Nazi Bastards! seriously, you can’t make this stuff up

Pardon all the Nazi stuff recently, I really couldn’t tell you why I am suddenly thinking about it so often (could be reading Hannah Arendt’s fantastic Eichmann in Jerusalem, I guess). Here’s a nice bit for your consideration, the devil, as always, in the details:

The Gestapo had the authority to arrest citizens on the suspicion that they might commit a crime, and the definition of a crime was at their discretion. The Gestapo Law, passed in 1936, gave police the right to act extra-legally. This led to the sweeping use of Schutzhaft—”protective custody”, a euphemism for the power to imprison people without judicial proceedings.^[52] The courts were not allowed to investigate or interfere. The Gestapo was considered to be acting legally as long as it was carrying out the leadership’s will. People were arrested arbitrarily, sent to concentration camps, or killed.^[44]

A Relatively Poor Day

How we are feeling at any given moment is relative, to our own feelings at other times and to the way anyone else feels in a given moment on a given day. I wouldn’t trade a moment of my life for even the happiest one of anybody else’s, but that’s just me. That said, I passed a sad, low energy day today. It was not only stumbling on the fezbook page of my old friend’s widow (she was the suggested friend of a friend I’d gone to read something by), seeing the beaming face of my dead friend in a couple of photos I’d never seen, and the one where, flanked by his daughters, his head is an alarmingly white ball with his familiar face on it. I didn’t immediately think of the image of our old mutual friend, after a visit with him not long before the end, stopping in on neighbors who were having dinner, and bursting into uncontrollable sobs. That image hit me just now, though it must have been lurking since I saw those happy moments in the life of my old, dead friend.

I’d woken two hours too early again today, no idea what’s up with that shit. This time I emerged from a dream where I was two-timing two pretty, delightful young women who were both, in the manner of such dreams, quite crazy about me. Complicating matters was that they lived in apartments directly next door to each other, so that I locked the door of one and unlocked the door of the other after the first one went to work and the other was about to arrive home. The obvious question of how anyone could possibly be clever enough, duplicitous enough, enough of a psychopath (not to put too fine a point on it), to carry on this deception was a considerable one. One, the newer of the two lovers (I was leaning toward choosing this girl, if things didn’t blow up completely before I could do so), was a singer, and I had a gig at a restaurant accompanying her on guitar, for decent pay, as I recall. The other was very cool too, and I’d known her longer, and we were very compatible and laughed a lot together. The sex with both of them was great. Neither had any idea of the existence of the other, as I went from one to the other over the course of an increasingly disquieting dream. In the end, I was awake, alone, on mysteriously short sleep.

Not long afterwards I was looking at the smiling face of my dead friend who’d died of a rare cancer, a deadly soft tissue sarcoma, The same one that killed Hugo Chavez, he told me after Chavez died. He told me that shortly before he himself died. I had a call from another old friend, a prostate cancer survivor, who is seeing his oncologist Wednesday about another unrelated cancer, some kind of soft tissue sarcoma. Fucking hell. He was calling me for advice, his sisters are closing in trying to get the rest of the money their mother left them. I told him to just give them their shares and tell them to shut the fuck up now. His daughter, a survivor of sexual assault at age ten from her mom’s new boyfriend (a guy my friend has somehow managed not to murder) is having nightmares. The latest one involves her dad dying before she gets back from sleep-away camp. In spite of it all, we had a few laughs, he promised to keep me posted on what he learns after his visit to the oncologist.

In the background today the Yankees came from behind to tie the game in Tampa, and then, on the first pitch in the bottom of the twelfth, boom! walk-off home run. Yankees lose. Judge O for 5. I’d watched the last segments of a documentary on Netflix called The Staircase, which sets out what appears to have been a grave and vicious fifteen year miscarriage of justice, in twelve parts. Well done, but the only doctor who would have ordered it for me today would have been Dr. Mengele, the notorious Nazi fuck. To relax I went for a long walk and listened to a bit of Hannah Arendt’s insanely detailed The Origins of Totalitarianism, which I’d recommended to a friend as being on a par with Eichmann in Jerusalem, but which I am having second thoughts about.

Returned from the stroll on aching knees, after several days doing the exercises the distracted young woman at the PT place showed me the other day, then didn’t bother to supervise as to form. Which would have been impossible, since she was simultaneously working with two other patients with non-knee-related troubles, each behind a curtain of their own, but very close by. My knees are killing me, as I wait for the ibuprofen– possibly deadly for my idiopathic kidney disease — to kick in. Well, they are not really killing me, my knees, they’re more than usually sore. I will live. That is the thing that is so easy to forget in this exciting world we all eventually must leave forever– for the time being, we will live.

The miracle of it, and the tragedy, really.

Totalitarian Tendencies

Of course, it’s always problematic to make comparisons between current events and infamous low points in human history, no matter how emotionally vexing those current events may be. I call for an end (until it becomes undeniable, at which point I’ll be unable to post calls for anything) to the comparisons of brutal policymakers to Nazis or other totalitarian regimes.

Taking young children from their mothers’ arms is not the same, clearly, as wrenching a baby from the mother and smashing a rifle butt against its tiny head. Putting a crying child in a cage for indefinite detention is not anywhere near as horrific as putting a child in a gas chamber. You can’t even fairly compare those two things, caging and murdering. So calling a government policy that dehumanizes certain classes of children and designates them for this kind of inhumane treatment “Nazi-like” sounds like hyperbole and is easily enough dismissed by the hard pragmatists who believe that this kind of harsh, tough, zero-tolerance policy that makes parents pay a brutally high price, their connection with their children, will deter desperate people from coming to our borders.

It is easy to condemn this sort of policy as the terroristic tactic of people consumed by unreasoning hatred of the objects of their policy. The people coming to the US southern border are portrayed by proponents of these harsh policies as criminals, rapists, terrorists, a hoard posing untold dangers to our eternally threatened nation, incredible dangers, unbelievably bad dangers, really dangerous dangers. That many of them are running from terrors directly produced by, say, our own imbecilic ninety year selective drug prohibition regime, our eternal War on Drugs, is beside the point. Those violent drug gangs are the problem, not the ongoing American law enforcement idiocy that has only produced a massively lucrative product for these increasingly violent foreign (and domestic) criminals to peddle.

