Reconciliation vs. Prayer

Reconciliation is crucial for restoring trust after violence has been done between people. An apology is a good first step, as long as acknowledgement of the harm done is part of it, and an honest vow to try not to do it again. I know that what I did was bad, I know how much it hurt you, how much it would have hurt me, I am sorry I hurt you, I will try hard not to do it again. Hard, hard words for anyone to utter.

It takes humility and self-confidence to speak that way to someone we’ve been unfair to, and a strong desire to mend torn feelings and have an ongoing relationship. It takes resolve to keep a promise to try not to repeat the harm, and sensitivity to the other person’s expression of discomfort when you start doing it. The most important single part, after the apology is accepted, is to be vigilant against repeating the harmful behavior. Without that last step the apology is as empty as an abuser’s protestations of love.

A soothing apology comes from a real desire to make peace, to abandon all the quick, limitless rationales that are the human genius, the imagined scenarios where what we did was not really so bad, where the unforgiving asshole waiting for our demanded apology is actually the aggressor, the self-righteous fuck. The sufficiency of my apology, which I gave without condition or eye roll, is now under dispute! Fuck him! Fuck that fucking prig!

I am a prig. I had a friend weaponize a casual observation I made during a conversation. My weaponized remark was shoved up the spouse’s ass at a therapy session, with explosive results. The spouse contacted me in utter panic, showed up eye lid twitching, informed me that either through malice or stupidity I had rendered their marriage untenable. My words, “oh, that makes more sense, I was left with some questions after X’s story” adduced as proof that X was a chronic liar, made me responsible for the destruction of a long marriage. Neither spouse was sure they could still be friends with someone like me. That would depend on how convincingly I recanted the awful thing I had said. Their therapist had recommended I be confronted, and so I was.

We live in a world where fucked up shit happens continually. Nothing personal, really, except in a case like this, where there is an element of choice in how this stark, allegedly vicious crime by an old friend is framed and prosecuted.

So I brought what I thought was logic to bear. Y told me a story over the course of five minutes, relating in detail events involving X, Y and Z that had happened a few months earlier. X had told me the same story right after it happened, in about thirty seconds, and hating Z, I had zero follow-up questions about it, though the story made little sense to me at the time. X had concluded his short telling with the words “I probably shouldn’t have told you this…”. Y’s longer version made much more sense than X’s short one. I said so.

That was the crime I was on trial for. My friendship with X and Y was at stake. I had to remember very clearly exactly what I’d said weeks ago when I compared one story to the other version I’d heard several months earlier.

I told my friend, at one point, if I maliciously confirmed your spouse’s opinion that you are a chronic liar, neither of you should be friends with me. A friend waiting for a moment of weakness to strike a painful blow is not a friend. If you don’t believe my comment was an honest reaction to a retold story that made more sense than the original version, there’s nothing more to be done here.

Of course, it turned out there were some other old wounds that needed to be pried open and poked into, other accusations against my character that I needed to make an accounting for. I did the best I could, seeing my old friend in obvious pain, without realizing how insane what I was being put through was. That didn’t sink in until later. In the meantime X reported that things were better with Y after the confrontation with me.

I know what you’re thinking, dear reader. These people are clearly nuts. What kind of example is this insane trap they put you in? It is the insane trap of two desperate, drowning people. What kind of example is it?

It is no more insane that a lot of wars. Kill them over there so they don’t kill us here, freedom on the march, manifest destiny, Remember the Alamo, the Gulf of Tonkin, a new Hitler, a new Hitler, a modern-day Hitler. We are not known for not being insane when we are whipped into a rage or goaded by terror. My friend X in the car was mostly insane when he confronted me about all the malice he imagined I had toward him. The confrontation was no more insane than many things in the news every day. Of course, we have a fairly insane person in charge of a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons, so there’s that.

I wrote all about this as it was unfolding and didn’t intend to go so far into the details this time. I am musing on it today because X’s mother has called me several times lately, looking for advice nobody can possibly come up with in the quantity she needs. I’ve done my best to help her figure out the lay of some very troubling land. X is very close to mom, though apparently has revealed nothing about our falling out. X’s mom asked me to keep our conversation secret, as is their way, so I have already violated that trust, in a technical sense. Oh, well.

To conclude, then. During the last of the ten days when our religion requires us to approach anyone we have wronged and make amends, if possible, X sits in the shul praying with the rabbi of the congregation that awarded Donald Trump’s business partner, a convicted felon (grievous assault with a deadly weapon among other, more white collar felonies where he got immunity for giving evidence against his criminal colleagues) its Man of the Year award twice in recent years.

They pray, for a better world, for more understanding, for forgiveness, for prosperity. I begrudge them nothing. But, truth, those prayers are not the same as taking an honest inventory of our deeds and seeking actual reconciliation, by our actions, with people we have recently hurt.

In the end, we choose to hear a friend who is in pain or to keep fighting for some kind of imagined supremacy in an ongoing war we have no insight into. The endless, unreasoned war is some fucked up shit, my friend. X is no doubt thinking the same thing as his rabbi asks the congregation, including their generous Man of the Year, to please rise, please be seated, please rise.

Fact or Fiction

My version of the story may be fact, or fiction. You can take that to the bank, even though fact and fiction may be woven together without a seam and almost always are. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. Think of any story you’ve heard, it contains the seeds of fact and the seeds of fiction grown together. A little bit of fiction thrown into an otherwise completely truthful account of a well-recalled event can explain something in a very satisfying way sometimes. Wisdom, if it is to be had, is choosing what is most useful, most evocative and real, among the interactive facts and fictions.

