Notes about the Law

The years immediately before World War One, then known as The Great War, were known in America as the Age of Optimism.  Progressive idealism was on the rise, but it is, of course, more complicated than that.  Woodrow Wilson, a progressive in many ways, was also sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan and was mesmerized by D.W. Griffith’s Birth of A Nation, a film glorifying the Klan as modern day knights and saviors.  The Klan was merely doing what was right, bravely defending the south’s honor, particularly the honor of its white women,  against the savage Negro, unaccountably vindictive, brutal and prone to raping, according to the film.   “History written in lightning” gushed Wilson after screening the film at the White House.  Klan membership soared during the Age of Optimism.

This “Second Klan” was also instrumental in the passage of the constitutional amendment that resulted in Prohibition, allying itself with the anti-immigrant wing of the temperance movement.  The Klan burned down bars, beat up or lynched distillers, tippling Italians, Jews, Negroes, what have you.    Meantime Wilson was drumming up American support for the glorious adventure in Europe with the brilliant, cynical, highly effective Committee for Public Information, also known as the Creel Committee, headed by the foremost advertising genius of the day, George Creel.   The progressive Wilson also passed the now infamous Espionage Act of 1917, a law designed to gag his political opponents.   A few years later, at the height of Klan membership (over 2 million proud, card carrying, sheet wearing assholes) the Immigration Act of 1924 was passed, restricting immigration. 

The Age of Optimism would not survive the colossal carnage of The Great War and the events that followed.   It was replaced by the Roaring Twenties, the modernist overthrow of the old ways in an era of wild stock market speculation that could create sudden wealth.   This was happening against the backdrop of widespread lawless consumption of recently criminalized alcohol.   Organized crime was born and criminal fortunes and empires built attendant thereto, then — The Great Depression.  Oh, well.   The generals of our eternal War on Drugs do not see any connection, no lesson of history to be learned here.  Oh, well.

   ii

I heard an interesting discussion of the history of the Fourteenth Amendment, on a non-partisan podcast by the National Constitution Center.  Two constitutional scholars discussed the creation and passage of the post Civil War amendment that ensures no state can deny any American the full rights, privileges, immunities and equal protection of the law.  Neither the scholars nor Jeffrey Rosen, CEO of the Center, mentioned the ninety year judicially imposed coma of the Fourteenth Amendment.  I think they should have.   The Supreme Court nullified the amendment and supporting laws less than ten years after the Fourteenth Amendment became the law of the land.. 

I originally thought “racist Supreme Court judges, the same bitches who decided the sickeningly slavery embracing Dred Scott case in 1857 decided the fate of the 14th Amendment”.  A quick query on google, to Wikipedia, showed me that the Supreme Court had a different composition by 1873 and that a new majority voted to nullify the 14th Amendment’s protections.   Men did not live that long back then.   The second majority ruled that the amendment and its protections simply did not apply, for a convoluted series of uninteresting judicial reasons, to the states of the former confederacy, or to any state.  

Writing for the majority one justice declared that, in any case, the white slaughters who brought the cases against Louisiana were not even the intended beneficiaries of the amendment.   Former slaves were, and as for them, the Negroes were done being the “special favorites of the law” after almost a decade of freedom.   Not until an 1868 enforcement law made under the Fourteenth Amendment was revived in the federal case brought against the Klan members who killed Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman in Mississippi, almost a century after its Supreme Court nullification, was the 14th Amendment ever enforced as originally intended.

The aptly named Slaughterhouse Cases that signaled the end of enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment are often described quite blandly, as in this circumspect example:

The Slaughterhouse Cases represented a temporary reversal in the trend toward centralization of power in the federal government. More importantly, in limiting the protection of the privileges and immunities clause, the court unwittingly weakened the power of the Fourteenth Amendment to protect the civil rights of blacks.   source

Temporary (only ninety years or so).  Unwittingly.   Like  Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, like the recent 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that enforcement of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is no longer necessary, since racism is now officially dead here in the USA!  USA!!!!   As proven by the election of an illegitimate Kenyan Muslim to our nation’s highest office.  USA!   USA!!!!  Nothing to see here.  History is fake.  Get Kavanaugh in there before the Republicans commanding 51-49 majority in the Senate is overturned in the upcoming elections.   Hurry, hurry!   

