Provoking vs. Disrespecting: anatomy of a fatal falling out

I will use a personal story to flesh out a mechanism that commonly leads to violence and sometimes death. It is a mechanism that is particularly ubiquitous in this black and white zero-sum society we are living in at the moment. It is the reduction of a complicated story to a simple, primary concept, like betrayal, or loyalty. One party wins all, the other loses all, or it’s mutual destruction — fine, everybody loses and everybody wins, sort of.

In this particular personal anecdote no punches, kicks or bullets were exchanged, though both sides wound up feeling hurt and completely justified in their final anger at the other. Every person who knows my once good friend, including two who claimed recently to love me, has cut me dead, which is as bad as the underlying impasse with a guy I’ve known since fourth grade. In some ways it’s worse, more painful, this tribal closing of ranks after an ultimatum to forgive without condition or forever be seen as the vicious loveless party persecuting a weaker man.

This is an aggravating story Sekhnet, who tries her best to take care of me, urges me to somehow put out of my mind every time I mention anything connected to it. I don’t know how that’s done, until I am done working through it to my satisfaction. A gnawing, vexing story untold is just a fucking tumor in waiting, as far as I can see. There is nothing I can do about a lying sociopath president or a lockstep political party who seems to have, with alarming speed, acquired a taste for the inside of their new leader’s ass, but this situation with an old friend I can wrestle with directly. I believe it also sheds light on our larger problem as a culture, which comes largely from partisan oversimplification and a mass failure of empathy.

The common response to a fight is to take sides, be loyal to your people. They call this tribalism now, reminding all of us homo sapiens that when it comes to war, we jump with those closest to us. Loyalty has been elevated to the highest value, they used to call this kind of reflexive patriotism “my country– right or wrong” — you defend whatever America does because you’re American. Somewhere far down the list of civic virtues, after loyalty, are being analytical, and fair-minded, and trying to find the causes of friction and the best solutions for difficult problems, including interpersonal troubles like I had with an old friend recently.

My mother always expressed frustration, even anger, at her daughters’ children’s seeming ingratitude. My sister (my mother’s daughter) always expressed frustration, even anger, that her mother could not just give with grandmotherly generosity without demanding a “thank you”. I always thought that a skilled mediator could convince my sister to teach her kids to say “thank you, grandma” when grandma gave them something. This simple act would have gone a long way toward reducing tensions, but they were both too angry, and too stubbornly committed to being right, to ever go to a mediator. Each one dismissed the idea of mediation as something the other would never agree to do.

Sekhnet reminds me of all the other things I should be worrying about, instead of this intransigent former friend who is too hurt and angry to make peace. I have worry enough to cover these other things, and have made appointments, or at least calls, about all but one of them. [1] Seems funny, in light of these other immediate worries, that I’m returning over and over to the sad and now sickening falling out with a friend of more than fifty years, but here we go. On the other hand, this is the only vexation I have any chance of getting closer to solving today.

Much violence among armed teenagers is over the issue of perceived disrespect. “He dissed me,” more than one violent young man will say in complete justification of why the person he shot needed to get shot. Disrespect is a fundamental blow that we are taught not to tolerate. For purposes of my friend’s case against me, I explicitly told him I don’t respect him and I gave several specific reasons why I don’t. It would seem to be case closed for our friendship.

I disrespected my friend, first by my actions and then by explicit words, and that’s all she wrote. If you don’t respect someone it’s impossible to be friends with them. End of story. There is no coming back from this. It’s as bad as lack of trust, lack of mutuality, lack of empathy, lack of affection. There is nothing else to tell, many would say, closing the case, though I will tell the rest, as is my way. The details may be useful in seeing how this sort of irrefutable tribal conclusion is often reached.

What I was seeking from my friend, by the way, was that when he saw me getting aggravated as he pressed ahead in some conversation — the reddening of my face, the clenching of my arms and hands, the gritted teeth, the labored breathing, the other universal signs of approaching anger, plus my words to that effect — that he could take his foot off the accelerator, apply the brakes a little and change direction. He was increasingly unable to do this in recent years, as his own life got more and more stressful.

During our last discussion my friend told me, three separate times in the course of about twenty minutes, that he felt disrespected by me. He felt this because I had been ninety minutes late to meet him for an important discussion to try to save our failing friendship. He told me at once, and slightly sheepishly, that he knew the feeling was irrational, since we’d been loose about the time, and he’d declined to accompany me on the errands that took longer than planned so that we could meet at the original time. This talk was important to him and he’d saved the entire day for it, from two pm on.

He told me we could meet at any point, true, but still, I didn’t show up until almost 3:30 and ninety minutes is past the border line for disrespect. It was even worse when you start the clock at 1 pm, which was my initial suggestion, making me a full one hundred and fifty minutes late. It was true, he said, that I’d called as soon as I knew I was going to be late, spoke to him from the middle of a traffic jam on the Grand Central, and that each time I called he’d reassured me that he wasn’t, for once, under any particular time pressure. He’d told me not to worry, in fact. All this was true, he said, and so it might seem irrational to me that he felt disrespected, but there it was. Ninety minutes. It’s hard to ignore ninety minutes.

The second time he told me how disrespectful I’d been to him, about ten minutes later, he was in the middle of denying that he had provoked me again recently, intentionally or unintentionally. He told me that he’d only apologized to me in the most egregious previous instance because I seemed so peeved. He had actually been in the right, he told me, to insist in the face of my rising aggravation, on the annoying thing he’d been insisting on me hearing, for a second time in a week, as it turned out. In fact, he added, he’d do the same thing again, if it came to it.

I was just wrong, he said, to see what he’d done as provocation. He is not provocative, he is actually a lifelong peacemaker by nature, and besides, I was the one who’d behaved disrespectfully toward him and was now not accepting his most recent apology. Ninety minutes, he reminded me, more than enough time for my disrespect, intended or not, to sink deep inside of him.

This line of counter-attack is familiar from my childhood. My father liked to reframe everything away from whatever I was concerned about to a discussion of my terrible temper, how angry I always was. When I was young, this used to piss me off pretty quickly, the abrupt pivot from what I needed to talk about with my father to the general subject of my crazy anger. Once I got mad, I lost any chance to talk about anything. “You see,” he’d say with a smug smile, “this is exactly what I’m talking about. The People rest, you’re irrationally angry again. You really have a fucking problem with your violent fucking temper.”

My father did me a favor, in a roundabout way, since by the time I was a middle aged man this kryptonite became a weaker and weaker weapon against me. It took years of work, but years well-spent, in my opinion.

My disrespected friend, on the other hand, had been actively taught never to show anger. Anger is a threatening emotion, particularly to someone raised never to express it by word or conscious deed. “I was taught to swallow it,” his mother told me recently, “avoiding conflict at all costs is how I was raised. My mother used to tell me to use any means necessary, including creatively altering any details of what happened that could possibly make anyone mad. The only supremely important thing, according to my mother, was avoiding confrontation.”

I experienced a few untruths from this now very old woman over the more than fifty years I’ve known her, but I never held that personality quirk against her. She’s a lovely woman, outside of that. I spent hours on the phone with her last month advising her about a very aggravating and frightening situation I must keep secret. That’s the other piece about her approach to anger, fear, shame — really emotionally explosive things must always be kept secret.

The son is like her in some fundamental ways. His occasional bending of the truth was something I just accepted as a regrettable feature. I always felt I could trust him about the big things, in spite of his tendency to be less than truthful at times about small things. Funny that this equivocation was never a terrible issue in my friendship with him, I guess because our affection went back to childhood and since I always felt I could trust him in the larger sense, I never worried when he did that dance he sometimes does to try to make sure everybody is happy. I suppose I never questioned his motivations when he was being less than honest, it was for the sake of avoiding what he saw as an inevitable confrontation, I could always see that.