Fleeing gang violence, says our tiny, racist top law enforcement official, is no longer grounds for political asylum, it’s your goddamn problem, deal with it, you brown, non-English speaking losers. Neither is fleeing a spouse who beats the living shit out of you and threatens to kill you. Nothing to see here! No longer America’s role, to provide a haven for women and children who will otherwise be killed in their home countries, or teenagers facing death if they refuse to join a drug cartel’s street gang.

We cannot underestimate the vital role that terrorism and the threat of violent physical force plays in human affairs. By terrorism and violent force, I refer to the routinized violence threatened or visited on citizens by states, by nations and coalitions of nations. This state violence causes the vast majority of deaths by terrorism (though it is rarely referred to as terrorism, for obvious reasons). Deadly violence, and the terrifying threat of its instant deployment, and more recently fear of non-government terrorism, and the need for extreme measures to protect the populace from Terror with a capital T, is always used by the status quo to maintain order and to influence political relations.

The old debate over who is the terrorist is now all the rage, in our terrified of terror Post-9-11 world. Those illegal Mexicans, Guatemalans and Hondurans are TERRORISTS, we are told by American law enforcement. The protesters in Gaza, every one of them according to the Israeli Minister of Defense, down to the medics and members of the international press: TERRORISTS! When you’re fighting terror, the gloves must come off, obviously.

The I.C.E. agents who forcibly take the kids from their potential terrorist parents are only protecting law abiding citizens from criminals and terrorists, the worst of the worst, shameless terrorists using their own babies as human shields! Those terrorists in Gaza? We have every right to kill as many as we need to in order to make them stop hating our freedom! Israeli leaders, particularly the extreme nationalistic right wing ones, are fond of reminding the world that Israel is the region’s only real democracy. Therefore any means needed will be employed to defend it from haters, including opening fire on unarmed protesters, with special bullets designed to do maximum damage on impact.

The moral battle is won by the most skilled story-tellers, the people who can make us empathize the most with their point of view. With that in mind, Israeli lawmakers are considering a law making it illegal to photograph Israeli soldiers in a way that could potentially harm Israeli military morale. Showing a photo of an Israeli soldier cuffing a belligerent Palestinian teenager could really harm the morale of the sorely tested Israeli army. Five years in prison for the photographer who has caused this harm to Israeli democracy, ten if the photograph, according to the law, undermines the security of the state. They are voting on this important measure as I type these words. Nothing to see here!

The motto of every great democracy– Nothing to see here! Criminalize those who take pictures of things that are nobody’s business, merely the democratic sausage we all love being made. We are no slouches in this department, here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. Dubya Bush’s daddy made it illegal to photograph and broadcast images of the coffins of dead American soldiers. How bad was it for morale to see, day after day, those dead Americans coming home from war zones?! No more of that shit, citizens of a democracy do not need that kind of incredibly depressing shit, it only creates prejudice. It sets our people against lawful war as the solution to every business-related foreign problem our leaders seek to solve by violent means.

Recently our perpetually petulant president withdrew the U.S. from the the Human Rights Council in the United Nations. Who needs fake fucking Human Rights from a bunch of self-righteous loser hypocrites? This sudden departure from the council did not come out of nowhere. First the council unfairly condemned Israel for having snipers shoot countless protesters, killing scores, hospitalizing thousands. Next they attacked us directly! The UN Council on Human Rights is poised to release a report about the extent and conditions of extreme poverty in the United States.

“It’s patently ridiculous for the United Nations to examine poverty in America,” U.S. Ambassador Haley Barber said in response to the Special Rapporteur’s report. Fair enough, Ms. Barber, if you say so. Just because the U.S. has vast numbers of citizens, an estimated 5.3 million (out of 40 million in poverty), living in desperate Third World type poverty is none of anyone’s damn business. Making a big deal about falling American life expectancy, an infant mortality rate as high as in many very poor countries, America’s informed choice not to recognize the human rights of children, outrageous meddling! It is no business of a bunch of Socialist America haters to “impartially” investigate and write preposterous, hateful, patently ridiculous reports about us. They’re our fucking poor people and we’ll deal with those selfish parasites, including the 13 million so-called children in poverty, as we fucking see fit, Sir. We’ve got your Human Rights Council right here (grab crotch), bitches!

It’s not right to call them Nazis, I’ll be the first to remind you. Assholes, yes, vicious assholes, sure, but Nazis… not quite yet. Still, this administration is taking steady, consistent steps toward a kind of American authoritarianism. The destruction of critical thought is the first thing that must be achieved, to allow incoherent partisan buzzwords to carry every argument.

Think of the incoherent messages about this policy of taking children from their parents, the citing of biblical scripture to justify it, the denials about the policy, the indignant objection to cages being referred to as cages, the blaming of Democrats for the policy, the sudden reversal of the policy by executive order. None of that really matters, if we are really ready for the end of our democracy. The silencing of all thoughtful criticism leads to the acceptance of incoherent narratives. This process is crucial for anyone seeking absolute control over a population. Silence the critics and you’re most of the way home. The lying media, enemy of the people, knows this too. Those bastards need to be made to fall into line, by hook or by crook.

Once the possibility of coherent public discussion is eliminated, the rest is pretty much downhill for any motherfucker, already in the highest position in our government, who would become Supreme Leader. The test of American democracy is upon us all. The good news is that’s its a pass/fail exam, which is also, sadly, the bad news.

I’ll leave this one to Diane Ravitch

As I am currently delving deeply into Hannah Arendt’s deep Eichmann in Jerusalem, it is hard for me to see any government policy that dehumanizes selected humans as unrelated to the larger Nazi worldview and purpose. You dehumanize unworthy humans who you can then treat viciously, blame whoever you like for your own deliberate brutality, heck, blame the dehumanized themselves, wait for any outcry to die down, then do whatever the hell you want to the sons and daughters of bitches. Hitler 101, straight up.

So it won’t do for me to get emotionally involved here, any more than I already am. I offer this one bit, from Diane’s piece, two immoral administration spokespeople indecently citing the words of Jesus in a bland attempt to justify their boss’s inhumane, unChristlike purposes:

Sessions, who continues to vigorously defend the policy he pushed for internally, freely acknowledges that Bush and Obama did not interpret the law the same way that Trump is doing now. “The previous administration wouldn’t prosecute illegal aliens who entered the country with children,” he said last Thursday in Fort Wayne, Ind. “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained the government for his purposes.” (Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended using religion to justify the policy. “I can say that it is very biblical to enforce the law,” the White House press secretary told reporters that afternoon.)