Labor Day

I heard a piece on NPR just now about apprenticeship and somebody mentioned digging a ditch.   On Labor Day in America today I celebrate the time I spent the day digging a forty foot long ditch in the East Bay in earth that was like cement due to several years of drought.  This was back in the 1970s.  The signs in California bathrooms read “if it’s yellow, it’s mellow, if it’s brown, flush it down”.   Sekhnet’s friend Uncle Tony had a sign in his rustic bathroom that expressed a similar sentiment:  “on these isles of sun and fun, we never flush for number one.”

I was in my early twenties, broke and strong.   A friend negotiated the job for me.   This guy was a genius negotiator, always getting the best deal possible for himself.   I don’t know what his motivation was in making this particular deal, but as I remember it I was paid $20 for the long trench I was supposed to dig.   I didn’t kick.  I needed the money, and twenty back then was like a hundred today, and headed out in the morning with a borrowed mattock and shovel.  

The job required not only strength and determination but great delicacy, as it turned out, and a certain amount of ingenuity.  I was digging around a thin water pipe, buried about a foot deep in the hard ground, that connected the house to the water main.    I had to work around the old pipe, which was about the thickness of a big toe.   I discovered on my first swing that my friend had negotiated an absolute shit deal for me.   The heavy mattock hit the earth and barely dented it.  

It took a while, but using the pick end of the mattock I was able to poke holes in the baked earth on either side of the pipe and then sculpt out little chunks with the flat end, carefully working away from the pipe.   I worked shirtless under a decent sun, and I remember feeling glad that it wasn’t too hot out.   It was slow work, impossibly depressing at first, but I made steady progress from the sidewalk toward the house, across the the baked brown expanse of hard dirt that was previously a lawn.   I probably sang as I swung my mattock and later, and more to the point, my pickaxe.  My friend had dropped off a pickaxe with a handy sharper point, after he came by to check up on me during his lunch break.  The pickaxe helped.

It was just one of those days in the life of a young man with big dreams.  I was about three feet from the end of my work, had skillfully dug a channel around the thin pipe, and had maybe an hour left.   The muscles on my back were starting to twinge a bit, and I had slowed my pace.  The end of this shit day of work was quite near.  It had been a long and productive eight hours or so so far.    I was taking a few breaths, leaning on the mattock, when a friend rode up on her bicycle.     I told her I was almost done and started back to work.    

She was one of these people who know everything.   She is the expert on everything, without exception.  It turned out, according to her, that it had taken me so long because I was going about it all wrong.  My form with the mattock, apparently, was ridiculous.  To stop her unwanted lecture I smirked and handed her the mattock, which I’d been using to lift out the dirt the pickaxe had loosened around the pipe.   She told me to watch carefully as she showed me how it should be done.   She raised the mattock high over her head, almost tottering backward at its weight.   Then she brought it down hard, directly on the center of the ancient pipe.  

A geyser of water shot up high into the air as the pressurized water made its hissing escape.  The long trench immediately filled with water, the baked dirt of the former lawn was now mud.  I never heard her drop the mattock as I turned to kick her as hard as I could in the ass.   She was off on her bicycle before I could take any revenge at all, outside of hurling a few curses at her as she sped off.  

Thinking about it now, I realize that fuck who offered me $20 for that job got exactly what he paid for.   I have wised up over the years, finally casting out people like the great negotiator, a highly successful businessman who resembles nobody as much as Trump in his need to win at all costs and his inability to maintain friendships that are not purely transactional. The know-it-all lasted a few years longer, but in the end, the spectacle of her pummeling her feeble husband became too sickening to endure.  

I will always fondly remember that day digging that ditch in Albany (or maybe El Cerrito).  Oddly enough, I had a date that night, in those free love days.  I cheerfully rode my bike a few miles to Berkeley where I was going to have sex with a young woman I’d known for some time.   It was the first time we’d gone to bed.  I recall, in the middle of things, literally while we were making the beast with two backs, she had to excuse herself to go pee.  She may have had some kind of urinary tract infection, I think.   I don’t remember the rest, I may have fallen asleep while she was in the bathroom leaving some mellow yellow in the bowl.

