How It Is Done Here

I spent three hours at the opthamologist’s yesterday and left without what I went there to get.   I was screened for glaucoma and every other eye disease, after a very detailed vision test with the nurse.   Unfortunately, the doctor said, he could not give me a prescription for new glasses because nobody would pay him for it.   “I used to get $20, I’d charge $40 sometimes,” the solo practitioner with the crowded waiting room told me, with only a slight complaint in his tone.   In a few months, when I get the EOB from my insurance company, I’ll learn how much he made to spend ten minutes with me yesterday, above the $25 copay I had to make in cash. I’ll bet they pay him less than $100 for all those minutes.

The doctor claimed, at 4:00, seeing me for my 1:30 appointment, that the optometrists’ lobby (who knew, but why wouldn’t they have one?) had made it virtually impossible for an opthamologist to write a prescription for glasses.  Then, twenty minutes later when the drops had fully dilated my pupils, he chided me for my reflex to close my eye when something with a bright light approached to touch my eyeball to measure it’s pressure.  

“It’s not a reflex,” he corrected me, possibly incorrectly, “you just have to control it.”   On the second or third try he was able to touch the sensor down on my right eyeball, move it around.  The left eye wasn’t as cooperative.   Three tries and I was still blinking when he tried to touch the probe to my eyeball.  He snarled at my lack of cooperation.

“I’m not trying to be a difficult patient, doctor,” I told this affable, slightly gruff eye doctor.

“But you are being a difficult patient,” he said, suddenly graduating from gruff to asshole.

Funny, I had no reflex to say “I might have been a less difficult patient after waiting, say, only 90 minutes, or a scant two hours, for this exam you already told me will not result in what I came here to get, namely an updated prescription for these fifteen year old glasses.”

Nor did it occur to me, angry, scrappy, no tolerance for assholes person I have long been, to say “nor is it a reflex to be a dick, particularly after keeping a patient waiting for almost three hours.  You can control it.   I don’t give a fuck about how much you used to be able to charge for a prescription.   Or how important you think you are, or how sincerely you believe your droppings emit no foul odor, nor any of the rest of it.   I’d be tempted to tell you to fuck yourself a little, but I’m trying to be like fucking Gandhi these days, so kiss yourself instead, my brother.”

The doctor also informed me I have something called blepharitis.   I asked him how one gets blepharitis.   “Bad eyelid hygiene,” he said conclusively, making another note in my new file next to the large printed circle that was one of my eyeballs.   He didn’t seem concerned about it, told me to buy eye wipes and gently scour the area between the hairs on my lower eyelid and the eyeball itself.   I asked how often I needed to do this.  Every day, he said, for the rest of your life.

This guy was just a hardworking American doctor running a successful neighborhood practice.  People are used to waiting as long as they need to in order to see a doctor.   This guy had a waiting room full of people the whole time I was there (though the number grew over the course of the hours I was there).   They were all fairly passive, patient, used to waiting as long as it takes to see the great man.  Every one of them using their cellphones, though the office was plastered with NO CELL PHONE use signs.  The doctor, in fact, snapped at me to turn off my cell phone as he escorted me back to his office.   Nobody but me, I suspect, had any second thoughts about why it took more than three hours to see the great wizard. 

My conversation with the nurse who did the actual vision test was a bit more interesting.  She looked at my paperwork and insisted I fill in my social security number, as requested on the form.    I resent this insistence on something that was once very private and is now required by every bloodsucking corporation one deals with.   I described to her how I’d worked for a bloated, amoral leech, a collections attorney, who had taught me the great value, to creditors and their attorney partners, of a social security number.    You can freeze all their bank accounts, for example, take whatever money they owe you by serving a restraining notice on the bank, sitting back and waiting for the panicked debtor’s call.

“People owe the hospitals millions of dollars they never pay,” she said indignantly.  “Millions!”

I, myself, have an unopened stack of bills from hospitals, and collection notices from an attorney for the most aggressive of them.   I said nothing about this, what was the point?   I told her how many corporations now obtain legally enforceable default judgements, obtained fraudulently by not informing the defendants that there is a case against them.   Since they have no notice of any court case, naturally the alleged debtor doesn’t show up, and bingo, Bird Wins!  Default Judgment.  Their unethical attorneys get bundles if judgements on default, worth many, many millions annually, by simply not serving the required legal notice on millions of suckers.  It’s called “sewer service”, create the legally necessary “proof of service” and put the required notice that your proof swears was legally delivered, directly into the shredder, or sewer, whichever is handier.  No harm, no foul, courts are too busy to inquire into cases where only the powerful side shows up.

