Distraction

There are certain things that occupy the mind so clamorously that they crowd out all productive thought. If you’re worried about something all the time to the point of preoccupation it’s hard to focus on anything else. Your work suffers. Eventually the boss sends in the guy with the ax, your head rolls a few feet and is booted into a basket. If you have no boss, thoughts themselves can be your brutal master. Certain thoughts, once they have their hooks in you, will not let go until they have sucked you dry of creativity, even the impulse to try to be creative.

Being captured by one of these thought occupying conundrums is like being caught in a loop while on a treadmill with no off switch. Presented with a difficult, seemingly insoluble problem, one real possibility, once you’ve tried to solve the damned thing a few different ways and failed, is becoming caught in a recursive cycle. You will continue to turn the problem, view it again from several different angles, tend to go over the same poor solutions again and again, failing each time and never being able to “think outside the box”, the only place where any possible solution exists after all other options have exhausted themselves. In the end, incapable of the necessary leap of inspired imagination, you’ll become convinced the problem has no solution.

Every serious problem ever faced by humans, the deadliest problem of the day, was solved by an inspired leap of creative imagination. These leaps are not conceivable to caged animals, pacing their confinement off in a track that rubs the fur off one of their flanks. Once the problem is solved, often by something ingeniously simple, the solution seems obvious, is eventually taken for granted. Before we harnessed fire, what?

Take any political stalemate you like as an example of the supremely distracting, mental energy sapping thing I’m trying to bring out. The killing on the Palestinian side of the Gaza fence. You can turn that one several ways, and it doesn’t ever come out good. The answer is not there, among terror advocates, human shields, political tools, protectors of democracy, dupes, zealots willing to die and snipers with orders to shoot to kill. In the end, your mind glazes over, you pick a side and glare, or turn your eyes away in despair. Even as you’re aware the human truth is not really there on either present merciless side: a terrorist outfit running Gaza, right wing nationalist extremists running Israel, and that no solution is possible as long as these merciless motherfuckers are running the horror show.

You get something stuck between your molars. It is lodged so firmly that it actually makes your teeth hurt a little bit, pain now traveling along your jaw. You can’t get it out with your fingers, your fingernails, with a toothpick, the thinnest blade of your pocket knife, the edge of your map, your tongue endlessly goes to it, you are talking, trying to do other things but distracted. Nobody has dental floss. You’re seven miles out on a hiking trail. Up shit’s creek, no paddle. If only…

There are many things like this in life, particularly in a fast-paced competitive society that believes “time is money,” and “chop, chop, we’re on the clock.” Time is obviously not money in the most basic sense. You can have a billion dollars, but when you run out of time, the worms begin licking their lips, dirt is thrown over you (the passive voice used) and your money is no good here, sir. Time is time, the only real possession we have while we’re here breathing, dreaming and being so often distracted. It is, of course, difficult to see that in a land where everyone keeps chanting “time is money, chop, chop, we’re on the clock!” The chant of a crowd is supremely distracting. A good chant can actually produce mass mindlessness. The examples in history and current events are so numerous and well-known that we can safely skip the example.

I’ve often railed against the lying, attention demanding false show called advertising, also known as Public Relations (and in the political context; propaganda) which has, of course, come to rule electoral politics in modern democracy, as well as in modern dictatorship, now that I think of it. During a brief stay in a PhD program in History (with the capital H, to be sure) I focused on the rise of the Nazis, masters of organized public lying on a mass level, the abusive fathers of the modern political advertising almost universally practiced today.

The rise of Nazism and the functioning of their infernal state were things I’d studied long and hard as an undergraduate. I even won a prize for my research paper The Nazis vs. Degenerate Art, which, like so many things, sounds more ominous in German: entartete kunst. In the decades since that Joan Kelly Prize-winning paper several books have come out about the infamous Nazi campaign against modern art. At the time, I was among the first Americans to explore the subject, with very little research material then available in English. I was basically following somebody’s footnote about entartete kunst. I somehow procured an original catalogue of the show that travelled through the Reich, the highest attended art show until the Metropolitan Museum put on King Tut (or maybe it was MoMA’s massive Picasso show) an art show that broke the record half a century later. Devilish shit, that black and white glossy catalogue, with a particularly ugly African mask on the cover, staring out with dead, hollow eyes.

Anyway, I noticed in my reading and watching that as mass media became the monolithic force it is today (and today, of course, our selected mass media is in our pocket, with a beep to notify us there is something urgently waiting for us to look at) corporations and governments took on more and more of the same tactics for influencing and dominating public opinion. The same experts who earned the most money in commercial advertising (masters of “psychological warfare” like Edward Bernays, who coined the phrase around 1920) sold things like war (Committee for Public Information in the build up to U.S entry into WWI, much extolled by Hitler in Mein Kampf) and political candidates. I’ve written a lot about this sickening subject over the years, there are many excellent books out there on the subject, (Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent comes to mind, there’s a great movie of that title on youtube, if I’m not mistaken; I’m not, here you go ) and the power of advertising in our current world is hard to overstate.

DISTRACTION, on a mass level, by design.

When I sat down to write yesterday I was unable to begin the important, challenging thing I have in mind to write (a 3,000 word version of the book about my father, to sell to some publication so as to procure a literary agent to sell the book, though it will be hard enough to sell the short piece to any impressive publication without a literary agent– Catchuh-22!) until I had written something else, cleansing the mental palette of what has been distracting me so much lately. A long friendship dating back to when I was seven or eight years old, on the ropes, bleeding from multiple cuts, both eyes swollen shut, head carbuncled with contusions, panting piteously as the onlookers gasp, referee nowhere in sight. I’m requested not to write anything about this, no matter how obliquely, even though writing clearly is the only way I know how to really process anything. The only way I can set the thing clearly in front of myself is to write it coherently for someone else. I am sternly requested not to write about it, chided with: I would certainly never publicly write about you, or any of your troubles. I could write it in my diary, I suppose, if I still kept one, but I don’t. I consider the discipline of writing for “publication” essential to my writing life.

So there you go, let’s just close that annoying fucking loop and focus on the difficult work ahead. Here we go loop de loo. Fine. Eyes on the prize. Mind on spin cycle. There is no way out. I will not be distracted, I will not be distracted, I will not be distracted, I will… OK, I suppose I will.

A true artist, I was once convinced, learns to extirpate everything from his life that distracts from making art. Now I think this is a cynical formulation created by auto-mythologizing public relations monsters like genius and money-machine Pablo Picasso, who devoured whole women alive to obtain the raw materials for his masterworks. On the other hand, fuck. Some weeds just need to be rooted out, tossed into the sun to dry out, become airy puppets for the doomed feral kittens in the garden to bat around.