Now here we were in a real confrontation, and his dance was not at all endearing nor did it give me any reason for optimism. He simply could not admit, beyond saying the words “I’m sorry”, that he’d been wrong to blame me, based on a casual remark made to his wife in passing, for willfully, or recklessly trying to destroy his long-troubled marriage. I was his oldest friend, and I tried my best to help him get the full context to that particular, unfortunately weaponized remark.

I was not at all angry at the pointed accusation, odd to say. I was on the spot, I was concerned, there was a slight tightness in my gut, I felt under pressure, but I wasn’t angry. Seeing him in such distress I did what I could to try to help him. It took an hour or more to get things to a reasonable place that he could offer to his wife and their therapist in explanation of his oldest, closest friend’s alleged treachery.

When I was finally done with that he asked me if I harbored anger at him, conscious or unconscious, and told me I’d never once in our long relationship ever admitted I was wrong, had never apologized to him about anything. These are faults I work on not having, when I become aware I’ve hurt a friend I do my best to make amends as soon as I can. He brought up a thoughtless thing I’d apparently done to him years ago and I told him I was wrong and apologized, for what it was worth.

As soon as I was done telling him how sorry I was he accused me, based on something “someone in his family” had disclosed to him, of insultingly treating him like a helpless child. The vexing information he complained of being spilled by a family member (there are only three possible candidates) was something I later realized that I myself had told him months earlier. It was quite an emotional trifecta in his car that afternoon. It took a few days before it began to strike me as an unfriendly, and unfair, assault on my character and my friendship. My friend kept telling me how impossible his life was, worse than ever, the pressure on him was unbearable. I told him we needed to talk face to face, that things between us were very bad.

Now I was in a suddenly aggravating conversation, doing what I could to try to save a friendship that was hanging by a thin, fraying thread. The conversation was hard work, because he’s very smart and quite capable of putting up a strenuous emotional and intellectual fight. His position was that he’d apologized to me already, about everything, including that “thing in the car”, and that it appeared to him that I was unforgiving, unreasonably demanding more than an apology. “I apologized to you already, but my apology apparently wasn’t enough for you,” was his opening line to this conversation we needed to have to better respect each other’s feelings if our friendship was going to survive.

In his defense, I’m pretty sure he honestly does not see himself as capable of expressing vehement hostility. That, he likely believes, is my area of expertise. I am the one who expresses anger, after all. All of his efforts in interpersonal relations are intended to keep the peace, make peace, be a mediator between angry people. In the short term, his efforts sometimes work, two angry people kiss and make up. Long term, his record is not as good — as nobody’s can be when “peace” is based on persuading everyone to let bygones be bygones and a polite agreement that everybody loves each other. That’s not how love, or anger, actually works. In any event, the impasse between him and me is a special case and he really couldn’t be expected to make peace with someone as angry and unforgiving as I apparently am. Plus, of course, the disrespect, how do you get past that?

In the end, the third time he brought up the disrespect, about five minutes after the second time, I finally lost it. Outside of provoking me, I have no other theory for why he kept mentioning this perceived feeling of being disrespected. I snapped. I told him he was right to feel disrespected, that I don’t respect him, not the way he treats people, not many of the choices he’s made in his life, not his inability to empathize, to be honest about his feelings, to have any insight into his anger, to make a meaningful apology. If you apologize for hurting somebody, I said, and you continue to do the same hurtful thing over and over, your apology is a shit apology. A lie. A meaningless fucking lie, dude.

It may be worth mentioning here that we spoke for another four or five hours after that. We talked quietly, but in circles, each trying our best to somehow rescue our deeply wounded friendship. Oddly enough, he seemed to calm down and fight much less after making me explode at him.

My childhood friend now spends a lot of time studying the ancient wisdom of Judaism with an orthodox rabbi, though he chose not to contact me during the Ten Days of Repentance, a time when Jews are supposed to make amends with people they know they’ve hurt. Feeling the aggrieved party (victimhood is one of the most frequently and potently weaponized feelings in Trump’s America) I am sure he contented himself praying for his soul and the souls of his loved ones. I thought about this falling out, blamed entirely on me for my inability not to be provoked by what I falsely claim is provocation, extensively during those ten days and beyond.

I heard a rabbi talking about apology, atonement and forgiveness. A fascinating seven minute segment on On The Media (click here for the excellent conversation) . The rabbis apparently require someone seeking forgiveness to apologize at least three times before they can give up with the human and atone before God. Element number one of an apology is empathy– I know you’re hurt, if someone had done to me what I did to you I’d be hurt too, just like you are, I’m sorry I hurt you, I’ll try my best not to ever do it again. Remove empathy and you have only the empty form of an apology: I see you’re hurt and waiting for an apology, so I’m sorry, can we just move on now?

Can we just move on, you merciless fucking irrationally hurt self-righteously enraged prick?

Think about any member of his family who might want to keep in touch with me– impossible. There is a huge cost to taking sides against your own family, going against the current of your tribe’s strong feelings, even in a small way. This conflict in the soul when a person opposes the will of the tribe has been the stuff of drama forever. First, it is seen by those who trust you as disloyal. Second, if you are critical of the accepted tribal story your head can be next on the chopping block, you see how upset everyone is. Best to say nothing.

I have a friend fond of quoting his grandfather’s aphorisms, gleaned from the teachings of the rabbis. One of our favorites is “yaffa shteeka leh cha-chameem” beautiful is silence to the wise. Dig it.

That said, the only hope we humans have, if we truly seek to change things for the better, is looking as deeply and dispassionately as we can into things that are sometimes, frankly, terrifying. It is easy to resolve conflict in your own mind by reducing something to a simple scenario. Few scenarios are actually as simple as we easily convince ourselves they are.

[1] I have a CAT scan of my kidneys, bladder and ureters early next week, then a camera on a long stick up the penis into the urethra to look for the source of a large blood clot, gross hematuria, some emergency dental work I need to set up and a bit of fancy footwork to do playing the insurance odds, by the December 15 deadline to buy health insurance for 2019, trying to learn before then if I’ll need another $88,000 infusion of chemotherapy for my eventually life ending kidney disease.

Facts Actually Exist

For example, these reasonable questions from the autocratic leader of Turkey all reference facts, things that actually exist or don’t exist. These questions seek important details about things that happened in the real world, things that can be examined, things that will determine which story about the events is more true than the others:

“Why did 15 people gather in Istanbul the day of the murder? Who did these people receive orders from?” he asked. “Why was the consulate opened not immediately, but days later, for investigation? When the murder was obvious, why were inconsistent explanations given?”

“Why is the body still not found?” source

These are all things that can be investigated and verified — did fifteen security men arrive in Turkey at 3 a.m. and leave for Saudi Arabia again at the end of the same day, after the murder? Who gave the order to kill a prominent Saudi citizen who had been critical of the young Crown Prince, to kill him in the consulate? Why was the consulate closed for days after the hit? Were inconsistent stories told by the Saudis? Where is the body of the man accidentally and tragically killed after he allegedly started a fist fight against the fifteen security men in the consulate?

