How the radical right do it

It is something of a cliche to say that anyone far to the political right is a fascist. That person is only a fascist if, among his other authoritarian traits he seeks the power to silence all dissent. An extreme right wing person determined to stamp out all opposition views is, for all intents and purposes, a straight-up fascist. You can have that on the left too, though in America, so far, that type is fairly rare. Open discussion is a hallmark of democracy, using government power to silence criticism is the mark of every fascist and totalitarian regime in history.

Avigdor Lieberman is the guy with the stylish Van Dyke in the photo below. Ladies and gentlemen, one-time anti-Arab extremist member of a fringe far-right opposition party (and present day Israeli Minister of Defense) Avigdor Lieberman. Check this piece of shit out.

An Israeli artist writes a poem apparently supporting a Palestinian woman who Lieberman hates, a symbol of everything Lieberman hates. His reaction is to try to ban the Israeli’s work from the media, starting pronto with Army Radio. “There is no room for discussion with haters!!!” says Lieberman, indignantly.

Fascism means never having to listen to anything that you fucking hate.

Avigdor has zero tolerance for terrorists and those who write poems about those who support terrorists. His position is that anyone attending an anti-Israel protest on the Gaza-Israel border is a terrorist and therefore has only him or herself to blame if shot by snipers armed with live ammunition. Shot, sometimes to death, as they assemble in the No Man’s Land on the occupied side of Israel’s long border fence with Gaza. Avigdor is also in favor of a law criminalizing the photographing Israeli soldiers in a manner that “could hurt military morale”, with a five year prison term. He has advocated that all Arab Israelis be forced to take a special loyalty oath of eternal allegiance to the Jewish State. His party is called Israel is Our Home and many in that party, like Lieberman, are from the former Soviet Union, originally. The fringe-party right-wing Soviet Russian emigrant is now the Israeli Minister of Defense.

As Yaakov Smirnoff used to say of the U.S.A.— “whatta country!!!!” Which also brings to mind Groucho’s quip, pointing at Chico– “I rest my case, restrict immigration.”

Fascist fuck.

The climbing sorrow of death

Death waits, in no particular hurry most of the time, since every living soul must go with Death in the end. Some beings get to live the full wink of an eye, eighty, ninety years. Many delightful winks are far briefer. It helps to think of the quality of a short life in these cases.

A tiny colony of feral cats coexist in Sekhnet’s garden, along with a couple of large, gingery raccoons and the occasional giant possum, who come by after dark to finish off whatever food the cats leave over. We get to witness the brutality of nature up close, its brutal cuteness and its seemingly random viciousness.

These two brothers, Whitefoot and Turtleback (foreground) were photographed hanging out in a flower pot on July 17, 2018. They were three months old at the time. I am lucky to have this photo, one of very few pictures I’ve shot in the last year or so that I’m still able to view on my phone. [1]

Their mother, the beautiful Mama Kitten, had her first litter two or three years ago, at six months old. Talk about babies giving birth to babies. Six months old and Mama Kitten. When they were big enough she dragged them from their hiding place and marched the adorable mice in front of Sekhnet.

“You see,” she told her kittens, “soon, when I stop giving you milk, you will come to her, act cute, and do just what I’m doing now, see?”. Mama Kitten would fix Sekhnet with a winsome look, make a quick cat move toward her and rub her head and her side along the human’s leg, using the tail to give a gentle caress as she makes her circle.

Sekhnet and I became familiar with the exquisitely gentle touch of a cat’s tail from my original cat Oinsketta, an affectionate cat who practiced the art delightfully. The late A.W. Skaynes was also a master of the tail caress. A few of these feral cats get pretty adept with their tails too, they’re generally the ones who like to be petted. Mama Kitten did not let a human touch her until she was several months old. She took to human affection cautiously, but she is now a very tactile cat who sometimes loves to have her sideburns scratched. And she uses her head and her tail very tenderly.

We had many great photos of those adorable kittens interacting with mom, playing with each other, eating food off of spoons. Suddenly it seemed Mama Kitten was in a hurry to wean her kittens and turn them over to Sekhnet for feeding. We didn’t understand the urgency. We soon realized she was pregnant again. Chemicals coursing through her body telling her to protect her turf, make it safe for her offspring who were about to be born.

Mama Kitten had her most recent litter, four beautiful kittens, two male, two female, in April. These four made the number of good-looking little cats Mama Kitten had given live birth to around twenty. She has been pregnant or taking care of a litter continuously since before she was six months old. When she is about to give birth to the next brood she drives her young kittens out to fend for themselves. Of course, they only know how to hunt by being cute to the humans who feed them, and there is only one other house on the block where feral cats are welcomed (see this here for that).

We once trapped three of her kittens who had lived to be five or six months old. We took them to a vet and had them all neutered. Each of them was dead within a very short time. There was no connection to the minor surgery, they were all fine after they got back from the vet’s. They simply disappeared, one after another, in the space of a couple of weeks.

Their lives tend to be short. The oldest so far was probably Grey Guy, who lived almost two years. There are hawks around that love a nice one or two pound kitten for lunch. We assume the hawks get most of them. A few have died from some kind of poisoning, we think they may have drank anti-freeze on a hot day. All four of those kittens died within a few hot early summer days one awful summer before Mama Kitten was born. A feral cat in this area that lives to be a year old is a survivor, an outlier.

It is a cruel thing to grow attached to these beautiful little creatures who have little hope of surviving more than a season or two. We try not to give them names, remembering the fate of oddly cute Dobbie, or Cathead (a playful, affectionate kitten I would have made a pet, if it was up to me, and we’d had her spayed, too) since the attachment makes their disappearance more painful.

Still, it turns out that just for reference you need to call each one something. Sekhnet takes care of that, keeping it simple. Whitefoot advances on a white foot, both of his front feet are white. Turtleback, mostly white but with nice markings, including a large beautifully painted section on his back that looks like a tortoise shell. Here is a picture of Turtleback taken two days ago. We were a little worried since we hadn’t seen the adventurous young male when his siblings were having dinner. I later found him relaxing on their favorite box, and snapped this to send Sekhnet to reassure her that Turtleback was alive and well.

Sekhnet has been furious at Mama Kitten since seeing how viciously she keeps attacking her almost year-old daughter, Paintjob (talk about a beautiful coat, that little cat was painted by a genius). Mama drove that poor soul Paintjob out of the yard two or three litters ago and somehow the timid Paintjob is still alive and, until recently, managing to get fed by me or Sekhnet every second or third day.

She eats fast, warily, wolfing her food and then stopping, tensing every muscle, marshaling all of her senses for threats. Then she will eat another can of food, using the same procedures. Paintjob is skinny but appears otherwise quite healthy.