Basic Goddamned Fairness! How about it?!!!

People are unfair to the President of the United States of America, as they so often are to the true, unapologetic geniuses walking among us. It is reported the U.S. president “attacked” our NATO allies, calling them cheap, demanding that they pay more into NATO’s military budget, claiming afterwards that they had agreed to his new terms. Immediately after those remarks the French leader said there had been no such agreement. The leader of Germany has never shown much respect for our president — he offered her some advice, told her what she needs to do for political survival, as he smoothly told one of Rupert Murdoch’s TV hosts in Britain the other day, but she, sadly, appears to be doing exactly the opposite. He took some modest credit for the great feeling of collegiality at the recent NATO meeting, something he said never existed until recently, when, presumably, someone of his caliber finally came into the room.

His meeting with Vladimir Putin on Monday, we learn, no surprise, will be secret, mano a mano; apparently no other witnesses, no recordings, no official record of any kind. Just the account that will be given of the meeting by two world leaders who have never lied about anything, nor have they ever agreed to lie about anything, nor would either ever have the slightest motive to lie about anything, clearly. No point to unfairly mention Cheney and Dubya’s controversial top secret, tandem testimony, not under oath, to the 9/11 Commission they reluctantly agreed to allow to proceed. I’m not going to knock our current president, he’s had a very challenging life, is constantly treated very unfairly by many, many, many corrupt liars and gets so little credit for his many towering and historic achievements from our communistic mass media.

One of the people who attacked the current president, while our leader was still a candidate, texted terrible things about him, this FBI man and one-time member of Robert Mueller’s team on the witch-hunt to find some kind of corruption to link to the highly principled POTUS. This Peter Strzok as much as called him a “fucking asshole”. When the defamation laws are tightened up (and truth is no longer an absolute defense to the charge of speaking words that harm another’s reputation) people like him will face justice. For now, he was dragged into a Congressional Hearing to explain to hostile interrogators what the fuck he was fucking doing texting these vicious, personal opinions to another FBI employee he was having an extra-marital affair with. Instead of apologizing, the adulterer Strzok was defiant. He said this, among other inflammatory things:

Peter Strzok: “That was written late at night, off the cuff, and it was in response to a series of events that included then-candidate Trump insulting the immigrant family of a fallen war hero. And my presumption, based on that horrible, disgusting behavior, that the American population would not elect somebody demonstrating that behavior to be president of the United States. It was, in no way, unequivocally, any suggestion that me, the FBI would take any action whatsoever to improperly impact the electoral process.”

That dickhead’s words speak for themselves. Traitor.

I thought the NY Times was too respectable a paper to publish outright mockery of America’s president. Apparently I was sadly mistaken. Not only did the fuckers splash headlines about 12 Russians indicted today for hacking the Democratic National Committee’s emails and other records, the president “trying to repair damage after criticizing British leader,” another headline reading, with leering suggestiveness, that he “Invited the Russians to Hack Clinton. Were They Listening?” but they also published a disrespectful, even humiliating little video of disgusting Brits ‘taking the piss’ on the NY Times website. The disrespect for our commander-in-chief that these fucking out of control goddamned Brits mirthfully displayed when our president came to tell their head of state she’s wrong and misguided, and that her extreme right-wing political rivals are smart and with the times? Fuck those fucking so-called “protesters”, you know what I’m saying? Totally unfair.

If you have a morbid curiosity about the depths the failing NY Times will now sink to in their hysterical hatred of our blameless leader, click here.

Depression v. Anxiety

Depression is familiar to me and no longer holds much terror for me. This lack of terror may be as much the result of my genetic coding as my experiences with depression. During the worst of the times I was depressed, for example, I never considered ending my own life. Killing myself always struck me as useless, worse than foolish, even when the world looked bleak, pointless and hopeless to me. I understand suicide if you are faced with a painful terminal condition with no hope of cure, but outside of that, I do not understand it at all. I can imagine other rare scenarios, about to be tortured by some powerful psychopath who has you chained up, with no way to escape or call for help, but with a cyanide pill in your false molar, OK, it might be reasonable then. I never suffered a depression deep enough to make me feel suicide was the only way out. I guess that’s the easiest way to describe my lack of terror about the Black Dog. Having experienced a fairly mild form of depression makes it easier for me to be philosophical about it, for sure. I recognize an element of pure, dumb luck in that.

All that said, the mechanism of depression, the complete loss of hope, is clear to me now, which also helps diminish the fear of it. You get sucked down into a low energy state where not only is everything hopeless and grim, but, on a fundamental, undeniable level, it’s your own fault that everything is hopeless and grim because you are a colossal asshole. I’ve heard, and it seems true, that depression is rage turned inward. Your imagination, along with all the hope it contains, turns to mud, to quicksand, no productive or hopeful thoughts can bubble out of depression. You cannot lash out at the oppression around you, which may be impossible to do in a productive way in any case, or at least unimaginably difficult, so you turn the whip on yourself.

Learning to stop whipping myself was a major change for the better in my life. It was a promise I made to myself about thirty years ago, during a very trying time in my life, when I faced the prospect of prison time (during the endless months before the charges were finally dismissed). Scary fucking days, The People of New York State v. Me. A little voice, my own, told me one night when I was quaking in my bed: whatever happens, I will be there with you, do not worry until it’s time to worry, and remember, add nothing to what the world is already doing to you right now. We will face whatever happens together.

I was, naturally, also filled with anxiety, biking twenty miles or more a day, up gigantic hills, lifting weights, got into the best shape of my life, against the day when I might have to fight for it in the narrow hallway outside of the exercise yard.

That little voice reassured the hell out of me. If I was a different kind of person that voice would have been a come to Jesus type moment, the voice of God, my Creator. In my own case, it was the voice of the best and wisest of myself, my internal parent, the voice I had nurtured every time the world made no sense to me. The world had often made no sense to me as a child, for reasons I was only able to fully grasp starting about forty years later.

Depression is familiar, anxiety disorder (as common an affliction, I read, as depression) is alien to me. Anxious as I was in those days when my higher voice had to reach down to pull me out of panic, constant anxiety is a different animal entirely, I think. Just as the depressive way of life is to accept a shit situation as something impossible to change, the way of anxiety is always churning along. Anxiety, I am pretty sure, never stops. The ceaselessness of worry, being on the edge of panic at all times, fearing the worst and taking measures always to avoid it, makes it a full-time job just to get through the day.

The only way I can really picture anxiety disorder is to imagine as my permanent overarching feeling the moments when I felt close to panic. Whatever else is going on, behind the scene terror is doing a mocking dance. The person is reassuring you that everything is fine, you see a sarcastic demon behind the person doing a grotesque, leering pantomime, waving hideous fingers in “air quotes”, as the reassuring voice drones on, almost unheard. That is my image of anxiety disorder, which I will refer to as anxiety for the remainder of this short piece.