Wisdom, I joke. There is only the way we treat each other.

I think of how many ways a child might be lied to. The lies are limited only by the imagination and determination of the liar. What do we call these lies? Fact, because the world may repeat them loudly, over and over, in a chorus sung to an earwig tune that is hard to drum out of mind? Fiction, because in the clear light provided by someone who loves you without selfishness or thought of profit, the ridiculousness of these lies can be easily seen?

How about the boy who watches his father be emasculated every day, what is the fact and fiction in his life? Hard question. What is it to be “emasculated”? It is to take away from a man, by some kind of force, the vital sense that, in a rugged moment, he can protect himself, protect others. This is the one thing a man has, at heart — the image of himself as strong enough to protect himself and those he loves. Forget all the other trappings of what we think of as toxic masculinity, and no mistake, those are some toxic trappings to what we commonly think of as masculinity. Emasculation is called that because the symbolism is easy to grasp: you hold a man powerless and forcibly remove that masculine quality that makes him think he has any control. [1]

We can call this rendering powerless by other names, or by no name, and it is certainly not restricted to use against men. It is routinely and brutally done to women, and to vast multitudes of children, to anyone who attempts to act, as we all start off doing, with self-agency. With the belief that our life is of infinite value, and unique, that our soul is a miracle, that there is right and there is evil and that we must be warriors against evil without becoming like those motherfuckers.

I see myself standing with the kid who is having his ass kicked. I see myself there, even though I am almost never there during the actual ass whupping. Kids have their asses handed to them every day, every minute of every hour of every day. The things routinely done to kids make a certain kind of grown up want to scream. Screaming is no help in this case. A scream is only a reaction to horror, a turing up of the volume, it only makes things worse for everybody.

Picture a hand moving quickly enough and strongly enough to intercept the fist heading toward the child’s face. Picture Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kun Do, the Way of the Intercepting Fist, not practiced for personal glory, not for inflicting punishment on a violent jackass, but to intercept the fist, turn aside the blow, save the child from the punch, make the adult hesitate, afraid, perhaps become amenable to a larger discussion of right and wrong.

Picture the same child at dinner, watching someone she loves reducing her father to a puddle of fear, the awful lessons she must draw from it. My father can’t protect me, my mother is a monster! Fact or fiction, makes no difference in the individual case, everyone can picture this child’s dilemma. The best fiction, of course, has the ring of truth throughout, is played without false notes. Maybe it didn’t happen, maybe it couldn’t even happen, no matter, the story itself makes sense. Real people would really do that, or want to do that, or dream of doing that. The line is not always clear between fact and fiction, is it?

“Who are you talking to, dear?”

And then, of course, there is always “who are you talking to, asshole?” which can be said in every shade of viciousness or perfect politeness if the tone is done just right. And the tone is always done just right, done to a turn.

[1] Note, please, how daintily I have avoided any reference to the horrifically graphic castration. Oops.

Nurture the Creative Spark Inside

Preserving the joy of creativity is essential to a happy life, in my experience. I don’t know how you nurture the creative spark inside you, though I hope you handle that spark with great tenderness. I wish you the blessing of doing something you love that transports you, involves you completely, makes you feel grateful to be doing it. The surest way to nurture this feeling is by truly loving the things you create and everything about the process of invention and refinement that leads to their creation.

Speaking for myself, the reverb on a note sustained on the guitar is reason enough to love that note, continue to exercise vibrato upon it, to love the notes that preceded it, the ones to follow, to enjoy their interaction with the beat. A good cook gets to eat well, feed others well with the best ingredients perfectly combined and prepared. The sung note, melding with the harmony of a chord, with other voices, the sound of it all, a kind of miracle. Pick whatever you love most, and love it from time to time. Your love may light a love in others who cannot help but be a tiny bit inspired. The world is better for that love.

For me, late last night, finding this great, discarded Speedball C-4 nib, stuck in an old cork handled nib holder I’ve had for years, dipping it in ink and bringing it down toward a nice piece of drawing paper, with a low-medium tooth, made me excited to drag the ink across the page. That thrill on contact, to see what a succulent line it was, was enough to make me wonder, did I actually have anything to write in my best flowing hand?

It was no matter, just as much fun to draw the knife, pen the word ‘anodyne’ on its handle. I thought how nice it would be to hand write the short note for the short Book Jacket copy I’m going to send to one of my oldest friends tonight.

She would immediately wonder why the hell I’ve drawn folding knives, Opinels by the looks of ’em, all over my note explaining what the enclosed page was. I answered that question as best I could, alongside the knives, and while I dipped the pen and wrote that answer I had no wonder about what to write to keep the pleasure of using this lovely nib going. A pleasure on top of a pleasure. Pretty good, in the scheme of things.

The Ten Days of Repentance

The rabbis have long spun the fable about how God, the All-Merciful, sits over His gigantic ledger, the Sefer Chayeem, the Book of Life, during the first ten days of the new year. In that unimaginably vast book the fate of every human is mapped out in detail for the coming year. Who shall live and who shall die. Who shall wax rich and who shall be poor. On and on, to every disease, accident, windfall, every twist of fate we can, none of us, imagine.