An Excellent Short Discussion of Depresssion

Johann Hari, writer of the excellent dissection of the drug wars, and drug addiction, called Chasing the Scream,  gives a short, remarkably common sense description of why we feel depression and anxiety.   Check it out here. 

We seem unable to grasp the simplicity of so many perplexing human riddles.   A person who feels loved, has a place in the world, work that is appreciated and a life without terror is unlikely to be chronically depressed or anxious.   It is the brutality of our tyrannically Free Market, a forum of endless, unfair competition,  that isolates us and fills us with dread of a bleak future.  There is no safety net.  Not for losers, safety nets are for winners.   Get over it, motherfucker, fear and insecurity is good for our bottom line.   Pick up your prescription over there.   NEXT!

Melancholia, Anyone?

Live with sorrows long enough and they will sometimes gather and swoop down in a wave of melancholia.   Allowing these sorrows to gather and swoop is something I have done since childhood.   It is familiar, somewhat understandable and without any terror to me at this point in my life.    I know the drill and accept it now, there is no sense fighting melancholia.   It has its seasons.  It is best just to slowly go with it, it arrives to make you consider your life a bit.

The semi-hollow body electric guitar you love to play, with that genius little looper that allows you to stomp, play, stomp, play along with your first track, stomp, add a second track, has no appeal when melancholia descends.   “Fuck it, maybe later,” you think to yourself, passing the guitar and looper on your way upstairs to tap these words.

There are cures for melancholia, of course.   You needn’t passively suffer from the blues, blues you don’t even have the energy to play or sing.   You can call a friend, if you have one.   The world is less lonely when you are talking to a friend.   You can go for a walk, or a bike ride, though your mood will accompany you, at least for the first part.   You can go shopping.  It’s what we’ve been taught since childhood, buying something new will cheer you up.  It works for millions of happy consumers everywhere, even if what you buy soon turns out to be crap.   You can read a book, watch TV (and we are in a renaissance of television at the moment), devour content in dozens of electronic forms. You can distract yourself until the cows come home, and when the cows get home, you can distract yourself some more.  It’s called entertainment, be entertained.   Yo, there are also anodynes, many of them handy, like eating something tasty, though the relief of that is momentary at best.

It doesn’t take melancholia to make you notice the brutality of the set up. We are told that statistically the odds of being killed by somebody else have never been lower in human history, unless you live in one of the many dangerous killing spots currently smoldering on the earth.  Of course, the odds of dying by your own hand, intentionally or inadvertently, have never been higher, are actually, for the first time in human history, more likely than your odds of being killed by somebody else, but that too is just a statistic, you dig.   We may, arguably, have a suicide epidemic in the greatest country, the most exceptional nation, the world has ever known.  Add the more than 72,000 overdose deaths from opioids last year to the tens of thousands accomplished by Second Amendment enthusiasts with their instrument of choice, add in drunk driving deaths, and murders by car, your goddamned vehicular homicides, and you start to get an impressive number of dead Americans.   We don’t need to talk about these motherfuckers really, they are not only losers, but dead losers.

This notion of winner and loser is a sick one I should pick at a bit here, just because this idiotic worldview is at the source of so much human misery.   You are a winner at the moment you win the lottery, a matter of pure luck, just as you are a winner when your Nazi-loving father dies and leaves you $300,000,000, another kind of lottery, albeit one you have paid dearly for by having a Nazi as a father.   Still, these are momentary victories, like every win is.  

That is the key thing: winning and losing are happening constantly in every life.  They go by other names, good luck and bad luck, providence and accursedness, good randomness vs. bad randomness.  Work is involved, of course, in preparing for victory.  I don’t discount the amount of hard work necessary to win a competition, nor do I necessarily shrink from it.   The thing I want to get across here is that winning and losing are relative and transitory, think about it even for two seconds and you will grasp that piece too.