As I recognize features of anxiety in old friends I learn new things about it. One complaint I’ve long had about one old friend is an inability to remember many of the specific, specifically troubling, details of a difficult discussion we’ve had. The troubling section of our conversation is erased, like an incriminating tape. This constant partial erasure appears to be a mechanism of anxiety. The things that make you anxious must be continually repressed, it seems. The strategy doesn’t really help in relationships, unless the other party is willing to simply accept that any emotional difficulty will be resolved by pretending everything is fine. Like the depressive’s neurotic willingness to accept the intolerable as the best the person deserves, the anxious person’s over-riding desire is to avoid anxiety. Anger? OH FUCK, NO!!!!! ARRGGGGH! ARRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!

Anger is a common and natural emotion. It is arguably the most difficult emotion we regularly have to face. Some unfortunate people face it by turning that supremely threatening shit on themselves. Can you look into the barrel of your own gun and say “fuck those fucking assholes!!!” and shoot yourself in the face if you are not full of irrational, inchoate rage? Let’s be kind, maybe the rage is neither irrational nor inchoate– does anyone but a nut shoot himself because he can’t deal with his own anger? (And, yes, for the gender pronoun police, part of that vast force of politically correct over-reactors who helped get the cruel Trump elected, He is more prone to shoot a gun in rage than She is, at least statistically).

Anger to a depressive is turned inward, a kind of self-torture. Anger to an anxiety prone person… I don’t know. I guess it’s pushed away, denied, buried under constant frenetic activity. It’s compressed, shoved down somewhere, rationalized, stored away as fodder for future anxiety — I literally have only the foggiest idea. It’s the same exercise to me as trying to imagine the quiet, inner life of a devout Christian, or Muslim, or Buddhist, or Jain. I have only the faint outlines, the imagined idea of what it might be like in the quiet heart of someone truly imbued with holy beliefs and living a highly moral life in accordance with those beliefs.

Living with anxiety is like that to me, a world I can only imagine. The full-flight pattern my father used to complain about his old friend running, in hindsight, is the perfect indicator of anxiety disorder. The day was divided into a highly scheduled series of tasks, each one allotted no more than the actual time it was supposed to take. In the real world, this ideal schedule is almost impossible to carry out, so the full-flight pattern requires constant triage, cutting corners, cutting short one thing to have the time to do another– the whole planned enterprise impossible, but, nonetheless compulsory. The anxious person is unable to be fully present because… already running late, late, got to get to those next things, shit, things are falling apart, goddamn it…

Time is all we really have here. Elmore Leonard has his idiot criminals and smart cops alike, in every book, “taking their time.” This shows that they are cool. What is cool but doing things the way you want to, not the way others demand? So a guy asks an Elmore Leonard tough guy “what the fuck?” and glares at him, waiting for an answer. The tough guy turns his head toward the window, through which a strip of the ocean is visible, takes it in, breathes the salt air. Reaches into his pocket, takes out a cigarette, reaches for his lighter on the table, lights the cigarette slowly, draws in the tobacco smoke, taking his time. “You know what?” he finally says, taking his time, “fuck you.”

“Spokesreptile”

No idea where the president got this particular spokesreptile, Alex Azar (no offense to snakes and lizards) but check out this beautiful attempt at auto-fellatio yesterday in response to the nettlesome question of why the administration has been unable to comply with a federal judge’s order to reunite families: to wit, 3,000 children forcibly taken from their parents at the southern border:

Health and Human Service Secretary Alex Azar: “It is one of the great acts of American generosity and charity, what we are doing for these unaccompanied kids who are smuggled into our country or come across illegally.”

source (hear the quote for yourself, spoken yesterday to Wolf Blitzer, on TV)

Here is CNN’s own account of the conversation (you can see that, in context, it’s not quite as simple as I made it sound above, but that’s just nuance).

Azar is the administration official who told the Senate Finance Committee recently that it would be easy to reunite children forcibly separated from their parents. It was a matter of a couple of keystrokes, he said on June 26, to find any detained child on the government database. He claimed “hundreds” of children had already been reunited with parents and gave the numbers to back it up: 2,047 currently in HHS custody, down from about 2,300. These claims were soon belied by many other reports, even by HHS’s updated numbers of detained children separated from parents (up now by about 1,000 from the 2,047 figure). This is often the case with claims made by those speaking for our compulsively untruthful commander-in-chief. Here you go.

I am sure Mr. Azar is as highly qualified for his position as Betsey DeVos is for her position as Czar of Public Education, or Ben Carson is for his stewardship of all federally subsidized public housing in the the United States, or Jared Kushner is for solving the Opioid Epidemic and making peace between Israel and the Palestinians, or as the environment-hostile Scott Pruitt was to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Mr. Azar is possibly even as highly qualified as the president himself, even as the cruel president doubles down to escalate a bullying, counterproductive, unwinnable trade war with America’s enemies and allies alike. But let us parse this “great act of American generosity and charity”.

The hateful program designed to terrorize those thinking of fleeing terror and seeking refuge in the United States is blandly called Family Separation. Reads much better than Forcible, Possibly Permanent, Removal of Children from Asylum Seeking Parents, (and you get no receipt for your fucking kid, who we will send hundreds of miles away with no records kept, s-word asshole) in Order to Deliberately Terrorize Asylum Seekers, no?

The president and his spokespeople freely admitted that the program was designed to scare would-be asylum seekers from coming to our borders. It was designed to inspire the greatest terror someone fleeing persecution could ever face: the loss of the little brown children whose lives they are fleeing to protect. Make no mistake about the class and race-based animus at work here: the despicable program is directed against impoverished brown people, not Aryans, the kind of genetic material, the best people, the very best of the best, that the president wishes were clamoring to enter the United States instead of these brown, raping hordes.

The diminutive, racist Attorney General sharpens this to a finer legal point. We are no longer allowing asylum applications based on reasonable fear of deadly violence to those fleeing domestic violence or gang violence.

He points out, as defenders of the Ku Klux Klan did successfully for generations, that gang violence is not “state-sponsored”. See, this is a supremely important legal distinction. When the Klan tortured and hung a Negro who didn’t know his place it was never “state action”, the kind of thing that would have triggered the federal laws made to enforce the long-slumbering Fourteenth Amendment. Since it was not “state action”, you understand, it was solely within the province of the individual state to convene a jury to decide, if a trial was even necessary, whether the allegedly murdered black person had crossed a goddamned line that would have made any white person justifiably enraged enough to kill him. Nothing to see here, says Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, as so many of his ilk pompously intoned since before he was even a glint in his racist pappy’s eye.