Lately, even though she has lost her last pregnancy through some kind of natural miscarriage, Mama Kitten has been particularly vigilant and ruthless in violently chasing Paintjob off.

Sekhnet has seen this many times, how Mama Kitten discovers each secret place where Sekhnet has arranged with Paintjob to throw her a quick feed. Paintjob was quite adept at making Sekhnet know where she’d be for a fast secret feed. Mama keeps guard, watches Sekhnet like a hawk, peeks around every corner, pops out of nowhere and viciously attacks Paintjob who runs off at an amazing speed. Their screams are heart-rending.

I keep telling Sekhnet not to make such human judgments against Mama Kitten. I point out that Mama is, and has always been, in pure survival mode, plus she’s crazed with chemicals produced by her constant pregnancies. I point out that she’s programmed to survive and is by far the longest lived feral cat to live season after season in Sekhnet’s garden in the back. Sekhnet points out that Mama is a complete psycho bitch who savagely attacks her own daughter when there is plenty of food for everybody.

Yesterday as I fed the kittens, Mama Kitten came around to see what was on the menu. She was not impressed with the first offering, which her kids all ate quite happily. She tasted a bit of the tuna and found it not to her liking that day, though her kittens were quite pleased with that one too. As everyone seemed interested in having a bit more dinner, I opened a third can, and this one Mama Kitten found to her liking. I fed her some slime from the spoon, to test it before dividing it among her kittens, and this one she wanted. She ate a bit.

Then I saw, suddenly standing less than two feet away, an emaciated, haunted, desperate looking Paintjob, staring at the food, almost hypnotized. I was aware that as soon as Mama saw her the savage attack would occur and that there was nothing I could do to get any food to Paintjob, or to stop what was about to happen. A few seconds later Mama Kitten took off screaming in savage pursuit of a wailing Paintjob. The kittens scattered in terror.

This scene was truly heartbreaking. I understood why Sekhnet finds it so hard to forgive Mama Kitten for this seemingly heartless, irrational and murderous rage against her own kitten. True they’re now both adult females, we get that, but, it’s hard to understand why it has to be this way. Only a cruel god would design nature to feature this kind of nonchalant, horrible savagery.

After I told Sekhnet this story of witnessing the vicious attack on Paintjob she became morose. I had a text from her at 3:20 a.m. (we stay together half the week) and I called her right away. She was tearful, couldn’t stop thinking about the doomed Paintjob. “As she gets weaker and weaker from lack of food it will become impossible for her to escape her psycho mother,” she said, her voice cracking, and it planted an image in my mind I did not want to see either.

Sekhnet reported a bad night’s sleep. She dreamed of Paintjob, lying on her side, her paws cut off, crying for food. In the dream Sekhnet was unable to get any food to the helpless cat. I tried to reassure her that she had not made the world, that nature was cruel, we’d seen it first hand over and over, the short, brutal lives these beautiful little animals live in the extremely limited, ruthlessly competitive wild in that part of Queens. Then she got a call, there was a dead white kitten near the area where the backyard animals eat dinner.

It was one time when, being a man, all I could say is what a man should say at such a time. I told Sekhnet I’d go to the house, carry away the body, that I would take care of it. We arranged to go together. There was a real-feel of 99 degrees in New York City again today. We had images of the little cadaver getting ripe, covered with flies, possibly bloated.

Halfway to the house, the sky got dark and a deluge fell from the sky in a massive electrical storm. It rained as hard as I have ever seen rain fall, the traffic began to crawl along cautiously, and it continued to pour down in sheets for a long while. The windshield wipers, on their fastest speed, had a hard time keeping the windshield clear. There was flooding in places.

We killed some time, gassed up the car, sat in front of the house until the rain stopped. I went to the back of the house. It was Turtleback, on his side, feet stretched in a slightly grotesque final pose. His timid little white-faced sister, who looks like him but without the turtleback, looked sad. All of the kittens, and Mama Kitten, seemed determined to make sure I knew that their fellow was dead, was just lying there Before I fed them dinner they all made sure I noticed the dead Turtleback lying there on his side, skinny and soaked. Each one passed close to him as I went to get their food.

Sekhnet brought a sturdy box, just the right size, and handed me a shovel. It took a moment, but it was an easy operation once I got the shovel positioned the right way. He fit in the box perfectly. “Watch his tail,” said Sekhnet and I tucked it into the box before I closed the flaps.

I carried him a short distance, to a wooded place by the highway. The area was filthy, littered with plastic bags and plastic take-out containers and probably much worse. I did not venture far in the dark, placing his coffin behind the closest trees. I got back and Sekhnet and I agreed that Turtleback himself was not there in that squalid place, just an empty vessel that had been, briefly, the beautiful little cat.

I am aware that nature is cruel, even as it can be so generous. That severe thunderstorm struck me as a gratuitous, a mocking touch for a gentle God to interpose in the path of two people heading somewhere to try to do a decent thing. I had several thoughts about God as that rain pissed down, as we killed an hour in the car before I could go back and lay whichever poor devil had died so young to his or her rest.

Afterwards we hung around a bit hoping Paintjob would show up for a feed while I was there to distract Mama in the back, but no sign of her anywhere. It is hard to shake the thought that yesterday’s desperate move by Paintjob may have been her final one on this earth. I got back home and began writing this, my attempt to, as they say, process all these thoughts and feelings. Then a notification beep, a WhatsApp from Sekhnet.

Sekhnet, among her many talents, apparently also has the power the make me sob in loud, honking notes, my nose drowning in snot, alone in my apartment. My emotions all night had betrayed nothing but manly resolve, stoically placing the tiny cadaver in its carboard coffin, stilly carrying the dead kitten to his eternal resting place, manfully reassuring Sekhnet at every turn. I don’t know what my neighbors must have been thinking to hear me weeping that way, it is rare to hear a grown man sobbing, especially a grown man prone to angrily cursing.

[1] Naturally, of course, the format has been randomly dicked with, it is not displaying full frame as I shot it, it’s messed up. I never inserted those moronic blocks of black at the top and the bottom. I am not even sure how to edit those out with the programs and apps I have.

Background: I took dozens of photos of these beautiful cats. Yesterday my phone spontaneously deleted over 2,400 photographs. The girl at the T-Mobile store said there is no way T-Mobile can recover the photos and that they were probably deleted because I accidentally hit something. I told her I had hit “restart” after several days of being unable to move or delete photos. When the phone restarted, 3,000 photos were wiped out. She was a pretty girl, and friendly enough, but there was something about her reply “you must have accidentally hit something that deleted the photos: that made me want to ask her to come around the counter to take a nice, quick knee to the stomach.