I told her that American medical care, the most expensive in the wealthy world, also has far from the best health outcomes.   We argued this point for a moment, with her going on about how poor people in America have the best insurance in the world, then I made my next point, about medical insurance.  

A big part of the cost of expensive American health care is the army of private middlemen who take their cuts.  Why are insurance companies involved in health care, again?   It was an interesting talk, after I conceded her the last four digits of my social security number.  She gave me an excellent and thorough vision test, the results of which I, arguably, do not own.    We call this free enterprise, the free market, the right of entrepreneurs, large and small, to be rewarded as handsomely as possible for the risks they take to make a profit.

Dr. McGruff did give me a recommendation to a local glasses store where there is a young optometrist who seems pretty sharp.  I require a prism lens in my glasses, to make my eyes cooperate more smoothly with one another as they get tired from the endless tracking that is reading.  Prisms are tricky, the opthamologist told me, and I should go to a recent optometry school grad to prescribe the exact prism I need, slightly different from the ones I’ve been wearing for more than forty years.

The insurance company offered me “vision” with my health insurance plan.  It was about $10 or $20 extra a month, but did not include glasses.  It would, presumably, pay the $30 to $50 I will pay this young optometrist for the eye exam.  I figure for the $120- $240 it would cost me for the year, I will make out OK on this particular deal, just like I did with the $88,000 I was charged for Rituximab.  

God bless these United States, eh?  Will you do that, God?   Can I get a fucking “amen” here?

Why I Call the NY Times the Grey Skank

The Grey Lady, our nation’s journal of record, is so much like the best of our great nation itself.   The evil institutions that undergird the well-to-do status quo are seldom addressed in any depth in the pages of the Times, it seems to me.   The Times has a reputation for even-handedness, which is well deserved, especially if you are an educated, relatively prosperous citizen. It portrays the world through a distinct point of view, the point of view of the upper middle class professional.   The articles and editorials are written at the reading level of a high school graduate, a much higher reading level than most of our public discussion is held at.   Exposition in The Times is refined.   The editorial standards are high, rarely will you read a speck of bad prose in the NY Times.  

I don’t want to write much more about why I dislike this fine publication.   My father loved the NY Times, a paper he read cover to cover daily.  I know he took certain things with a grain of salt, read other publications to cover the gaps left by Times coverage, but he basically trusted the Times to give him his news.  I may just be a fucking malcontent, a professional underachiever, a person who cannot accept much of what has long been institutionalized here.   But tell me if I’m crazy after you read this randomly selected article.  In fairness, remember that it’s a report on findings from a study conducted by the Center for Disease Control, so there’s also that. 

read it here, it’s a quick and interesting read

The article purports to give the good news that the recent CDC study shows blacks are now living, on average, only three and a half years less than whites.  Black life expectancy is going up, in part, because blacks who (against the odds) live to be 65 (“weathered” blacks, according to the CDC)  have a longer life expectancy than whites of the same age.  

Why have blacks been dying so much younger than whites for all these years?   Poverty and an unhealthy lifestyle, junk food and cigarettes, as well as an off the charts homicide rate, are killing many blacks in America.   The article notes the homicide rate among blacks is nine times (900%) the homicide rate for whites in the 18-34 demographic, then it goes down to only five times (500%) higher for blacks 35 and older.   The recommendation, more healthy food and more consciousness about the grievous harms of smoking.  Hard to argue those are not good ideas, yet the story remains incomplete.

Reading the short article reminded me of searching my pocket copy of the Constitution for the legal foundations of American slavery, skillfully and marginally inserted between other clauses in the blueprint for our democracy.   At one point I searched the index for “African” “slave” “black” “involuntary servitude” and every other term I could think of.  Nada.  “The importation of such  persons as the States shall see fit to admit” [1] was one of three or four subtle yet irrefutable pillars of a century of violent, perfectly legal, race-based slavery at law.

Could the stress of being born into a despised, formerly enslaved minority whose people emerged from slavery with nothing but sometimes well-intended promises similar to the ones America gave the Native Americans have anything to do with the alarmingly high death rates for younger blacks?   Not if you read the Times, reporting objectively on the CDC study.   The Times article makes no mention of factors like widespread racism or the unbearable stress of being born into generations of hopeless poverty and the violence often attendant thereto.   Living longer is a matter of eating more green vegetables and making smarter health choices, says the Grey Skank sensibly.    