Not surprisingly, our leader had a different spin on the apparent guilt of the Saudi Crown Prince. In a curiously framed paragraph in the Washington Post (where Khashoggi worked for the last year) he is quoted as describing the Saudi hit as a bungled job:

Speaking in the Oval Office, Trump skewered the Saudis, saying, “They had a very bad original concept, it was carried out poorly, and the coverup was the worst in the history of coverups.” He added, “In terms of what we ultimately do, I’m going to leave it very much — in conjunction with me — I’m going to leave it up to Congress.” source

Nice skewer job, sir. Now we are led to a series of alternative thoughts, taking us away from what appears to be a brutal premeditated murder ordered from on high and into the realm of pure imagination. A very bad original concept– they should never have killed that traitor in the consulate, that was just stupid, an ill-conceived idea. You kill him elsewhere, any mobster’s preschool grandson could tell you that you don’t kill him in your own house! Carried out poorly — you don’t leave a blood spattered consulate that takes days to clean before investigators can be let in, you don’t saw up the body there, for Christ’s sake! You drive a car in and secretly take the body out intact, wrapped in plastic, in the trunk, even if you have to wait until dark. You certainly cut him up somewhere else. Sheesh… The coverup was the worst, the worst! You don’t wait weeks to make up a story that is not a bit credible, you do that immediately and you tell it over and over and over, as many times as necessary. Then you say “I’ve told you this a hundred times, that’s it. Now you treacherous fake news vampires are just being deliberately disrespectful. You want what that Saudi big mouth got? LOL!”

I don’t know what happened in Istanbul, outside of the fact that a man from the wealthy and powerful elite of Saudi society, banned from writing in Saudi Arabia by the new Crown Prince, was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. I also know that his body has not been found. Bad concept, bad execution (bad pun intended), bad coverup.

I also don’t know what happened in a house in a wealthy Washington D.C. suburb more than thirty years ago, between a drunk prep school junior and a freshman girl, out of her depth at that little impromptu gathering nobody else even recalls. I believe the sickening detail of the laughter of the drunken preppies after one of them held her down and the other later piled on. It makes sense that this moment would be indelibly imprinted on the hippocampus of the traumatized young woman.

Applying Judge Martha Kavanaugh’s famous rule for judges– ‘use your common sense, what has the ring of truth? what rings false?’ it appears that a premeditated murder of a critical journalist was committed on behalf of the young medieval crown prince of Saudi Arabia and that the trauma the woman remembers happened pretty much as she told it. Her explanation of why she was certain of the identity of her attacker rang true.

Of course, the president is excellent at answering these questions, he does it effortlessly. The Saudis did a full investigation of their badly planned, terribly covered up murder of a very disloyal guy who had it coming. The Supreme Court justice gave a very strong denial, very strong, and it turns out nobody could confirm anything that woman said, which proves she was lying.

In each case, one question remains above all others when trying to discern the ring of truth from the ring of falsity. Who stands to gain the most from the story being told the way it is? Who has the weightier motive to tell the particular story they tell? Who has the more convincing concept, execution and cover-up, to put it in the president’s purely transactional terms?

Storytelling 101 — part six

Stories, we humans need them for many reasons. They make us feel better about contradictions that are otherwise impossible to reconcile. They bolster our ideals, confirm our worst doubts, or clinch the deal on the things we already know. They cause us to walk forward, united with brothers and sisters, millions of them, not alone in a terrifyingly cold universe. We do not live random, meaningless lives that end in inevitable death, we are part of a larger story, connected to our ancestors, our living loved ones, our lives nurturing the lives of those who come after us. There is great comfort in a good story.

It was a bit of a shock to hear the story today, three weeks after the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, told by the dictatorial leader of Turkey, speaking to his parliament and the world beyond. Erdogan announced unequivocally that the journalist had been the victim of premeditated murder in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. He asked pointedly where the body of the murdered man is.

Our president has been very coy about this whole affair involving our cherished Saudi allies, telling Americans that we have to wait for the Saudi investigation into the alleged murder to be complete, so that we have all the facts. Meanwhile, he dispatched the U.S. Secretary of State, and more recently the Secretary of the Treasury, to Riyadh and CIA Director Gina Haspel to Istanbul.

It may be an odd thing, to some of us, that the president was waiting for the alleged murderer to finish investigating whether they had committed a murder, but in the rush of ongoing chaotic events, there hasn’t been much time for most people to even consider this troubling story. Besides, POTUS reminded us, the sacred democratic presumption of innocence was once again being discarded by people rushing to find someone they don’t like guilty until proven innocent. Very unfair! It’s not like the Saudi royal family is in any way comparable to the hoards of Mexican rapists surging toward our own borders.

The president compared this lynch mob mentality of those who feel the Saudis should be accountable for their crimes (including, of course, massive war crimes against the poorest nation in the Middle East) to the people who insisted there should be a full investigation into the multiple terrible allegations against innocent choir boy Brett Kavanaugh, or at least into the most credibly detailed of them. A mob, a violent angry mob, motivated by tribal bloodlust, satisfied with nothing but the fatal lynching of a good man, a good tribal monarchy, presumed guilty until proven innocent, in the president’s telling.

The president was not wrong to make the connection between the aftermaths of the murder of Khashoggi and the allegations against Kavanaugh. There were credible stories in both cases to check out and investigations to be concluded. In Kavanaugh’s case a quick investigation proved he was innocent, at least to the satisfaction of these who mattered in the 51-49 vote. In the murder of Khashoggi, after a few weeks of thorough investigation, the Saudi story was that the chubby sixty year-old journalist and critic of the thirty-three year old Crown Prince got pugnacious and decided to take on the fifteen armed men who were tasked with merely ‘interrogating’ him. He resisted, starting a fist fight, and was, unfortunately, well, he died during the altercation.

Subtle, but valuable, that passive voice. In law school we were actually instructed about the only proper situation for a lawyer to use the passive voice. If your client’s knife, in your client’s hand, was plunged into the heart of the now dead man, you can’t deny it, exactly, but you can soften it with the passive voice. The knife, admittedly belonging to my client, was plunged into the heart of the victim. Sounds so much better than the active voice since it highlights not the act itself, but facts that are not in dispute, facts that appear to damn your client. So in the belated Saudi spin on Khashoggi’s last moments alive, it’s not that he was killed, so much, as that he, unfortunately, died. Why wait more than two weeks to admit that the journalist was dead? We had to investigate everything very, very thoroughly. Where is the body? No fucking idea.

Stories rule, in every situation we can think of. Whose story do we believe? Which story makes more sense? Which story moves us more? I was practicing my writing with a new nib last night and decided to copy Lincoln’s famous 272 word Gettysburg Address. The poor Irish immigrants who were drafted into the slaughter to reluctantly fight for the Union — and die gruesome deaths, by the thousands– were transformed in Lincoln’s immortal rhetoric into ‘honored dead’ devoted to that cause ‘to which they gave the last full measure of their devotion’. That their sacrifice not be in vain, Lincoln said in his marvelous short speech, should be our work going forward as we pursue Liberty in the nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

He gave that moving speech, appealing to the better angels of our nature [1], almost 155 years ago (it’ll be 155 years exactly on November 19th). We have come very far since then in becoming a land honestly and tirelessly devoted to true liberty and equality for all. Or we have come a few halting steps, and taken many more steps backwards. Which is the more inspiring story? Not much of a contest, I’d say.

It is, of course, like this in personal life too. A man who has a long history of lying, stealing and committing fraud, a man who made death threats against his own wife and children in a moment of rage– well, your view of him will depend on which story you believe, based on your relationship to him. He has a warm, loving side too, is a supremely sensitive reader of the moods and needs of everyone around him, he has a good heart. He is a loving father, the death threats were a one time thing, he was very desperate! The story becomes tricky only if you try to reconcile the two indisputable yet jarringly contradictory sides of this fellow. For his part, the man will never admit he did anything wrong. Either you have love in your heart or you’re a vicious asshole, is his position.