I can say, without hesitation or need to qualify it in any way, that Adolf Eichmann and his ilk would have been equally comfortable with the quoted scripture about obedience to authority. A moral duty to accept the dictates of a human governor as expressions of God’s law … Jesus Christ. It may be many things, but it sure as hell ain’t democracy.

I now refer you to Diane Ravitch’s well-done post, which is here.

And, after reading the piece, I salute Laura Bush [1] and Melania. You go! Expressions of the best American impulses, rather than the most petulant, vicious, extortionate and politically cynical.

[1] From Laura Bush’s editorial:

Recently, Colleen Kraft, who heads the American Academy of Pediatrics, visited a shelter run by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement. She reported that while there were beds, toys, crayons, a playground and diaper changes, the people working at the shelter had been instructed not to pick up or touch the children to comfort them. Imagine not being able to pick up a child who is not yet out of diapers.

Internet Service Provider Duopoly Millionaire Strikebreaker

I’ve got to write and post this quickly, my internet has been out all day so far, as it was most of yesterday, only winking back on a few minutes ago during a long call with Spectrum tech support. While on hold I learned, and passed on to Ron, the good-natured Spectrum rep, that Tom Rutledge, the great and important CEO of Spectrum’s parent company, a guy who made $98.5 million in 2016 when his outfit bought Time Warner Cable, is still refusing to negotiate with the technicians union, IBEW local No. 3, an outfit whose strike is in its second year.

Rutledge, in fairness to him and his principled refusal to negotiate with the lawfully constituted technicians’ union, is probably bitter at the vast drop in his income. He made a mere $7,800,000 last year and his ungrateful technicians are bitching about giving up certain features of their health plan, retirement benefits and things like that. It’s hard to blame Rutledge for being so intractable, unless you are the kind of person who is harsh to complete assholes.

Ron had no idea Spectrum technicians in New York were on strike, though he’d heard of vandalism in NYC. I explained the difference between vandalism and acts of skilled sabotage by workers whose rights under the National Labor Relations Act seemed to be being violated. I explained to him that in the old days workers who accepted bad pay to cross a picket line and break a strike were called bad names, including scabs, and that I was reluctant to let a strike breaking technician into my apartment to check a modem that doesn’t seem to be faulty, as it is currently working.

Ron agreed the problem was not the modem, since it is getting a fine signal at the moment. The problem could be in the “drop”, the box that splits off from the “node” for delivery into individual buildings. The node serves 248 modems in my area, the drop might serve a dozen in my building. There was no way for him to monitor activity on my “drop”, though only 10 of 248 modems on my node are currently offline. If you are wondering why I don’t just switch to an ISP that is not so fucked up, I will tell you.

We have two ISPs in most of New York City, Spectrum (a branch of Charter, who bought the franchise from Time Warner Cable a few years back) and Verizon. Both ISP giants provide substandard internet service, intermittent service, and, because the free competition we hear so much about only involves two giants in our free market, they are free to set whatever prices it pleases them to set for whatever service they see fit to provide. I currently pay $50 a month for intermittent internet service from Spectrum, having grown tired of no service and repeated lies from Verizon. Ron was somehow able to give me a double credit today for the hours last night into today that I had no service: a generous $3.33.

I have to contact the technicians’ union, IBEW local # 3 and get the latest on their strike against Spectrum, the internet provider with the handsomely compensated CEO, a chap who made over $100 million the last two years. This wealthy titan will not negotiate with the union. He does not believe in unions. If he had his way, workers would not be paid at all. Think of how much more money he could make if all those wasted technician salaries, vacation days, health benefits, pension contributions were saved, clawed back, put into his tax-free investment portfolio!

I need to contact the IBEW and offer to help them publicize their strike. They ran a great online ad a few months back, very compelling, but not a public word since. Almost nobody knows about the status of the strike that strikebreaker CEO Tom Rutledge is doing his best to make go away. I wonder how many are still on strike after more than a year, like Jewish children making a strong moral case to a Nazi. I want to support the union and I need the striking workers, if possible, to exempt my home from their sabotage of Spectrum’s never perfect, now never worse, service.

Spectrum told me yesterday that my modem is defective, that, for once, there is no outage in my area, on my node. They will need to send scab technicians over to inspect it all, the modem, the interior connection, outside connectivity at the “drop”, issues relating to the entire node, etc. They gave me a generous $1.67 credit yesterday for a day without internet service (this outage must last, according to corporate policy, at least four consecutive hours to qualify for the refund). The modem I was assured yesterday must be broken, after hours of no service with no outages reported, is delivering a signal again now. Ron assured me today it is very unlikely to be the modem.

Shades of the old runaround from Spectrum’s fellow duopolist ISP Verizon, who told me for months that there was a technical problem with my line and that they were working on it, that a technical team would contact me the following day. I was never contacted. The problem was not with my line, it was with the entire Verizon network, which was off-line for many months as they switched their network from copper wire to fiber. This required digging up streets, getting permits, burying fiberoptic cable, it took many months. A call to Verizon was the same bullshit, month after month. A complete lie. The technical team will call you tomorrow, we have no idea why you have no service, now about that huge bill you keep refusing to pay…

If your only business is making profit, it would behoove you to lie if you might lose the bulk of your customers during the months they will have no service. What self-respecting American business would admit something that would undoubtedly cause an exodus of customers? Verizon billed me, month after month, for service I had not been receiving. According to them, no refund was due until I paid in full. They were demanding hundreds of dollars by the end. Would it seem petty of me to call them Nazi motherfuckers? Sure it would, they are just an American business trying to keep the lights on so that all Americans can enjoy a brighter day!

post-script:

The modern world, my friends, where every war must be fought by propagandists who specialize in branding, messaging and targeted marketing, sometimes brings us, just fucking bullshit.

Pull up the IBEW information on their long-running strike against Charter/Spectrum, and here you go:

check us out, brothers and sisters

You can read about the neo-liberal asshole NYS Governor’s battle with the mega-corporation, complete with mealy mouthed almost-threats and a hint at support for a striking union that is a key political support group. We have to go to Crain’s, in May 2018, for any kind of update on this shit?