“A Samsung problem,” she told me. She showed me how to find the randomly saved photos in something called Google photos that I never signed up for. Apparently Google randomly collects images from your phone, to show you how they provide this great cloud backup for all your data. If you pay them, they will save everything. If you take their free version, which you might not ever know you even are using, they will choose what to save and what to delete, probably by some brilliantly calibrated algorithm.

This was the only photo remaining of perhaps 100 shots of these great looking feral kittens and their beautiful mother.

Feral Neighbors

Noticing Small Things

They call this mindfulness these days. Awareness of your mind, your body, your surroundings, other living beings, their presence, your presence, your interactions with the world. We live in an age where “reality” itself is presented to us, constantly, in small, exciting boxes. These boxes arrive continuously, with alert beeps if you set your phone to give you notifications. You look at the phone and through a filter you instantly see a selected slice of life.

Your life is clearly not this selected thing you are looking at, but the irresistible device is designed to make you feel that it is very important. Breaking news, crucial, need to know, this just in, ten things that will make your jaw drop, five amazing secrets nobody will ever tell you, the seven, yea, eight best cures for distraction, the most erotic nude photo of the most beautiful person ever photographed, very tasteful. Click here.

All very compelling, but not your life. In most cases it is only the thinnest, most superficial slice of your life. In many cases it has nothing whatsoever to do with you as an individual and everything to do with you as part of a discrete/discreet [1] demographic.

I had some drama with my smartphone the last few days, it wasn’t letting me move, copy or delete photos. I take hundreds of photos, very happy now to finally have an excellent camera on my phone. I had more than 2,000 photos in the folder marked Camera. There have long been two folders marked Camera. The first has about 80 photos in it, the last one taken on July 4, 2017. All the photos since have been saved in a second folder, also marked Camera, which was created autonomously by the smartphone on July 5th.

Frustrated at being unable to delete or sort photos the last few days, I finally restarted the phone. The phone reset. When it came back on-line there was one folder marked Camera. It had 80 pictures in it, all taken before July 5, 2017. Almost every photo and video I’ve taken since is, inexplicably and without warning of any kind, no longer on the phone.

I think of this and consider it in the context of a glance I had at my face in a magnified mirror just now. I see the results of the original “plastic surgery” I had to close and cover the incisions from removing the basal cells on the right side of my nose a decade ago, a kidney shaped piece of shiny beef jerky, with jagged outlines. It is my own fault, I had shit insurance. The upper East Side surgeon wasn’t going to bust her ass for what they were paying her. My mother actually put up $500 for some cosmetic follow up, but that was clearly money down the toilet.

My skin is scarred, so the ugly one on my nose sort of blends in. My hair is gone, eyebrows scraggly. My teeth are crooked, uneven, brownish. My eyes are strained, pinkish in the whites, and they do not track exactly. I rarely look at my face closely in the mirror, and that’s better, since my general impression of myself is of a decent looking man. Do not look too close, you will see the enlarged pores, the tiny veins in the eyeballs, the unhealthy-looking little tags growing on your skin.

Still, it gave me perspective. I am a unique and beautiful creature, I realize and remind myself at times like this. It is not my skin, or even my bones, that make me this way. It is how I try to be with the creatures around me. I rarely clench my hands these days, they’re open. Soft to the touch. I do not often offend with my touch.

I don’t even mind taking a metaphorical punch, if there’s a chance for something better on the other side. I won’t take more than one, usually, but I extend that courtesy. It is a better world if we do extend each other the courtesy. Kant’s Categorical Imperative, Hillel’s Golden Rule, Ahimsa and all. Good enough for these deepest of thinkers, who am I to say no?

I will go to the T-Mobile store tomorrow and try to recover those deleted photos, though I have no reason to be optimistic. It would be a great bummer if they are gone forever, yes, but no less a blow than seeing that jagged piece of beef jerky over my right nostril, extending across half the lower nose, and half again as tall. A ragged dry lake bed on a bumpy, pitted topographical map in a place where the most lovely faces have a smooth expanse of skin. Think of any beautiful face.

That is what I see, actually, when I think of my face, when I think of faces I love. There is nothing to compare to those faces, in my world.

[1] discrete: individually separate and distinct. Discreet: careful and circumspect in one’s speech or actions, especially in order to avoid causing offense or to gain an advantage. also, intentionally unobtrusive.

An Incoherent Narrative

The triumph of irrationality in human affairs is made possible by the ready acceptance of incoherent narratives. A narrative that supports our point of view is generally accepted at once, even if it makes little or no sense. This is often called the ‘confirmation basis’– we tend to agree with anything that supports what we already feel or believe. The shapers of public opinion have made a science of exploiting this bias.

They take a feeling, say anger, or dispossession, or fear of dispossession, and create a narrative to mobilize a mass of people who feel this way. The narrative gives body to the shapeless feelings of malaise, fear, rage. The story does not need to bear any scrutiny at all, can be internally inconsistent, key details can be changed at any time, on the fly — the main thing is that the story is simple in its outlines, easy to repeat and available to forcefully offer in support of a point of view. The effect doesn’t follow from the purported cause? The story is incoherent? Who cares? Fuck you! I know you are but what am I? Make me!

I had a PT therapist the other day tell me that he thinks Trump is doing a great job, particularly with the economy. I pointed out that Trump inherited a good economy [1], the same way he’d inherited a fortune, that virtually all of his businesses except his reality TV show were failures, that his trade war policies are beginning to have bad effects, that he recently had to give $12,000,000,000 in emergency relief to farmers hurt by his tariffs.

The opinionated PT therapist allowed that Trump doesn’t care about anything, but insisted he is doing a great job with the economy. Besides, he said, China is screwing us big time, and then went on to describe an out of control China, madly polluting the air and water, lustily fucking away, while laughing at America. Good to know America’s big problem is those fucking Chinese, I thought, as the therapist wrenched my knees into uncomfortable positions.

Each of these things could be discussed, many of the PT guy’s opinionated statements countered with facts, but that that is not the point. The point of any narrative is to give your own feelings a rational sound and to have a ready story to shove down somebody’s throat if they disagree with your feelings. Trump would smile to see this PT therapist who likes him, a brown-skinned Indian immigrant with an accent, led away in handcuffs by ICE agents, while his children bawled, but I thought it an insult to mention this inconvenient counter-fact to the incoherently opinionated fuck.

