Happy Birthday, Mom

Yesterday I was at a party, a memorial and celebration of the life of the mother of an old friend who died recently at 95. [1] My friend’s mother was, in fact, almost 96 when she died. In a glamorously lit photo from more than 70 years ago, she appears as a dreamy beauty from the silver screen. Her smooth face is illuminated as Rita Hayworth’s was in those gorgeous black and whites taken during the war with Hitler and Tojo. [2] When I met his mother, my friend and I figured out, she was 47. Seems like the blink of an eye.

My own mother, who died in 2010, would be ninety today. Happy birthday, mom. There is a book to write about you, someday, if the God it’s hard not to curse just a little allows me the time and focus to write it. Not that you had much use for that particular fable, the whole God thing, the all-wise, always merciful creator who lets the creatures He made in His image take the fall for every evil thing that is constantly happening in His miraculous world of Free Will.

There was a blue, leather bound notebook I remember seeing as a kid. Your poems were in it. Your gravestone, don’t forget, is inscribed, in Hebrew, “heart of a poet”. You had such a heart, a heart that would not allow a simple story to be told without a couple of embellishments that would make the story shine a bit more. I came not here to quibble about truthfulness, not on your birthday. Not to say you weren’t also essentially a candid and truthful person. You just always had that artist’s desire to make the thing a little more perfect, in this crooked, cockeyed world.

Funny though, as funny as this conceit of talking to someone dead for eight years tomorrow, I was sitting at your kitchen table in Florida, close to the end of your long battle with cancer. That twenty-three year ordeal that knocked the shit out of you, and eventually took your last breath. You were on the phone, talking to your buddy Sophie, also my friend, and she asked you if I had arrived in Florida, as planned.

“No,” you said emphatically, as I watched in amazement, “he got stuck at the airport, in that terrible blizzard they had in New York last night. He was there for hours, before they finally cancelled his flight. I don’t know when he’ll get here…” I said nothing, of course, but as soon as you hung up the phone I asked you what the fuck?!

“I love to lie!” you said happily. “I don’t know what it is, but I love to lie.”

A few days later, when we were visiting Sophie, the subject of my being stranded at LaGuardia never came up. Why would it? Sophie lived to be 98 by living in the present. She was happy we were there, happy we were going to your favorite restaurant for lunch, eager to hear all the latest news.

I know, I know, of all the stories, that’s the one I tell on your birthday. Some fucking son! Hey, what can I tell you, mom, that’s the way God made me.

Kurt Vonnegut replaced Isaac Asimov as the president of some organization of free-thinking atheists. In his first address to the group he told them Asimov was looking down from heaven, smiling on them all. This caused the assembled intellectuals to roar in mirth. If it had been now, one might have texted ROTFLMAO! Funny line, Kurt.

What has that to do with you, mom? You know very well. You always loved a good story, especially one with a punchline. I don’t really have one for this birthday card, as I am feeling almost constantly angry these days, but I’m, you dig, trying to keep it light here for you. For YOU, mom. That’s kind of funny right there. Even as we both know you’re smiling down from heaven right now, thinking of the perfect rejoinder.

[1] I am well-aware, Sekhnet (and mom), that the structure of this sentence is as ridiculous as the one I love from the old Mad Magazine “I was the prisoner of a sadistic hunchback with bad breath named Harold.” I point out that the ambiguity about who died in that first, dick-fingered sentence, my friend or his mother, was resolved a nano-second later in the sentence that follows. For what it’s worth, to a caviler with bad breath named Sekhnet…

OK, as I suggested above, I’m too pissed off and impatient at the moment to fix it. (No, you don’t have bad breath, Sekh, and I’m pretty sure if you did it wouldn’t have the same name that you do). Peace!

[2] see note above. Rita never posed with Hitler and Tojo. No way.

The Seven Deadly Sins

Last night I was making a bookmark for a friend I promised months ago I’d send some bookmarks to. I’d made them months back. A few were nice, but I’ve mislaid them here in the quivering paper quicksand in this house of constantly shifting stacks of paper. Most had gibberish writing on them, among the colors and drawings. I decided to use my fancy Namiki Falcon to inscribe more meaningful words on the new bookmarks. I made one with the Seven Deadly Sins on it, for handy reference. [1]

Pride
Greed (avarice)
Lust
Envy (jealousy, covetousness)
Gluttony
Wrath (anger)
Sloth (laziness)

Reading the list I had a minor revelation. Below the sins I wrote “7 for 7, impressive!”

I don’t have to say any more than that, I think. Except perhaps to state the obvious, what is lacking in someone who exhibits all seven of these bad traits.

Pride keeps a person thinking they are more important than everybody else, removes empathy.

Lust turns other people into mere vessels for gratification, removes mutuality, makes the objects of lust disposable.

Greed speaks for itself, it places the desires of the self about all else.

Envy, as corrosive an emotion as there is, is an enemy of peace and driver of malice, it keeps bitterness and ill-will simmering.

Gluttony means you will covet and steal someone else’s portion to overfeed yourself.

Wrath is the same as just being mad, fucking nuts — it is the opposite of prudence, if you think about it, since an angry person literally cannot think straight.

Sloth may be the slipperiest sin. It means you are perpetually too lazy to do the hard work that needs to be done.

Seven for seven! You’ve got to hand it to the motherfucker. Every cardinal sin on the list and the pious Christian right loves him. Now that is a unique species of fucking genius!