Peter Fonda, an actor currently promoting some project, angrily tweeted that Barron Trump, son of the president and his third wife, Melania, should be ripped from Melania’s arms, that she might wail in agony to her supremely cruel husband (I think Fonda used the less precise adjective “asshole”) as the mothers of the forcibly seized young children wail to their husbands, if their husbands have not already been killed by the forces the US now claims no longer constitute “reasonable fear of persecution” for purposes of political asylum. Fonda was forced to retract the tweet and apologize, since he was promoting a movie that is probably already being boycotted, based on his outrageously offensive, if morally justified, tweet.

There is only one person in the country who is immune from apologizing for anything: the birdbrain-in-chief whose tweets, while largely incoherent brain farts emanating from his constantly enraged insular cortex, are often clearer than his oral pronouncements, his oral pronouncements, his very fine pronouncements, the repeated, idiotic sounding cadence, the idiotic sounding cadence, repeated, familiar, familiar from reality TV, which is real TV, let there be no doubt, and I repeat, I repeat, because he has, like, you know, the finest words, the best words, the very best words money can buy, and when I say money, I’m talking about money, MONEY, heaven-reaching towers of golden money piled on top of more money than you can ever imagine. I have the greatest words. Your words suck, but my words are the greatest, the best, the finest words. I have the finest words, the best words, and I always get the last word, the last word, the greatest word, the greatest last word. I always get the last word! Which is the greatest word, the greatest word.

Nuance vs. Anger

In an enraged world, where powerless people are poised, at the slightest provocation, to bite each other’s heads off, nuance disappears. The best explanation I heard of why this happens is the neuroscience of what happens in the insula (insular cortex) when people are angry. This important region of the brain, crucial to our emotional lives, lights up, apparently, whenever we are angry. When the insula is glowing with anger we simply can’t process nuance, can’t make distinctions, can’t make productive comparisons, can only see our anger. People who insist Trump is the worst president ever can quickly get mad enough to insist that fucking Trump is a better president than fucking Bernie Sanders would have been.

We attended a concert for peace at Temple Emmanuel a few months back. A couple of musicians we like very much were performing and it was touted as a concert for peace, Palestinian musicians making music with Israeli musicians. Outside the historic synagogue a small group of angry looking Jews were holding signs, behind a barricade, with a couple of NYC cops flanking them. The signs said this was an anti-Semitic event held by self-hating Jews. I crossed the street to ask what was up. Imagine my surprise to learn that I was about to be a dupe of fucking anti-Semites! I was informed that one of the concert’s sponsors, the New Israel Fund, supported terrorism against Israel.

This claim took me by surprise. I knew nothing about the New Israel fund, and asked how exactly these momzers [1] supported terrorism against Israel. “BDS”, I was told, the anti-Semitic plot to squeeze Israel to death economically so that the Arabs who claim to be Palestinians can overrun it. I felt like I was talking to Stephen Miller, the hatred coming off this one young man was palpable. I told them I’d check out the New Israel Fund, but that as far as I knew, from the artists in the show, I was pretty sure none of them are anti-Semites. My friend crossed the street and took me by the arm at this point. She led me away from the dozen or so protesters who continued to make a ruckus after we headed in to see the show.

For true believers, it suffices merely to have a rationale, a buzzword, to spit in the face of those who refuse to believe. In the case of these protesters, BDS is a tool for modern day Nazis and should be criminalized in America, the sooner the better. Full throated support for BDS is the same, to them, as opposing the criminalization of this specific form of non-violent political coercion. To these angry people, anyone who believes BDS should not be illegal supports BDS and intends to put a dagger through the heart of our beloved Jewish State. Easy peasy, no need for your fucking anti-Semitic nuance you self-hating fucker!

Here is the New Israel Fund’s position on BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction), from their website:

What is NIF’s position on boycott, divestment and sanctions?

The New Israel Fund is committed to strengthening democracy in Israel, supports freedom of speech and promotes non-violent means of expression of belief and conscience. We oppose any attempt to criminalize the legitimate expression of support for any non-violent strategy or tactic, including the global BDS movement which we do not ourselves support.

The NIF does oppose the global (or general) BDS movement, views the use of these tactics as counterproductive, and is concerned that segments of this movement seek to undermine the existence of the state of Israel as a Jewish homeland.

NIF will not fund global BDS activities against Israel nor support organizations that have global BDS programs.

However, NIF opposes the occupation and settlement activities. NIF will thus not exclude support for organizations that lawfully discourage the purchase of goods or use of services from settlements.

[1] bastards

בצלם אלוהים

The words above are “b’tzelem Eloheem”, a biblical phrase that means “in the image of God.” Man and woman were created b’tzelem Eloheem, in the image of God. To those who believe in an all-powerful, all-merciful creator who watches over the world (God), the connection between the divine creator and His creations is more than a metaphor. Sentience, the ability to feel the many miracles (and pains) of this world, is an attribute of God. Empathy is an attribute of God. Jealousy and rage are also attributes of God. That’s righteous jealousy and rage, mind you. We are, every one of us, created in God’s likeness, animated by a divine spark breathed directly from God’s soul. Accordingly, we may never behave ruthlessly toward fellow creatures created in God’s image.

In my view we’re on our own down here, God, in whatever form we may imagine, has long ago been driven mad by the wickedness and brutal folly of those He created in His image, but that is another story.

One should not look for consistency in religious views. Humans are not known for the consistency of their beliefs, any of their beliefs, religious or otherwise. If you truly believe God has created every human in God’s own image, it would call for different behavior, difficult behavior, Christ-like behavior. You could never, for example, condone the torture of anybody. The ripping of babies from their mothers’ arms at a border? God simply would not tolerate this, Jesus would have his proverbial mildness tested. Concentration camps? No way. Poverty going back many generations in the wealthiest country the world has ever known? God would send a plague against that Pharaoh.

There are righteous followers of every religion, gentle men and women of peace, generosity, humility. These humbly religious people are one of the great hopes of humanity. There are also followers of virtually every religion who are complete, even murderous, assholes and hypocrites. To be sure, they may pray to God for guidance in how to live with the atrocities they wink at, sometimes carry out with their own hands, but these folks have no hesitation to spit in the face of the God who urges them to treat the least of His creatures the same as the most powerful, when it suits their righteous purposes.

This is not intended as a critique of religion, though there’s one image I can’t seem to shake lately. My parents toward the end of their lives, tutored elementary school kids in reading. My mother worked with one little girl, a tiny beauty, who, although very sweet, was, according to my mother, the dumbest girl she ever met. The kid simply could not grasp the first thing about reading. My parents met the girl’s parents and struck up a friendship with them. This couple were Born Again Evangelical Christians. They had turned their backs on their parents, who self-righteously refused to accept Jesus as deeply as they had. My parents became surrogates for the grandparents their kids would never know.