Hillary Clinton was not the most naturally gifted politician but it’s hard to believe she’s running a vast pedophilia ring with young sex slaves for hire in the basement of a pizza place in D.C. Hard to believe, perhaps, even impossible to believe, particularly when we learn that pizza place doesn’t even have a basement, but, though the details might be a little wrong– it’s exactly the KIND OF THING a despicable person like that would do, according to those who hate her. In fact, there’s a story out now, tacitly endorsed by the president, raging across the internet like a California wildfire, that the corrupt liberals are all in on this pedophilia thing, with fucking Tom Hanks fucking away as lustily as China is fucking the U.S. Hanks using young children for his sick sexual thrills… disgusting. [2] Make America Great Again!!!!

We can see incoherent narratives at work throughout history. Hitler’s forceful story comes to mind: Germany was never defeated in World War One, it was betrayed by Jews. These treacherous Jewish criminals, in addition to controlling the world, fomenting war and profiting from it, were determined to impregnate as many Aryan women, preferably virgins, as they could. They were intent on polluting the gene pool with their poisonous DNA, in this way undermining and eventually destroying the superior race. It was a matter of simple self-defense then, to fight these preternaturally evil degenerates. The only way to deal with these ruthless fucks was by rooting them out, every one of them, and doing whatever was necessary to ensure they would never reproduce.

That’s the basic blueprint of an incoherent narrative. The beauty is the simplicity. You hear the story, it confirms your suspicions, and now you know what you must do. I always hated that fuck who ran the candy store, that Jew bastard. Now, after listening to Mr. Hitler, I know exactly why I was right to hate that piece of dreck. My spider sense, tingling, in the presence of the very evil that is destroying everybody and everything I love. What must be done is now clear.

In America we had a huge economic crash in 1929 that reverberated around the world as The Great Depression. Our capitalist economy was saved by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s bold initiatives. With tens of millions of Americans destitute and hungry, FDR devised plans to put as many as possible back to work, to ensure that those who had no work didn’t starve. The New Deal “social safety net” was our nation’s first real attempt to make sure masses of people didn’t die, or become Communists, because the richest Americans were, in a sense, lustily fucking them. Like Tom Hanks, like China.

One of the first key pieces of New Deal legislation made it illegal for banks to make huge speculative gambles using customer money. That was the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. For almost seventy years it protected the U.S. from another massive economic collapse. Then some very rich people had an excellent idea: why gamble with our own money when we can use those countless billions people have put in the bank, money that’s just sitting around, idle? Deals were made, Clinton signed off on the repeal of Glass-Steagall, his successor made many cynical decisions that benefited the richest Americans et, voila, the massive misery of the fraud-driven 2008 economic collapse. Now the right wing project is dismantling the entire New Deal.

You can’t do this without a compelling narrative. The brightest and most determined of these super-wealthy radical right wing folks have been playing the long game to convince Americans that government is not the solution to anything, using the incoherent narrative brilliantly. Government is the problem. Simple and direct. Government regulation fucks everything up, destroys liberty and kills initiative along with freedom. Government is the enemy of liberty. We need to restrict the government’s power, shrink government until it is small enough to drown in a bathtub. We do this by starving the beast. The monster runs on tax dollars. Stop the tax scam. If millions of parasites on dismantled government programs die, so much the better. Eh, scratch that last statement, it does not advance our narrative really, true though it is.

The only trouble with this narrative is that the government performs a host of crucial functions and that many government programs are greatly appreciated by millions of participants who benefit from them. Clearly not every beneficiary of Medicare, or Social Security, is a parasite. So here’s what we do. We fund campaigns to put people in office who will sign a pledge to advance our anti-government agenda. Once the government can be literally shut down by obdurate, disciplined zealots, our point is beyond dispute.

See, can it be more clear? Government, fucking government, can’t do anything, deadlocked, stupid, corrupt. All despicable, self-serving whores. We should know, we paid many of the whores, raised them out of obscurity, put them in office after they pledged to cripple the hated liberal president and his overreaching government programs.

In 2012 our network spent $120 million, lost the presidential election, damn it. In 2014 we spent $180 million, did much better. In 2016 we spent twice that and the results speak for themselves. We have more than $400 million in the war chest for the 2018 midterms. Plus, campaign funding practices that were once illegal are now TOTALLY legal, constitutionally protected “free speech” and we have a clear corporate wealth-friendly majority on the Supreme Court for the foreseeable future. How far we have come in convincing millions of average Americans that their government sucks!!

See, government is the problem. Fuck the 40 hour work week, minimum wage, workplace safety regulations, the right to collective bargaining, anti-pollution laws, a so-called environmental agency to enforce those laws, the Communist inspired catastrophic climate change hoax supported by partisan NASA scientists, so-called Civil Rights legislation, programs to make sure children and old people don’t starve, all the rest of that fucking liberal bullshit. The government is fucking you as lustily as Tom Hanks, China, Oprah. Disgusting!!!

I suppose it is the mind-fucking prevalence of these incoherent narratives in public life that makes me so intolerant of incoherent narratives in my private life these days. If I can’t have a conversation with a back and forth, a serious mutual effort to understand the other person’s point of view, and some internal coherence to the thoughts presented, I’m out of there. I thought of this one the other day, which I offer as my last example.

A friend has an issue with his memory, sometimes things we agreed on are simply forgotten. Shit happens. He’s quite sensitive about his memory issues, I’ve learned. We had an uncomfortable confrontation on my apparent treachery: I had not told him something I’d told his family (waiting to tell him only if and when my efforts had born fruit) and he felt betrayed and belittled. He confronted me about this. It was an uncomfortable confrontation.

Later I recalled that I’d told him the entire story, starting with the recent good news and including why I’d left him out of the loop, months earlier. I mentioned this to him, as an example of his faulty memory, responding to his insistence that his memory of our recent conversation was clearly as good as mine.

Granted he was on the defensive, but what he said next surprised me, and not in a good way. He told me that in fact he hadn’t forgotten that I’d told him the entire story weeks earlier, that he remembered the whole thing, every detail. Apparently this vindicated him, his memory is fine.

“That makes putting me on the spot like that much worse!” I said in exasperation. “If you remembered that I’d told you everything already, how can you then confront me about it in an inquisitorial way as though you knew nothing about it?”

He bulled right past this point, for purposes of his narrative that I was wrong about his faulty memory, my last point made no difference at all. This kind of thing works fine in current American politics, as we have seen, though it has does nothing to support friendship, let alone love.

[1] Good economy, in this case, being synonymous with a thriving stock market. More money for the wealthiest investors. More profits for corporations. Less taxes for the wealthiest. To the bitch on the street, working two or three jobs, this “good economy” bullshit is a little fucking galling, considering her real wages haven’t gone up in decades. Millions of children in poverty going to sleep hungry every night in the wealthiest nation on earth has nothing, really, to do with the “good economy”.

