candidate got about 85% of the white vote. The key, for white politicians in Mississippi, is making sure whites get out to vote. The opposite goes for black candidates. Nothing to see here!

Foamy Urine

One from the Don’t Worry About It Department:

My urine had been foamy. Not just bubbles, but real foam, like soap suds, or the head of a draft beer, or the top layer of a root beer float, to be most precise. The urologist laughed when I mentioned, in passing, that my urine was foamy. “Your urine is foamy?” he said with a big smile, like I was pulling his leg.

The first nephrologist told me I had permanent. irreversible scarring on my kidneys and would need a lifelong regimen of drugs, and regular visits to his office, to maintain the functionality of my kidneys. When your kidneys go you die, of course, but, then again, whatever you do, you die, so there’s that, plus, I’d already lived to sixty, no mean feat. The doctor was philosophical.

He made his dire diagnosis with certainty, without having to run any tests, merely by noting the swelling from my knees to my ankles, bilateral edema, and, of course, the foamy urine, proteinuria. The foaminess of the urine turns out to be an indication of protein being passed in the urine. Normal kidneys do not allow protein to pass through their filtering system into the urine, the body has more important uses for protein than pissing it out.

Fortunately, the medical insurance I had at that time refused to pay this doctor, so he cancelled our follow-up appointment, when actual tests would have been done. I found another nephrologist and had tests done.

There was a lot of drama the next year or so, and three or four other nephrologists, the second discovering elevated levels of anti-PLA2R autoantibodies in my blood work. The presence of these antibodies correlates highly with the presence and progression of a kidney disease called idiopathic membranous nephropathy. That doctor, though I liked him, was not on my new insurance plan, so I had to take his paperwork to another nephrologist.

The third one argued vigorously about the meaning of “idiopathic” (which she eventually had to admit does mean ’cause unknown’) and urged me to undergo an immediate kidney biopsy and begin the twelve month immunosuppressive protocol without delay. The kidney biopsy confirmed that I had this rare disease with the unknown cause. The good news was that the biopsy also showed no scarring of the kidneys, organs which, in my case, continue to function in the normal range.

The last nephrologist I saw recommended that I have a short course of treatment borrowed from cancer treatment, infusion of a powerful immunosuppressive agent called Rituximab, or Rituxan. It is tolerated well (far fewer debilitating side effects) and requires only two infusions, as opposed to the twelve month course of infusions that has long been the standard treatment for this disease, a regimen that includes intravenous steroids and other powerful, potentially harmful chemicals designed to shut down the immune system, every month for a year. Rituxan is expensive, the doctor told me, but apparently my health insurance in 2017 would cover it.

When I showed up for the first round of infusions I was asked to sign a paper that included a paragraph where I stated that I’d been informed of the price of the treatment and agreed to pay any balance the insurance company refused to pay [1]. I asked the woman at the desk what the price of the treatment was. She said she had no idea, and no way to find out, actually. I asked her how I could possibly sign off on the paragraph I pointed to.

“Cross it out, baby,” she said nonchalantly, and I did. “They’ll tell you the price upstairs,” she told me, photocopying my papers.

All they knew upstairs is that Rituxan is very, very expensive.

A few months later I learned the price when the insurance company sent me the EOB (everybody in America knows what an EOB is– Explanation of Benefits). The EOB stated that the list price for the two small bags of immunosuppressive infusion was $88,000. My insurance company had paid a small fraction of that, maybe 10% or 15%.

Since the infusions a year ago my blood and urine work has been heading steadily in the right direction, though my urine continues to be foamy, indicating that it still contains protein, and the numbers are still far higher than normal. The last time I saw him the nephrologist suggested that, just to be safe, we do another round of Rituxan. I asked if we could hold off on this, as I was just getting back toward 90% of my health and fitness levels from before the infusions had induced persistent asthenia (weakness, lack of energy). He told me there was no harm to wait, that we should check in three months from now, which is currently about three weeks away.

It suddenly occurred to me, since I have only a few weeks to select my health insurance for 2019, that I ought to see the nephrologist before the enrollment period ends, to determine whether he still recommends another $88,000 round of treatment. If so, I need to be sure the insurance I buy will cover it. In 2018 I’m paying a fraction of what I paid in 2017 for my current insurance, based on my 2017 income. My current appointment, December 18, is three days after the deadline to purchase health insurance for 2019 or be ineligible for a year. Fair is fair. He had no earlier appointment available but would discuss my blood and urine test results on the phone as soon as I could get them done. I had them done last Tuesday.