The facts, we often think, matter. This turns out to be a quaint belief. The story is the only thing that matters. Was Lincoln lying about the heroic dead who so nobly gave their lives that we might have a more just nation? He was telling the story that needed to be told so that we did not conclude the massive number of American dead and dismembered had been merely a sickening instance of the intransigent, inhuman greed of a powerful few unleashing a river of American blood to protect their right to have complete control of their way of making a living, a way that makes most of us shudder today.

Likewise, if you put your friend in an unfair, untenable, even vicious situation, forcing him to convince you that he did not deliberately, or thoughtlessly, jeopardize your most sacred relationship, there is a way to put it that sounds infinitely better than that. “That thing in the car” you can call it, if you confronted him in a car. Now then, it was referred to directly. It was a thing, like many other things. Then you fucking overreacted and blew it up into this huge justification of why you can never fucking forgive me, you judgmental fucking piece of shit! You’re dead! You’re fucking dead!!!

As always, it’s all in how the story is told, my friends.

[1] “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” source

Worth knowing by heart

This is from Isaac Babel’s immortal short story Guy de Mauppassant, perhaps the greatest story ever written about the love of reading and writing.

These line below were set forth by a less skilled craftsman, but they are good enough. They worked. They’ve been rattling through my head a lot since I heard them recently. I need to set them down to study them a bit.

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I know, I know. A dead horse, a dead horse, stop whipping! I jotted these lines down the other day. I will explain. I am using a pen and ink a lot lately, because I suffer from graphomania, an idiopathic, little understood and apparently incurable condition. [1] I need to make marks on paper sometimes, it can become urgent. It’s good to have a few words handy to practice, otherwise the words are completely random and the pages look a little batty.

So these words were handy, since I noted them the other day, and I used them to practice my handwriting and try to master the new pen I need to dip into ink in order satisfy my graphomania. My graphomania has gotten worse over the years. I become quite desperate if I ever find myself without a good writing implement and some nice paper [2]. So, anyway, because I like to have a passage handy to write, unfortunately, I seem to have chosen this one.

While we’re here, let’s examine the banal and unconvincing nature of each element of this half-assed non-defense. These lines were passionately delivered in opening remarks by someone defending himself against charges that he is an angry partisan, an evasive lawyerly crafter of arguably non-perjurious but deliberately misleading answers given under oath [3], and also, of course, to drive home a strong, full-throated, sometimes tearful blanket denial of every detail of every allegation mercilessly made by those tools of the Clintons and George Soros — never drunk, never disrespectful, never out of control, never did anything bad, ever!

Let us take them line by line:

This is standard for any political conspiracy theory — an elite of smart, powerful people making devious calculations to advance their goals and then skillfully orchestrating the actions of a group of disparate conspirators in what amounts to a mob style rub-out, an assassination. I give him points for the two words used like that, calculated and orchestrated, they underscore how much thought and planning go into this kind of partisan torture and execution of an innocent opponent.

The first of these assertions blames the pitiful losers for being so doggoned enraged and desperate they’re prepared to believe ANYTHING that could discredit a good private school boy who has led a storybook life and is a wonderful dad and husband. Their pent-up rage, you understand, makes them irrational, hysterical, capable of insanely justifying any viciousness you could imagine. They are mad, nuts, blinded by anger, in a blind rage, a blindly raging mob, because they’re losers.

This kind of in-your-face violent talk about pent-up anger plays great to the Trump base– anything that makes a libtard cuck look like a loser is gold for this fist pumping MAGA demographic.

The fear that has been stoked about his twelve year federal judicial record is real. It is based on his actual record. So he takes pains to insert “unfairly”, to show that he is the victim of a coordinated effort to make him look bad. Here they go again, the haters, unfairly stoking unreasonable fear. He asserts the fear has been unfairly stoked, though he says this in passing without pause, on his way to his next serial accusation.

But if we pause to have a look at his judicial record on the federal bench we would see a straight line of decisions and dissents that are the proof of the staunchness of his political bona fides. He grew up a Federalist Society member, he resigned briefly, for the optics when he was up for appointment to the federal bench by G. W. Bush, and then rejoined the Federalists as soon as he was informed it was no breach of any kind of judicial ethics to be a member in good standing of an ideologically pure libertarian legal society.

His judicial record reflects his belief in a particular notion of American liberty– business should not be fettered, nor any citizen, corporate or human, coerced, nor is business often unduly accountable to people it may harm, in the service of the common good, corporations are persons with rights and feelings as important, and often more important, than individual human plaintiffs or groups advocating on behalf of the environment, worker safety, non-discrimination, voting rights and so forth.

This is the bit that reveals, more than any other part of his long angry opening, what an insanely partisan fuck this man is. After clerking for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, upon the recommendation of disgraced former federal judge Alex Kozinsky [4], he assisted Ken Starr in the far-ranging investigation that led to Bill Clinton’s famous perjury charges for lying about oral sex in the White House, perjury that was used as the grounds for his impeachment. Kavanuagh was one of the most extreme and zealous of Starr’s advisors. He urged Starr to aggressively press Clinton under oath, without a break, as the best way to get him to slip up and say something that could be used for a perjury charge. Talk about hypocrites… He references the second Clinton too, Hillary, one of the most divisive and hated personalities in American politics. She has reason to hate him too, according to his tribe, because Trump beat her, because she sucks and because she’s an angry, vindictive loser bitch.

The rest of Brett Kavanaugh’s independent, impartial legal career was no less partisan. After his work with the Independent Counsel Ken Starr he worked for the Bush/Cheney campaign and was one of the lawyers who successfully prosecuted Bush v. Gore which stopped the Florida recount and led to George W. Bush being declared president by a 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court in a special one-off decision that instructed posterity that it could not be cited as a precedent. He then worked loyally for the Bush White House and Bush appointed him to the federal bench a few years later. Virtually every piece of controversial legal advice he ever gave President Bush was classified and off-limits during his confirmation hearings. Deemed top secret by his friend who got to make the final call on every document.

There has never been a time in his ambitious, well-connected life when he has been impartial or independent, especially when it comes to his strong activist political ideology, his deepest convictions.

But we really should take him at his word, when he speaks to Fox News during the hearings, on the eve of his accuser’s testimony, or when he writes an editorial in the Wall Street Journal about his impartiality and independence on the eve of the Senate Judiciary Committee vote to send his name to the full Senate, and tells us again that he is not only an impartial judge, but independent. He amply demonstrated both of those things in this articulate denial of the fake charges against him. The People rest.

[1] See Confessions of an Aged Graphomaniac, E. Widaen (coming soon to a university press near you), This book combines writing with a generous portion of visual art and graphics.

[2] In the days before we finally had to put the beloved Baron down I finally broke down and paid $160 for a fountain pen. It was a beautiful pen with a unique, soft, flexible nib, and I began immediately working on writing in a more elegant hand. It was a pure pleasure to write and draw with that soft, flexible nib. Sadly but predictably, my graphomania worsened with this beautiful flexible nib fountain pen always in my shirt pocket. After six months, the nib — the part that actually makes the marks on paper — was irreparably ruined and replacing the delicate nib would cost at least $140. I was too bitter to even consider this, but later found readily available Speedball C-4 nibs that, if dipped in ink, could make a line very similar to the beautiful flexible line of the defunct $160 pen. The Speedball rig costs about $5.

[3] One seemingly petty example to stand in for many: asked by Senator Whitehouse for a definition of the term “Devil’s Triangle” on his printed yearbook page, he invented a drinking game of that name. Any search of the internet would show a definition for the term that was a sexual act, two males one female. Kavanaugh made up a drinking game by that name that was nowhere referenced on the internet, the repository of the world’s accumulated knowledge, fact and opinion.