20180518_005809 (1).jpg

[1] The seven deadly sins, also known as the capital vices or cardinal sins, is a grouping and classification of vices within Christian teachings. … These sins are often thought to be abuses or excessive versions of one’s natural faculties or passions (for example, gluttony abuses one’s desire to eat). source

A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Medicine Go Down

As we walk through this world of darkness certain things become clear if we live long enough. It is better to be mild with upset people whenever possible. Particularly when confronted by someone who is angry, it is best to remain calm, keep your eye on defusing rather than escalating anger. It’s not easy, and not always possible, but is generally a better way to walk through a violent place than flipping the bird at every one of the many angry, deserving jerks you will encounter here.

Then there is the calculated use of strategically applied reasonableness to attain a desired goal. Not exactly the same thing as described above, but it’s a smart play. Interim CIA director Gina Haspel, who repeatedly denied the incendiary charge that stripping prisoners naked, freezing or overheating their cages, slamming them against walls, depriving them of sleep for days on end, blasting deafening music, making them engage in forced mock sex (for the cameras), using electrodes, stress positions, hanging with feet barely touching the ground, other fear and terror inducing techniques, amount to torture, backed off ever so slightly in her denials of government wrongdoing.

These things were all perfectly legal when the CIA did them, Gina Haspel insisted repeatedly, if not 100% uncontroversially, during her confirmation hearing. “Bloody Gina,” by all reports, was pretty gung-ho about the new freedom to roughly interrogate granted by the top secret Torture Memo[1] and the $80,000,000 manual of best arguably non-torture practices painstakingly laid out by two patriotic American psychologist/torture tutors, Jessen and Mitchell. To my knowledge she did not deny that she destroyed evidence of torture conducted under her watch at a “black site” in Thailand.

It was going to be a tight vote for the president’s nominee for CIA director, Ms. Haspel and her allies realized. So she wrote a heartfelt letter to the top ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner. The magic words:

While I won’t condemn those that made these hard calls, and I have noted the valuable intelligence collected, the program ultimately did damage to our officers and our standing in the world. With the benefit of hindsight and my experience as a senior agency leader, the enhanced interrogation program is not one the C.I.A. should have undertaken.

It seems to have done the trick, precatory (non-legally binding — she promises nothing, , admits nada) language and all. She should now, with Mark Warner’s vote and a couple of others, have enough votes today to become America’s Next Top Spook. It is petty, I know, to parse such sincere words as though they were crafted with the help of a lawyer and other partisan hacks, but I can’t help but note just a couple of things. After-the-fact snideness is about all we get to exercise, much of the time, here in our great, participatory democracy.

I won’t condemn those that made these hard calls

It’s a nitpick, but I love use use of the word “that” to refer to those who insisted torture was legal. “That,” while acceptable as a reference to a person, is also exclusively used to refer to animals and inanimate objects; “who” is exclusively used for people. A telltale slip. Nothing to see here. Yes, OK, Dick Cheney was a bit of an inanimate object, as were the steely men who made “these hard calls”. Kind of like a corporate “person”, not something you’d want watching your back in a fox hole, or babysitting for your kids, or meeting in a dark alley.

I also love the principled refusal to condemn the architects of the recent American torture program. You go!

and I have noted the valuable intelligence collected

So Gina Haspel is sticking to her guns, a woman of principle! In contrast to the reasoned opinion of every intelligence expert I’ve ever heard on the subject, she is suggesting that torture works. She will not say it’s not a damned good way to get evil fucks to give up valuable intelligence. Nope. The regrettable part, to Haspel and her higher morality, is that it makes us look bad to be secretly doing things that, when leaked, make us look like monsters no better than the people we are torturing, er, interrogating in an enhanced, perfectly legal, or at the very least arguably legal, manner.

Since we are good, and evil people, or people we suspect may be evil, are evil, or quite possibly evil in the case of mere suspects, well, our American secret agents hold themselves to a much higher moral standard than standard morality requires. You see, we only secretly torture us some folks to preserve our higher moral values.

It is important to grasp this distinction. Only then can you understand why our highly principled UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, walks out when the Palestinian delegation complains about the fog of tear gas rained from Israeli drones and the dozens of demonstrators killed and many hundreds wounded on the Gaza border with Israel. The NY Times headline today refers to “scores” of Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers in the last two days. Typical liberal crap– “scores,” while technically accurate, suggests way more than a mere sixty or so, eh, Nikki?

US ambassador Haley defended Israel’s amazing “restraint” in killing and maiming so few of the people who publicly massed to openly hate their freedom. No other country, she insisted, could have behaved with more restraint. Then she got up and left as the Palestinian representative began to speak. The perfect way to show the world how much America cares, how willing we always are to listen. How much more moral we are than those who self-righteously, hypocritically, attack our higher morality.

“Just a spoon full of sugar
makes the medicine go down,
the medicine go dow-own,
the medicine go down,
just a spoon full of sugar
makes the medicine go down
in the most delightful way!”

[1] Torture, according to that memo, “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” Yoo also advised that for mental pain or suffering to amount to torture, “it must result in significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years.” source

U.S.A.!! U.S.A.!!!!

I wish I could remember my father’s exact arch remark every time something shameful was revealed about our country and its people. He said it the same way each time. “Doesn’t it make you proud to be an American?” may have been it, though it could also have been “Makes you glad to be an American….” Words to that effect. I heard him say it many times, but, sadly, I can’t be sure which words composed the exact phrase.