My mother, a woman of strong opinions, got into a dispute with them one day about the supremely simple Christian counter-myth certain believers argue: Intelligent Design. Under this theory, used to refute another theory, Darwin’s theory of evolution (merely a theory, say the Born Again, no better than our “theory”), God created everything perfect the first time, there was never any need for improvement of any creation of the Supreme Creator. For whatever reasons, my mother found this theory fantastically imbecilic, impossible to swallow. A good natured argument raged between my mother and the mother of the beautiful little girl. The husband stuck his head out of the kitchen door to chime in on his wife’s side. He was eating a banana, half of it was in his mouth, the other half in his hand. “You’ll never convince me that I evolved from a monkey!” said the father. Everyone in the room laughed, because in that moment, he resembled nothing more than a monkey. Even he laughed.

When my father was dying the couple showed up with a few other people from their church. They formed a prayer circle around my dying father and called for him to accept the Lord Jesus Christ into his heart that he might be saved from the flames of eternal damnation that await the righteous of all nations who do not accept Jesus. Had I been there, I’d have gone Jesus at the Money Changers on them, overturned their tables, dashed them out of the dying man’s sight. I was not there. They prayed over my father and left. Then my father died. And these righteous Born Again lovers of Jesus never contacted my mother, his grieving widow, after her husband died. I think about this every time Evangelicals wink at some sinful thing their politicians do, when I think of how many of their leaders uncritically support our cruel, unChristian president. “Who among us, if famous and powerful, has never grabbed a woman by the pussy in a moment of lust?”

I am thinking about this because I looked up the name of that Israeli peace group B’Tzelem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, and was reminded of that biblical phrase. B’Tzelem’s position is that, since Jews and Palestinians of every political orientation are all created b’tzelem Eloheem, Jews must not treat others brutally in the Jewish State. There are many current examples of the the Jewish State behaving brutally, often under the name of Ha’ Shem, God, the Supreme Ruler and Ultimate Real Estate Mogul. God gave this land to me! Who am I going to believe, God or some so-called “refugee”?

I was referred to an article that describes the Palestinian Refugee Issue as something of a massive fraud. The article was not published in the Jerusalem Post, as I was told, but here. The piece was supposed to convince me, I imagine, that since Palestinians and the surrounding Arab states are manipulating and misstating the scope of the Palestinian refugee problem, and creating this gigantic political wedge to hammer into the heart of Israel, that I should not be so quick to condemn the use of live ammunition against those who hate Israel. I haven’t checked the facts asserted in the article, but for the sake of discussion, I’ll accept everything as true. What does any of that have to do with using live ammunition against a massive demonstration? This article also appeared on the website, and I think it is more to the point and provides a bit of nuance.

Of course, as any Christian preacher will tell you, the Devil is fond of quoting scripture, and good at it. Infernally good, yo. That motherfucker can quote the hell out of biblical wisdom. Word.

There is no grinding like the Law

The relevant rule governing “retirement” for purposes of not paying the biennial $375 dues:

(g) Each registration statement filed pursuant to this section shall be accompanied by a registration fee of $375. No fee shall be required from an attorney who certifies that he or she has retired from the practice of law. For purposes of this section, the “practice of law” shall mean the giving of legal advice or counsel to, or providing legal representation for, particular body or individual in a particular situation in either the public or private sector in the State of New York or elsewhere, it shall include the appearance as an attorney before any court or administrative agency. An attorney is “retired” from the practice of law when, other than the performance of legal services without compensation, he or she does not practice law in any respect and does not intend ever to engage in acts that constitute the practice of law. For purposes of section 468-a of the Judiciary Law, a full-time judge or justice of the Unified Court System of the State of New York or of a court of any other state or of a federal court, shall be deemed “retired” from the practice of law. An attorney in good standing, at least 55 years old and with at least 10 years experience, who participates without compensation in an approved pro bono legal services program, may enroll as an “attorney emeritus.”

and does not intend ever to engage in acts that constitute the practice of law.

Which suggests retirement is final and irreversible. On that ground I paid my dues every two years, though I haven’t practiced law more than a few times in the last decade.

I was told by a bright man at the Office of Court Administration that coming out of retirement is easily done. It is a simple process, though, apparently, a secret one. You request a Rescind Waiver Form, fill it out, submit it along with the full biennial dues for that period, and take one Continuing Legal Education credit for each month going forward. A matter of a few weeks to come out of retirement, no problem.

I told him that I had no doubt about what he’d told me but that, as a lawyer, I needed something in writing to that effect. This is because if I acted relying on a statement of the rules he sent me in writing, I’d have an excellent defense if it ever came to that. He obliged by sending this email, which is not part of any rule or contained in any on-line guide one can access:

A link to the registration rules can be found here: www.nycourts.gov/rules/chiefadmin/118.shtml

NYS does not have an inactive status as may be available in other jurisdictions.

The retirement certification may only be claimed if you do not practice law in New York or elsewhere and do not intend ever to engage in acts that constitute the practice of law. If you meet the definition you may sign the retirement exemption and the biennial registration fee of $375 is waived. As a retired attorney you would remain a duly admitted NY attorney and there would be no bar to you filing on a future registration as active – additionally, Part 118.1(g) allows retired attorneys to continue to perform legal services without compensation. Therefore, since you remain a duly admitted attorney you would still be required to register every two years.

and do not intend ever to engage in acts that constitute the practice of law.

The devil cavorts in the legal details, yo. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, they say, including, I suppose, the intention never to engage in acts that constitute the practice of law.

Simple vs. Complicated

Complicated is hard, simple is so much easier. It’s no wonder that buzzwords and the wearing of different colored hats so often carry the day in human affairs.

Keeping the countless gnarly complications in mind, remembering contradictions, comparing everything to your own situation and remembering that while you may be lucky, many just like you are cursed… the endless nuance and supreme challenge of trying to remain fair-minded, pursuing justice, mindful of history’s famously slippery slopes, the dependable unreliability of history, of homo sapiens — it is exhausting just to map it out in a sprawling sentence.

Complicated is difficult, takes too much goddamned work to work your way through, there is no end to complicated. Simple is better, clearly.

Hence the soundbite. The tweet. Slogans. If your slogan does not parse well and fit on a hat, the marketing folks will nix it. A great ad is supremely simple. It hits some essential truth we recognize immediately. The best of them bring tears, so simple, so true! We should make that long distance call to the poignantly adorable child who misses us. Oh, God, it’s all so simple.