The greatest baseball players in history, in their greatest all-time record-setting seasons, lost 60% of the time they went to bat. [1]   They were out more times than they succeeded.  An impressive majority of the time they were losers.  A 40% success rate, for Shoeless Joe Jackson, Rogers Hornsby, Ty Cobb, Ted Williams, was a season for the ages, a .400 season.  A small handful of historically elite players have ever achieved that.   Babe Ruth, the greatest hitter of them all, by many estimations,  made it to a personal best of .393 one year.   Anyone hitting .350 today is having a season for the ages, but still– losing more than they are winning.     Winning is a relative term, unless you understand this you are a loser.   Even if you understand it, you are still a loser, as often as you are a “winner”.

We’re told there is an attitude that winners have, an ineffable quality that makes them winners.  I think of the greatest American exemplar of winning, a man who has won every contest he has been involved in (by his account, anyway), including the greatest prize for an American winner, the presidency of the United States.   Being the world’s greatest winner means that you have conquered the game, are at the top of your game, on top of the world.   No reason to be angry, or peevish, oversensitive or insanely needy — you’re a great winner and therefore happy in a way a loser will never be.  

Still, check the man out.   Five a.m. rage tweets lashing out at the unfairness of his envious, unfair persecutors,  an inability to be truthful except in rare, unscripted moments (“I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and these gullible morons would still support me”) a life of manifest unhappiness and gnawing insecurity, behind a gaudy front of blustering compensatory over-confidence, for the world’s greatest winner.  What’s up with that?  You want to be a winner like him?  Go for it.  Start with choosing the right dad.

The winner/loser game has one measuring stick: wealth.  If you are rich you have won.  Except, of course, that there are always other motherfuckers richer than you (some have vast, interest generating hereditary wealth, going back generations), which is a goad and a motivation.   Being filthy rich is no longer enough, to be a real winner you have to be richer than Jesus Christ and his father combined.   The Greeks used to have myths about foolish humans sucked into this thing called hubris.  The insatiably greedy Midas got the gold touch, and that was the end of him.   His food turned to gold, when he wiped his ass that turned to gold.  He was done.  [2]  The Midas touch, which we think of as the gold standard of good luck, turns out to be one of the more clever curses of the gods.  I always loved the Yiddish curse:  may you be very successful in business, may you become very rich and build a mansion of a hundred rooms — and may the devil chase you from room to room.

Of course, I am a bitter man, melancholic today or not.  I tend to think of winners like the fucking Sackler family, several generations of doctors who have evolved into a clan of fabulously wealthy drug pushers under the corporate name Perdue Pharmaceuticals.   It turns out they researched which areas of this great country were most plagued by drug abuse, specifically opioid abuse.   They targeted these ravaged, hopeless areas where despair was rampant and options few, coal mining country, rust belt, foreclosed farm communities, etc., with trained doctors, nurses and pharmaceutical reps claiming that their patented product, Oxycontin, had an “exquisitely rare” chance of addiction “less than 1%” (a number they pulled out of their collective, corporate asses).   The Sacklers made billions upon billions marketing this highly addictive patent protected anodyne poison to America’s most desperate while addiction and overdose deaths predictably sky-rocketed.   Winners vs. losers, yo.

Civil suit after civil suit against Perdue Pharma resulted in nothing but wasted legal fees and shrugs all around, and anger and despair for the loved ones of those now dead from the exquisitely well-marketed opioid.   You can’t prove the lying corporation killed your boy, ma’am, nor can you make them pay you shit for his death.   It was the drug addict’s own damned fault, after all.   Nobody held a gun to his dumb head and forced him to overdose.  De minimis non curat lex, sir.

The U.S. Attorney in Virginia finally brought a criminal case against Perdue Pharma.  In 2007, after a series of negotiations (pre-dementia Rudy Giuliani was brought in to do his magic for Perdue) the parties agreed to a plea deal where the corporation, charged with a series of felonies, pleaded guilty to the single felony of “criminal misbranding” a crime that had been committed continuously for six or seven years by then.   Three executives took misdemeanor charges.  Justice was done, as well as it ever is done to extremely wealthy malefactors.