I’m thinking of this because my sister alerted me to an imagination beggaring “informercial” she’d seen on TV. While I was talking to her I found the two minute video ad, which I pass on to you without further comment. Except to say, order your’s today, supplies are limited — and satire is now officially dead in America.

Thank You, Amy

Democracy Now! opens today’s headlines with the 25 [1] Palestinians killed, and over a thousand wounded, by Israeli bullets yesterday. The Palestinians are protesting the U.S. Embassy being moved to Jerusalem, on the day Ivanka and Jared land in Israel for a ceremony opening the new embassy. Jared will get right back to work on Middle East peace, one of several important tasks he’s been given by President America’s Got A Complete Asshole. The protesters are massing by the highly fortified border between Gaza and Israel, where they are also contending with tear gas, dropped from Israeli drones over Gaza. Meanwhile, right wing fanatics applaud the Israeli violence as moral and just, or at the very least, necessary.

We are used to this America RIGHT OR WRONG stance from years of black-and-white thinkers defending atrocities. “If we committed atrocities– and I say IF, because we are basically good and our enemies are evil— they WERE FOR A VERY GOOD FUCKING REASON! Look how evil those fucks we ‘tortured’, threw out of helicopters, burned, slammed against walls, deprived of sleep, shoved feeding tubes up their assholes— only evil can fight evil. Like you never had a fucking evil thought, you self-righteous piece of shit! Go live in Roosha, boy, if you hate our freedom so much”

As I walked into a concert for peace the other night, Arab and Jewish Israelis, Arab and Jewish Palestinians, showing how to make beautiful music across bitter and deadly historic disagreements, there was a small knot of protesters outside the venue. They were chanting that the synagogue where the concert was being held was anti-Semitic. They chanted some catchy little rhyme about hate.

I walked over to them, and learned that they feel that since one of the groups sponsoring the concert, New Israel Fund, is apparently against the proposed U.S. law that would make it a felony to support BDS, Boycott, Divest, Sanction and that, therefore, the concert was propaganda for haters of Israel, self-hating Jews, etc.. There was really no talking to them about the issues involved. Arab lives simply don’t matter to these zealots, anyone questioning Israel’s right to enact any policies whatsoever are the moral equivalent of Nazis.

Those who hate Israel are able to make certain apt comparisons between Israel’s state policies under Netanyahu and those of the NSDAP in Germany, the group history remembers as the Nazis. There is collective punishment. One member of your village takes a shot at one of us and we raze all the houses on the block. There is a casualness about deadly violence directed at the people being occupied. Settlers and occupying soldiers have a right to shoot Arabs who hate them in a provocative way. It’s like here, the way racists think of angry blacks. They’re scary and who can blame you if you flinch sometimes and shoot one? They want to kill you, so go ahead and shoot them before they do.

I don’t hate Israel, not at all. As an idea, as an ideal, as a reality, Israel is very important to me as a Jew, particularly in a world where anti-Semitism is on the rise, along with all kinds of racism. That said, the current governing coalition in Israel, with its long tactic of the Iron Fist, the abandonment of Jewish morality about helping the weak, feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, etc. (notably not about protecting Jews at the expense of everyone else) is the Israeli equivalent of Trump’s America. There is the same level of nuance, of empathy, of vision of the future.

Israel, right or wrong. USA! USA!!!! It cannot be, though it very often is, that creatures with such simplistic views carry the day. These things are complicated, you will say, there are millions of Palestinians, in camps, generation on generation of hopeless rage. You solve the problem by being strong, making sure your iron fist can crush whatever comes, at whatever cost is necessary. This is a recipe for a self-perpetuating eternal war. It’s like The War On Terror or the War on Drugs. These zero-sum policies are moronic non-solutions to real, pressing human problems.

“Duh, if we, uh, kill all the terrorists, and all the drug dealers, and all the people who think the terrorists might have legitimate grievances, and all the people who buy the drugs from the drug dealers, well— eventually these evil fucks will get the point. We will kill all of them, and done. Is that simple enough for you?” Very much simple enough, yes. The only problem is that imbecilic, violent “solutions” only create more despair, violence, motive for retaliation, hopelessness, rage, killing.

Aside from that, it’s the best possible way to deal with a complicated problem– kill all the fuckers who complain too loudly. You’d want that done to you, if you had legitimate grievances, despair, rage, hopelessness. Isn’t that true?

[1] by the following day the numbers were 61 Palestinians dead and 2,700 wounded, as reported by Democracy Now! Reports vary widely:

Gaza protests – as it happened: Two Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in second day of deadly violence The Independent · 20 mins ago source

Gaza braces for protests and funerals a day after at least 58 Palestinians killed by Israeli troops Telegraph.co.uk · 14 hours ago source

Israel Kills Dozens at Gaza Border as U.S. Embassy Opens in Jerusalem

New York Times · 18 hours ago

Dozens of Palestinians killed in Gaza clashes as US Embassy opens

CNN · 1 day ago

Lynching in America

Terry Gross recently did a show on the new National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, a museum that honors the “victims of lynching and racial terrorism in the U.S.” The hideous subject of gruesome, racially motivated murders, usually involving prolonged torture, is little discussed and even less often analyzed here in the land where it was long practiced. The highly uncomfortable subject of lynching is usually treated, by those whose family members were never lynched, with the famous Obama formula of “looking forward, not back” on horrific American practices, though, of course, that is unfair to the first African-American (literally) president.