Crain’s article

Nice bit of Irony re: Israel’s kidnapping of Eichmann

This tasty irony was discussed in Hannah Arendt’s epilogue to Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Israel apparently caught a lot of flack from many quarters, including distinguished jurists and legal theorists, for kidnapping Adolf Eichmann from Argentina to stand trial in Jerusalem. Some expressed the view that Israel had more right to kill him in Buenos Aires than to kidnap him for purposes of a trial. [1]

Argentina became a haven for top Nazis on the lam in part because of its tolerance for Nazi types living under false names, in part due to a network of SS men in South America and also because of their strict statute of limitation for war crimes. If a Nazi could avoid capture for that long, he was legally home free in Argentina, Argentina would not extradite him.

The Israelis caught Eichmann (who was living as Ricardo Klement) just after the fifteen years was up. The statute of limitations had run, no more prosecution for that crime, those crimes, any crimes, sorry. The Israeli’s couldn’t legally get jurisdiction over him as long to try him under their own laws as long as Eichmann had his feet on Argentine soil. The Nazi Hunters and Ben Gurion seemed to have found themselves SOL, both in the law school sense of the acronym for statute of limitations, and in the Louis Armstrong sense referred to in the title of his “SOL Blues”, meaning “shit out of luck”.

So they kidnapped the piece of garbage. Rendered him back to Israel, if you will.

“… only Eichmann’s de facto statelessness enabled Israel to get away with kidnapping him [2], and it is understandable that despite the innumerable precedents cited in Jerusalem to justify the act of kidnapping, the one relevant one, the capture of Berthold Jakob, a Leftist German Jewish journalist, in Switzerland by Gestapo agents in 1935, was never mentioned.”

Nor did Hannah Arendt bother to point out the rather tasty irony of the one on-point legal precedent being the what’s good for goose is good for the gander of a Nazi protesting treatment that only the fucking Nazis, in their infinite legalistic slickness, had ever done before. Berthold Jakob, at the time of his kidnapping, was not a fugitive from the law, as were all the others cited as precedent by Israeli prosecutors.

Nazis, man, some very fine people, very fine people, the finest people.

[1] This is, in fact, the way most state killings are normally done these days, by the U.S.A. anyway: extrajudicially, no need for judge, jury, trial. President declares you an enemy combatant, puts you on the secret kill list, they kill you. No muss, no fuss. But 1960, the time of Eichmann’s capture, was, in some ways, a quainter time in matters like fully-legal state execution without a judicial process of any kind.

[2] Eichmann had entered Argentina and was living there under a fake name, Ricardo Klement (Ricardo presumably for the priest that helped him get out of Europe) and so was not legally Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. Also, in another neat bit of irony, recall that the Nazis were legally able to do much of what they did to Jews, Gypsies, other enemies of the states (transporting them East, among other things) under international law because they had declared them “stateless”. Now Rickey Ricardo Eichmann himself was not protected by Argentine authorities because he was … legally stateless. Germany wanted nothing to do with the Nazi bastard, his lawyer made the request, so the Jews just grabbed him.

Nazi Lawyers Laid Down the Nazi Law

I’m listening to Wanda McCaddon’s superb reading of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem again. I’d missed a lot in my first listening. It is a fascinating book, particularly if you feel any urgency to learn about the progression and functioning of a totalitarian regime. Arendt’s 1964 book is as good a single volume history of the Nazi period as any I’ve seen. I’m looking forward to hearing Wanda McCaddon’s reading of Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, on hold at the library.

Arendt provides, among other things, a wealth of detail about the structure and day to day functioning of the Thousand Year Reich. I just heard a bit that sent me dashing to the book, (also on loan from the library) and finding page 148, where Arendt discusses the role of Nazi lawyers in crafting laws that made all kinds of cruel and murderous practices perfectly legal and provided a sturdy legal defense to any post-war charges. When I say Nazi lawyers [1] I mean that all lawyers in the Third Reich were required to be Nazi party members in good standing, I am also talking about Nazi judges, of course, every single one of them, up to supremely loyal Nazi Supreme Court judges, accountable only to the Fuhrer’s will.

As every self-respecting dictator demands: the supreme leader’s word is law. In Nazi Germany Hitler’s every command had the force of law, Fuhrerworte haben Gesetzeskraft (Arendt, 148). Even so, in certain cases, like codifying his command for the Final Solution, teams of expert Nazi lawyers got to work. That particular secretly spoken order for the physical destruction of European Jews and other undesirables, “was followed by a huge shower of regulations and directives, all drafted by expert lawyers and legal advisers, not by mere administrators.” (Arendt, 149).

Under Nazi law as crafted by the most learned Nazi lawyers (and it is now known that the Nazis studied the racial laws and practices of the American south [2] ), there was a strong “state action” defense Nazi state actors could raise if they were prosecuted, in the event the Nazis lost the war, for things like mass-murder. The old Nuremberg Defense was heard over and over during those trials: “I was only following orders.” This “state action” defense argument contends that any act done in one’s official state duty cannot be prosecuted as a crime. Blood curdling capital crimes would have to be excused, under this theory, if executed under this principle of international law.

American law often grants the same exemptions to Americans acting under command of the United States of America, particularly in time of war. Think of the second Bush administration’s secret torture memos that preemptively legalized illegal acts and the immunizing of private mercenaries for all acts committed in liberating Iraq from a modern-day Hitler, etc. Certain unspeakable acts, like machine gunning civilians from a helicopter, and then strafing the rescue van, or prying American bullets out of civilians accidentally killed in a raid, might be hard to justify under any theory. These were the kinds of hard cases shrewd Nazi lawyers were prepared to defend under the “state actor” theory, a potentially useful defense for war criminals or those who may, arguably, have committed “crimes against humanity”.

The idea of a novel legal concept like a “crime against humanity” was sneered at by Nazi lawmakers when they worked in a legal system that made the systematic murder of certain “stateless” civilians fully lawful (enemies of the state were commonly branded “stateless” for purposes of avoiding liability for hostile state action.)