In a nation that was not insanely racing against death by trying to acquire everything in sight, and blindly worshipping those who can,  this would not appear to be a reasonable, fair or just outcome.   At the very least this gigantic corporate drug dealer, after “criminally misbranding” its deadly anodyne and profiting obscenely from its crime, with deadly consequences for hundreds of thousands (and counting), would have to lay out the cash to set up rehab and treatment centers in every area they had targeted to sell their lucrative, criminally mislabeled product.   That’s not how it works in the land of winners and losers.   We don’t punish the powerful here.   What kind of message does that send?   We punish the weak, send them to private, for-profit prisons.  They are losers anyway.  Yo, be serious!  Punishing losers equals corporate profits: win win!  

Not to say this hideous picture is all bad.  In the impoverished West Virginia town of 400 that received 9,000,000 tablets of Oxycontin one year, many were able to keep their noses just above poverty by selling the pills, which go for up to ten bucks a piece.  The free market, being free.

I am content with the things I own.  The guitar I love cost a few hundred dollars, a fraction of the price of the one the Chinese factory skillfully recreated.   I am a good enough guitarist that I “deserve” a guitar costing many times more.  I don’t need it.   Do you understand what I am saying?  Owning a $5,000 or $10,000 guitar would be lovely, sure, but I don’t need it.  Can you grasp that?   It is worthwhile to grasp a thing like that.  Otherwise, in the words of an ex’s Hindu guru, you are like a deer, dying of thirst as you chase a mirage of water.

Our failure here is a failure of imagination.   We fail to imagine the many real possibilities that would make the world a more decent and merciful place for all but the richest and most psychopathic among us.   We simply cannot imagine the great philanthropists of our age, the finest people, folks like the Sacklers, ever being held accountable for any crime they may or may not have committed.   “Criminal misbranding”, I mean, how bad a crime is that really, in the hierarchy of felonies?    It’s a fraud perpetrated deliberately year after year to the harm and death of tens of thousands, but it has to been seen in context.    The Sacklers donate wings to museums, they endow professorships, they are culturally generous with their billions.   The men who paid themselves a record $135 billion in compensation in 2009 after almost causing the second worldwide Great Depression by their systemic, highly lucrative, fraud, same deal.   Does it really help anyone to put these kind of folks in prison?  Aren’t they really too big to jail?   Seriously, am I suggesting that such fine people deserve to be held accountable for the petty crimes they may, arguably, commit?  Unimaginable, the luxury prisons we’d have to construct to house such fine people.

Our failure of imagination, in this nation where we are trained from birth to be passive consumers,  makes us replace the universe of possibilities with the world we have in front of us.   You see, there is no way, in a free country, to make sure no children are raised in dire, hopeless, life crushing poverty because…. the Free Market.   Communism obviously failed, was put out of business and taken off the map by the only form of social organization that makes sense, that truly reflects human nature, Capitalism.    

We reduce many undreamed of possibilities to our famous imagination crushing false dichotomy.   If you hate Capitalism as it is practiced today, as it has always been practiced, then you are a Communist, by definition a discredited loser.  History proves how much you suck.   Winners win, losers whine, suckers walk.  Freedom is on the march.  Democracy equals capitalism, winning equals fabulous wealth, end of the story, boys and girls.  Koch Industries, sponsors of the NY Yankees, makes products you use and are dedicated to a level playing field where everyone has an equal opportunity.   They say so in their own ad.   Nothing else to see here.  Bird Wins [3].

This is a world of losers, friends, every one of whom will die without any hope of eternal, corporate style, life.   Losers with costive imaginations, hemmed in by mass-marketed external reality.   That’s a peevish and dumb way to put it, ‘costive’ being an old-fangled word for constipated.   Imaginings are not shit, of course, though they are constantly shit on.   Neither are they all good, some in fact, would benefit from not have been shitted out at all.  

We are led to imagine that all the problems in the world caused by runaway, unregulated capitalism are the fault of illegal aliens and refugees, poor people sneaking through our porous borders to rape and murder, while bringing illegal drugs in.   Many are, quite possibly, terrorists who hate our freedom.   Imagine that!   All of our problems, caused by those ruthless, relentless fucks, millions of them, lawlessly overrunning our once great nation like cockroaches.   At one time, even now in many parts of the world, in some of the best parts, the best parts, my people get the blame.  The fucking Jews.   If Hitler had finished his important work every ignorant racist fuck in the world would now be a king, once the goddamned colored people were dealt with the same way. It’s only a matter of will, of winning.  