Stalin, a man not known for his wit, is credited with the witty formulation: the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million men, a statistic. Thousands were lynched during a long reign of terror against the previously enslaved citizens of these great United States, but a look at just one lynching should suffice to drive the nature of this vicious tragedy home.

Then consider the pompous blowhard fuckheads (racist fuckheads, by the way) who decade after decade thwarted any and all attempts to make lynching a federal crime. The strutting, braying racists of today, men like America’s former Sheriff Joe “I Know the Law Better Than You, Fuckface, er, your Honor” Arpaio, are just an echo of those walking turds who considered themselves good men, American patriots.

I don’t mean to get all emotional about this subject, a subject which I have thought about many times over the last few years. My feelings on the subject have been stirred in recent days by America’s collective nonchalance about our extensive, secret torture program directed against suspected Islamic terrorists, with the confirmation of a zealous, stonewalling torture advocate hanging by the votes of a few spineless politicians. (See this one for more on Gina Haspel, the reality TV president’s pick for America’s Top Spook).

I recall my father telling me that not all lynchings were secret backwoods murders. Some of them happened in broad daylight, before a cheering crowd of average Americans who brought a picnic lunch, and the kids, and afterwards bought souvenirs of the event, photos, dismembered body parts taken from the screaming victim. Imagine that, if you can.

Google Jesse Washington (or simply click here), if you want to feel sick to your stomach about Making America Great Again. A glance at the photo of his charred, mutilated corpse, toward the top of the linked entry, should suffice. A glimpse of the photo of the vast crowd, pressing in from every direction to get a close look at the torture, will make your skin crawl.

Jesse Washington was an illiterate teenaged farm hand, a black kid, accused of… whatever… probably making advances toward a white woman, nay, raping her, with his eyes if not his body– yeah, that’s it– he raped her — and then he murdered her! Justice followed swiftly. Within a week, after full due process as guaranteed by our Constitution, Jesse Washington was a burnt, mutilated husk of a corpse, on display for the roaring crowd.

The record shows he was convicted of the rape and murder of the white woman he worked for, seven days after the white woman’s bludgeoned body was found. He was convicted after a no doubt scrupulously fair hour long trial, found guilty of both crimes by a jury of his peers in Waco, Texas, 1916. The jury deliberated for four minutes. Washington apparently had confessed to the crimes and his inexperienced court-appointed lawyers attempted no defense. In any event, there clearly would not be time for an appeal.

I note here that just as in the cases when police shoot unarmed blacks who later turn out to have criminal records of some kind, the fact of their record does not begin to justify the extrajudicial death sentence. You will hear gas bags argue that point, but… you know. Even if Jesse Washington was guilty of the crimes he was convicted for, the punishment should never be left up to a lynch mob. Although in Waco that day it was, with the law and order mayor, up for re-election, and police chief, standing aside.

An example was made of him as he was immediately dragged from the courthouse and thousands of righteous white people, up to half the population of the Texas town, pressed forward in front of Waco City Hall, good Christians, their children on their shoulders, to watch him be publicly tortured to death over the course of two hours. His death by torture lasted twice as long as the trial, imagine that.

Jesse Washington’s fingers and genitals were chopped off. The lack of fingers thwarted his attempts to climb the chains to get out of the bonfire he was lowered into. He was burned a bit, raised back over the bonfire by the chains, lowered, burned slowly, piece by piece, dismembered, burned some more, hung like a large strip of beef jerky, eventually dead. His charred, armless body was chained to a wagon and dragged a few miles, to be hung up on display in the small town where the murder had taken place, as a lesson to everybody.

What is hard to understand about this terrorist act we blandly refer to as “lynching”? It is unthinkable social barbarity of an unspeakably medieval variety. The larger horror is that lynching is performed to keep the status quo humming along, to strengthen desired social norms. It is a public demonstration, or equally effective as a private one people can wink about, of the prerogative of a group with the power to torture and kill anyone they target in a group without the power to do anything about it.

How much real power did the white barber from Waco, Texas, his wife and three kids have as they stood in the sun among the 10,000 to 15,000 good citizens watching men roast, cut and hang Jesse Washington to death, children pry his teeth out to keep as souvenirs? Not much. But, goddamn, they sure had more power than that boy they were taking to pieces up front. The satisfied face on one of the spectators, looking at the charred remains of Jesse Washington, says it all. You can see the picture on the linked Wikipedia page.

Here in America when we talk about terrorism it’s always the same one note samba: Al Queda, ISIS, fanatical militant Islamists who hate our freedom. It is not a brave stand for me to point out that those motherfuckers have nothing on our home grown haters. We just don’t talk about our history of violent racism and the legally winked at terrorism that long supported it. We don’t talk about the many harms that flow from institutionally protected violence, like the epigenetic changes passed on among the descendants of the victims.

I am glad that museum is open in Alabama, I’d like to visit it some day, unlikely as that may be. It is past time for Americans to begin confronting, understanding and addressing America’s shameful, ongoing, long-repressed history of racialized fear, rage, hatred and deadly violence.