[2] Why the talented, down to earth, self-effacing Tom Hanks? I have no fucking idea, except, maybe that he said something these trolls found offensive and why not make the story really fucking good? If the all-American seeming Hanks is in on it, who could have any doubt that Bill and Hillary are gang banging five and six year olds in their secret sex dungeon, not to mention all the child sex Jay-Z and Beyonce, George Soros, the hated Obamas, Oprah, Al Franken, etc. are in on?

Irrationality 101

For most human purposes, rationality takes a back seat. All that is necessary for human action, most of the time, is a rationale, a slogan, an emotionally resonant excuse. It is hard to think of a collective misfortune more horrible than war. Yet every war is always somehow justified, even when it is inexcusable aggression, illegal under the spongey law of nations and conducted solely for the profit of a few who don’t care how many others must die so they can grow richer and more powerful. Justified. Read your history book, read virtually any history book. War, unfortunate, yes, hell, of course, but necessary, you see, because… that guy over there is Hitler. He’s fucking HITLER! Nuff said.

My sister and I had a good laugh when she pointed out a howlingly imbecilic line I’d written in an otherwise promising first draft about our family life. Describing our nightly fights around the dinner table as a battle field I went a step too far. My sister read the line with beautiful archness: “the brutal battlefield of our family dinner table was as nightmarish as any war scene you can imagine.” ANY war scene, she repeated, with deft intonation for maximum ironic emphasis. In the beat it took me to reply she reeled off a string of famous atrocities that left no doubt of the idiocy of my claim. Instead of a reply I burst out laughing. We had the best laugh we’ve had together in years. Then I caught my breath, pulled myself together and deleted the absurd line.

There I had a rare moment of good fortune, somebody gently pointing out my foolishness, and doing it with humor and superb understatement that made me see it for myself. The laugh made it undeniable, how laughable my claim had been. I submit that this moment was an outlier in general human affairs, a rare moment when rational good sense triumphs over a feeling of poetic license, shoddy but justifiable thinking, emotional overstatement.

Yes, of course, no child should ever be subjected to the mistreatment my sister and I regularly endured from our parents. Yes, of course, I have a right to be hurt and indignant, even angry, about the abuse we were made to suffer. But was it really as horrific as Turks on horseback driving helpless Armenians into a river to drown, worse than the Janjaweed, ISIS, the viciousness of the fanatical SS?

Eh, probably not, now that you put it that way.

But there’s the thing about irrationality, as a general rule it doesn’t stop anyone. We have an irrational chaos-monger insisting he will make our country great again, apparently by wiping out every vestige of decency that people have fought for centuries to achieve here. All he needs is a slogan and his base will roar, full-throated support, chant anything, no matter how idiotic. “Drain the Swamp!” which they chanted during his historic presidential campaign, a slogan he told an interviewer he had his doubts about, but then decided was great when he saw how the crowds took to it, was actually translated from the original Italian– it was a mantra of Benito Mussolini as he rose to power [1]. Many people are saying Mussolini was a fascist, but there are many views, on many sides, on many sides. Just sayin’.

There is no point feeling superior to a stadium full of desperate people chanting “lock her up!” or “Fake NEWS!” or “Suck my ass!!!”. No reason to feel superior to a strutting, supremely confident-seeming cruel bully with seemingly very few actual thoughts in his head. As a species, we are no more rational than anyone in that Make America Great Again crowd. Which is not to say we don’t each have the ability to be more rational — all it takes is somebody stating the truth in a way we can hear it. After my sister and I had a good laugh, there was no way to deny how laughable my claim about the atrociousness of our family war was. Is being called a “fucking cobra” as bad as being locked in a church with everybody in your town and having it burned to the ground? I suppose not.

And so it goes down virtually every issue we constantly debate in our battling society where unfair competition for material possessions is shrugged off as merely the law of nature. One of the “debates” that drove me most insane during those madcap Cheney-Dubya days was the torture debate. A fucking “debate” that will not fucking die, I might add. We had an administration determined to use practices we’d long ago signed on, as part of the civilized world, to ban forever. All that was necessary to overcome all those treaties was a horrific event followed by convening a small team of partisan lawyers to craft an argument — how idiotic an argument didn’t matter, just a secret memo to justify it in the odd event anyone was ever held accountable for the illegal program.

In light of the secret torture memo a hard kick in the balls was now “enhanced interrogation” instead of “torture” because it was not as painful as the shutdown of a major organ system. Nobody in their right mind could argue that a little kick in the balls is as bad as, say, your lungs shutting down. Are you fucking crazy, you’re going to claim a kick in the balls, or sleep deprivation, or a freezing cell, or stress positions, or “walling” or water-boarding is as bad as your goddamn heart stopping? Fuck off, peace bitch, we reframed this “debate” and there’s nothing you can do about it.

The other day I had a tiny moment of blessed relief, when a friend who loves to argue somehow drew me back into the fucking torture debate for a moment. “You’re saying even if you have the person who planted the ticking time bomb that’s about to kill 5,000 children, you can’t use torture to make him talk.” I took a breath.

“In that one in a million scenario, where you have the actual guilty fuck strapped to a chair, and in a matter of minutes 5,000 kids will die if you don’t get him to talk– yeah, sure, put the fuck on a water-board, electrodes on his balls, the works. I’ll fucking torture him myself, if we somehow know for sure that this is the actual psycho who planted the bomb. The murderous fanatic probably won’t talk in any event, but it’s worth a shot, to save that stadium full of kids. But the likelihood of that imagined scenario ever happening is less than a lightning strike, winning the lottery, inheriting 300 million from dad, like David and Charles Koch did.”

In that liberating moment I felt free from the moronic “ticking time bomb scenario” hypothetical always used to justify torturing anyone who might possibly “hate our freedom”. But it was a momentary feeling of relief. My friend, although he backed off a bit, still seemed to believe that there are situations where, the absurdity of the highly unlikely (how about NEVER) “ticking time bomb” hypothetical notwithstanding, that you would be justified in torturing somebody. It reminded me of our long ago torturous debate on the subject via email when I eventually asked in exasperation: what next, are you going to start actually torturing me? To which he wrote something to the tune of: Oh, but I already am…

So here we have a man, highly intelligent, well-read, a skilled debater, a moral person with nuanced political views, many of them progressive, for whom a “hypothetical” with a likelihood of 0.001% is good enough to justify, in some cases, an otherwise morally unjustifiable position. Not to say I could picture him torturing anyone (not physically, anyway) but that idiotic hypothetical is all he needs to keep arguing the position of the most vicious, ruthless, cruel and lawless among us.