Happy Labor Day, my hard laboring friends.   Get out there and take advantage of your day off and your freedom to save big at malls all over this great land.   They’re practically giving the wonderful stuff away.   Go, go, go!  If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to slouch over to my guitar and see what comes out.  [4]

 

 

[1] for the quibblers, sure, their On Base Percentage for those seasons, the times they walked added to the times they had base hits, means that these baseball immortals, in their greatest seasons for the ages, only lost maybe 50% of the time.   Call me pisher.  

[2]  OK, fine, the Greek myth makers gave greedy King Midas a reprieve and his story a laudable moral.   Ecstatic about his new gold touch he hugged his beloved daughter, she turned to gold and he broke down.   He begged the gods to take the curse away, and they did.  Midas lived a life of generosity when his touch stopped turning everything he loved into gold and died beloved of his people.

[3] Bird Wins was the title of a book I once tried to write.  The title referred to the flashing sign in the Chinatown Arcade on Mott Street, mercilessly announcing that the tic tac toe playing chicken had beaten its human opponent again.   The bird went first, and always played to thwart a victory.   I doubt anybody, ever, beat the goddamned chicken, though many probably tied.   Bird Wins stands in for all fixed games, rigged contests, manifest abuses of the gullible and earnest alike.  

[4]  I‘m So Tired, it turns out, by the fookin genius John Lennon.

A Blank Slate

It’s got a cool sound in Latin:  tabula rasa, the writing tablet scraped clean.    They used to theorize that the newborn human was a tabula rasa. The sensory world begins making marks on that blank slate and it matures accordingly.   The Hindus, I was told by American devotees of an Indian guru named Baba Hari Dass, a man who had not spoken for decades, call some of these impressions on the tabula rasa samskaras.   These were like fingerprints in clay, as I was made to understand it.   Samskaras are dispositions, characteristics and themes left over from past lives, as I recall.

Somebody came up with the clever “wherever you go, there you are.” There are some clever bastards out there, really.   Writing in the darkness of night, intent on the words you are putting down, you will find no time to imagine the blank looks.   I speak only for myself, of course.  

I get angry.  At things like brutality, the random fuckings we are all subjected to, fuckings out of the blue, with absolutely no pleasure for ourself, no possibility of pleasure.   We are done this way, at random, for the pleasure of people who, like pedophile priests,  say “fuck mutuality, fuck decency, I see my fellow humans as base coin with which to gratify my passions.   My passions!”   These things are uttered by people who imagine themselves winners, and they do what they do to the rest of us losers feeling wholly justified.   Because they can, you understand.

My grandmother flew into rages, the grandmother I never met.   Her older brother was known to be a rough customer, a man with a formidable temper.   Her nephew was a tough guy with a bad temper too.   You did what they said or you paid the price.   What was the price?   How about I fucking whip you in the face, you like that price, asshole?

My father, a man whose poignant tenderness to animals was always in evidence, often flew into rages.   His mother, I learned very late in his life, whipped him in the face from the time he could stand.   Basic unfairness scalded him all throughout his life and he would cry out.  There was nothing I could do for him, when I was a tabula rasa.   Nothing but stare at him accusingly, with my big, black eyes.  He would look over from his pillow, with his glasses off and his 20/400 vision, and I would be staring at him through the bars of my crib.   A blank slate, staring without mercy at his own father.    

How insane is this arrangement?   It is hard to put it into words.   It is also good to try to put it into words, speaking only for myself, of course.    I heard that David Foster Wallace believed a good book made you feel less alone, less lonely.   There is a certain pain, familiar to most people, of feeling isolated, apart, removed from the community.   This pain is big business, a huge driver of our highly competitive economy.  