Since I always try to end even the most depressing of these posts on an uplifting note, here you go:

On the centenary of the lynching, May 15, 2016, the mayor of Waco apologized in a ceremony to some of Washington’s descendants. A historical marker is being erected.^[114]

Fuck Eric Schneiderman

I’ve admired Schneiderman’s principled political stands throughout his career, which I followed since he was a political tadpole. Now he is permanently done in government, because, apparently, he can’t control his violent anger around certain women.

A sponsor of bills to protect women from being battered or choked, he stepped down immediately after reports of these allegations against him were published in The New Yorker the other day. So goodbye to the activist Attorney General of New York State, one of the few who seemed to relish going toe to toe with corrupt billionaires and their shady enterprises. A sad day all around for anyone but the president and his circle.

I will leave it to the great Samantha Bee, who puts institutionally protected anger against women into much sharper, and funnier, perspective than I can. Click here to watch Sam tear Eric a new asshole,

Why is everyone hating on Bloody Gina?

The president’s pick to head the CIA is thirty-three year CIA veteran Gina Haspel, known by her CIA colleagues as “Bloody Gina”. (I can hear Stephen Colbert reading the Trump tweet: So unfair! She’s a WOMAN……. how dare they disrespect….. wait….blood coming out of where?…. SAD!). The top CIA spot is open because the president drafted the most recent CIA director, Mike Pompeo, the Koch brothers’ erstwhile personal congressman from Wichita, Kansas, to replace the former CEO of Exxon as America’s Top Diplomat (America’s Got TALENT!).

The CIA, currently being run on an interim basis by Ms. Haspel, is apparently sending out social media messages expressing its love and support for Bloody Gina. Ms. Haspel is also, apparently, the one at the CIA who decides what parts of her record are highly classified and what can be revealed to the public. She has been (big deal, yawn!) implicated in participating in/observing torture at a “black site” in Thailand (apparently she liked it) and in the infamous (also completely unpunished) destruction of video evidence of American torture, which a couple of tenured-for-life weasels, Mssrs Yoo and Bybee, torturing the definition of ordinary language, rebranded as something else in a secret memo making the brutal practices, illegal under international treaties against torture, the Geneva Conventions and common decency, 100% legal, arguably, when performed secretly by the CIA and its contractors under secretly specified conditions.

At the confirmation hearing yesterday California Senator Kamala Harris asked Haspel two simple questions the acting head of the CIA refused to answer. (wherever things are not in quotation marks I’m paraphrasing Senator Harris and Gina Haspel)

Harris: “Do you believe the previous interrogation techniques were immoral?”

Well, Senator, as I have stated, the program was legal…. etc.

It’s a yes or no answer.

“Senator, what I believe sitting here today is that I support the higher moral standard we have decided to hold ourselves to…” (Harris interrupts as Haspel tries to dribble more time off the game clock)

OK, I see you refuse to answer that question. Do you believe that torture is effective in extracting actionable intelligence?

Senator, I have stated my beliefs, which are that among the legal tools we used, and I have to speak very carefully because… you are a former prosecutor and it probably won’t be enough to pause… continue to call you “Senator” each time, make a steely, determined face… wait out the very short, loudly ticking clock you have there (a tip of the hat to the indignant Condoleeza for showing us all how it’s done), which I notice is almost out … I repeat, all of the legal tools we had at the time allowed us to prevent major terrorist operations, to get the intelligence needed to save American lives, so, no, there’s no way of knowing if particular interrogation techniques were useful or not.

This is American politics in 2018, a kind of deadly reality TV show where the underlying facts of the important matters under discussion often just get in the way of a good dramatic story arc. We had a two term president who, although holding nobody legally or even morally responsible for the torture program, made the brave public admission, during his second term, that, with the best of intentions “we tortured some folks.”

We, you know, we, uh, tortured some folks. Just folks like you’d have over for a cookout in your backyard, folksy kind of folks, the kind of folks, folks, that you know, I have to be honest here, folks, we, in hindsight, maybe shouldn’t have done those terrible things to. Any fair-minded person would have to call the things we did to these folks torture, but it’s not my job to make sure the US sticks to its treaties and obligations under American and international law. I don’t want to get fucking assassinated! There are folks out there who would flat out kill me. I don’t want a needle-induced fatal heart attack while I’m lying in my bed! Do any of you folks?

The Republicans, who hold a razor thin majority in the Senate, because of a lone holdout and a medically absent senator who himself was tortured [1], don’t have the votes to make Haspel the next CIA director. They will need a few votes from Democrats if Bloody Gina is to lead Trump’s CIA. They already have one, Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. has already said he’d vote for Haspel. This article lists the many undecided Democrats (including both NY Senators and NJ’s Cory Booker) who can’t decide whether to vote to confirm Gina Haspel as America’s Top Spook. A fairly sickening list of folks, I’d have to say, folks.

Read the list and shake your head. Then contact your senator if he or she is on this list. If you’re in NY: Schumer: (202) 224-6542 (nobody picks up his phone); Gillebrand: (202) 224-4451 (a bit of a wait on hold to speak to a staffer, but worth it).

Send them emails. The contact info for the rest of these spineless weasels is here: https://www.senate.gov/. I composed this for Gillebrand, while I was on hold:

Senator:

I was dismayed to find your name on the recently published (CNN) list of Democrats “undecided” about confirming Gina Haspel as CIA director.

Ms. Haspel is an unapologetic advocate of “enhanced interrogation.” She participated directly in the CIA’s destruction of evidence of the torture program. She is known by her colleagues at the CIA as “Bloody Gina,” presumably for her lack of squeamishness about brutality and violence.