Almost as soon as he was done falsely testifying, a new Wikipedia page was suddenly on-line, describing a drinking game similar to the one Kavanaugh had just made up. The authors of LikeWars, a recent investigation into the weaponization of social media, were interviewed recently on Fresh Air. Here is a link to the interview.

According to them, Wikipedia was updated to include the fanciful new drinking game by someone connected to the House of Representatives. Apparently, because every computer and location have a particular IP address and some other location data indicators, it could be determined that the new Wikipedia information had been uploaded by somebody sitting in the offices of the House of Representatives.

One data point, lost among billions in lightning paced cyber space, but fuck. Talk about your calculated and orchestrated political hit squad work! Nice going, Team Brett!!!

[4] Wikipedia: Alex Kozinski (born July 23, 1950)^[1] is a former United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, where he served from 1985 until announcing his retirement on December 18, 2017, after a growing number of allegations of improper sexual conduct and abusive practices toward law clerks.^[2] Kozinski was chief judge of that court from November 2007 to December 1, 2014.

During his tenure as a court of appeals judge, he has become a prominent feeder judge. Between 2009–13, he placed nine of his clerks on the United States Supreme Court, the fifth most of any judge during that time period.^[13] He has been particularly successful placing his clerks with Justice Anthony Kennedy, for whom he had himself clerked.

Impartially disproving an accuser’s lies

If you are confronted with an accusation about yourself that makes you look really bad, there is a way out. The first thing to remember is that if you apologize, it’s over. You’re guilty. Done. So, rule number one, never apologize for anything, even if they have videotape. You can always argue the tape was an extremely well-financed forgery, a complete fake.

That goes to rule number two of what are sometimes called Roy Cohn’s rules or Roger Stone’s rules. These are the rules the president lives by as well, he imbibed them at the breasts of these two father figures. Rule one is admit nothing/never apologize. Rule number two is counterattack twice as hard.

You do this by going on the offensive. Two women testify that you did aggressive, sexually fucked up things to them when you were drunk. It goes without saying that they are liars, so there is no reason to dignify those infuriating charges. Say something like this, as you snort in righteous, barely containable anger, the women peddling these vicious lies are part of:

Once you have established this new story line, everybody on your team merely has to double down. You have fired up your base, they will begin swinging their clubs for you. The skeptics and critics will always cavil, try to show illogic, etc., but if you have the money and the votes– fuck them, seriously.

The third thing you have to do, after doubling down, is keep repeating your talking point. The Democrats have no shame, they made a circus of the hearings, they denied the nominee the presumption of innocence that every accused criminal is entitled to under our system of law. They hate the presumption of innocence, they are a lynch mob, an enraged out of control mob. A mob of ruthless, lying haters!

ii

Justice Kavanaugh said he wrote this opening statement himself, a powerful refutation of all the many false charges that he’d ever done anything wrong while drunk as a teenager. I take that claim, like many of his other statements, as worthy of skepticism. In fact, I can affirm under the penalty of perjury that I wrote the above words. You can see they are in my handwriting.

Seriously, though, Stephen Miller seems to have had a hand in its composition, as does the philosopher Sean Hannity. Rush Limbaugh may also have given some editorial input.

The president is very generous with the presumption of innocence, for those who publicly kiss his ass, as well as for those whose power he respects. A strong, powerful denial is as good as a full investigation, a trial in a court and full exoneration, if you’re someone he loves. The inadvertent murder of a Saudi journalist, dismembered in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul? According to the AP, the president had this to say: “You know, here we go again with, you know, you’re guilty until proven innocent. We just went through that with Justice Kavanaugh. And he was innocent all the way.” Again, another witch hunt, like with the unconscionable Democrat torture of Brett Kavanaugh who also forcefully and strongly denied everything. Hey, he fucking denied it! The Saudi’s completely denied it. So what if they accidentally did murder a critical journalist working for the Washington Post? So? What don’t you get about a strong, powerful denial?

Oh, yeah, now I can go after Horseface. A loser. I’m not a baby. No baby! No puppet. You’re the puppets, you’re the puppets!

Unfortunately, you can’t make this shit up, boys and girls.

can you spot the typo in this second version of the statement I wrote?

Et tu, Fox News?

So much for fair and balanced, sheesh. What’t the world coming to? It’s like they’re deliberately ignoring the detailed instructions media gets for photographing the president. These instructions go back decades, a friend in news once had a copy of them. They were quite specific. Lighting is key, as is shooting him from the side where he has a full, thick head of hair and never, NEVER, shooting him from the bald side! FOX? Really? This is how you have the president’s back?

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A Fair Hearing — by a lynch mob

The worst part to a summary trial by a lynch mob has got to be the superior, mocking good cheer of everybody present in the moments before your inevitable death sentence, which has already been decided. The sick feeling you have looking around at the smiles of the people about to cheer your execution must be what a tiny prey animal feels like when it’s being batted playfully between a cat’s paws. Imagine that feeling of powerlessness seared into you by the satisfied smiles of the assembled sadists and voyeurs, before the actual sadism of the deliberately painful execution starts, as the leaders of the lynch mob make their cruel jokes at your expense. What the fuck are they laughing about? you must think, as they begin cutting your fingers off in preparation for the fiery grand finale of the lynching. What indeed are they laughing about?

I have had many opportunities to ponder this lately. SAD! I keep thinking of Judge Martha Kavanaugh’s now famous rule for a judge, the one she taught her choir boy son: use your common sense, what rings true? what rings false? If you apply this rule, most of what passes as legitimate process in Trump’s Washington D.C. doesn’t pass the smell test. Of course, this is a partisan statement, made by a hater, a loser, someone jealous that a young genius could be given a tiny million dollar loan from his father and parlay that into countless billions in personal wealth and then the world’s most powerful office. OK, perhaps he exaggerated a little, maybe the small loan was more like $60,000,000 (his lawyers are poring over the scandal rag NY Times hit piece that laid out their detailed lies about their client’s mere puffery, there must be some grounds to sue those fucks…) but that’s fake news for you, folks. The failing NY Times, am I right? Am I right?

I have to say, applying Martha Kavanaugh’s test– a very unfair test, by the way, very unfair– the woman sent by Bill and Hillary Clinton, Oprah and George Soros to destroy a good man, a pious and even saintly man, rang a little bell of truth when she said that she clearly remembers the laughter of the two drunken older boys who had locked her in that upstairs bedroom and turned the music up when she started protesting. That particular detail rings true (which is undoubtedly why Soros and the Clintons wrote the line for her). Two drunken prep schools boys would laugh after one of them forced himself on to a young woman, held his hand over her mouth, to scare the crap out of her, at minimum.

When you get a trial from a lynch mob it’s got to be quick. That’s the main feature, the extremely speedy trial. The speed of that trial is blinding because there is no need for cross-examination, testimony, investigation, motions, objections, evidence, doubt, remarks from the judge, pointless discussions about so-called justice. Justice is we get to kill this guilty fuck. Or, in other cases, justice is we have a 51-49 majority so we win– whatever you might think, whatever millions in the streets might think, whatever the mothers and fathers of every fifteen year-old girl in the country might think.