Except, of course, that it’s not at all simple. “What do you think of Bernie Sanders?” someone asks simply, though it’s not likely you dislike Sanders or what he stands for based on the way you talk. So, carefully, sensing a mine field as the first few critical comments about him fly around the table, you say: if we remove the personality and the things you just said from the equation and put all the actual issues his campaign raised on the table, I think we’d all agree about most of them. I got as far as the importance of addressing catastrophic climate change before the heavy guns were wheeled into place. Sanders is a self-hating Jew, he only uses his Jewishness for his own purposes, he hates Israel, supports BDS (Boycott, Divest and Sanction Israel) [1] One raises his voice to say he’d vote for Trump before he’d vote for the hypocrite Jew-hater Sanders.

Now everything is simpler, easier to understand. My reflexes were a tad too slow, though I know the right thing to do at a moment like this. It is time to get up from the table and start washing dishes, or at least to clam up. Perhaps sit on a nearby chair and play the ukulele a bit, as this little storm passes. All these options I hope to keep in mind should this kind of thing arise again any time soon. There is no point, no nuance that can be brought up once somebody is peeved enough to say Trump is a better choice than Bernie because Trump loves Israel and Bernie is a grumpy old Jewish Nazi.

Simple: Anyone critical of Israel’s long, often brutal, occupation, and the ticking time bomb of millions of encamped enemies living close by, generations of haters, many raised in hellish, hopeless poverty, many living in camps, literally, with state violence the only means of keeping a lid on the anger of now literally generations of these hopeless and dispossessed people — anti-Semite.

We can agree that Bibi Netanyahu is clearly not an exemplar of the highest Jewish values. He’s a putz, a schmuck, a much smarter Israeli Trump. Fine. Perhaps we can agree that the mildly racist Avigdor Lieberman, former extremist now Israeli Minister of Defense, and his party, to the right of Netanyahu’s right wing group, is not a legitimate force for de-escalating tensions in the seemingly eternal war between former neighbors.

But, let’s keep this simple. BDS, Boycott, Divest and Sanction, the same economic tactics used to exert enough pressure to bring down apartheid in South Africa, is plainly anti-Semitic. Any Jew who thinks it might be a legitimate tactic to employ is simply a Jew hater, end of story.

Sitting here calmly, reflecting dispassionately, it is beyond dispute that there are numerous issues involved in this particular issue of BDS. It equates Israel to the racist South African regime — not entirely fairly. This equation requires its own long, sober conversation. It involves uncomfortable levels of candor, perhaps, or tamping down an angry reflex to dismiss anything comparing Israeli military policies and THINGS THE FUCKING NAZIs used to do.

Breaking down doors at night, grabbing and torturing suspects, an off the books detention or killing when required, doing secret violence here and there to keep the opposition from organizing, or bulldozing an entire block of homes because a terrorist was harbored in one of those homes, or forced relocation, or whatever you want to bring up, are reminiscent of things ruthless armies of occupation routinely do. There is a much larger discussion to be had of the particulars of all these policies.

All this is very uncomfortable terrain to negotiate, even among people who agree about most things in American politics, you have to walk through it very, very slowly, reassuring the other party of your good will at every step. Easier to just say Israel, eternally menaced by a world of haters, is justified no matter what or the equally emotional position that Israel is acting just like the fucking Nazis. The tic to view everything as a dichotomy blinds you to any truths that fall along that human gradient, seamlessly from black, to dark charcoal grey, to grey, to paler, mouse grey, to ash-colored grey, to white.

Truth is hard, true belief is easier. That ease is the reason so many still support their president, even as his policies are already starting to fuck them hard.

There are Israeli peace groups (example) working tirelessly against the right wing forces in Israel which have controlled the government, and the narrative, since a right wing religious fanatic murdered Itzhak Rabin more than twenty years ago. These right wing Israeli officials argue it’s perfectly fine, even restrained, to shoot protesters with live bullets if they come too close to the fence in Gaza. This policy is controversial and complicated, many difficult discussions can be had over whether it’s the best way for Israel to proceed toward any kind of peaceful resolution to the long conflict between Palestinians and Israel..

But, for the moment, let’s keep it simple, folks. Israel is a democracy and our greatest ally in the Middle East (along with Saudi Arabia, but why mention those publicly beheading motherfuckers?) Our U.N. ambassador applauded Israel’s restraint in killing and wounding so relatively few Palestinians in the recent outburst of mass ugliness between these enemy neighbors. Soon after her comments we [3] left the U.N. Human Rights Council who wouldn’t stop bitching about Israel’s use of deadly force against unarmed civilian protesters, even suggesting the shootings by sniper might constitute a war crime.

To cite but one example of the complexities involved. One Israeli peace group, The New Israel Fund, supports the right of people to use protest methods like BDS, or, more precisely, it opposes the proposed U.S. criminalization of BDS (their position is much more nuanced, New Israeli Fund actually explicitly OPPOSES BDS).

Yet to those Jews who seek to keep it simple at all costs, the New Israel Fund supports terrorism by opposing “pro-Israeli” laws to criminalize BDS, thereby supporting BDS and hatred of Israel. The New Israel Fund is a target of angry American Jews who believe Israelis who oppose their government’s extreme right wing tactics are traitors and anti-Semites, no better than Nazis, really. I actually heard this view expressed by a tiny gaggle of disgruntled protesters outside a Palestinian-Israeli peace concert we attended.

Keeping it simple: the New Israel Fund supports terrorism. Boom. End of story, synagogue hosting event is giving a forum to anti-Semites! The great David Broza, anti-Semite. Anyone looking for peace with the enemy– traitor!

The Israeli government’s moral position on the mass shootings at the Gaza-Israel fence is that it gave the Hamas-inspired protesters fair warning: come within this distance of the 37 mile long reinforced fence [2] and we will use deadly force. The warnings were dropped in the form of leaflets, plainly written in Arabic for anyone to read. Fair warning. Come near my fence and I will shoot you, even kill you. Still they came, protesting by the thousands, surging toward the hated fence, threatening to breach it and cause a bloodbath in Israel, whose right to exist they angrily deny.

The failing NY Times reported on the many Palestinian deaths, at least sixty, in the days around Ivanka and Jared’s photo op with Bibi Netanyahu as they cut the ribbon on the controversial U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem. Palestinian and international sources give much higher numbers of dead and wounded at the Gaza fence. Easy enough to dismiss these numbers as fake news, anti-Israel propaganda, since it comes from people who have historically had a bloody ax to grind against Israel. Is there a number of medics shot that is justifiable? Is it legitimate to fire on medical personnel because they are aiding and abetting, by trying to save the lives of, those who surge toward the guns of their hated enemies?