Nominated by a president who insists, against all evidence, that “waterboarding” is not torture, and is an enthusiastic supporter of torture as part of American policy, Ms. Haspel’s background as a supporter, and concealer, of these techniques is very dangerous.

Vote no, I urge you.

(feel free to cut and paste this one for an email to your spineless representative)

A rep at Gillebrand’s office informed me that she is voting NO, that three days ago she expressed her vigorous opposition Haspel for her participation in torture and its cover-up.

So I’ll send this email to Chuck Chuck Bo-Buck Schumer whose office does not even allow you to stay on hold while you compose a few words for an email.

But we should really, to be fair, try to see it from the president’s point of view, a president who has already stated, emphatically and with apparent sincerity, that he is a big fan of torture, promising to do things much worse than essentially harmless “waterboarding”. He’s only trying to keep a campaign promise!

As every young child knows, in America the president makes all the laws, carries them out, decides everything. So why should these corrupt, dishonest partisan buttinskis in the Senate have anything to say about a qualified appointee the president legally chooses? UNFAIR!

I note, because its hard not to be paranoid in a nation leaning so markedly toward authoritarianism (see list of “undecided” members of the “opposition party”) that every time I am unable to resist and write the word “Trump” in a post, or treat the hideous subject in any way, I suddenly get a small flurry of emails from a series of new “followers”– anonymous folks with long random sounding handles and always “outlook.com” at the end. If you ever hear that I have committed suicide, assume it was an expertly assisted suicide and make sure the coroner checks between my toes for a tiny needle mark.

[1]

Monopoly

Monopolies, one entity controlling an entire market and using unfair practices to squash competition, are officially frowned on in the “Free Market”. Teddy Roosevelt made a name for himself as friend of the Common Man by busting up some big monopolistic conglomerates. It was called Trust Busting when TR did it, walking quietly, carrying a big legislative stick. A quick google search gives us:

When a corporation eliminates its competition it becomes what is known as a “monopoly.” Monopolies took several organization forms including what were known as trusts. Stockholders of several competing corporations turn in their stock to trustees in exchange for a trust certificate entitling them to a dividend…

John D. Rockefeller, ruthless founder, chairman and largest shareholder of the Standard Oil monopoly, found that his vast fortune actually increased when the monopoly he ran was broken into many smaller companies, companies which included ExxonMobil and Chevron. Go figure!

The theory of Trust Busting was that it should not be legal for one giant company, using its vast size and market power, to gain preferential rates for itself and thereby eliminate all competition, control an entire market and charge whatever that market will bear for its products.

Today, since we live in a land of freedom, a nation of law (or, more accurately, two distinct and different sets of laws: one for corporate citizens and their human executors and one for everybody else), where nobody is allowed to run a monopoly, on the books, anyway, such practices are, heh, frowned upon. We have businesses that are “too big to fail” and the government will use tax dollars to make sure they don’t, sure, that’s the Free Market. We don’t worry that Google is really the only internet search engine, its name having been verbed to mean “search the internet”. Google, by the merit of its superior product, eliminated the many competing search engines of yesteryear: Altavista and Ask Jeeves are two that come to mind. I suppose there is still Bing, technically. I could google it, I suppose.

We live in a corporate culture. The leaders of business have an army of skilled lobbyists who worked for the government agencies they are now handsomely paid for influencing on behalf of their generous corporate masters. Corporations have accomplished campaign funders and wheeler dealers who make sure the laws are friendly to the interests of these artificial “persons” known as corporations. If you were a wealthy psychopath, human or legally created, you might well do no less.

My internet winks on and off throughout the day and night. It may be out for ten minutes or an hour, when it goes down. At times it will be out for two or three hours at a stretch. It does this unpredictably but it seems to happen more regularly during peak internet use hours, like Friday or Saturday nights when many customers just want to sit back and stream a movie.

It doesn’t take much research to learn that Spectrum, the company that swallowed up Time Warner, the company owned by, or also known as, Charter, is the only internet provider in my neighborhood. (You will mention Verizon, and I will say: fuck them. Here you go.) Fine, if you want to be technical, internet service in my neighborhood is a duopoloy [1] and customers are free to choose either of the ISP giants.

I called Spectrum a couple of times yesterday, as my internet went out. I ranted, politely but forcefully, stalling until my internet service came back on line. The representatives I spoke to were cool, sympathetic. The first told me at one point that there were 400+ people on my “node”, meaning that our internet was coming into all of our homes through the same “pipeline”. He noted that 34 other people on my node were currently experiencing no internet. As this was less than 10%, the company does not consider this an “outage” and so the robot you initially hear tells you confidently that there are no internet issues reported in your area. The robot then walks you through resetting your modem, unless you shout “representative” forcefully enough over her instructions to be connected to a human.

The second time I called back, an hour or two later, I was again told by the robot that there was no outage in my area. The rep I finally talked to was a nice kid. Tony was entirely sympathetic, in the end even issuing me two days credit, over $3, for the regular loss of internet service I’ve been experiencing. He and I spoke for about 25 minutes, and during that time the internet winked back on just long enough for me to google this motherfucker, the highest paid CEO in the U.S., probably in the world.

I told the kid I had the photo of his grimly smiling weasel CEO up on the screen, Tom Rutledge, I said his accursed name again, repeated his $98.5 million dollar paycheck and riffed on that and how intolerable it is to be at the mercy of a ruthless monopoly. The rep was very agreeable, had no argument at all, no corporate talking points to spin the situation differently. He completely understood, from personal experience, how frustrating intermittent internet service is.