The Sefer Chayeem and God sitting over it like a divine accountant is a metaphor, of course, and we moderns see it that way. I think we do. I can’t speak for the rest of the moderns, but to me the image has the ring of a poem written to explain the inexplicable. Jews have the first ten days of the year to make amends to people we have wronged. When night falls on the tenth day, Yom Kippur, right after the final long blast on the shofar, a ram’s horn, and before the Jews rush home to eat after a long, high-stakes day fasting and praying, God seals the Book of Life and everyone’s fate is sealed for the year. That’s the poetic version, anyway.

The Jewish New Year (5779 this year) is the first day of ten days, Days of Awe, when Jews are required to search our souls and do whatever we can to set right whatever we have upset during the previous year. This is difficult work, since we rarely do things that are knowingly wrong, making it much harder to see our own bad deeds than it is to see the ones others commit towards us, and as the songsters sing, sorry seems to be the hardest word. It is rare, and the truest sign of love, to feel another person’s pain as strongly as your own. In those situations, we are required to act, directly and without hesitation.

Meanwhile, God sits with the Sefer Chayeem open, watching. God is watching for a hard heart to soften, for someone who has angrily told a loved one to fuck himself, at the worst possible moment, to approach that same person and sincerely show contrition, and love. When someone who has wronged you is truly contrite, you should never turn them away. Under that circumstance, especially during the Ten Days of Repentance, a Jew is obliged to accept a sincere apology, a repaid debt, an attempt to restore what was torn or taken.

Like I said, this is fucking hard work all around, and, because humans are a deeply flawed species of ape, is work more often not done at all. There are the endless prayers at this time of year, hours and hours in the temple, rising and being seated. Please rise, please be seated, please rise. Special prayers are chanted aloud and others are recited silently, standing. The prayers beseech God to show His infinite mercy, not like to all the victims of unspeakable horrors, who seemed to have died or been maimed without any mercy from the All-Merciful, but to those who promise their everlasting love and unfailing obedience to His will, whatever that may be, however it may stack up against Free Will, which, as far as I can see, is almost as puckish a phrase as Free Market. Almost. Unlike the Free Market, Free Will is something each of us possesses, in matters of our heart, in how we act, even if it seems to be the merest spark.

Personally, I am not one for prayers, for rising and please being seated. It was ruined for me in my youth, the whole congregation rising and being seated again together, and rising, and being seated. Struck me as an exercise in appearing to be doing the right thing, without the hard work of actually having to do anything more than turning pages, rising, being seated, mouthing words in a language you don’t know to a deity who may or may not exist. A communal worship of the source of all that is miraculous, while all that is truly horrific is, we are told, the work of humans abusing the great God-given gift of Free Will. God loved us all so much, you dig, that He left each of us free to become Hitler, if we can. Nice work, God.

Of course, God needs my praise as much as He needs my prayers. Which is to say, not at all. The only thing God or, more to the point, my fellow creatures, need from me is my heart and my mind and the actions I take in this broken world. Our life is only the things we do, no matter how hard we pray to be spared responsibility for the most thoughtless of our deeds and the people we hurt.

One two punch for 9/11

JOHN BOLTON: Today on the eve of September the 11th, I want to deliver a clear and unambiguous message on behalf of the president of the United States. The United States will use any means necessary to protect our citizens and those of our allies from unjust prosecutions by this illegitimate court. We will not cooperate with the ICC [International Criminal Court], we will provide no assistance to the ICC and we certainly will not join the ICC.

AUDIENCE: [Applause]

JOHN BOLTON: We will let the ICC die on its own. After all, for all intents and purposes, the ICC is already dead to us.

AMY GOODMAN: John Bolton also threatened to directly target judges at the ICC.

JOHN BOLTON: We will respond against the ICC and its personnel to the extent permitted by U.S. law. We will ban its judges and prosecutors from entering the United States, we will sanction their funds in the U.S. financial system and we will prosecute them in the U.S. criminal system. We will do the same for any company or state that assists an ICC investigation of Americans.

AMY GOODMAN: During his speech, John Bolton also announced that the Trump administration would close the Palestine Liberation Organization’s office in Washington in response to a Palestinian effort to push the ICC to investigate Israel for war crimes.

JOHN BOLTON: The Trump administration will not keep the office open when the Palestinians refuse to take steps to start direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel. The United States supports a direct and robust peace process, and we will not allow the ICC or any other organization to constrain Israel’s right to self-defense.

AMY GOODMAN: Palestinian diplomat Saeb Erekat criticized the move.

SAEB EREKAT: We were notified unfortunately that they will close the office and lower the Palestinian flag. This is an affirmation of the U.S. administration’s determination to continue its process of blackmail and extortion and undermining the peace process and the two-state solution. They have cut all humanitarian aid.

When you have angry people who believe their imagined view of life is more compelling than what is actually happening in the world — you get this kind of madness. The U.S. wants peace and prosperity for everyone, and we will kill you if you stand in our way. The infuriated John Bolton, a rash man who loves war, ladies and gentlemen. Working with fellow savage warrior (not that the younger version of himself or anyone he knows would ever die in the wars he supports) our current president.

Peace be upon you, and may whatever you worship protect you from the merciless designs of such men.

Persecuted Rich White Men

Bill Maher uses the term “whiny little bitch” to refer to our massively sensitive (when it comes to his own feelings) president’s constant complaining about the world’s unfairness toward him. It is the prerogative of rich white men to complain; that there are other people richer than them, that taxes are unfair, that the roads they drive on should not be partially paid for by their wealth. We just take this for granted, it is the way it is. Simple. Money talks and you shut the fuck up.