Gassing a room full of naked men, women and children, for example. You’d think that would be a cut and dried murder qualifying you for a death sentence if convicted. Premeditated murder like that would likely be a tough rap to beat in virtually any courtroom in the world. But the Nazis rewrote the legal norms of Germany, turning them upside down [3] and writing new laws to circumvent all existing law, and after the war, allowing defense lawyers to argue matters of post-Hitler international law at the Nuremberg Trails and later during the Eichmann Trail. Eichmann’s lawyer argued unsuccessfully that since Eichmann was a German citizen only a German court had the jurisdiction to prosecute him. The West German government in 1961 wanted nothing to do with a trial against a Nazi (for one thing, other prominent former Nazis were in high positions in that government. The Germans were only too happy to let the Jewish State have the headache of trying Eichmann. Eichmann’s defense, beyond his state actor status, is that he himself was no murderer, let alone a mass-murder, but a minor functionary who simply did lawful things under lawful orders from his lawful superiors. A point Arendt does not dismiss — his being personally squeamish– though she ends her book stating that she would hang him based purely on the conviction that we should not have to share the earth with somebody like Eichmann.

The Nazis performed this revolution in law with an army of the best, brightest and most ambitious Nazi lawyers, without ever abolishing the liberal Weimar Constitution. All that was needed to make that blueprint for democratic document work perfectly for the Nazis was a terrifying national emergency that required the immediate activation of special powers, and a quick yes/no vote in the Reichstag for an Enabling Act. The emergency powers the Nazis seized were all legal and perfectly constitutional under the Weimar Constitution, leaving aside the troubling fact that the Nazis themselves almost undoubtedly arranged for the terrifying national emergency, the torching of Reichstag, the German Parliament. Everything the Nazis did during the endless twelve year national emergency had been done with a brazen Nazi veneer of perfect legality under existing democratic law in Germany. The early years in power were spent crafting timeless laws for the Thousand Year Reich.

Sadly, when you think of justice as basic fairness, there is often a law, even in non-totalitarian societies, specifically created to allow things neither just nor fair, that can be cited in defense of terrible acts [4]. The best lawyer will make the strongest possible case for a particular section of that particular law prevailing over all other laws, all squishy moral considerations. Eichmann was accused of mass murder. Eichmann insisted that he had never murdered even a single person, hated bloodshed, so how could he possibly be culpable for jack shit under any law, since he was simply lawfully doing his lawful job the whole time?

Nazi lawyers were busy in those final days destroying incriminating legal documents and tightening up laws with an eye toward shoring up arguments that that arguably criminal acts done under state law could only be prosecuted by state officials. This is the same practice racist Americans used for generations, under the doctrine of States’ Rights, to ensure that local lynchings remained basically lawful activities, to be decided by local juries of people who knew the murderers to be damned good people who wouldn’t have done that kind of thing without a damned good reason. Under almost any law you can cite, there are grotesque specifics the lawyer can argue to try to get the client off the hook. It’s no mystery, really, that in Nazi Germany Nazi lawyers supervised the drafting of every important law.

Or course, law is not the only way people are kept in line. Controversial laws often come last, after the groundwork has been laid by the behaviors and attitudes tolerated and eventually applauded by the citizens. This is the reason propaganda is so important, to sew the seeds of the beliefs necessary to promulgate laws that, in other situations, may not seem just, fair or humane. The Nazis understood this keenly and taught future generations of politicians exactly how it should be done. The lessons have been well-learned and the battle for hearts and minds is being constantly waged by monied partisans on every side of every issue. Life for the person on the street often changes long before the new laws are put into effect, or even drafted.

You live in a place where people who are too loud in their dissent will be politely asked to shut the fuck up. Many times people get the hint, pick up the social cues and move someplace where they don’t have to argue politics all the time. Particularly after a few people who won’t shut up are made examples of.

But say you have the odd, perverse partisan, living in the same place for many years, unwilling or unable to relocate. His new neighbors all support the candidate he hates, and that candidate wins the national election. The loud-mouthed opinionated fellow simply won’t shut up about his stinking opinion that the new leader is a Nazi.

There are ways to make this person shut up. Perfectly legal ones, or at least perfectly reasonable, acceptable ones. And if they are not strictly legal at the moment, but everybody involved goes along with current, extra-legal methods until better laws can be passed that will make complete assholes like this shut the hell up under penalty of law, well… call us pishers!

[1] The lawyers in Germany were the first profession to fully and voluntarily Nazify, followed closely, if memory serves, by German doctors. (Robert J. Lifton, The Nazi Doctors)

The requirement that every lawyer must be a loyal Nazi was essential to the creation and administration of the Nazi State. In programmer parlance: Nazi in, Nazi out.

[2] The States’ Rights argument here is based largely on the right of a sovereign state to make and prosecute its own civil and criminal laws. If an American state decides it is illegal for blacks and whites to marry each other, end of story. If a state decides that sometimes an uppity black person needs to be taught a violent lesson to keep the others in line, so be it. Those two racist state laws were later abolished, the first by a Supreme Court decision finding the law unconstitutional, the second by a series of Supreme Court decisions and the enforcement of a longstanding federal law to punish racially motivated terrorism, but it took more than a century. A dark century of vicious racism at law, state law.

[3] Think of the cunning, lawyerly rebranding of commonly understood tortures as mere methods of “enhanced interrogation”. Imagine John Yoo, the Korean-American Bush-Cheney loyalist who drafted the secret torture memo (along with a fuck named Bybee, later promoted to federal judge for life), not as a tenured professor of Constitutional Law at Berkeley, but as a perp on a water-board, being forced, under enhanced interrogation, to explain his actual thought process while writing that infernal legal justification for acts we had signed treaties to prevent, acts illegal under American law, the Nazi motherfucker.

[4] The current, highly controversial, American policy is to have U.S. border agents pluck the children of asylum seekers from their parents’ arms and throw the kids into prisons for children. About 2,000 so far, under this balls-to-the-walls administration. All perfectly legal, to hear the supporters of this policy tell it. It is a form of brutal deterrence calculated to slow down the flood of people coming to our borders seeking asylum. Sanctioned by Jesus Christ himself, as spoken by Paul (commanding all of Christ’s followers to never question the law, apparently– obedience to government authority being the highest spiritual calling of righteous Christians), according to our pious, God-fearing, scripture quoting racist Attorney General. Another guy I’d pay to watch sputtering on a water-board any time he refuses to honestly answer a simple question.