It is so much easier to pick a side and just be on it than to try to consider all sides in an extremely complicated and intractable situation and take nuanced positions on a case by case basis. We can raise arguments about the Palestinian definition of refugees, as the Jerusalem Post apparently did recently. Simple, these fucks are not actual refugees, they just pretend to be victims under a definition they came up with. They can’t leave Gaza? Good for them! The simple view sees good guys and bad guys and good people stick with the good guys. Simple.

I was reminded, even sitting around a table with good friends, warm friends, people I love, all old friends who speak Hebrew and love Israel as much as I do, that some innocent questions are, to be simple about it, not innocent. Say the wrong thing and the conversation is over. Forget the fact that we all likely agree, to one extent or another, about the school to prison pipeline, intergenerational poverty going back directly to slavery, the fossil fuel industry-created denial of plainly observable climate catastrophes as part of a of pattern related to centuries of escalating human pollution, vast, escalating income inequality, the anti-democratic curse of concealing information of great public concern from the voting public, the recent gift of billions in tax breaks to the wealthiest, at the cost of cutting the social safety nets for the most vulnerable, our unforgivable and unaddressed national racism (we can pat ourselves on the back for banning the hateful word “nigger” and replacing it with the great neologism “n-word”, much less offensive!), the imminent dismantling of a woman’s federal right to choose to terminate an unwanted, or dangerous, pregnancy, the inevitable corruption of a democratic system where unlimited campaign money is “free speech” and dark money — if donated in a large enough pile — needn’t ever have its source exposed, as the recently rewritten law provides.

We did not get to this cruel president and his blundering administration by chance. The extremest, greediest billionaires found their donkey to ride to the promised land they’ve been dreaming of since the days of the John Birch Society. The Koch brothers’ wealthy, distant father was a founder of that society. The John Birchers were rich, paranoid men who suspected Dwight D. Eisenhower might be a secret Commie, or at least an unwitting dupe of the goddamned Commies. These canny billionaires built a national infrastructure over the last thirty years or more, methodically, think tank by think tank, state house by state house, created legislative/corporate partnerships, and finally, as the Kochs head toward their reward in heaven (both are old men now) their long-cherished dream has become reality for all of us. The cancerous chickens of our materialistic, profit-worshipping “libertarian” democracy have come home to roost.

It is a certain kind of torment to live in a world as inured to violence as our world is. Millions die violent, hopeless deaths, it’s just the way it is. Cherished principles are so easily tossed aside when policies are addressed directly to our terrors. THEY ARE GOING TO KILL US!!!! So we are morally justified in killing them first. THEY HATE US. Therefore, we can torture them, because if they hate us, fuck them, you know? They already hate us, so torture them, what are you being so squeamish about? They’d do the same to us, probably much worse.

At the same time, when we are calm, we can recognize that hate never conquers hate, that an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind, that we need our most creative, empathetic, ingenious solutions for intractable, historically violent problems, but those are just abstractions. All very exhausting abstractions!

BUILD THE WALL! BUILD THE WALL!!!! BUILD THE WALL!!!! Feels pretty good, actually.

[1] Not only is this a sticky factual issue, with many sources stating that Sanders actually opposes BDS, but there is a related and completely separate issue that is easily elided into “support for BDS”. Do you oppose a law criminalizing BDS? I do, vigorously. Do I support BDS? I don’t. What is Bernie’s position? Truly, I have no fucking idea, though it appears he doesn’t. I’m pretty sure he agrees that criminalizing selected nonviolent political expression is anti-democratic. Which in my book, makes Bernie Sanders no more an anti-Semite than I am– trying my best to live by my Jewish values, including dedication to protecting the weakest among us and not doing what is hateful to us to others.

[2] The fence is actually two parallel barriers built by the Israelis: a formidable one of barbed-wire within Gaza and a 10-foot-high metal “smart fence” packed with surveillance sensors along the Israel demarcation line. A restricted buffer zone as wide as 300 yards is between them. Israel has warned that people in the zone without authorization risk being subjected to deadly force.

source (Lying NY Times)

[3] We, the People.

Searching for Ancestors

It is late at night, has been a long day, an emotionally challenging day, but I wanted to get back to my cousin in Israel, so I dropped him an email just now. He has been searching for the traces of our family and recently found some real clues. The hamlet our people came from, on a fork in a marsh south of the Pina River a short ferry ride from Pinsk, has been erased from history, wiped off the map– the people who lived there and the name of the hamlet that all those who lived there called it by.

Truvovich was the name, wiped from every map in existence, as far as my cousin, and I, and a friend who lives in Poland and is a pretty fair researcher himself (and who searched in Polish), have been able to ascertain. Between us we turned up one map, with a Jewish star and the letter T at the place we suspect may have been that site where one of my grandmothers, and one of my cousin’s grandfathers, were born. The link I sent my cousin to that map no longer exists, though we have my screen shot of the pertinent section of the map.

Pinsk Street Map - circa 1925.png

This takes us into the realm of What the Fuck? We know the Nazis were fucked up, that the einsatzgruppen, the special killing units that followed the Wermacht, the army, as the secret police state was imposed in one occupied territory after another, were merciless (until they started going mad, becoming alcoholics, became unable, most of them, to continue murdering unarmed civilians and their children, usually by shooting them into ditches).

The Final Solution, with its mechanized extermination camps, was put in place partly because the number of Jews and others believed by those insane Nazi fucks to be genetic poison was too great to be wiped out by shooting alone, and partly because the killers they sent to massacre these folks just couldn’t keep doing it, psychologically. Those rare sadists among them who loved to kill became another kind of problem. Easier to just put them in charge of a crew in one of the death camps, where their perversion would be a virtue.

But I am getting ahead of the story. At one time all of my family members were alive and supremely insecure in the impoverished little shit hole in the marsh where they lived. Of two of them, Harry Aaron (who I always knew as Uncle Aren) and my grandmother, Chava, I know what can be known. Aren fled the Russo-Japanese war, made a life for himself in America, had three children, all of whom I knew. My cousin in Israel is the son of Aren’s daughter. I remember Aren too, he lived until I was eleven. Chava, Aren’s youngest sister, begat my father and my uncle and died in Peekskill a few years before I was born. There was a cousin, Dintsche, who had two kids in America, both still around,

Beyond that, the fate of the rest of our family is a statistic. The einsatzgruppen rounded up all the Jews of Pinsk, and the outlying areas, and wiped them out in two major aktions, a few months apart, in 1942. The details are here.

It is late, and airless, the humidity is like a continual punch in the face. Outside the sky is black. I haven’t the strength at the moment to follow all the thoughts that led me to begin to write this. Except to note the mystery, as we are alive here in this wink of an eye, and the need to know. The desire, like a serious thirst, to find something out, to learn even a single detail. It is too maddening to know nothing.