Of course it’s easy to pick on rich white men who whine about unfairness. Low hanging fruits, you sassy bitches! They can’t help it. Why be so judgmental just because they tend to be greedy, entitled, overbearing in-your-face assholes? They are winners. Isn’t it kind of automatic for losers to resent winners? Automatic or not, that’s exactly what I’m doing, a loser being a reflexive hater, but I can explain.

I just saw a piece detailing the reasons why powerful TV executive Les Moonves was finally fired by his corporate overlords. He apparently forced a few women to perform oral sex on him, exposed himself to others, threw at least one against a wall, damaged careers and professional reputations of women who hurt his feelings by refusing his unwanted sexual advances. Moonves is a man with a beautiful wife much younger than he is. You’d think… never mind. He’ll be OK, one suspects, with his severance package worth over $100,000,000, luckily for him (skillfully, really) his lawyers made sure there was no “morals clause” in his employment contract. Isn’t his ignominious ouster from a position of power punishment enough for his widely alleged shitheadedness?

It’s not really about sex, the abuse of power that hyper-sexualized alpha apes like Moonves exhibit. Rape, it is said, is about power, rage and domination, not about sex at all. Forced sex is used to express rage, to demean the victim, to increase the raping asshole’s damaged sense of self-esteem. Rapists and other sexual predators are not romantics, they’re the opposite. It’s easy to dump on the evil bastards, of course, and I won’t stoop to it. Fuck them is all I can really say about it at the moment.

Outside of the realm of sexual abuse, we have many institutionalized abuses that are far too lucrative to ever halt, or even seriously question. Racism comes to mind. It’s big business. Always has been here. You capture and import a gigantic workforce with all the rights of cows, sheep, pigs. The good looking ones you can screw whenever the urge moves you. You can work them to death, in the manner of slave laborers cheaply rented out by the SS to far-sighted, bottom line focused German corporations during World War Two.

A decade after the Civil War you can put a law meant to protect the rights of freed slaves into a deep, unappealable judicially induced coma for ninety years (I’m thinking here of the Fourteenth Amendment, reduced for a century to protecting three or four limited federal rights [1]). Why not? The Ku Klux Klan has rights too, after all. Nobody can appeal a Supreme Court decision, no matter how morally repulsive it might be. Law of the land, boys and girls, decided by nine unsmiling Americans appointed for life, like supremely impartial family guy Brett Kavanaugh, overruling, with a one vote majority of their peers, explicit legislation by pointing to some imagined higher principle that nobody can question.

I’m thinking of the financial disaster of 2008, and the inevitable next one. The 2008 massive upward redistribution of wealth was in the making for years. George W. Bush made speeches encouraging people to find the American Dream by owning their own homes. Profiting off people getting mortgages they couldn’t pay wound up being a gigantic windfall for financial industry profiteers. Unsophisticated consumers who wouldn’t have qualified for the gigantic loans soon began defaulting on their mortgages, the rate they had been paying suddenly “ballooned” as they sometimes do in that industry. This tsunami of debt was an additional windfall, unscrupulous highly paid geniuses figured out there was a way to make a killing by repackaging the debt, creating investment opportunities buying and selling slices of it (tranches, don’t you know?), having those opportunities falsely rated triple A, the safest investments around. Everybody was in on it. It was massive fun for a while, certain super wealthy people made shitloads of money. Then it all collapsed.

The government, reviled by super-rich financial titans as tyrannically trying to stifle the Free Market whenever an attempt is made to regulate anything, was forced to come up with enormous stacks of tax-payer money to rescue financial institutions that were “too big to fail”. Unlike you and me, who have the freedom to fail every day, the absolute freedom to move from a home to a cardboard box somewhere any time our luck turns bad, these gigantic money making enterprises could not be allowed to fail. The world economy would have gone into the toilet.

We get all this. We have State Capitalism here, the government enables this kind of profiteering because it’s good for the economy. The economy being a synonym for the gigantic roulette wheel that is the Stock Market. Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen. Pick right and you will do well. Pick badly and you have nobody to blame but yourself. Who could begrudge the rescued financial giants the record $135,000,000,000 compensation they paid themselves in 2009? It’s not as though any of them were caught in a random stop and frisk with a joint in their pocket. These super important men are too big to jail, or fine, or even prosecute. Be reasonable, boys and girls. We all know the set up.

We cannot imagine it any other way. This is by design. This is what freedom looks like in the land of the free and the home of the brave. If you are a liberal, wise-ass senator given to asking tough, probing questions at confirmation hearings, and your hand falls in the wrong place on a female body during one of a thousand campaign photo ops, your own high-minded, corporately funded party will force you to resign as a sexual predator. If you are a powerful, avowedly apolitical executive who just happens to like having your dick sucked by any woman you find attractive, well, allowances can be made. You see, this is the Free Market, really. It’s free until it’s time for loser suckers like us to pay for it.

One of the cardinal rules of wealth is never risk your own money. Our president, who doesn’t grasp much, who is, in the words of a sassy comedian, a “whiny little bitch,” knows this. Witness the billions he personally saved during his multiple business failures, his serial bankruptcies. Even he knows that fundamental rule of wealth: let the fucking suckers suck on not getting paid, avoid taking a dime out of your own pocket at all costs.

Of course, I should not really be writing this today. It is the first day of the Jewish year today, year 5779 since God created the world (I know). Many of my co-religionists are in synagogue (that’s a Greek word for ‘shul’) today praying to the all-merciful Creator who gave us all free will, the Free Market and every other freedom. Whether God is a desperate creation of humans born into an often terrifying world that ends in each of our inevitable deaths is not my place to speculate about today. Only actions matter. It is what we do, not what we espouse, that matters.