Writing, the last refuge of a scoundrel

It is, I suppose, the last refuge of a scoundrel, this sitting and writing out the things that vex you. Writing on the internet gives carte blanche for every opinionated asshole to have a good purge with no editor to get in the way. [1]

I had an editor once, I suppose he could be called that, he definitely did edit. Since the company he worked for paid me $250 for a thousand words, he got the final say on what I really meant. One of his improvements really fucking got to me, I can tell you for sure. He took the line “It made no sense to me that a man with all the qualities he possessed could be such an intractable asshole” and rendered it “It made no sense to me that a man my mother absolutely adored could be such an intractable asshole.”

It made perfect sense to me that my mother loved my father, and I understood the many reasons she did. I shared many of them myself. That was no mystery to me. The mystery was that someone with all the admirable qualities he had, and the humanistic ideals, could abuse his children, that was the point of the sentence, the rest of the paragraph. It was why I had placed the line where I had in the complicated story I was trying to tell in a way too few 1,000 words.

The perfected sentence was clearly much closer to what the editor felt was true, he couldn’t believe, apparently, that his mother had loved his father, an intractable asshole he’d written about in a svelte 10,000 word essay also published on the site. Fuck him and the knock-kneed, swaybacked turd he rode in on, the dick-fingered mediocrity. His unsought refinement of what I really meant made me want to slap him hard, back and forth, smartly, bip-bap! We eventually had a series of misunderstandings [2] and I saw that sending future work to him for his random editorial attentions was not worth the $250 or the emails from friends congratulating me on having my tampered with prose published. [3]

Thus it is with the world, my invisible friends. We constantly have to weigh what is most important to us. To me, it is finding as much clarity as I can, wrestling things that don’t make sense, particularly maddening things, into some kind of coherence. I am, for better or worse, a life-long student. I tend to brood and read, make notes, brood, read, stop while walking to make a note.

If you don’t know the people involved, you will probably find my piece about the terrible erosion of an old friendship an interesting read that might apply to your own life. If you know the people, there will inevitably be a shudder of horror seeing the situation set out so starkly. I have come to prefer seeing a thing clearly and deciding the best course of action based on my beliefs about the way to be in the world to passively waiting for the next arguably inexplicable assault and the sickening argument that sometimes follows about who was the bigger asshole. There is nothing to compare to doing an emergency favor for someone and then, instead of thanks, having some shit thrown on you. I can tell you this from recent personal experience.

I think of something like the president’s current policy of ripping babies out of the arms of asylum seekers, having government personnel lie to the parents that after a short interview they’ll see their kid again, while during the interview the kid is shipped to a prison for children, never to see the parents again. The first thought that comes to mind, outside of the fact that the privatized prisons where these poor kids are warehoused have some kind of exemption under this supremely corrupt administration, where they get a huge break on the already lowered tax for corporations, is that this is exactly the kind of “feeling out public reaction” that Mr. Hitler’s people used to routinely do.

Hitler didn’t come to power and immediately open up the now famous Death Camps. It took years, step by step, to prepare everyone for this final, extreme, previously unthinkable step. That final step only became necessary, you understand, once the nation was at war. Step by step, always prepare the next step carefully. First you gas ‘useless eaters’, people in insane asylums, the mad, the demented, the retarded. You read the polling carefully. Most Germans, it seems, had no problem with euthanasia, if it was pitched correctly. Eventually you will be able to euthanize all enemies of the state, keeping it discreet and secretive and always, always justifying it as a mercy done for the greater good.

(added the next day) Stop the presses. The larger point about the incremental nature of the ascendence or evil practices remains, but my example is problematic. We learn from Hannah Arendt that the gassing of “mentally sick” Germans had to be stopped, due to public outcry, after a mere 50,000 souls were “granted a mercy death”. No such protest was made a couple of years later when the “granting of mercy deaths” was liberally extended to millions of Eastern European Jews and many others who died in the gas (the Nazis preferred poison gas, Zyklon B, was originally developed as a pesticide, don’t you know?) and by other methods.

So the fact that Trump and his diminutive racist lapdog A.G. are forcibly, and deceptively, separating parents and children when the family comes seeking asylum, is just one of the many steps toward becoming a society where unspeakable cruelty is as common as America’s Top CEO’s bristling over-sensitivity to criticism.

Look, once something becomes routine, most people will stop questioning it. It’s human nature, you can only be outraged for so long, particularly if there is nothing you can do about it. A shame that thousands of children and their families will be scarred for life, fleeing violence in one country to experience cool, rationalized, perfectly legal government violence in the country you fled to. But what is that next to the brutal scarring that men like the president and his Attorney General must have experienced to make them the vicious people they are today?

That is always the question, in this world so deftly described by the brilliant Mel Brooks in his explanation of the difference between comedy and tragedy. “Tragedy is when I break a fingernail, comedy is when you fall down a manhole and die.” If you are not personally the victim … well … you can understand … kind of … an abstraction like why it’s wrong to torture somebody who was turned in for a large reward … on the off chance that he is a terrorist … or wrong, OK, to take a baby from its mother’s arms and lie to the mother, as you lead her away … or wrong to lie, repeatedly, about everything … but on another level these things will never be absolutely, compellingly real to you.

If an old friend is in a panic to see you, accuses you of malice, gives you the chance to say you were mistaken, or lying, then tells you that you’ve never been a true friend, are incapable of admitting wrongdoing or apologizing, and expresses deep anger for a good deed you did thinking you were sparing his feelings … well? What is one to make of this? I was confused as hell for a few days, then, as I digested the constituent parts of it, came to finally see it clearly.

The old friend is prone to anxiety, fears the worst, always, apparently. This anxiety causes him to live a nervous life where he really can’t always give the feelings of others the same immediate attention he must give to his own feelings. His friends must understand this characteristic distractedness, his true friends must see past it. They must make an allowance for this personality trait, even if he can’t always reciprocate. His life is, in a phrase Springsteen once sung, “one long emergency.” He has many fine qualities, great intelligence, humor, warmth, but he also has needs that can sometimes obscure these qualities.

I don’t have great insight into panic or anxiety. I had to imagine and understand, as best I could, what life must be like for someone prone to that. Depression I have lived, I get that, but what it must be like living with constant anxiety took some imagining. I don’t understand being angry for reasons that are mysterious to myself. It simply makes no fucking sense to have anger you don’t understand constantly simmering in the background. I have to understand why I’m mad. It can take time, but most of the time I can put my finger on it. I get a certain relief when I understand what I’m mad about, I can often take some action that will help. This old friend has no time for this exercise, and his anger comes out in odd ways. Like lambasting someone who has just spent a couple of hours being as kind to him as he knows how to be.