Imagine the average person, without my friend’s fine education, generally refined moral awareness, wide reading, long professional experience making and dissecting arguments, confronted with an irrefutable bit of logical sounding rhetoric like “we got to fight ’em over there so we don’t have to fight ’em here!” Jesus, that makes perfect sense. We just need to go over there, kill or capture all of ’em, detain the live ones forever, torture ’em — end of problem! Next!

You see, they hate our fucking freedom. They’re not like us. They don’t love their children, they use them as human shields. They’re terrorists who hate us because we’re better than them. You get that? They have a massive cultural inferiority complex that makes them insane. Somebody who would do what they do is not a human in the same sense that a middle class white American is a human. They’d kill us all, and certainly not hesitate to torture us, in much worse ways than the many techniques in the $10,000,000 manual our legal team deemed totally legally defensible. You see, we’re talking savage, primitive fucking fucks here. You do understand the difference, don’t you?

On the other hand, my dear fellow American, you can see the obvious flaws in that stinking pile of horse diarrhea. I know you can. You just have to look directly at it, get a real whiff, think of your friend from school, the kid from Pakistan, a self-effacing, warm, funny guy… well, you would exempt Fahrid from any torture program, if you could…

[1] According to Madeline Albright in her recent book Fascism: A Warning.

This is Why I Love Naomi Klein

This Sunday the Grey Skank is devoting their entire magazine to a single article about catastrophic climate change. I heard an interview with the author of the long article, who seemed a very bright, well-informed and reasonable fellow. As you would expect from someone who writes for the Grey Lady. That said, I am always suspicious of the first drafts of history written by the New York Times. Humankind, the Times apparently concludes, is at fault for the climate mess we are in. We were not up to the challenges of keeping up the momentum to halt climate catastrophe that was developing up to 1988. We all failed, it seems, human nature itself dooming us to our doom.

The New York Times often tends to leave out one or two crucial factors, for no doubt excellent reasons that, most likely, have nothing to do with the myopia of their distinctly upper middle class worldview [1]. I always read the Times with an eye toward the story not being told and consult other sources to get as much of the rest of the story as I can. My father, who read the Times cover to cover every day, always supplemented his reading of the Times with other publications. As an adult now myself, I understand why the Times alone is not enough to keep us fully informed on the pressing issues of the day.

Which is where a journalist like the brilliant Naomi Klein comes in. I have always been engaged by what she has to say. When she writes of the Times piece “this work of history is filled with insider revelations about roads not taken that, on several occasions, made me swear out loud” I want to know exactly why. I had the feeling the Times was going to somehow partially miss the mark with their important landmark piece, Naomi Klein was about to tell me how they’d missed it. You can read her recent article here.

When I think about the New York Times, so valuable in many ways, I often think: fucking earthlings… If you are in their demographic, it is a wonderful part of Sunday sitting in the cozy family room unwrapping and sharing the gifts of their vast Sunday edition. If you are poor, disenfranchised, homeless, well, the reading of the Sunday Times is not as great a gift. Let’s just leave it there.

Read Naomi Klein’s article in conjunction with the Times magazine this Sunday and you will get more of the picture than the Grey Skank will give you herself. Here is Naomi Klein’s good news:

And the good news — and, yes, there is some — is that today, unlike in 1989, a young and growing movement of green democratic socialists is advancing in the United States with precisely that vision. And that represents more than just an electoral alternative — it’s our one and only planetary lifeline.

Yet we have to be clear that the lifeline we need is not something that has been tried before, at least not at anything like the scale required. When the Times tweeted out its teaser for Rich’s article about “humankind’s inability to address the climate change catastrophe,” the excellent eco-justice wing of the Democratic Socialists of America quickly offered this correction: “*CAPITALISM* If they were serious about investigating what’s gone so wrong, this would be about ‘capitalism’s inability to address the climate change catastrophe.’ Beyond capitalism, *humankind* is fully capable of organizing societies to thrive within ecological limits.”

Their point is a good one, if incomplete. There is nothing essential about humans living under capitalism; we humans are capable of organizing ourselves into all kinds of different social orders, including societies with much longer time horizons and far more respect for natural life-support systems. Indeed, humans have lived that way for the vast majority of our history and many Indigenous cultures keep earth-centered cosmologies alive to this day. Capitalism is a tiny blip in the collective story of our species.

Of course this is an unthinkable thought for the “liberal” New York Times. After all, it is beyond dispute that Reagan and Thatcher defeated Soviet Communism back in their day and so the only viable economic ideology in the world today, now that socialism was invalidated, you dig, is the global “free market.” Yes, there are problems with capitalism, the Times seems to agree, but picture your retirement portfolio without the dynamic, ever churning roulette wheel of the stock market making sure you don’t have to eat cat food in your old age. In a certain way the stance of the NY Times is marked by a lack of creative imagination.

Imagining a different and better world, analyzing the clear brutality of this global “free market” we are all being sold, for billions of human beings, animal life and the planet itself , and writing about it vividly, is but one reason I love Naomi Klein.

[1] In a story about the good news that, statistically, black American are now living almost as long as white Americans, the decisive factors, according to the Times, have little to do with the extreme stresses of institutionalized racism, apparently. Poor dietary and lifestyle choices of black Americans are the culprit, it turns out. Jeez, good thing we have the fucking New York Times to enlighten us! You can read more about that, and the wonderful article itself, here.

Can People Change?

People can’t change
my father always insisted.
Fundamentally, he said,
without a shred of doubt,
people cannot change themselves.

Fifty years later
as he was dying
his born-angry baby
standing quietly by his deathbed
listening
with no apparent anger
made him think

Fuck, he thought,
looks like I may have been
wrong about that
I wish I hadn’t been so
goddamned categorical
about it all my life.

Then he died.

The Process

Humans are not strictly rational beings. Human Nature 101, people will kill, march to certain death, commit unimaginable atrocities, for seemingly insane causes, or for no rationale they can articulate. In America millions of us routinely vote against our interests, in nakedly profit-driven elections now decided by the unlimited “speech” of legally created “persons” who exist only in the minds of unappealable activist judges. We vote for imperfect candidates who serve these interests, in the states where we’re still allowed to vote, our ability to vote less a given now than a few years ago, when the Supreme Court deemed the Voting Rights Act unnecessary in our colorblind, post-racist, er, post-racial democracy. Yeah, we all know, n-words can’t take an f-wording joke, particularly about American history. I’m not laughing either, and I’m technically a white man.