I can believe with all my heart, with all my might and all my soul, that we have a duty to our fellow creatures never to mistreat them. If I mistreat them in spite of this fervent belief, well, call me what I am. That is all we can ask of our fellow creatures, to live by our highest ideals. Unless, of course, they are rich white men, the most unfairly persecuted group on God’s polluted earth. We are morally obliged to give those freedom-loving involuntary fellatio connoisseurs a pass every time. Fair is fair and hard to picture it any other way.

[1] The Supreme Court decided that the Fourteenth Amendment was not intended by its framers (only a few years earlier) to make the protections of the Bill of Rights applicable to the States (it was, and currently is). The Court restricted the 14th Amendment to the enforcement of the rights to use navigable interstate waterways and ports, to freely migrate from state to state and to be protected on the high seas. Civil Rights were, according to the Court, completely at the discretion of the States and not intended to be protected by the federal government under the 14th Amendment. Civil Rights violations by the states could not be challenged via the 14th Amendment, or in any other way, for almost a century. A century of terrorism at law for unlucky former slaves and several generations of their descendants.

Here’s a bit of the sickening, neutral and impartial sounding cavil of the famous 1873 Slaughterhouse cases that decided the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment a few years after it became part of the post-Civil War constitution:

Was it the purpose of the fourteenth amendment, by the simple declaration that no State should make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States, to transfer the security and protection of all the civil rights which we have mentioned, from the States to the Federal government? And where it is declared that Congress Shall have the power to enforce that article, was it intended to bring within the power of Congress the entire domain of civil rights heretofore belonging exclusively to the States?

All this and more must follow if the proposition of the plaintiffs in error be sound…. [T]he effect is to fetter and degrade the State governments by subjecting them to the control of Congress in the exercise of powers heretofore universally conceded to them of the most ordinary and fundamental character….

We are convinced that no such results were intended by the Congress which proposed these amendments, nor by the legislatures of the States which ratified them.

— Slaughterhouse Cases: 83 U.S. 36, 77–78 (1873)

“[T]he effect is to fetter and degrade the State governments by subjecting them to the control of Congress in the exercise of powers heretofore universally conceded to them of the most ordinary and fundamental character…”

Jesus, wasn’t that exactly the reason our divided nation had just fought the Civil War, to decide that question?

The states that seceded from the United States and took up arms to defend the rights of their wealthiest to own slaves were forced, after their military defeat, to ratify the wartime amendments as the price of getting federal money to rebuild their destroyed infrastructure. As the Court reasonably points out, why would the legislatures of such States agree to federal protection of the rights of their former chattel, chattels they’d spent rivers of blood and gold to keep in slavery?

In the more objective light of hindsight, and ongoing racist practices from coast to coast, we say to the former slave states and their ilk: you lost the fucking bloody war you started, you goddamned racist motherfuckers! Losers walk. Traitors too, with malice toward none. Now take down your proud flags of treason, too, even though the 14th Amendment protects your First Amendment right to fly them.

“Perjury Trap”

The only person who has to fear a “perjury trap” is someone who can’t control his lying. A person with things to hide, given to lying to get himself out of trouble, to distract, to divert attention from their actual deeds, is the likeliest victim of a ‘perjury trap’. A person whose deep sense of shame and inferiority will cause him to reflexively lie when any probe gets close to that shame and fear walks right into a perjury trap. “Perjury trap” think about that phrase. It’s an admission that the person going to testify under oath is a compulsive liar, no?

It’s not surprising that the best Rudy Giuliani can do for his friend the president is cough up the talking point of a “perjury trap”. He appears to be as demented as his buddy when he speaks on right wing talk TV in defense of the often insane- seeming statements his friend makes. Giuliani likes to appear to be a ‘stand up guy’, and so he talks tough, and loyal. I will not let the president put himself in a no-win situation where his lies will have legal consequences, no way! Perjury Trap! Fuck that. We’re going to hit Mueller’s investigation with both barrels.

It is a tribute to the times we live in that this curious phrase appears to be good enough for purposes of telling Mueller to fuck himself on right wing TV. “My client is a well-known and prodigious liar, as well as a master of puffery and the world’s smartest genius. I’m not going to subject him to perjury charges in an obvious perjury trap. Why would I place him in a situation where he could go to jail for lying? He does what he does, I do what I do. The truth is a completely separate question and your truth may not be my truth, or the president’s. You see what I’m saying?”

When Trump was asked the other day about the short jail sentence for an aide named George Papadopolpous, who perjured himself, he prevaricates a bit, mentioned Flynn, out of the blue (another former close associate who is talking to Mueller) and ended with a curt, smart-sounding “perjury trap.” It’s good to be on the same page as your lawyer.

By the way, PBS did its best, prior to the 2016 elections, to alert people to the perjury trap the nation was about to fall into, thanks to ingenious work by one campaign identifying and winning a few dozen crucial districts to get the Electoral College while the other campaign did a victory dance on the fifty yard line the night before the election. Check this 4:16 piece out, though it may also make you holler a bit.