But here’s the funny part about all that, if we can take a brief break for a bit of levity and a raspy laugh, the mothers and fathers of at least 40% of the millions of American fifteen year-old girls believe that their daughters would never, under any circumstances, drink a beer in a house where the adults were gone, with a bunch of already drunk seventeen year-old guys and only one other girl there. Inconceivable, you understand? Our daughter is not a little slut! If we ever found out she is, we’d beat the fuck out of her– with sanctions I mean, sanctions: we’d ground her, take away her allowance, force her to come to church with us every Sunday. If this supposed assault really happened, why didn’t the girl tell her parents and take her punishment like a man? You see? You see how we know she’s a fucking liar!

The beauty of a quick trial, from the point of view of a lynch mob, is that so-called good Samaritans don’t get a chance to self-righteously ride up on their white horses and call time out. Even the people in the crowd, laughing and smirking, if their blood had a chance to cool down, and an appeal was made to their consciences, if other facts were brought out, might not be cheering when we took this sick bastard to pieces before we hung him over a fire and roasted his guilty ass. Do you see the point of a speedy trial? It’s in the Constitution!

I heard a discussion between investigative journalists recently, talking about their investigations. They all agreed that the most important single element of an investigation is time. The kiss of death, as far as truth emerging fully, is an arbitrary time limit imposed on the investigation. It takes time to talk to enough people, to find enough corroborating evidence, to come to publishable conclusions. If you write an investigative piece you need to have multiple sources for your reporting. Finding and interviewing them, and carefully checking out their stories, takes time. Before the investigative report is published it will be critically read by a team, including lawyers, who will challenge every detail, make sure the piece contains no uncorroborated speculation that could lead to a lawsuit for defamation. All of these things, the investigation, the vetting of every source, confirming the accuracy of the report based on the sources and other evidence, take time to do properly.

Which is exactly why a lynch mob has to act quickly, while they have the moral hot hand. We’re going to give this fuck a fair trial and then, before any bleeding heart bullshit artist outside troublemakers can start making a stink, we’re going to lift him up by his neck and watch his feet kick, which is exactly what he deserves, good ladies and gentlemen of the jury.

As far as the president being a liar– well, everyone knew that when he was running for office. He’s honest about the fact that he’s a liar– he makes no attempt to hide it, which makes him very truthful, in a way. He’s lying because he’s up against liars, you understand, he’s lying for us! His lawyers threatened to sue the NY Times for their vicious hit piece on him and they are going to sue the lying NY Times and put them out of business, watch. Just because he’s lying doesn’t mean they are not much worse liars than him, much worse liars.

You’re giving me a headache.

As for me, I have just one question– where are the people who are supposed to have the president’s back about his hair? They’re photographing him from his bald side now, those lying fucks?

Thoughts on Common Madness

I have been writing daily now for a long time. I look forward to it every day, taking some thought, some idea, and writing it out, refining it, making it as clear as I can, to myself and to the reader. It feels like a valuable exercise, particularly in the perplexing world we live in.

“All he seems to do is write, he doesn’t actually DO anything, except walk, draw and play the guitar. It’s funny that he sometimes talks about writing for ‘the reader’, since the reader he had doesn’t even read his stuff anymore. He had an aspiring writer friend who used to read his stuff everyday– well, the guy was actually a failed writer, he’d tried to write one ambitious great American novel decades ago and then kind of quit — but outside of that, he writes for an audience of one, himself. It’s kind of crazy. His stuff is sometimes pretty good. He could make some money from it, probably, if he focused and learned a bit of marketing.”

I surprise myself, sometimes, with the things I learn as I am mulling something over. For example, in writing a massive first draft of a life of my father, I eventually came to see things from his point of view. This amazed me, since the guy had always been a bitter adversary. The process of seeing the world from his vantage point snuck up on me, but one day I suddenly had a clear view from his eyes. It explained a lot to me about his life, about my life, my sister’s and my mother’s lives.

“He spent two years working steadily on a massive memoir of his father, it will be three years pretty soon. He will mention the 1,200 page manuscript he has on his computer like it’s a normal thing for someone to have written. He’s written more than a thousand pages about a complicated, difficult, unknown man nobody’s ever heard of. Think about that. A guy who’s published only two short pieces, ever, and suddenly he’s undertaking a massive, landmark biography of an unknown man.

“He gets worked up about celebrity culture, the shallowness of our materialistic, advertising-driven world, the hideous spectacle of one famous idiot after another publishing and publicizing books they are well-paid for, about losing a famous trial, working for and being fired by an internationally famous bully, having a talk show where irrational hatred is preached like a religious calling. Fame sells books, it has always been thus. He dreams, somehow, that this massive book about his father’s life will be magically published and then he’ll get that MacCarthur Genius Grant that’s been eluding him, the one that will keep him from having to eat cat food in his dotage.”

It’s easy to see me as wasting my time. Time is money, and where is the money for me? I see the world I live in as clearly as anyone. I understand that without success you are a failure, but it’s more complicated than that to me.

“Look, he’s a smart guy, nobody will dispute that, but something is amiss with him. He always admired Hillel, the Jewish sage remembered for his kindness, a man who was an illiterate shepherd until he was forty. Like Hillel, who became a leading scholar only after learning to read late in life, he got a law degree at around the same age Hillel hit his stride. Passed the New York and New Jersey bar exams on the first try and went on to earn a meager living as a lawyer that enabled him to just about pay his modest bills every month. He is kind of self-righteous about his inability to make a living, really, it’s like he judges everyone around him for their success and feels morally superior, somehow.”

Success is problematic.

“When he has no answer, he speaks in riddles. Zen koans.”

I am driven to try to understand things that perplex me. Three of my four grandparents lost everyone they ever loved back in places in Europe that had never been hospitable to their kind, places that suddenly became deadly for them. The fourth grandparent probably lost almost everyone too, but he himself, it is said, was lost. Fifteen lost brothers and sisters of my three grandparents that I can count, back in the Ukraine and Belarus. No graves, no details, names for only three of them: Chaski, Volbear, Yuddle.

“He goes into these irrelevant, morbid reveries about people he never knew. We have all lost things, some of us have experienced terrible, unbearable losses. But we get up every day, brush our teeth, take a shower, get dressed and go out into the world. We go to work, we socialize, we try to help others, we go to the gym, we participate in things. He thinks about things. He does this while being very critical of successful people who think for a living. Lately he’s on a kick about David Brooks, of all people.”

The murder of everyone on both sides of my family is no historical anomaly, really. Millions and millions worldwide have experienced similar things in the past century, and down through history, in every epoch. What is the larger meaning of this? To me it is to oppose organized violence wherever you encounter it.

“In the privacy of his rented hovel he fancies himself a kind of contemporary Gandhi. His kick the last few years is ‘ahimsa’, the philosophy of ‘non-harm’ that Gandhi made famous in the West. He certainly has a funny version of it, with his foul mouth, his opinionated remarks that he often delivers with no filter, no concern for how his views might chafe the person he’s talking to. His neighbors on the air shaft are regularly treated to his alarmingly vile curses, words I will not even hint at here, grunted loudly out of nowhere, exploding violently whenever his internet service winks out for a minute, or an hour, often long after midnight.”

There was a guy, years ago, who lived in an apartment with windows on that air shaft. I concluded he must have had Tourette Syndrome since he would bark periodically, out of nowhere, streams of staccato curses. I thought he must have had Tourette’s but maybe he had Spectrum internet service, I think now. No, this was years ago, before anyone spent hours a day staring at a computer screen, clicking on links for distraction, information and disinformation. I remember reading in one of the local tabloids that a man had been screaming incoherently in a nearby bodega and was beaten, later dying of the beating. I immediately thought the guy must have been him. I never heard any screams from the air shaft after that, seemingly confirming my theory. The only screams now come from me, I guess.