Recently my cousin learned that one of his great-uncles, a man I’d heard of as Volbear, a man he names Wolf Bear on his family tree, is listed in Yad Vashem as killed in 1942. This was big news, to see the testimony, our ancestor’s name in writing. The testimony consisted of a few names: Wolf Bear’s (born 1888), his wife Tzirel’s (age unknown), their two children, Leah Reizel, 14, and Yisrael, 10, and the year they died in the slaughterhouse that was Nazi-occupied Belarus in 1942. This is far more detail than we have about the fate, and lives, of Aren and Chava’s other brother Yudle or their sister Chaska.

The other day my cousin sent me this photo, taken in 1938, found among his mother’s papers (she lived to 104!). The niece and nephew of our common ancestor, named for the matriarch and patriarch as far back as our family tree goes (four generations). Those ancient ancestors would be my great-grandparents on my mother’s side, Leah and Azriel [1]. The nephew and niece in this photo are Azriel and Leah. Look at them:

Azriel & Leah (Nephew & Niece) - 1938.jpg

1938, before Hitler’s war, the war the madman insisted the Jews made him start. Their photo, taken that year, came with a note, in Yiddish, which my cousin had translated into Hebrew. My cousin wrote: they state that life is difficult and they are looking for help.

[1]

Leah and Azriel Gleiberman.png

Fantasy Island in my mind

Outside, the world is raging. People are actually arguing about what to call the cages they are throwing confiscated children into. One wealthy country’s criminally misguided drug laws put neighboring countries’ drug cartels into overdrive, people are killed, tortured, threatened. Citizens flee the violence of their impoverished home countries. They are caught at a border, have their kids grabbed, or are told that their children will wait for them while they’re being processed as potential illegal terrorist types [1]. Then, as the adults go with authorities, their kids are secretly whisked hundreds of miles away, no receipt given, the kids can be anywhere. Whose fault is that?

Outside, on the Fourth of July, freedom is no doubt loudly, ponderously on the march. Is it still freedom if it wears jackboots? Back in Germany, between the world wars, as the violent revenge fantasies were gestating in vats of nationalist, racist steroids, militant German youth marched chanting “wir sheissen auf die freiheit!“. The NY Times translated this as “we spit on freedom!’ though, of course, the active verb in that sentence means “shit”. WE SHIT ON FREEDOM!

In my mind, it is much more quiet. Nobody shitting on freedom, no bureaucrats sending children hundreds of miles from their parents with no records kept, no world leader threatening to detonate nuclear bombs and annihilate millions if he doesn’t get universal adulation — and a Nobel Peace Prize.

“You pretentious asshole,” says an old friend.

“Yes?” I say.

“You seriously believe you can write your way out of a world of festering horrors?”

Mmmm, result is unclear.

“Did you read that off the little screen of your magic 8 ball?”

It is likely.

“Look, you seem to feel you can just write out your thoughts and feelings and put them up for your dozens of mindless followers to salute.”

Here is my bottom line. If you are my friend, I give you the benefit of the doubt. I exert myself not to judge the things you do to survive, even if they are things I myself am unable to do.

“Fuck you!” says my old friend.

Didn’t mean to sound judgmental, old bean. I only mean to point out that my first duty, as your friend, is to give you every benefit of every doubt. I was directed to an interesting opinion piece in the Grey Skank the other day about the corrosive shame so many men feel, and how it leads to the disrespect of women, which fuels more shame. This cycle culminates, of course, in toxic masculinity. That is the kind of macho bluster that puts violence at the top of the list of ways to get people who say uncomfortable things to shut the fuck up.

“Jesus, the torture never stops! Will you get to the fucking point?” says my old friend.

Of course. Giving the benefit of the doubt starts with recognizing the feelings of another person. He did this because he felt he was about to be killed. Fair enough. In his shoes I might well have done the same thing. I certainly would have felt the same way he did.

“You are maddening!” he says.

Yes. Anyway, I’ve learned that you cannot argue, or it is pointless to argue, aggravating and counterproductive to argue (unless your goal is a good argument), that you should not feel what you are feeling. The feeling must be acknowledged, its reality accepted. The feeling is what it is, the reasons for it cannot be understood or addressed without first acknowledging the feeling. No productive conversation into overcoming the bad feelings can be had if the other person’s strong feelings are denied.

“Feel this, motherfucker,” says my old friend clenching his fist and brandishing it uselessly.

“Oh, uselessly, eh?” says my old friend, swinging his fist an inch from my nose.

I smile without showing my teeth. “Doan wase yourself…” I say through my smile/smirk, like Bruce Lee on the deck of that boat in Enter the Dragon, not even turning my head to the bully, watching the waves lapping in the distance.

My friend punches me full force in the mouth.

Feel better, do we?

“You self-righteous fucking asshole,” says my friend.

Yes?

Look, I get that your feelings are hurt. I seem to be blaming you for acting badly, even though it wasn’t your fault. You were in a total panic, afraid I was secretly angry at you, maliciously sabotaging your shaky marriage. I get all that. It was important for you to point out, at that time, that I always feel I’m right, never admit the possibility I could be wrong, never apologize about anything. I apologized to you, for what it was worth. Then you told me how hurt and angry you are that I see you as an anxious person who needs to be protected. I get it, I get all that, truly.

Thing is, though, strong feelings, stirred and unacknowledged by the people who are supposed to be your closest friends, lead to other strong feelings. This happens almost in direct proportion to the strength of the feeling that is left unacknowledged. If you deny my right to be angry, what am I to do with the feeling? You come to me in rage, I don’t acknowledge your right to be angry. Tell you you’re a fucking baby, advise you to “grow a pair”, man up, stop being a pussy(cat). What happens to the rage I tell you to fucking shut up about?

“One punch in the face wasn’t enough for you?” asks my friend.

Once is never enough, from a man like you. You remember that Captain and Tennille line, the pretty Tenille singing to the Captain: do that to me one more time, once is never enough, with a man like you. What the hell?

“I’m going to kill you,” says my friend.

No, you are not going to kill anyone. One thing I can assure you, I am not going to be killed by you today. You may feel like killing me, and we can talk about that, you toxic male you, but you ain’t going to kill me any more than I’m going to kill you.

Feel free, in the meantime, to punch me in the face as hard, and as many times, as you like. I’ve got to get back to my daydreaming on Independence Day, so forgive me if I don’t cry out. Rest assured, your punches are mighty, and terrible indeed.

[1] Not to make a gratuitous comparison between government lies told to helpless people, but when the Nazis forced the Jews at the killing centers to strip naked and line up, the Jews were told it was for a shower, not a gas chamber. Which would you rather step into? A nice hot shower, or a sealed room about to be pumped full of poison gas? Come on, is there even a choice?