Committee Classified

Brett Kavanaugh is an extreme right wing rich man’s dream Supreme Court justice. He rules for corporations, almost every time. He does not necessarily think a woman’s right to an abortion should be constitutionally protected across the country (although what business that is of extreme right wing rich men is a mystery to me). He consistently rules against consumers, employees, the disabled, voting rights, the environment, the air we breathe, the water we drink. He rules for gun manufacturers and the Scalia-created expansive view of the Second Amendment. He has no problem with the right to own an arsenal of assault weapons being constitutionally protected. He has no comment about his involvement in the Bush Administration’s torture program, though he admitted he probably worked with John Yoo, author of the torture memo, in the days after 9/11 when it was “all hands on deck”. He could not promise to recuse himself from any case involving the investigation into Trump, even after probably, and improperly, speaking with Trump’s lawyers about the Mueller investigation.

Kavanaugh has a perfect score on every issue dear to bottom-line conservatives. Some of his writings and opinions are so far to the right, and presumably so repugnant to most average Americans, that they have been classified and are being kept from public view, in the interest of getting him confirmed as quickly as possible without an undue uproar about his actual beliefs. You can be sure of these beliefs, since he was recommended highly by the ultra-conservative Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, endorsed by every other organization of their type. He brazens it out, as his predecessors have learned to do. One important qualification for our nation’s top court would appear to be brazenness. This quality enables him to blandly pretend that the issue of a president claiming the power to pardon himself and to refuse to comply with judicial subpoenas is purely hypothetical.

Kavanaugh has long been a partisan conservative. He was one of Kenneth Starr’s most aggressive assistants during the historically partisan investigation that led to the impeachment of an American president for lying under oath about a series of blow jobs he received from a White House intern. Since then American presidents have prudently stopped speaking under oath. Kavanaugh, whose deference to the wishes of conservative presidents is well-documented, worked in the George W. Bush White House when Bush refused to testify under oath, quite possibly advising him on that matter. George W. Bush would not speak under oath to the 9/11 Commission, a commission whose work he fought for a long time. Bush and Cheney eventually negotiated a deal, they’d jointly attend a secret session where they’d speak to the Commission on terms of complete secrecy. No notes or recordings were allowed, no oaths were administered, no promises to be truthful were made, the Commission agreed to say nothing about the meeting. Nothing to see here! Including, fourteen years later, whatever Brett Kavanaugh might have had to say about it, he was a lawyer at the White House [1] in the years before Bush appointed him to the federal bench.

This seemingly guilty behavior, lawyering up on terms that offer absolute protection from any possible liability, has been normalized, but it was, until recently, a ballsy move for a politician to invoke complete secrecy, and preservation of the right to prevaricate or outright lie, without legal consequences, in a matter of extreme public interest. It makes them look guilty, for one thing. Blanket classification of politically embarrassing matters appears to be profoundly anti-democratic, since the public, theoretically, has a right to be fully informed on such matters.

Brett Kavanaugh appears fine with this enhanced secrecy as he brazens out his confirmation questioning by Democrats who don’t have the votes to stop his confirmation. He went to the top of the nominee list when the justice he clerked for, Anthony Kennedy, was persuaded to retire so that Trump could immediately get another Supreme Court pick. It is hard to imagine that his replacement, by a clerk he trained, was not part of Trump’s discussion with Kennedy about preserving his legacy on the Court.

Kavanaugh has written, since his days aggressively pursuing the investigation into the perjurer Bill Clinton, that the president should be immune from prosecution, even investigation, during the performance of the duties of our nation’s highest office. Very handy, for a president under investigation, whose personal lawyer and former campaign manager are already heading to prison, to have another friendly ally on the bench of the Supreme Court as he seeks to continue working “outside the box” to Make America Great Again.

Unfortunately for the rest of us Americans, and for our jurisprudence going forward for at least a generation, there is little any of us can do to influence the outcome of this confirmation sham, or even to get thousands of pages of compromising writings by Kavanaugh released prior to his confirmation and appointment . Kavanaugh’s rushed confirmation and appointment to a seat on the nation’s final arbiter of what is legal and what is illegal, will give the sitting president a long-term partisan majority to rule on every matter pertaining to his administration. The rush is no accident, the Republicans are in a hurry. If Kavanaugh is confirmed next week (it would likely be a new record for a speedy appointment [2]) he will be seated in time to make rulings during the crucial midterm elections. If there is an emergency ruling on some voter-related issue during the elections, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch will decide it. If there is a subpoena served on our historically prolific liar in chief, to testify in the “perjury trap” he’d be surely caught in, according to his supporters, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh will decide whether he must obey it.

Until the Republicans changed the rules after Gorsuch’s nomination fight to ensure that a 51-49 majority was inviolable, a filibuster would have been possible to delay this fait accompli. Prior to 2017 the opposition party could engage in a filibuster that took 60 votes to overcome. Now a 51-49 majority is inviolable, absolute. Nothing to see here! This is American partisan democracy at work. Suck on it, losers.