Here are the factors the NY Times sets out in its Health Section piece, citing the CDC:

Black Americans as a group have lower levels of education and homeownership as well as higher rates of poverty and unemployment, all factors linked to poorer health.

Individual behaviors like smoking are more common among younger blacks, compared with whites, and they contribute to higher death rates in younger age groups.

source

 

 

Reverie during a hot shower

The hot water pounding gently
felt so good
it made me close my eyes

I saw suddenly
caramel colored shoulders
the collarbones also caramel
against the brilliant white peasant blouse
I was trying to peer down into

The house where this happened
has long ago been razed
a gothic nightmare stands there now

I was monosyllabic
still in the grips of
a long bout
of what they told me was
a mild form of depression,
I had no interest in anything,
only dread,
but somehow I was seeking
what was down the front of this loose
necked white dress

The girl, for her part
seemed interested in
showing me whatever I
wanted to see, to touch

“Call me,”she said
as she rose to leave the party

“I…” I began
as time turned thick
“I’d… like to…” I said

Her eyes were like
the eyes of a beautiful deer

“Uh, it would be hard to do, though,
since I…
don’t have…
your number”

Apparently she took this
as stylish
and gave me an easy smile

As she bent forward
to write her number
I got to see more of the smooth skin
inside her white peasant dress

it was only a little bit
lighter than her caramel colored shoulders,
face, neck, collarbones, arms,
her perfectly smooth legs.

A few days later
around midnight
we sat on the ledge of a fountain
at Lincoln Center
kissing.

I told her she must
come home with me,
she said she couldn’t
there was a guy in love with her.

Back at my apartment
the little sounds she made
reminded me of a long lost love.

“I’m going to assemble my thoughts”

“Where are you going to assemble them?” asked Sekhnet, covered in dirt as she tills the rich earth of her little farm in the back.   Sekhnet is never happier than when she is covered with dirt.

Upstairs, I tell her, where I can write them down, see them before me, move them around until they make some sense.  

“Oh,” she said, “I didn’t know where they were.”

I made lunch for us, vegetable wraps, which we ate out in the garden, which  is starting to come to life, there are beautiful colors everywhere.   Mama Kitten, now almost three years old, an ancient for feral cats around here, came over to rub against my leg and have her ears scratched, her face stroked.  She liked having her back scratched so much that she turned her face around, with an open mouthed expression, thinking of sinking her fangs into my hand, then thought better of it and rolled on to her side, to have her ribs scratched.

Her four latest kittens (she’s given birth to at least twenty, the first litter when she was six months old) are as beautiful as all the rest, as good looking as their beautiful mother.   They are not much bigger than large mice at the moment, and much cuter.  All the rest of Mama Kitten’s many offspring are dead, but when they were alive they were very handsome, playful little cats.   Sekhnet has photos of a hawk sitting on a nearby tree.   The fucker was licking his beak the other day as the tiny kittens were dragged by their mother to another hiding place.   Six months or a year is a long life for these beautiful little animals.

We have a friend who takes care of a small colony of feral cats in her backyard.  She has had them all spayed and neutered and they all get along fine, huddling in winter months in the warm insulated dens our friend makes for them.  Most of them are seven years old and older.   One year, at her urging, we caught three young kittens here, took them to her vet to be neutered.   Within a few weeks all were gone, probably delicious snacks for the hawks.  Of Mama Kitten’s many offspring, every one of them a beautiful little animal, these four new ones are the only ones alive.  Alive and delicious.

 We watch these adorable, doomed little souls, the four of them, then the three, then maybe one.  They play, they display bravery, or timidity, they show their little personalities.   Then nature does what nature does.  Man plans, God laughs.  We try not to give them names, though some, like Dobbie, Cathead and Mini Me, we could not resist getting personal with.    

We were told by a cat expert that once a feral cat gets to a certain age without being touched by a human it will never let a human touch it.   Mama Kitten, as a young adult, often sat close to us when we sat outside, but never let us touch her.   Then she began eating from a spoon we’d hold out to her, as her next batch of kittens also did.   Then she began rubbing against our legs.  Now she is like our pet, living in the merciless wild, surviving not through God’s mercy but by her superior skills as a survivor.

How do you bear the sorrow of seeing these adorable animals disappeared like political dissidents in some South American dictatorship?   I have no idea.  God’s merciless plan, I suppose.  Everybody’s got to eat.  