This old friend’s oldest son is a mensch, a really admirable young man. I don’t know him nearly as well as I know his father, but I know enough to hold him in high esteem. It was the thought of him reading what I had originally posted, a more detailed, much angrier piece, that caused me to take the post down. His father never reads anything I post here, the son periodically does. After talking to Sekhnet, someone I’ve never known to pull a punch, telling me I might want to pull this punch, I realized how much the original version could have hurt the son. It’s possible the revised post might too, but much less, I thought, and there was value to the post in the “larger conversation” I am always dreaming of.

Relationships, like all living creatures, have a life cycle. It’s hard to see this when you are young and idealistic, but live long enough and you will come to see this life cycle over and over. When a friendship is mutual everything is cool. Over time certain patterns become ingrained, resentments can build up. One guy crucifies the other guy’s priceless guitar. Anger is stored up. Distance is inserted between people to insulate themselves from further damage. Mistrust accrues every time an untruth is uncovered, or an attack happens. Enough of this shit happens for long enough, the warmth of friendship can cool to coldness.

I haven’t reached that point with this guy’s father, someone I’ve known for about fifty-five years, but I certainly am not confident that my old friend is capable of the kind of self-knowledge I need in those closest to me. I have friends as neurotic as he is but they have never given me the same cause to doubt their basic good will. I intend to give my old friend every benefit of the doubt, I’m just not optimistic about the long-term health of our long friendship. I hate the idea of holding him at emotional arm’s length, for the sake of remaining friends, but that may be the only working compromise available to me.

Consider this, related, if seemingly unrelated, to the incremental way things die. It would have been unthinkable a few years ago to imagine waking up in the USA every day and hearing the lede “the president attacked”. This thin-skinned man with the massive inferiority complex attacks someone several times every day. It’s what he does. After a few hundred attacks we just take the words “the president attacked” for granted. It’s tempting to fume about that for a moment, but I’ll rein in that impulse and give one last grunt here. (You may laugh, or at least grimace, to see how well I rein in that impulse, I suppose).

Professional football players respectfully protesting police violence against unarmed blacks are “sons of bitches” fumes this man who then screeches that they should be “fired!” His campaign fundraiser crowd goes wild, applauding their hero who basks in their adoration. One of the bitches tweets that she’s proud of her son, proud to be the bitch who raised him to be such a man of integrity. The president, of course, has no answer to this, he’s looking for someone else to attack, the main thing is to keep attacking.

His daughter, a mannequin-looking woman he’s on record as wishing he could have sex with, busily promotes her many brands while a public servant, profiting handsomely, if corruptly, from her selfless service to the nation. A comedian points out that she’s behaved with monstrous insensitivity regarding her father’s policy of ripping young children from their asylum-seeker parents’ arms. The comedian calls her a “feckless cunt” for not confronting her father on this heartless policy, instead of narcissistically, obliviously, posting pictures of herself hoisting one of her loving children. The description seems to fit pretty well, feckless meaning “lacking initiative or strength of character, irresponsible” except that “cunt” is the c-word, like “nigger” is the n-word. It is a word that simply may not be uttered, except at one’s peril.

Now the president gets to be righteously outraged, the thing he does best. Picture how much restraint it must have taken him not to tweet that the offending comedian, Samantha Bee, is the cunt. “She’s a cunt, not my daughter, her, she’s the fucking cunt, with a mouth like a fucking toilet bowl full of disgusting vegan shit!” He could have tweeted that, but he’s the president and aware of his power as a role model, so he merely ranted a bit without profanity about no talent, loser Samantha Bee and her low-rated show and called for her to be fired. The First Amendment is overrated, he thinks, even as the sacred Second Amendment is constantly under attack by liberal c-words and n-words who fucking hate our freedom. Lock her up, lock her up!

USA! USA!!!!!

[1] With WordPress you can even do it for free!

[2] A nice example is outlined here, along with a 1,000 word piece he actually solicited, one he rejected as “strangely unmoving”.

[3] WordPress bots helpfully provided a link to an earlier piece, which has more a bit more detail and nuance. Vous pouvez clickez ICI, mes amis.

The Larger Conversation

Perhaps this conversation exists only in the realm of imagination, a place where I do like to hang out, but I believe there is a larger and more important conversation, an enriching conversation about principles, context and perspective, that is rare in our daily lives. I see this dispassionate dialogue about principles, integrity and fairness as an island of peace in a world of war. It is the imagining of a world where one does not have a gun thrust into one’s hands along with extreme pressure to shoot at the enemy.

I write much of the time intending to contribute to this larger conversation, though, aside from reading the words of others engaged in this project, it is a mostly one-sided conversation. A silent one on my end, for the most part, unless I manage to find publishers for my contributions to the conversation.

George Orwell put a finger on his motivation to add to this larger conversation:

I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.

He expressed it as one of the four major motivations for writing:

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity. [1]

A specific case is needed to illuminate the nature of this larger conversation I am imagining. In the case of my endlessly long draft memoir of my father’s life, certain motifs and themes emerge. Not everyone, I grant you, is disposed to ponder painful personal matters. I’ve always been drawn to ruminating and seeking some kind of understanding, a predisposition reinforced by my upbringing, I suppose.

For me, an ongoing vexation cries out to be examined, turned carefully in the hands, set aside to cool, examined again, combed over for clues, set into a larger context, reconsidered, clarified. Writing is an essential part of this process for me, putting my thoughts and feelings in order, expressing them as plainly as I can, as clearly. In time, sometimes, a certain peace can be obtained about something that was formerly only a torment. It is the peace of finally understanding something essential in what only recently made absolutely no sense.

Specific: my father was verbally abusive to my sister and me. His language, when he was in a rage, was extreme. He regularly assaulted his children in ways that made me wonder if a simple beating wouldn’t be more merciful. My many attempts to have a conversation with him about this abusiveness were in vain. In hindsight, it was predictable that my father, being also a man of conscience, humor, ideals, great intelligence, himself the victim of unthinkably brutal abuse that started when he was an infant, would be incapable of productively discussing his abusiveness. The subject, naturally, made him very uncomfortable, defensive, angry.