My polite but vicious rant passed the time while waiting for the internet service to come back on-line. I managed to refrain from referring to Rutledge as anything worse than a grimly smiling weasel. I had to admire my own restraint, looking at the soulless face of this foul, infected, years unwashed shit-spattered sphincter. The smug face of a monopolistic master of the universe.

I know, I know! I’m so judgmental! Isn’t this piece of shit Tom Rutledge entitled to be paid whatever the market will bear for someone of his superior talents, his genius, his great contributions to society? I told the kid about the technicians who work for Time Warner/Spectrum/Charter, the ones who have been on strike for over a year. The company will not bargain with these unionized workers as it seeks to cut their medical and retirement benefits.

The kid didn’t seem to know much about the strike, or maybe the fact that we were being recorded added to his reticence. Here you go. I mentioned to Tony that it was quite possible these rolling outages were sabotage by technicians old Tom Rutledge was nonchalantly fucking by not negotiating with them. I said that while these interruptions were a major pain in the ass, you had to hand it to the striking technicians if this was industrial sabotage. Tony sort of agreed.

One reward of a long conversation with a sympathetic phone rep for a huge corporation is that you can sometimes learn something. Tony told me he was looking at a chart of my intermittent internet service (service which is out right now, I notice…) and could see by all the red areas on the chart exactly how many times, and for how long, my internet has gone out. I asked him if he could send me that chart. Naturally, he could not. It was no surprise. 8% of customers on my “node” were currently experiencing no internet connection. Not enough, you understand, to call this an outage or service interruption of any kind, but enough to demonstrate that these rolling outages are almost certainly not caused by my modem or router.

Tom Rutledge’s policy is that nobody is entitled to a refund for lack of service unless that service is out for at least 4 hours. Why four hours? Rutledge pulled it out of his highly compensated ass. 4 hours of no internet qualifies the customer for a credit of 1/30 of the monthly charge, unless the month has 28 or 31 days, in which case the credit is 1/28 or 1/31 of the monthly fee. Tony was the first rep who told me he could actually see a visual record of the last month and that the record looked very, very intermittent, sketchy, unreliable. Several of the other reps had pretended they were bound not to give me a refund for less than fours continuous hours of no service. Go figure.

I told Tony that while Tom Rutledge smiles his fucking weasel smile and makes new rules to maximize the corporate bottom line, raising rates for shit service by up to 25% a year, underpaying reps and others who do the actual work for Charter/Spectrum, refusing to negotiate with the unionized technical workers, everybody else, of course, is getting what we deserve. Hey, it’s a free country, you dig? Even though Charter/Spectrum/Time Warner has a monopoly, or duopoly, for crap internet service in my area, squeezing the bandwidth to provide unreliable service as cheaply and profitably as possible, you have a choice. You can always choose NOT have internet service. It’s not a right, it’s a privilege. This is America, bitches.

American Exceptionalism: piss on average consumers and insist they are fucking liars for pretending it’s not raining.

[1] a situation in which two suppliers dominate the market for a commodity or service.

Scandal and Optics

There was a long running network TV series called Scandal that I just learned about. Netflix has its many, many episodes, available for on-line viewing and I’ve been watching it. It is a non-partisan, though highly charged, political soap opera and very, very engaging. Well-acted by a fine ensemble cast, led by a charismatic and beautiful protagonist, the story churns along irresistibly in the page turner, cliff-hanger fashion my mother and grandmother used to love about the soaps they watched. The over-the-top heroics of the superstar main character, a character who will boldly gamble everything and never lose, are the stuff of comic books.

The show is to real political insight what a bag of potato chips is to a complete and healthy diet. And, anyway, political insight might as well be a dead language as far as the culture is concerned, it is, at best, a vestige of a time when there was actual debate on issues, prior to our age of media-driven partisan branding. That said, and needing the distraction, I’ve had a hard time staying off the tasty visual junk food of Scandal in recent days (when internet service permits).

I had a series of unsettling thoughts about real-life political events as I compulsively watched this show about a Washington D.C. fixer, Olivia Pope, a flawed genius played by a beautiful actress with a remarkable talent for evoking sympathy. This beautiful fixer simply will not lose. Is she perfect? Hah! Far from it, she’s got a closet full of painful skeletons that would immobilize most people. Yet she bravely fights a series of obscenely powerful monsters, and against all odds, and her self-doubts, manages to spin a just, happy ending to her immediate criss in every episode.

The unsettling thoughts while I watch the show involve what are now called “optics”, Olivia Pope’s stock-in-trade: getting out in front of the story and spinning it, from multiple, completely different angles, if necessary, using whatever leverage comes to hand to have things come out her client’s way. It turns out, if you are wealthy, smart, (not to mention beautiful), have personal connections to everybody of any importance in D.C., there are always strings you can pull to have the story told in the light most beneficial to what you need.

I had the thought, watching the fictional president’s chief of staff hire someone to commit murder, the president himself kill a retired Supreme Court justice on her deathbed, Olivia’s own staff occasionally doing a little minor torture and killing, and having everything come out OK, due to the genius of Olivia Pope and Associates, that Trump must have loved this show. If you are a true born superstar, there are no consequences, they let you do it, they let you do it! I could picture him watching it every week, taking in another personal lesson about how the game is played– like that aha! moment when Olivia suddenly realizes that she can keep her private boutique fixer firm running and more profitable than ever, even as she is poised to become First Lady in Season Five.