Sekhnet shot a video of Mama Kitten in a stand-off with a fledgling hawk.   Sekhnet took the earthbound bird’s side, you can hear her in the video trying to dissuade Mama Kitten from killing the bird, which was almost the same size as the cat.  The plucky little predator was not taking any shit from the cat who could have easily killed her.   It was a standoff.  The bird hobbled off to grow up to feast on kittens, most likely. 

When I feel the anxiety that plagues so many in America today I usually try to get some exercise.  I walk five miles a day most days, I ride the bike for short, hard, uphill rides or long leisurely ones along the beautiful Hudson River, and always feel better after a ride.   Since my fucking idiopathic kidney disease, and the twelve weeks of no exercise after the “chemo,” I have been trying to get back into shape.   It has been a battle, trying to get the legs strong again, the heart and lungs back up to capacity.  I tried too hard, apparently, a week or two ago, pushing myself two days in a row, and now wear a knee brace.   I am bitter, I am anxious, I feel sorry for myself, and angry.   If I get up too fast, CLICK!, my knee locks up like a steel trap, with the flash of sudden pain one associates with a steel trap.

Nothing for it but a visit to a specialist.  Thankfully I managed to arrange one for two weeks from now.   I will try to take it easy, keep my knees calm, take hot baths, let the soreness in my shoulder from doing a sitting one-handed push up every time I stood, when the knee pain was at the worst, calm down.   I will try my best to keep myself calm and reasonable.   That is more than most people are able to do but I consider it a worthy goal.  

 There are millions of anxious people who live with deadly secrets, too terrifying to even think about.  The threat of certain fearful truths becoming known makes people into fabulous story-tellers, geniuses of fictive narrative.  They rewrite history, they invent the present, they dream of a future where they are magically not irrevocably fucked by hideous things they can never admit.  

I must take solace where I can find it — from the blessings of my life, of all life, and from my stance– at least I’m not one of those poor fuckers who can’t bear to explore themselves, look at the demons that are always close behind.   I may not know everything I need to know about living a good life, but I have a leg up on many people I can think of.  Even if that leg is currently a bit tender to walk on, or even to sit with now as I assemble my curious thoughts here in the far reaches of Cyberia.

 

IMG-20180504-WA0000.jpg

The Radiating Power of A Lie

I’m not talking about a lie told to spare somebody’s feelings, saying “oh, what a cute baby!” as you’re thinking the opposite.  It’s a slippery slope, of course, sparing feelings as a bullet-proof justification for a lie, but I am talking about a different category of lie, really, the outright denial.  This kind of lie, which insists something that happened never happened, erases all possibility of resolving the underlying issue that gave rise to the lie.  It destroys trust, once it is uncovered.  The damage that this kind of lie does, and how many harms radiate out from it, is our subject today.   

On a political level the lie is as powerful in America as it ever was, maybe even more so.   With tribal loyalties in America at a high water mark, issues are no longer discussed based on the underlying realities that cause the actual problem.   All political issues are now summarily disposed of by reflex, without analysis, according to the color of the hat you wear, the color of the money you stand to make or lose if the issue goes one way or the other.  

Millions recoiled from anything the Black President did, even if what he did was implement a long-time conservative dream like the PPACA, Obamacare, which greatly expanded the market for the private health insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies who remained free to pursue profit from illness without undue competition from gigantic government programs that could kill their corporate bottom lines. We now call the lies that support this kind of mindless opposition “alternative facts,” the fruits of our “post-truth” culture.  The good and bad of the PPACA, what was actually accomplished for its intended beneficiaries, how close it brought American health outcomes to the standards of the other wealthy nations, what needs to be tweaked to make it better, is all beside the point.   You support it 100% or you want to repeal it 100%.  Those who hate Obama believe that anything with his name on it must be destroyed.  Those who love him, same deal, but the opposite.

Annoying and disgusting as they are, I am not even thinking of the demonstrable lies being constantly told by our supernaturally thin-skinned Commander-in-Chief.   We are no longer surprised when he is revealed as a pathological liar, contradicting his ever-changing legal team’s assertions at every step.  I see this person as the embodiment of something he had no hand in creating, a familiar type he was born, booted and spurred, to be, the cancerous chickens coming home to roost– there is nothing unique about him except for his undeniable genius as a shameless self-promoter.    So I will respectfully leave this divisive motherfucker out of my meditations on lying, tempting as it is to cite some of America’s current head CEO’s more grotesque untruths.