Of course, none of this is anything a patient should have to worry about, which tier of the health insurance hierarchy he or she is on and what medicines and treatments are covered on each tier. This is a profit-driven American sickness. Under the Affordable Care Act, the tier of medical insurance you may purchase is based exclusively on your income. Your income level determines the level of medical care you may buy. To purchase a QHP (“qualified health plan”) like I had in 2017, your income must be something like a minimum of 200% of the official poverty income. If your income is only, say, 167% of that number, you will be required to buy what is essentially pay-as-you go Medicaid. Medicaid famously does not pay for cutting edge treatments when far less expensive old standbys are available.

In other words, if you want to pay 10% or more of your annual income for health insurance, to ensure you can continue a medical treatment for what used to be called a “preexisting condition”, you are prevented by the ACA from doing this. You must have an income sufficient to purchase a QHP. If your income says you are too poor to do that, well, whose fault is that?

I no longer get bogged down in the philosophical issues [2]. If you are poor enough to be subject to a law that singles out poor people for a little extra nonconsensual sex, well, whose fucking fault is that? I can howl at the moon, or figure out the odds of getting the medical treatment I need, to hopefully qualify for insurance, at more than ten times the monthly premium I am paying now, that will pay for a treatment that will only weaken me for three or four months, instead of for a year or more.

I called my insurance company to find out if the well-tolerated cancer drug was in my plan. They really couldn’t say, beforehand, whether Rituxan is covered under my current plan. The first rep told me it did not appear to be covered under my plan. I gave her a svelte version of my rap about corporate “personhood” and the psychopathic self-regarding myopia of such “persons”. She was sympathetic (I find most people are, if you remain calm and speak very succinctly) and asked me to wait for a rep who could actually answer my question. The second rep was also sympathetic, but not the expert in pre-auth I took her to be. She was not sure why the first rep had connected me to her. I told her I wasn’t sure either, though it had been very nice talking with her. She asked me to please hold for a third rep, someone who could definitely answer my question, hopefully.

For once the muzak was not oppressive. It was an anodyne little jazz combo, led by a guitar, playing a completely innocuous, if uninspired, loop of jazzy blues in G. Better than most of the nerve challenging, blood pressure spiking shit the Mengeles out there use for hold music.

The third rep was the most sympathetic of all, and only 40 minutes into my call. She told me that Rituxan was clearly on the list of drugs not covered by my plan, but that, if the doctor received a pre-athorization, based on medical necessity, it would be covered. Although, sad to say, she had to check with another expert to be sure and hoped I wouldn’t mind holding. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” I said cheerfully.

Fortunately, the little jazz combo was still playing that short bluesy loop in G, and I nodded along and made marks with ink, this time with a brush, for about ten minutes, at which time the third expert was on the line with a fourth. They gave me the number the doctor needed to call at the third party that handles such things for the insurance company. Tell the doctor to press 1 for “preauthorization” and then 5 for “medical necessity”. If the doctor can prove Rituxan is a medical necessity, your insurance will pay for it. If not, take what is behind door number two.

After submitting a few vials of my blood, and a small screw top jar of my foamy urine, I walked over to the doctor’s office where I left Deirdre with a note containing the pertinent numbers from the paragraph above. She assured me she would follow-up once the labs came back, and that I would get a call from the doctor about the test results.

One last thing for me not to worry about. Unlike in December 2016 when I was able to merely state my income, for purposes of paying a premium ten times more than I’m paying now for insurance that covered the treatment I need, there is apparently a brand new requirement. To purchase a QHP you must submit a copy of your 2017 tax filing, showing the income that qualifies you to buy a qualified health plan. I’ll cross that fucking bridge when I come to it, yo.

[1] The practice of trying to make the patient pay the balance, the difference between the rate the insurance company has agreed to pay and the sticker price billed by the provider, is called ‘balance billing’, apparently. Of course, if a provider accepts insurance, the negotiated rate is all they are entitled to be paid. Balance billing, while not ethical, proper or strictly legal, is common. Of a billion balance billing bills sent out, I’d imagine many millions are paid by conscientious consumers who don’t want to damage their credit rating. Columbia Doctors recently sent me this kind of bill for $250, only 900% more than I actually owed for the visit. Balance billing, you dig. They can do this because there is no government agency in New York State that one can really complain to about this common practice. Caveat emptor, bitches!

[2] Though it has not been easy to come by this fragile new dispassion. You can read some of my selected struggles with this merciless American health insurance and pharmaceutical industry-authored scheme here.