As fucked up as human beings so often are, there is a quality called integrity that many of us admire. The dictionary defines integrity as “the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.” The synonyms include — honesty, probity, rectitude, honor, good character, principle(s), ethics, morals, righteousness, morality, virtue, decency, fairness, scrupulousness, sincerity, truthfulness, trustworthiness.

It’s plain to see that the definition of integrity will vary based on your beliefs about the nature of decency, fairness, morality. There are often arguments, in democracy, about what is moral, honorable, right. These debates, in our smash-mouth culture, are often conducted by adamant partisans (many of dubious intellect) on a maddeningly reductionist level: abortion is always murder, a sin despised by God; abortion is a mother’s difficult decision and her absolute right to choose, at any time and for any reason, even the day before birth.

“You got a glass of water, Elie? Even for a blahg that virtually nobody reads, this post is a little bit dry, no? A tad academic, might we dare suggest? A wee bit pedantic, preacher?” says a pile of bones, interrupting. “Seriously, Elie, don’t mind me, I’m just here wearing the coxcomb, so to speak, to break the spell.”

Fuck me.

“Let’s get down to it, man. You’re thinking hard about something that is stuck like a jagged fiber between your molars. Play it out, motherfucker, work the damned dental floss. This piece is called ‘Process’, explain the process. Show us, don’t perfessor us.”

Fair enough. There is little enough we control in our lives. I’ve been in two discussions recently with people who doubt there is such a thing as “free will”. Let us suppose that free will is like the “free market”, a tiny speck of truth in the ocean of bullshit it claims is all fact, all freedom. There is little enough we have control of here in a world of chaos often run by the most ruthless psychopaths among us. We have our reputations, which are built on the goodwill of people who… never mind.

On the most elemental level, in our personal lives, all we really have is how we act in the world, how we are with the people we encounter. Each of us almost without exception have hurtful things we do, morally neutral things, and helpful things. If we are great, we also have the healing things that we do. There is no greater work, I think, than calming a distraught kid, listening with empathy, helping someone recover from trauma. There is plenty of trauma in our troubled world.

“Like this excruciating fucking post, for example. What the fuck, really, Elie, can you make your goddamned point while some of them are still alive?” said the pile of bones.

Your friend Eichmann cited Kant’s Categorical Imperative during his trial for crimes against humanity in Jerusalem. Hannah Arendt gave the otherwise dull defendant a gold star for stating it more or less correctly: to act in such a way that your actions could be universally practiced and the world would be better for it. Kant’s imperative is related to Hillel’s famous formulation of the Golden Rule: what is hateful to you, do not unto another. Now all this is quaint stuff in our modern world, our commodified, monetized world where the exact worth of an individual;s life can be reckoned down to the nickel by calculating their “net worth.”

“Elie, I’m fucking begging you,” said the skeleton.

No good deed goes unpunished. The sassy devil of this cliche is in the waggish details. Say you take the high road with an old friend, somebody who we will stipulate can be difficult, prone to tirelessly trying to prove himself right, no matter how many contortions are involved, a man in deep trouble, at any rate. He is unaware of the effect his actions have on those around him, seems to have little insight into how provocative he can be, is locked in a constant zero-sum war for survival. In this war he has shown that he will do whatever he has to do to survive, even things most of us would shrink from. That is what people often do in war.

“So why take the notoriously thankless high road? Why not just take your leave of him if he’s such a toxic person?”

I don’t have a good explanation, except that I am trying to redeem a friendship we once had, for the sake of learning a better way than just shoving these types off the back of my yacht and leaving them bobbing in my wake.

“Nothing better than a good shove and bobbing in the wake job, it seems to me, if the person has been loudly demanding it for some time.”

Well, I wont say no to that. But here’s the point I’ve been stumbling toward about my process. First I have to try to understand as much about the thing as I can, try to see the thing from as many sides as I can, extend the benefit of the doubt if a friend is involved. I do that by thinking and then writing here. I arrange things until they make sense. I arrive at conclusions that help shape my actions. In writing I see clearly…

“Unless you’re as deluded as your, eh, friend…”

… for example, that this chap has rage he is unaware of, pent up, waiting for an occasion to let some of it out. He appears to be largely unaware of this rage or its unconscious seepage. He is nervous, so that things that might not rile a less nervous person really drive him nuts. He reacts pungently. I have to map all these things out, to get a handle on how to best approach the problem.

“While exacerbating the problem by writing about it here where your angry, nervous, distracted friend can stumble on it and stoke his righteous anger at being once again betrayed. A laudable process, I have to say.”

Well, sure, he would know the anonymous allusion to, say, a person who keeps forgetting key agreements and so on, are about him. On the bright side, he’s too busy most of the time to read anything that’s not somehow related to his overwhelming professional life, so his stumbling on anything on my blahg is unlikely. In any case, I always write with an eye toward preserving the anonymity of the people I mention in my “work” here.

“Your ‘work’,” said the skeleton, silently opening his jaws in a pantomimed guffaw, “I love that. Thanks for tickling me with those quotation marks.”

Shut up. Here is my point. Someone can make you mad, give a meaningless apology that is dragged out of them (“implied apology” asshole, I’m already covered, you merciless dick), and then continue aggravating you in the very manner he’s already apologized for. That’s a person that needs to be extirpated from your world, no question. Is it better or worse if the motherfucker has no idea of their neurotic habit of making others angry? An irrelevant question, really.

My point: I wrestle with the right way to approach all this and then, after a hellishly combative several hour long attempt at reconciliation during which I manfully avoided physically assaulting my decisively unrepentant old friend, I get an email congratulating me on the test showing a trend toward remission of my kidney disease (which I’d bcc’d to everyone on the list) and saying he’s looking forward to our next get together.

“Your fault, Elie, why on earth did you bcc him the health news?”

Point taken, bone breath. I suppose in an ill-considered attempt to preserve relationships with his wife and kids. Eichmann again: Hannah Arendt notes that the three German-Jewish judges who decided the war criminal’s fate were unfailingly humane and respectful to Eichmann. Unaccustomed to this treatment, Eichmann took their attitude as sympathy and was cruelly disappointed when these men, who had treated him so decently, suddenly condemned him to death. Arendt watched the face of the man in the glass booth and saw this reaction for herself. He couldn’t believe it, they’d been so respectful, even kind, and now they were fucking hanging him?

“Look, if you’re comparing an old friend to Eichmann, I’d say the poor devil is already off the back of your yacht and bobbing, utterly betrayed, in the wake.”