When my father was still fighting for social justice, in the early 1970s, there was a riot at a Brooklyn high school.  My father’s team went into the school and brokered peace between warring student factions.   A year or two ago I read the New York City Division of Civil Rights’ report on the riot.  To my amazement, they were not seeking to lay the blame for the riot anywhere in particular.   In this rare moment in our history, around the time of the first massive Earth Day celebration, public officials were earnestly seeking to understand the causes of the strife and how to improve things so that, to the extent possible, groups stopped hating each other.   Or, at least, to understand things enough, and make enough changes, to end the violence between the ethnic groups involved.

The report describes how black students bused in from their segregated, low income Brooklyn neighborhoods were congregating at local hang-outs on the main thoroughfare of the slightly more upscale white neighborhood near the school.   There was escalating friction with local residents and business owners.   Several factors that contributed to the violence at the school were set out and discussed in the report.   The report was filled with analysis and nuance.   It was a sober, fair attempt to understand and solve the underlying problems that led to the riot.   As I said, it was a rare moment in our history.

Much more common is to simplify, vilify and righteously hate.   You see, the problem is not segregated living, segregated schools, institutionalized inequality, fear, anger, prejudice, pressures caused by these things.   The simple answer is that the riot was caused by unruly blacks, or angry whites, or whatever your simple-minded, self-serving Trumplike answer is.    Once you have your idiotic answer, implement policies that flow from it.  Privatized prisons come to mind, in the nation, long a beacon of freedom and democracy, that leads the world in incarceration, and, naturally, incarceration for profit.  The death penalty for dealers of illegal drugs ought to solve America’s drug addiction crisis, wouldn’t you say?

We are no longer expected to see the big picture, only the tiny part of the picture our attention is being directed to.    Look, there’s a photo of a black student punching a white kid in the face.  In the fucking face!    End of fucking story, as far as the person holding up that photo is concerned.    Another pundit has a photo of a group of snarling white students surrounding a cornered black female student.   Again, a snapshot used only to argue that there is nothing left to argue about.

I am quite familiar with this selection of a single incendiary image to end a conversation. My father was a master of this.   During one heated exchange he insisted I had no defense for my actions because I had impermissibly entered the kitchen of a rented hall and therefore anything that happened after that, including the physical assault on me, was strictly my fault.    It didn’t matter that I’d received prior permission to go into the kitchen, from the person in charge.  There was no discussion possible, it was rage against rage.  It only ended when I extended a finger and smartly popped it against my father’s nose, a warning shot.

Something happens and there is a moment of truth.  I once smoked a little weed with a friend (and, like Obama, we both inhaled).   When we got back to his house his wife asked us if we’d smoked.  My friend immediately said “no” as I was saying “yes”.  My friend had an excellent and irrefutable reason, as far as he was concerned, for lying to his wife.   My admission of a simple fact was apparently mortifying for him, made him look like a goddamned liar.   The resulting angry confrontation that took place between us had nothing to do, as far as either of us was aware, with me not lying to support his lie.  The argument was based on all kinds of confused emotional stuff, the impulse to lie versus just saying the true thing never came into it.

In fact, it is only now, years later, that I even see the simple yes or no question, and my abject failure to back my friend in a necessary lie, as related to the ugly fight we had.   No punches were thrown, but I can tell you it was as ugly a fight as I have ever been in, including ones where punches were actually thrown.  

A lie that forecloses discussion?  It’s like a government that keeps a program top secret, a program that permits the arguably legal torture of suspects in the event that they are actually connected to terrorist organizations.   Slogans are advanced as irrefutable justifications for why this secretive program must be kept top secret. These foreigners being roughed up in our name hate our freedom, quite possibly.   The revelation of proof of war crimes, kept secret by the chain of command, is regarded as treason when somebody like Chelsea Manning makes them public.   Same slogans: revelations of these things that inevitably happen in the fog of war are weaponized by those who hate our freedom.  No punishment is harsh enough for a traitor like that, say a good proportion of our nation’s true believers, even as the cool execution of Iraqi civilians by American soldiers is regarded as a trifle.  Like however many Mi Lai massacres there may have been during our long, bloody mistake in Vietnam.  Nothing to fucking see here!  Support our troops!