On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine Trump watching a show where a woman is the star, the indomitable protagonist. Who knows, though? I’m sure he would love it, if he could get over that. What I am absolutely certain about is that this show had to have been a favorite of many of the young wannabes who wound up working for the great man’s campaign, which is still in full swing. Trump, don’t forget, prefers campaigning to anything else related to the presidency. An adoring crowd is what keeps him moving indomitably forward. He declared his candidacy for 2020 very soon after taking office in January 2017. My man.

Not that the show invented any of the gambits it relies on week after week, the very ones used daily by Trump and Associates in our real, post-factual world of fake news and very fine Klansmen and Nazis. It goes, almost without saying, that if you, like the fictional Olivia Pope, have the CEO of every mass media company on speed dial, and have filthy kompromat on several of them, it is not a big deal to get them to delay a headline until you can publicly change the story enough to give the appearance of exonerating your client, or making allegations disappear. How a story is reported is the difference between a guilty verdict and a widespread public pronouncement of “nothing to see here.”

Joe Arpaio, America’s Sheriff, the fellow who boasted about his private open-air Auschwitz there in the relentlessly hot, arid Arizona desert. Roasting small time criminals in inhuman outdoor prison camp conditions while humiliating them? Law and Order, motherfucker. That’s one view of the man, from his supporters. Another way to see Arpaio is as an unrepentant racial profiler who essentially told a federal judge to shut the fuck up if you feel there’s a problem with the way I do my elected duties. He was found in contempt of court for disobeying the court’s rulings against him and his extremist policing practices.

President Trump immediately pardoned Arpiao, which Sheriff Joe was later surprised to learn was tantamount to admitting he was guilty as charged (the precondition for accepting a pardon, apparently. Who knew?) The important thing, optically, was how the president demonstrated his loyalty to polarizing high profile contemnors (a person or entity who is guilty of contempt before a judicial or legislative body) like Arpaio. Let that be a lesson to all you whining bitches and would be snitches!

The discussion should always, of course, be about what actually happened, who was actually wronged, what the decent result is, what just laws should require. That, of course, is not how the game is played in a world run by advertising spin and the tsunami of dollars it generates.

President, ten years before he runs for office, has consensual sex with a porn actress, his own business. Does it make him a saint, doing this shortly after his youngest son is born? No. But nothing to see here, you know? Except that days before the election he has somebody, a bumbling “fixer” who thinks of himself as fictional macho man Ray Donovan (who, spoiler alert, commits suicide from PTSD after years of an unsupportably violent life) pay the porn actress to dummy up. Now, if everybody abides by the ironclad non-disclosure agreement, there is truly nothing to see here. But, whoa! This porn actress with the big fake breasts has suddenly hired a lawyer! An aggressive and smart one who loves the TV cameras. They both quickly become media superstars in the real life soap opera that is the genius of reality TV’s presidency.

America’s embattled CEO brings in a one time star of the American Law and Order (yeah, you heard that, you people) Right: former federal prosecutor and one-time America’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani is so excited to finally be in the president’s inner circle that he can’t help but make the rounds of the talk shows. On those shows he comes off as demented, or possibly drunk, as he points out that, in spite of the president’s own claims to the contrary, obviously, the president reimbursed his lawyer for paying off the woman he fucked ten years earlier, and of course he knew very well what he was paying him for, that’s why they signed the non-disclosure agreement. The fact is, these women are… well, that one is a porn star! I rest my case, even as I can’t get my eyes to stop bugging out of my head or my eyebrows from wildly shooting upwards. As a matter of plain fact, the president could have any woman in the world, every woman, they let him, they let him do it. He probably has, muses Rudy, his eyes wild, probably has fucked all of them. There could be fifty more nondisclosure agreements out there, who knows? Who cares? Next question? Should we bomb the fuck out of Iran? Absolutely. And that’s not just my opinion, ask John Bolton!

Giuliani, the president reminds everybody after Rudy’s alarming talk show appearances, is still “getting up to speed”, meaning he doesn’t have the agreed on public narrative down yet. The president expresses great confidence in Giuliani, who will get the story straight after enough briefings with the people who run the president’s spin department. Trump often expresses great confidence in people right before he has one of his surrogates fire them for not having the sense to dummy up when it’s time and stay out of the megalomaniacal reality TV superstar president’s spotlight.

Optics, everything in our pay to play media world is all, or largely, a matter of optics. Olivia Pope, the superstar political fixer, broods about an unfixable mess, there is truly no way out, even the dumbest member of the audience can see this. Then, out of the blue, inspiration, the stroke of genius. It will mean throwing this person under the bus, the torture and/or death of these couple of arguably evil fucks, blackmailing that one, a good and decent man, but it is doable. The main thing is to win.

As the episode ends, although Olivia is now in great danger from an enemy from Season Three, back from the dead, she modestly takes her bows. Then, finally alone in her apartment, she flashes that expression that shows how supremely, critically, helplessly vulnerable she really is. A beautiful, hurt little girl with self-admitted Daddy Issues (her father is “command” a mass murdering rogue intelligence officer played with great nuance by Joe Morton) aching deep inside but doing the best she can. Doing the best she can!!!