“I don’t know if he thinks it’s funny, or clever, or what, some of the things he writes. I mean, hours upon hours, millions of words by now. On papers in folders and dozens of notebooks prior to the computer age, on various computer drives since then. He even, somewhere, has the rolled up degree he got in Creative Writing. ‘Creative Writing’– seriously, they give a masters degree for that. He had to translate a long passage of very obscure literary French to get that degree, along with writing a ‘thesis’. That was many years ago, before law school, before his subsistence legal career. I mean, if you look at his life, it makes no goddamned sense.”

If you look at a human life, it rarely makes much sense. The irrationality of so much of history is readily apparent reading it, watching it unfold. We are not primarily rational actors here, we humans. Powerless people are often whipped into frenzies, sold vicious ideas like racism, carry out unspeakable acts against people who, in every fundamental way but one, are exactly like them. Powerless and supremely vulnerable. Frustration, terror and rage are much bigger forces in history than contemplation, logic, desire for fairness.

“Fairness. There we go. He likes to write as though we all have a vast array of choices, among all the daily pressures most of us face. He feels superior to the rest of us working stiffs in a life of ‘contemplation’ only possible because he had the fantastic luck, eight years ago, to inherit enough money to live without having to work for a living, provided he lived like a monk. The financial advisor his girlfriend took him to informed him that nobody could live more than five years on the amount his parents left him. That was seven years ago. He considers himself a secular monk, I suppose. It’s clear he fancies the life he lives a life of contemplation, though what he actually contemplates is hard to imagine. He speaks in generalities about the irrationality of human affairs, like he’s above it. His life is arguably the most irrational of anyone he knows.”

Any idiot can make arguments. Some of the most argumentative people in the world are the most idiotic. Something is wrong, they are stirred up, they react, they make arguments. There are not two sides to every argument, sometimes there are four or five sides. We look for logic, but most of it depends on the biases we start from. A mentor in law school told me to read Dred Scott, the 1854 Supreme Court case that infamously, but accurately, declared “the negro has no rights a white man is bound to respect.” Read that decision, he said, and find me one weak legal link in the argument– outside of the premise that blacks are inferior to whites. As he said, once you get past the premise, a flawless legal argument. I couldn’t find a single weak link of legal reasoning in that irrefutable chain of arguments and sophisticated syllogisms that led directly to the Civil War.

“He works by distraction, by the relentless, endless divergence of his written attack. Finally he just wears you down with irrelevant bits of remembered trivia, there is nothing you can do against a scripture citing devil like that. Nothing but turn away.”

Nicely played, for whatever difference it might make to anyone.

Fighting with the Only Weapon They Have

It’s a fairly safe assumption that someone who regularly suffers from a physical condition he reasonably believes is caused by rage is frequently angry. He may not often know exactly why he is angry, or even that he is so angry, but then a car cuts him off on the road, his skin cracks open, his spine painfully seizes up, and he literally can’t move without agony. So angry, he can’t even scream.

There are releases from the choking grip of anger. Vigorous physical exercise, for example, is frequently thought of as a great outlet for stress, including rage. You work up a sweat, breathe hard, drink in oxygen for your hard-working muscles, endorphins are released, you experience a sense of well-being. In movies we often see a persecuted protagonist sweatily taking out her frustrations on a punching bag, It is better to pound a heavy bag than your own head against a wall, for sure. Probably also better than the fake catharsis we so often see in American movies, vengeful violence as the final and best answer to unbearable pain. I’ve found that writing clearly while thinking through something thoroughly can sometimes make a difference, help me contextualize, understand and digest my anger.

Many people don’t see anger as a chance to work through an aggravating issue that has long plagued them, but something to repress at all costs. If a friend you admire is secretly screwing the girl you love, a young woman who then inexplicably scorns you, well… that’s something for a novel you might dream of writing some day. Bros before hos, yo– no reason to get angry about even a double betrayal. A person given to repressing anger, no matter how reasonable that anger might be, will not be tolerant of someone who sees anger as part of a process to be worked through, with important insights to be gained.

For example, if you feel yourself getting angry there are steps you can take to control how you express that anger. That modicum of self-awareness and self-control is sometimes the only thing that can prevent violence. The first essential thing is learning to recognize the initial rising of anger, that is the moment when you must become super clear in your mind and body about what you need to do differently than what the chemicals coursing through you are now urging you to do. It is not an easy process to get better at controlling an angry reaction, but I have two friends who’ve made great progress controlling their tempers and I take courage from their examples.

“Yeah, but he still makes that face,” a mutual friend will observe with a wry smile. OK, but making that face is much different than following it up with a provocative insult, violently smashing things or bashing your face, isn’t it? A much better reaction, the face, with no violence in word or deed beyond that. I’d say that is tremendous progress, and I find it inspiring. Plus, you can’t help the look on your face, beyond a certain point.

To someone at the mercy of the constantly percolating violent impulses of repressed anger, there are only the tools at hand to crudely express it. This is where the passive-aggressive playbook comes into play. Anger is threatening and must not be expressed, but I am enraged. I am also terrified, because if I express anger there’s no telling how cataclysmically destructive the violence will be. The best course of action, for someone with a mortal fear of anger, is passive aggression. In fact, it’s often the only course of action available to people afraid of conflict.

“You are a judgmental motherfucker,” the individual I have in mind here snarls, departing from his usual high civility.

We are all judges here, friend. We judge what we can accept and what we can’t, what is proper and what is out of bounds, what is fair and what is unfair. We judge crime and punishment. We all do this every day, in many choices we make. We judge this better than that, this one a friend, this one an acquaintance, this one an enemy.

“Only vicious people like you have enemies,” says the person too angry to be angry.

I rest my case.

“Yeah, easy for you to set up a straw man and knock it down, with nobody here to contradict your pontification,” says the nonjudgmental one.

Nothing could be easier, buddy.

So here’s what you do, the only power left to you. You withhold. I know all about the power of this, having been raised by a father with many weapons, but none more effective than this one. You listen to the heartfelt expressions of someone close to you who is in pain, you read them laid out at length in writing, if necessary, and then reply, simply:

You’ve expressed your view of things here very clearly and I truly appreciate the mildness of your formulations.

Period.

Many people would find this reply to a long, thoughtful letter inadequate, annoying, perhaps even provocative, but no matter. As all decent writers learn at some point, no iron can stab the heart like a period placed just right. [1]

[1] this truth was expressed by the great Isaac Babel in his wonderful story about writing and editing “Guy De Maupassant”.

Working out the puzzle

An idea popped up last night as I was trying to improve my handwriting in the little drawing book I always keep in my back pocket.

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We Americans have been locked in an endless argument, as we so often are, about who is the victim and who is the perpetrator. Cops, in cheap novels, always call the alleged perpetrator “the perp” as when they walk him, handcuffed and awkwardly trying to hide his face, past a phalanx of news photographers. While the shame of the perp walk is deliberately inflicted, because that’s what you do to a stinkin’ skel, the identity of the victim (or “vic” in these same dime store books) is often protected, because every protector naturally has sympathy and protectiveness for the vic.

All the vic did was be someplace where the perp showed up. The vic just provided a vulnerable target for the perp, a malefactor who in most cases would have done the same to just about anyone who could serve the same need. The vic just happened to be the one this time. Sucks to be the vic. Walk into the wrong room and — boom! Traumatized for life by a scumbag.

This argument rages in public and in private. I myself have been, it appears, recently turned from vic to perp because of my stubborn refusal to pretend I wasn’t treated badly several times by an old friend. The actual crime is not forgiving the old friend. The guy said sorry, even if he did the same thing again a couple of times afterwards. Actually, he also defended why he was right in the first place and said he had only apologized because I seemed hurt and mad. He is currently the deeply wounded, vulnerable party and I am the arrogant, unforgiving hypocrite, so you might want to take the rest of this, as always, with a few large grains of coarse salt.