The anodyne business itself, huge, vast mountains of money.  People die behind that stuff every day, take enough of it and you will no longer need any pain killer.  The entertainment business, which lets us forget, while moved by an artfully told tale, that we are essentially, blank slates or slates scribbled with a hundred layers of glyphs, here in the darkness by ourselves, destined each of us to our own end.    A good book connects us with another mind, helps us forget all that.   The same can be said of music that stirs us, transports us, or visual art that evokes feelings that leave us in some kind of awe.

You will meet a few people in your life who are familiar, become more familiar. They put their fingerprints on you in the right way.   You learn things you need to know from such people.   They are rare, and precious.   Not everyone has the luck to meet them, and if they do meet them, not every two of us have the ability to hit it off.  Not every two notes make good music.   Where there is noise only, there is no soothing of the savage beast [1].

I’m thinking about this blank slate because of the empty page, the white screen.   Some people look at that expanse and say “shit…”    I always have a certain excitement when I see that empty canvas.   It can become literally anything you can imagine, speaking only for myself, of course.

 

[1] OK, fine, “savage breast”.

The phrase was coined by William Congreve, in The Mourning Bride, 1697: Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast, To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.

Corporate Generosity

I wrote this yesterday, when I had no internet service for about 14 hours:

I can’t tell you the name of the cadaverously leering psychopath who is the CEO of Spectrum, the corporation that provides spotty internet service to much of the country.  Tom something, let’s call him Tom Fuckface.  This genital canker made $93 million a year or two ago. I can’t tell you his last name at the moment because I have no internet service and I don’t feel like using my phone.  It is no problem having no internet service for four hours so far today.  I will be reimbursed $1.61 for today, since I’ve had no internet now for four hours or more.

I had a 25 minute chat with a lovely woman named Maria. I was vehement but civil as I described Tom Fuckface’s corporate style: do not negotiate with unionized workers, raise rates liberally, provide miniscule refunds to customers you provide no service to.  I assume there is some fine under the Labor Relations Act for refusing to negotiate with unionized workers, but any fine is certainly not coming out of Tom’s pocket.  Tom’s company also enjoys a virtual monopoly in many areas of New York City, including the neighborhood where I live. It’s a free country, don’t want internet service? Tell Spectrum to fuck off.

Maria told me seven of the other 200 customers on my hub have no internet service today. Statistically insignificant, for reporting purposes. Not a real problem. She saw that I have had very spotty internet service for the last few days. She refunded me four times $1.61. which was very kind of her.  I made her an ally and she reacted with friendliness.  My patient forbearance from cursing won me $6.44.  I’m so happy I could shit.  Though I’ll be shitting without internet service.  C’est la guerre, I suppose.

(update)

It is six hours later, still with no internet signal. The seven who had no service in my immediate area earlier today is now up to forty, still only 11% and below the 15% necessary to have the psychopath ISP deem it any kind of outage they need to investigate.  A scab technician will arrive here between 5:00 and 6:00 pm tomorrow to check the line coming into my building, into my apartment and my modem. Hopefully the motherfuckers will accidentally restore my internet service by then.

(update)

Four hours later the internet winked back on, as slyly as it had winked off.

The DU was not generous

My father, the Dreaded Unit, was not a generous person.  He gave us things, he provided a nice lifestyle for the family, he didn’t begrudge us what we needed or wanted, he just was not personally generous.   It seems easy enough to blame this on the “grinding poverty” he experienced until he was drafted into the Army.   Though the most generous kids I ever worked with were always the poorest.   My sister’s experience working with children has been the same.   We both, at different times and in different places, taught classes of well-to-do kids and classes of poor kids.   Certain rich kids were prone to grabbing the last cookie and shoving it into their mouth.   Poor kids always seem concerned that everyone gets a fair piece.  Of course, I over-generalize, there were wonderful rich kids and poor kids who were complete dicks.   When it came to sharing, and my sister will back me up, the poor kids unfailingly shared, rich kids not such unfailing sharers.  So my father’s poverty by itself does not explain his difficulty being generous.

Generosity is a trait, like kindness and fairness, that if not planted young has a hard time growing later in the depleted soil of a love-starved soul.  My father told me as he was dying, in that weakened voice as his life force ebbed, that he’d had never had any idea how to show affection.   “I’d never seen it done,” he told me, a slight pleading in his tone, alluding to the house of violence, poverty and madness he’d grown up in.   His mother and father never touched each other.   No affection was ever shown.