My friend would never do what Eichmann did. I take your point, but let me finish. I am stuck musing over this, and because I cannot clear my mind of it, it floats up in conversation. I made the mistake of bringing it up yesterday. I myself don’t know a productive thing to say about this festering idiocy that remains so clearly oppressive to me. I’ve done everything I know how to try to make this person understand the peril our long friendship is in, I’ve been more patient [1] than I ever thought myself capable of being, in the face of mind-numbing obliviousness, denial and attack from my desperate old pal.

“Yer a fucking saint, Elie, no question now. Join a religion pronto, my boy, so you can be canonized.”

Good idea. Anyway, there is nothing anyone can say about this situation. I’ve got nothing.

“Outside of the last few thousand words of postmortem.”

Yeah, and I’m hoping this last bit of coughing will hack up whatever’s left of it. The point is, this process has made me see all the issues very clearly, anyway. If someone is unaware of their anger, and it causes them to provoke others, who then become angry, and they are bitter about the angry friend’s demand that they apologize for something they don’t even know they’ve done, no matter how clearly the facts point to it, and then they argue instead of being at all contrite… well, there you have it. So there’s not much that can be said. My experiment failed. Case closed. But still you feel compelled to rattle on about it. What is a friend supposed to say at this point?

“You’re empowering him to bother you,” a friend says, in an attempt to be helpful. The attempt was well-meant. The effect of the comment is to blame you for being unable to put the hideous conundrum out of your head.

“We’re back to free will now, Bozo. If you have free will, your friend is right. You’re giving this irredeemable neurotic the power to continue endlessly fucking with your mind. Be done with the slimy little bastard. Trust me, the clueless, enraged little fuck will look much, much better bobbing hopelessly in the wake of your yacht.”

[1] The Hebrew word for patience is more profound than our English word. In Hebrew they say “sovlahnoot” which means the ability to endure suffering. The Hebrew word for patience comes from the root “sevel” which means suffer. It takes no patience to endure something that does not make us suffer, true patience involves enduring something that is difficult to endure.

Fair and unfair

Fairness is what everyone wants, like liberty, freedom and love. Fairness feels right. Unfairness sticks in the old craw. We live in the midst of vast, rising, institutionalized unfairness, a small group of extremely powerful people making unappealable decisions the rest of us suffer from. Even here in our great democracy, small groups of special interests (e.g., those who insist that the estates of billionaires should not be taxed a penny when they die) get an unfair amount of say in the policies we all must live by.

In the personal sphere, the only place where we can exercise true autonomy (to the extent any of us do), unfairness can sometimes be avoided. You can simply subtract toxic people from your life, it’s done all the time. Addition by subtraction. Of course, personal things are not always so simple. Take the example of a friend who insists on his love, who insists on the right to be your friend, no matter what, and seeks to bind you to an agreement to this effect.

A friend who consistently treats you unfairly, in the manner of my beleaguered brother-in-law telling me to keep secret that he was taking advantage of me, may sometimes make a rule for you, draw a line in the sand. For example: you may not discuss how I treat you with other people. There is nothing to say that we must abide by unfair, one-sided obligations imposed by others.

In the case of my brother-in-law, he told me to keep our “confidence” about his inability to keep his promise to quickly repay the loan I’d made to him, in the context of him revealing how much money he owed several other people, including my father. He owed me my entire life savings, which I’d offered him in a loan when he was in a tight spot. Then he couldn’t pay me back as we’d agreed, since paying my father’s loan (which I knew nothing about) had priority over mine. I’d had no idea he’d taken money from my father and many other people, no idea he’d been untruthful when he convinced me to loan him the money. Now I found myself in a bind and he was insisting I needed to suck it up, dummy up, shut the fuck up. I told him I’d talk to my father, arrange to get paid back first. This upset my brother-in-law, and he threatened me, and called me a pussy who had to run to his father. He tried to make me promise to keep this between us. This was unfair. Fuck him, I was under no obligation to participate in my own fucking for somebody else’s sake.

I spoke to my father who told me, with characteristic directness, that it was my problem, that he insisted on continuing to get paid back first and that I shouldn’t have been so generous with my life savings. Also unfair, sure, but no more unfair than my brother-in-law trying to force me to keep a secret for the sake of helping him to conceal his shameful practices.

Now, decades later, I find myself up against another game with evolving rules that are not fair. “I know you are an open kind of person, not given to arguable untruth or subterfuge, and that you seek advice from people close to you, that you tend to write about your vexations, so it may be very hard for you, but I need you to shut up about how difficult I am making your life. I would never betray you this way, so I’m asking you never to reveal anything personal that happens between us.”

I think of Zora Neale Hurston in this context. She was up against the rules of a rigged game she had no hand in designing. She was not consulted about the virulent, often violent racism of her home country, our country, an America where death by lynching was still imposed on Negroes who forgot their place. Someone wrote of Zora that she refused to play by the rules of a game she’d never agreed to play. Respectable position to take, I’d say, even heroic. She got some fame, deservedly so, and fell hard, because, in the end, the game is designed that way. Agree to play or not, there it is.

I have my faults, but lying is not one of them. To say to me “you’re lying” when you feel I’m in error about some small, easily verifiable fact, is not the same as saying “you’re wrong.” But I’m not here to quibble, so don’t bother arguing that you never said it. You said it, take that to the bank.

I’m here simply to state that as I’m being smothered by a toxic blanket, wielded by a drowning man, I’m not going to agree to sit quietly and keep trying to work things out nicely with the fucker who’s wrapping the stinking blanket around my face. Fuck that. If you are offended, here is some consolation: you know now, full-stink, how it feels to have your feelings and wishes ignored. Feels unfair, I know.

For someone who owes an apology he is incapable of giving to go on the offensive to try to save an old friendship… well, it’s nuts, fucked up, crazy, mad, foolish, doomed, counter-productive but also: unfair. The big betrayal you apologized for, after we came as close as two people can to punching each other’s faces without actually exchanging blows, you still defend as right, in some twisted way. “I saw you getting furious, OK, but I also seriously thought if I told you those two little things it would make a difference. So, sorry you got so mad, but I was actually only trying to do the right thing.” Insisting even now, that the thing you were forced to apologize for really was hardly blameworthy at all, oh my. I guess winning really is the only thing, if your personality is hardwired that way.

I’m trying my best to get this whole unfair set-up out of my head. I have other things I have to focus on, things that will take massive concentration to do properly. That rule “no reference to how consistently antagonistic and morally tone deaf I am or how my slightly insane passive aggressive behavior toward you might irk you, I’d certainly never make such a reference to you, I’d never publicly betray you…”— nah, bunk dat, homey. Fuck that. Learn to do better or move the fuck on.