We saw this hoary debate about who is the perpetrator and who is the victim raging throughout the recent horror show of our latest Supreme Court confirmation hearings. The only thing both sides agree about regarding the hearings is that they were a despicable circus and a national disgrace. Men of great discernment and integrity, respected intellectuals like David Brooks and Alan Dershowitz, told us after hearing the testimony of the two alleged victims, Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh, that our opinion of who was more truthful depended entirely on which tribe we belong to.

There was apparently nothing more at issue during the hearings as far as the judge’s qualifications for a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court aside from whether he drunkenly committed sexual assault on a girl two years younger than him while they were both in high school. An insignificant younger girl none of the other teenagers at the home where they were drinking during an impromptu gathering while the parents were away even recall, apparently. Sometimes history narrows to a point like this one.

Let’s assume for a moment that Kavanaugh was an innocent man and the victim of a vicious coordinated political hit, as he angrily insisted he was. Some people get righteously angry when they’re accused of shameful things, we all can understand that, it proves nothing about a person’s innocence or guilt that he reacts with rage instead of humility to a terrible accusation. If this inflammatory accusation of atrocious behavior (and a criminal act) was concocted out of thin air by George Soros and the Clintons for nakedly political reasons, Kavanaugh had every right (if not every reason) to be outraged. So let’s put his rage about the accusations to the side now, shall we?

Not every innocent person calls for a full investigation of the facts to prove their innocence, to clear their good name. One reason an innocent person may not want to undergo an FBI investigation into specific allegations of something he never did is because you never know what other unfortunate facts a deep investigation into a specific, long ago time in your life might uncover. Suppose you had been nothing more than a clandestine (to your parents and teachers) heavy drinker back in your high school days— would you want that made public as you were about to be confirmed for a seat on the highest court in the land? Of course not.

Accepting those two scenarios about Kavanaugh’s righteous anger at the accusation and his, and his Party’s, resistance to a full FBI investigation to clear his name, it is possible to understand both reactions as guiltless displays of human feeling. Construed this way they constitute no proof that he was hiding anything, or had anything to hide, or had ever hid, or continues to hide, anything. For the sake of argument, let’s give Kavanaugh the benefit of the doubt on his demeanor under pressure, the “presumption of innocence” his defenders get so worked up about when it was rudely denied him during the rush toward a quick FBI probe.

Next we come to the substance of Mr. Kavanaugh’s actual defense, which was submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee in writing the day before Blasey Ford testified. You can read his complete written denial here, as it was submitted to the Committee the day before both victims testified. The most muscular and effective allegations about how he was the one being victimized were left out of the first draft of his statement. He wisely omitted them from the written statement he gave to the Committee, why give your determined enemies a chance to organize themselves against your best attack? He added these powerful touches to the statement he passionately delivered on national TV:

This has destroyed my family and my good name. A good name built up through decades of very hard work and public service at the highest levels of the American government.

This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election. Fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record. Revenge on behalf of the Clintons. and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.

This is a circus. The consequences will extend long past my nomination. The consequences will be with us for decades. This grotesque and coordinated character assassination will dissuade competent and good people of all political persuasions, from serving our country.

And as we all know, in the United States political system of the early 2000s, what goes around comes around. I am an optimistic guy. I always try to be on the sunrise side of the mountain, to be optimistic about the day that is coming.

But today, I have to say that I fear for the future. Last time I was here, I told this committee that a federal judge must be independent, not swayed by public or political pressure.

I said I was such a judge, and I am. I will not be intimidated into withdrawing from this process. You’ve tried hard. You’ve given it your all. No one can question your effort, but your coordinated and well-funded effort to destroy my good name and to destroy my family will not drive me out. The vile threats of violence against my family will not drive me out.

You may defeat me in the final vote, but you’ll never get me to quit. Never.

If you are a Republican partisan, or even a right wing radical with no allegiance to any particular political party who is simply eager to have a reliable Supreme Court vote for your views, you were roused by these words. An innocent man, attacked by vicious, well-funded partisan enemies, forced to defend a spotlessly good name forever besmirched by a godless conspiracy of people without honor, shame or any sort of morals. Good for him! To someone impressed by him these lines will sound like a kind of sweet, infinitely just music:

This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election. Fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record. Revenge on behalf of the Clintons. and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.

People worried about your long record as a Republican operative, your troubling and heavily redacted partisan past, your consistent twelve year judicial record, your evasiveness and surliness during the hearings, the many misleading and false answers you gave, the haste of your controversial appointment, will not be reassured by these words, of course. The words you spoke in portraying yourself as a saintly victim make you sound like an angry partisan and the farthest thing from the impartial, independent arbiter you claim to be, but that’s not the point. Fuck those people!

Just one thing troubles me. Are the American Bar Association, the dean of Yale Law School, retired Supreme Court justice and lifelong Republican John Paul Stevens, the many classmates coming forward to corroborate stories of your heavy drinking and occasional abusiveness while drunk all also part of this vast, vindictive well-funded left wing conspiracy?

Even more ominously, what in God’s name could have possibly possessed the Jesuits, the famously fair-minded and intellectually rigorous Catholic sect that founded and run the elite prep school you attended, to take part in this calculated and orchestrated political hit by outside left-wing opposition groups? For the love of God, Brett, how could these defenders of the faith have so treacherously, so faithlessly, abandoned you? How did the left-wing conspirators recruit even the politically nonpartisan Jesuits? A truly devilish bit of partisan treachery. I read about it in this AP account:

The Jesuits took an even stronger stance. Following Thursday’s testimony by Kavanaugh and his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, the magazine of the Jesuit religious order in the United States publicly withdrew its endorsement of Kavanaugh. An editorial in America Magazine declared that “this nomination is no longer in the best interests of the country.”

Kavanaugh was a student at Georgetown Preparatory School, a Jesuit high school, when the alleged assault took place.

The editorial doesn’t attempt to parse whether Kavanaugh’s or Ford’s testimony was more credible. But it concluded that “in a world that is finally learning to take reports of harassment, assault and abuse seriously,” the nomination must be abandoned.

“If Senate Republicans proceed with his nomination, they will be prioritizing policy aims over a woman’s report of an assault,” it states. “Were he to be confirmed without this allegation being firmly disproved, it would hang over his future decisions on the Supreme Court for decades and further divide the country.” [emphasis mine, ed.]

The magazine had previously given Kavanaugh a full-throated endorsement, stating that his addition to the Supreme Court may furnish the fifth vote needed to overrule Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion nationwide. The Catholic Church firmly opposes abortion.

That original endorsement editorial concluded that “anyone who recognizes the humanity of the unborn should support” Kavanaugh’s nomination.

The reversal is significant given that Kavanaugh has cited his Catholic faith and Jesuit education in defending himself against Ford’s accusations. In his opening statement Thursday, Kavanaugh twice referenced his years as a student at Georgetown Prep.

The Jesuits’ editorial stated that unless Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations were firmly disproved doubts would hang over Kavanaugh’s future decisions and further divide the country. Fortunately for Judge Kavanuagh he was nominated by a man who doesn’t know how to lose. As far as firmly disproving all doubts, the FBI did it in less than five days. Disproved by all nine witnesses who didn’t recall anything bad about the nominee! Give the man his robe. Next case! Suck on that, Jesuits!

Jesus, it is so hard to keep your faith in a world as corrupt as this cruel place!