If I succeed in setting out my father’s brutality in a nuanced way, showing the harm it inflicted and the terrible harms it flowed from, as well as the torment it must have caused my father, the reader has something to work with. People who have experienced something similar in their own families are likely to be engaged by a detailed dissection of this familiar syndrome.

Questions of forgiveness come into play, how do we forgive an abusive father, why would we? The reader will understand from my account that the son had largely forgiven the father by the time the father was expressing his terrible regrets the last night of his life. The exposition of this process, the true understanding that the father’s brutality was, hard to understand, also a tragedy inflicted on the father, could be helpful to others struggling with the same difficult feelings.

Those who knew my father, who know me, having all required preconceptions will only be able to take in part of the story, only be ready for a piece of the larger conversation. The partisans will pipe up.

“Well,” those who simply loved and admired my father might say, “you paint a mighty unflattering portrait of a very fine man”. True, perhaps, but also a true portrait, I believe. My goal as a portraitist is not flattery, but verisimilitude. Can you picture how the subject of this painting draws a breath, moves, persuades?

We can, instead of delving into more important aspects of the person’s life, the lessons we might draw from it, be distracted prosecuting a devilishly detailed argument over how fair or unfair a portrait I have painted of the fine man, since feelings are bruised on both sides. That argument will get us no closer to larger, more important truths, only connect us more firmly to our deeply held opinions about this person or that one.

“Well,” those familiar with my long refusal to monetize any of my skills, my long battle with my father, might say “isn’t this in large part just the ravings of a frustrated man who believes himself more insightful than most, the kind of self-righteous egotist a father might well endeavor to teach important life lessons to?” Etc.

The reader who has never met my father or me has the great advantage of reading the account without prejudice. That reader alone will be in position to decide if the narrator is credible, if the history seems fairly presented, if the voice of the dead man is three-dimensional, the voice of a real person. Paradoxically, by not knowing the people involved, this reader can best judge the credibility of the account. That reader, having read the book, will be in good position, if she desires, to take part in the larger conversation about the themes and potential lessons the story raises.

There is a lot of nuance in our world that we are often too distracted to appreciate. A person can often be a wonderful friend, warm, funny, sincere, playful, and also have a mean streak. A mean streak seemingly beyond their control, a mean streak driven by inchoate anger. Inchoate in the sense of incoherent, generalized, not understood or developed. Many of us are subject to this kind of faceless anger in some form from time to time.

Anger plays a part in every life, as often as not on an unconscious level. An angry person is the worst version of himself: rigid, self-righteous, hurt, flailing, justified in violence, incapable of empathy, reason or love.

Anger comes most directly from personal hurt. You, personally, are treated like a powerless asshole, told you’re mistaken about essential things, treated as someone with no right to your hurt feelings.

Anger at powerlessness is a common human experience. Even living in a great democracy like ours we are confronted daily by policies, carried out in our names, that make us want to scream, things we have absolutely no ability to influence. These accumulated common public “fuck yous” give rise to the serenity prayer, asking for the simple ability to not be enraged by maddening things we have absolutely no control over.

Torture, extrajudicial execution, two tracks of criminal justice — a merciful one for the wealthy and a merciless one for every other low-life motherfucker, the world’s most expensive and often inadequate medical care (while tens of thousands of Americans still die annually for lack of any medical “coverage”), corporations as persons, disputing the legal right of a fifteen year-old rape victim to terminate the unwanted pregnancy, denial of the plainly observable curse of man-made climate disruption, forcibly taking children of asylum seekers from their parents, insisting from on high that there is only one way to be a patriot in America [2] and doing everything in your power to make sure those who don’t conform to that single way are punished [3], on down the endless fucking list.

Remove the personalities. Forget what Trump says and does, what Obama said and did, forget Mitch McConnell and Bernie. It’s hard to separate the principles involved from the individuals who throw these things in your face, I know, particularly the way issues are packaged and presented by partisans. Removing the distracting personalities from the conversation is the only way to weigh the issue fully and fairly. It is very hard to do.

The larger conversation I am seeking involves putting as many available facts as possible on the table between us, both of us able to examine them at our leisure, and coming to as many common understandings as we can.

I’m not talking strictly about politics, though a larger conversation would be a wonderful thing to have in the political realm. Actual problems could be solved. I am talking mostly about the way we treat each other in our personal lives, how we proceed in the world, what we expect to give and receive. The personal is, of course, also political, how we feel, what we hold most dear, expresses itself in our political leanings. On another level, the personal is personal– and that personal realm is something we share with everybody else on this miraculous, troubled planet.

One trouble people encounter in connecting with others is that the personal, what is most deeply precious to us, is often closely guarded and seldom shared. There is a great deal of fear involved in being vulnerable. Once somebody comes forward and opens the door, as in the case of millions of sexually abused women coming forward, which started with one brave soul stepping into the light, the larger conversation can begin. The conversation is not easy, but it’s essential if the need for change is great.

The larger conversation is the one we have with others who’ve experienced vexations similar to our own. None of us escape troubles. That is the conversation I mentioned looking forward to in connection to this book about my father, should it ever be published and promoted and reach an audience where some could be moved to enter the discussion. It could be, as I said at the start, only in my imagination, though I can picture it very clearly.

It begins with seeing the larger principles, untainted by the personalities involved. It moves on, if all goes well, until a feeling of not being alone or crazy in your beliefs emerges. There are many basic human things we can all agree about, if you remove the fucking personalities. That’s the larger conversation I am so often thinking about.

[1] source

[2] This donkey-like insistence on the only proper way to love America coming from a man, a president no less, who later mouths the words to God Bless America, mangling the ones he does manage to sing. Of course, “patriotism” is really beside the point– it’s a white supremacy thing for this man, who has the unwavering support of every red-blooded asshole who resents black professional athletes and their undeserved wealth trying to exercise their right to political expression.

[3] And a hearty fuck you to the sheeplike, “patriotically correct” billionaires who own the NFL teams and wrote new rules to punish “insufficient, unquestioning gratitude to America” during football games. Shout out to the NY Jets owners for announcing they’ll pay player fines for anyone resisting this fascistic decree from the NFL owners.

Why I Write– George Orwell 1946

A beautifully written short essay that everyone who writes should read. At one point Orwell lays out the four main reasons people write. This one leaped out at me:

(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

Fancy that!

The essay, a quick and rewarding read, is here.

also HERE