Oh, yes, Committee Confidential. I think this too may be a new innovation by the famously shameless partisans on the Republican side of the aisle. Under pressure more Kavanaugh writings were released to the Senate Judicial Committee members, after vociferous public demands for more of the classified documents by Democratic members of the committee. They were released on the condition that the American public, the voters, never learn of their contents. There was an email about Racial Profiling that Kavanaugh wrote, apparently reflecting his reflexive right wing thinking on the matter. Cory Booker asserted that he’d be making the email public, and take the consequences. A Senator named John Cornyn, an apparent dickhead from Texas, seemingly sitting in for the chairman, reminded the angry Democrats on the committee that such opinions were Committee Confidential and would be disclosed to the public at the rule-violating committee member’s peril. Cornyn read the rule severely, threatening Senator Cory Booker with expulsion from the Senate. It appears to have been a wholly blustering threat. [3]

What business is it of the American voting public if the lifetime appointee believes, for example, that Racial Profiling is a perfectly acceptable way for law enforcement to protect us from the ravages of our long, ongoing race war? Or if he believes that a woman who gets pregnant, or a girl who is raped, must give birth, no matter what, if the laws of her state forbid abortion? What kind of country we are living in will be decided by Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, even if Trump, who won the democratically dubious Electoral College by a historically small number of votes (about 80,000), is impeached, tried, convicted, sent to prison, he will leave his illegitimate mark on our nation for at least the rest of my lifetime, if not everyone on the planet’s. He will leave his indelible stain as he goes down fighting, to the death.

[1] After the 2000 U.S. presidential election (in which Kavanaugh worked for the George W. Bush campaign in the Florida recount), Kavanaugh joined the administration and was a central figure in its efforts to identify and confirm judicial nominees.^[3]

[2] The Republicans have a very short window to get Kavanaugh his seat on the Supreme Court in time to join them before the midterms. The new term starts the first Monday of this coming October, October 1.

Before 1981 the approval process of Justices was usually rapid. From the Truman through Nixonadministrations, Justices were typically approved within one month. From the Reagan administration to the present, however, the process has taken much longer. According to the Congressional Research Service, the average number of days from nomination to final Senate vote since 1975 is 67 days (2.2 months), while the median is 71 days (or 2.3 months).^[13]^[14] Some believe this is because Congress sees Justices as playing a more political role than in the past.^[15] The perceived politicization of the process has drawn criticism. For example, columnist George F. Will termed the defeat of Robert Bork’s nomination “unjust” and, more generally, that the nomination process does “not delve deeply into the nominee’s jurisprudential thinking.”^[16] Supreme Court nominations have caused media speculation about whether the judge leans to the left, middle, or right.^[17] One indication of the politicized selection process is how much time each nominee spends being questioned under the glare of media coverage; before 1925, nominees were never questioned;^[18] after 1955, every nominee has been required to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee and answer questions; and the hours spent being grilled have lengthened from single digits (before 1980) to double digits today.^[19]

[3] Cory Booker’s bold challenge to be censured or expelled from the Senate for violating the Committee Confidential rule made good television. Unfortunately for fans of Senator Booker, he’d allegedly already received clearance, the night before, to disclose the contents of the email before his television moment of great principled bravery . This is according to the Kavanaugh ally in charge of the release of any or all the controversial documents. Booker’s office had no comment (Booker give his side here). Snakes everywhere, Mr. President!

Copy for the book jacket

I visited the website for Jeanne Safer’s literary agent. Safer writes insightful, useful books on difficult subjects, how to deal with a toxic sibling, what there is to celebrate at the death of a difficult parent, when not to forgive. I admire her writing on these taboo subjects and figured her agent might be a good place to start my search for an agent for the difficult book I am wrestling with. The agency has a query page that reads, in pertinent part:

We love discovering new talent and welcome your query.

If your project is in keeping with the kinds of books we take on, we want to hear from you. In non-fiction, we represent narrative, popular science, memoir, history, psychology, business, biography, food, and travel.

So far, so good. But they don’t want me to send them my svelte 1,700 word evocation of the book I’m writing, they have a better idea.

Synopsis (up to two paragraphs). Briefly pitch your project, indicating what makes it unique and compelling. Imagine writing the jacket copy for your book.

I wrote one the other day, 319 words, two paragraphs (the second actually two paragraphs) pretty good, but not really the jacket copy they were looking for. I will try again now.

The Book of Irv is a son’s memoir of his father’s life, a life that ended with terrible regrets. It is a meditation on anger and the power of reconciliation, even when it arrives tragically late. Irv Widaen triumphed over a childhood of grinding poverty during the Great Depression to live the American Dream. He was an idealist with a deep commitment to bending the moral arc of history toward justice. A specialist in Human Relations, he brought warring gang leaders together. A man of great empathy and a quick, irreverent wit, he quickly won people over. His own children referred to him as the Dreaded Unit, or the D.U..

The D.U. saw the world as a battlefield. He fought his children to the death over dinner every night. Almost his entire family was massacred back in Europe during World War Two; there were other unspeakable, inescapable terrors in his earlier life. Heartbroken and desperate, he viewed life as a zero sum game. He did harm to both of his children by constantly denying their feelings, while imbuing them with the highest ideals about fairness, identification with the oppressed and kindness to animals. The Book of Irv interweaves his personal story with the turbulent history of his times. His pessimistic insistence that people cannot fundamentally change is set against his realization, as he was dying, that he should have had more insight. At the heart of the book is the dialogue the difficult father and troubled son should have been having all along. The D.U.’s skeleton smiles in his grave to finally have this chance to be heard.

264 words

Majority Rules

Like a two year-old with a shit filled diaper triumphantly proclaiming ownership of the sandbox, the party with the commanding 51-49 majority in the Senate plunges forward in its quest to quickly confirm another extreme right wing corporatist partisan as our next Supreme Court Justice. The stakes are high, a second appointment for Trump and the Kochs, as criminal investigations close in on the ethically exempt president: a permanent extreme right corporatist majority on the Court for the first time since the Great Depression. The nominee sits, face as bland as a potato, waiting for the hurried sham hearing to proceed, as the minority party, the losers, appeals to the chairman for basic fairness and integrity. Loyalists for the majority party keep making points of order, insisting the hearing not be interrupted or delayed for any reason.