These days I am trying to learn each of the lessons of my father’s tragic life and put them into practice to live a better life.   Being unforgiving is closely related to a lack of generosity — you will not extend the pardon you yourself would want to be given in the same situation.   It is a terrible thing never to forgive.  I watched my father do it all his life, the man never forgave anyone, starting with himself.   Unforgiveness feeds a deeply destructive need, the need to feel completely vindicated in one’s anger.  We see it played out on a mass level today with our vengeful Insane Clown President, as Matt Taibbi dubbed him when writing about the 2016 campaign.

I am always impressed by generosity.   I recall going to the home of a Palestinian who lived in East Jerusalem, in the Old City.   He took everything out of his refrigerator, he and his children literally emptied it, and put it all on the table in front of us.  “Take, take,” he said, smiling, gesturing at everything.   There turned out to be more to the story, but this kind of generosity, holding nothing back, is a beautiful thing.   

What does it cost to be moved by something beautiful somebody has just done and saying “beautiful”?   The thing is beautiful, is there a price to saying so?   I don’t know, I can’t see one.   To some people, I suppose, it costs a lot.  It appears that way, anyway.    Maybe it’s related to envy, or distraction, or simply being bitter, I don’t really have a handle on that kind of reticence.  My mother didn’t have it.   She would read something I’d picked out for her and smile and say “it’s wonderful”.   I could tell she meant it.   My father would read the same piece looking for the fatal booby trap I’d hidden in there, the tell-tale adjective that would show the rigging about to collapse on his head.

What does it cost to give the benefit of the doubt?   You can give it once, be disappointed, give it again, remaining hopeful.   After enough disappointments you will stop extending this generous courtesy, but what does it cost to give it in the first place?   It requires trust, I suppose, a certain faith that good will is going to be returned.   It often is.   It often isn’t.   I think more often than not, good will is reciprocated.   My father did not think so.   It was hard for him to make himself vulnerable in any way.    

As he was dying he said:

I know a lot of people are sorry for what they did, yet at the time you don’t see anything but just a battle which there has to been winners or losers, and there’s no gradation.

 I know when we had our differences, I realize that it was nothing personal in the classic sense but I also know that it’s the only way that I could live… like I told mom, we always had these battles where she’s saying “we’ve got enough money, we’ve got enough money” — for me it was never enough. I’ve got to make sure that every dot is dotted, every ‘t’ is crossed because I don’t want her to want a thing.  So, it’s kind of a lifetime battle, I don’t know, I think now how much richer my life would have been if I hadn’t seen it as a battle—good versus evil.

I know we should have had this talk ten, fifteen years ago. I couldn’t reach that level because I was really thinking that it was going to be a battle and that there wasn’t any way I could make it into a dialogue, and that’s my fault. You’re supposed to have some fucking insight.

 

 

  

 

 

 

OK… All Right…

I have found, as I get older, that when I am alone, as happens in my life of contemplation, and I need to exert myself even slightly, I more and more often accompany the action with a reassuring “all right… OK…”    This involuntary self-encouragement is delivered in a slightly rough voice, but very softly.  It is as much a breath as a voice, really.    I don’t know where it comes from, except that such self-talk must go deep in the human experience.

It is unusual, in many lives, to have a gentle hand to guide us along.  Like many things we learn to do on our own, we sometimes provide our own gentle hand.   However otherwise gruff the voice is that encourages me to get up slowly after sitting for a long time, say, it is more than anything a gentle voice.   I don’t mind it at all.    I greatly prefer it to my outbursts.

I watched the last hour or so of the wonderful Princess Bride the other night.   It reminded me again, watching Peter Falk play a character years older than he was at the time, a kid’s grandfather, both gruff and extremely gentle, that Falk’s character was probably a main source of this voice.

The grandfather reads the end of the story, closes the book, says goodnight to his grandson and gets up to leave.   The boy asks his grandfather if he’ll come back and read it to him again the next day.    Falk turns at the door of the boy’s room,  bows his head slightly, like a vassal about to address his lord and says “as you wish.”