The chairman, Chuck Grassley, tasked with getting this done before the midterms two months away [1], bristles at the challenges to his fairness and integrity, in the face of a strong argument he and his party lack both. 42,000 pages of documents regarding this nominee were delivered to senators the night before the confirmation hearings. Documents requested by Chairman Grassley himself have not been produced, the minority senators claim. Presumably these are among the 100,000 pages deemed too incendiary to release, Kavanaugh memos written while he advised George W. Bush on judicial appointments and vetted candidates, being withheld under some convoluted version of Executive Privilege. A privilege, incidentally, that the Executive in question, George W. Bush, explicitly waived recently, in the interests of transparency and the appearance of fairness.

The Democrats don’t point it out, trying simply to get time to read the 42,000 pages before the confirmation hearing, but the nominee was a well-known right wing partisan activist and did some potentially compromising things in his zeal during the Clinton impeachment and in the Bush/Cheney White House. There is also his record, as a judge under Merrick Garland, in cases involving employers and employees, consumers, the environment, of voting, in split decisions, against the public interest 87% of the time . Nothing to see there! Today, in spite of his salacious interest in Bill Clinton’s sex life and the impeachable offense of Clinton lying about the blow jobs, and his aggressiveness prosecuting this terrible crime, that Mr. Kavanaugh believes, and has written, that, as a general principle, the president is largely above the law and should not be distracted by investigations during the performance of his duties. Convenient, no? Moved the corporate ass-kisser to the head of the Koch brother’s list of conservative jurists ready for the top job.

The chairman pretends to consider Corey Booker’s appeal (the two women who sought to intervene moments earlier were both ignored by the chairman) for an adjournment to read the redacted, 42,000 page record. Then Grassely responds, gravely and respectfully, to Mr. Booker. How dare the minority party interrupt my hearing to try to take advantage of my sense of integrity! My integrity is absolute, as is that of my party, my president, my president’s revolving cast of advisors and cabinet members, no matter how many might have been forced from their positions, indicted or convicted in recent weeks.

Senator Grassley listened respectfully to the female senator from Hawaii, Mazie Hirono, who expressed concerns about the unprecedented step of requiring judicial committee members to pre-submit their questions for the candidate for screening, by telling her politely to shut the fuck up. Grassley, although pompous, appears not to be the sharpest knife in the drawer (not that he needs to be, 51-49 as it is), as when he admits, in response to Senator Leahy’s concern that the claim of Executive Privilege (a claim not asserted by the Executive himself in this case) must be resolved before any hearing is held, that he could answer all these minority questions “but I think if I answer those questions it’s going to fit into the effort of the minority to continue to obstruct and I don’t think that’s fair to our judge, it’s not fair to our constitutional process… blah blah blah.” [2]

All Chairman Grassley had to say was “I know you are, but what am I?” As every two year-old knows, 51-49 is a majority, a commanding majority. Might makes right. 49% has no right to interrupt while the 51% is telling it to eat shit. Get your spoon and fucking dig in! Simon says! And say “God bless our sacred constitutional democracy and our infallible leader” as you shovel it down, assholes.

[1] Forget here, if you can, that the illegitimate Kenyan Muslim’s pick for Supreme Court, a well-respected moderate named Merrick Garland, Chief United States Circuit Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit,, was short circuited by partisan Republicans who insisted the People should decide, since a presidential election was about a year away when Antonin Scalia suddenly died. You can’t have an appointment so close to an election, the majority party insisted, before they insisted the opposite, with a fraction of the time left on the clock and as investigations against the president continue: we have to have this hearing before the looming midterms! So the People can speak!

The haste here, of course, is that the 51-49 majority enjoyed by the party of Trump could possibly disappear in a matter of weeks as we await the will of the People on this matter. Their leader, a prodigiously untruthful autocratic oligarch, might even face impeachment, or worse! Time is suddenly, very much, of the essence if we are to have a solidly right wing Supreme Court for the next few decades. This emergency began with the suddenly negotiated retirement of the so-called Swing Vote, the conservative Anthony Kennedy, a man who voted with the zealots most of the time, but unaccountably, was not homophobic or openly misogynistic. Forget all this, it is irrelevant. Fake controversy ginned up by lying partisan twats like me. NOTHING TO SEE HERE! God bless America. USA! USA!!!

[2] Grassley goes on to answer Senator Leahy’s concern about what the administration has to hide among Kavanaugh’s writings while he advised President George W. Bush, when he served as advisor on judicial appointments. White House counsel speak under an expectation of confidentiality, said Grassley, as do all lawyers to their clients. If this was not so, a memo using language that could be taken out of context and used to destroy a candidacy, such as “I recommend we press the nigger/bitch/kyke hard on whether they support the murder of the unborn,” or a suggestion to, say, demand photos of President Clinton’s penis, flaccid and erect, to be used as exhibits during his impeachment, would never have been written, depriving the Executive (or in the case of Clinton’s impeachment, Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, who Kavanaugh zealously advised) of the full, frank range of partisan opinions to which he or she is entitled. Confidentiality demands no less.

As for the 42,000 pages of documents delivered to the committee the night before the hearing, the only requirement, according to Grassley, was that they be delivered before the hearing, and they were. End of story, whiners. The Republican members of the judicial committee managed to read all 42,000 redacted pages, suck it up, obstructionist minority party. If you can’t manage to do your homework, don’t blame the diligent students who did.