The examples are too many, and too ubiquitous, to catalogue.   The harm these lies do is hard to calculate.  It radiates outward from the shameful source of the lie in ripples that have no end.  It ends intelligent discussion before it can even start.  The lie may confer a strategic advantage at the moment it is told, but it will be deadly for intimacy, among those naives who still hold a quaint value like “honesty” in high esteem.

Here is how it works.   This thing happened that is … I’d have to say humiliating to me, potentially infuriating to others.   I make up a story to make it appear non-humiliating, non-infuriating.  What is the harm to that?   I’m trying to avoid friction, strife, keep the peace, save us all from a truth that is, to some, humiliating, regrettable, sickening.    What is your problem with my impulse to improve on the horrible situation on the ground with a harmless variation on the truth that makes things better for everybody?  

The thing that makes it worse for everybody (with the possible exception of the person who appears to benefit from the lie) is that the actual facts of the case have been completely removed from the conversation by the lies.   Nobody thereafter has any chance to gain any insight into what happened, and all that flowed from what happened, because what actually happened is buried, will never be the topic of discussion.  Cause and effect are completely uncoupled, events are now simply a mystery of the Human Condition.   The lie erases any possibility of understanding.   Not to mention, to those aware of the lie, the erosion of ongoing trust.

There was a lot of whining recently over the remarks of Michelle Wolf, comedian, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, an annual theatrical event as phony and disgraceful as any in our culture.  A female comedian had insulted the female press secretary in a joke that said the press secretary burns the truth to create her  “smoky eye”– a reference I took as relating to how somebody throws “shade” on somebody by giving an evil side glance, a move the embattled press secretary is known for.   I may have been way off in my interpretation.    The comment was construed on Fox as a vicious attack on the press secretary’s looks, a woman on woman hate crime.   It was pointed out by the other side, disloyal commies who hate our freedom, that according to his supporters only the president is allowed to comment on how women look, call certain women fat, ugly bitches.  They played a half dozen recent clips of the president doing just that.   The whole irrelevant argument over “comedic good taste” makes me want to politely projectile vomit.    

What is lost to most in this “argument” over what a comedian may or may not say, what is funny and what is just sick, blah blah blah, is that we are currently refueling Saudi fighter jets and bombers, in the air, that are raining death on the civilians of Yemen.  That a secret global kill list is maintained and acted upon at the sole discretion of the American president, and that list may include any American citizen the president designates an “enemy combatant”.   That environmental protections are being rolled back every day, that civil rights are once again under forceful attack, along with public housing, along with a record number lifetime appointments to the federal bench.  That we have a seemingly lawless administration in power, corruptly sharing the public wealth in an open and notorious manner, brought to office in large part because the Democratic party insisted on running their anointed, wildly unpopular candidate and turned a deaf ear to what was actually going on in the country.  The DNC insists, with idiotic certainty, that it was the Russians who turned the election, cost them the White House in 2016.  But for the evil Putin, you know…

Trevor Noah interviewed Michael Hayden last night.  Hayden, like James Comey, is a guy long high up in covert operations now flogging a “tell-all” book.  Like Comey, he’s suddenly seen by millions as a good guy because we currently have a villain from Batman, with his own eponymous fortress of evil, as the chief executive and this former high public official is very critical of the boss.  Hayden’s book is called something like “The Attack on Intelligence”, a clever double entendre.  

Noah asks Hayden about Russian interference in the 2016 election and Hayden gives a superficially thoughtful answer.   Russia is incredibly sophisticated in their skills at public manipulation, says Hayden, they literally wrote the manual on this kind of thing.   What Russia did was far worse, far more insidious, than anything our CIA ever did to interfere with another country’s internal politics, according to Hayden.  That would include, apparently, assassinating democratically elected foreign leaders, orchestrating violent protests, funding U.S. friendly rebel groups, and sometimes death squads, with money from the local drug trade, bombing, invading and occupying countries on a series of weak, or openly false, pretenses.  

You see, Hayden points out with a winning smile, America loves freedom, but Russia, heh-heh, they are masters of freedom hatred and are very, very good at it.   End of story, nothing more to see here, nothing to do but buy the book.  “Available now,” says the great Trevor Noah, holding up a copy of Hayden’s book as the “applaud” sign lights up, the studio audience applauds and they cut to a commercial.

I love Trevor and have no ax to grind regarding him or his great show.  It is simply the way it is here in mass media America.   Fame sells books.  It doesn’t really matter so much what you are famous for, as long as the public relations firm does its job, makes you and your book look irresistible.   Don’t you want to hear what West Wing insiders actually know about the president’s personal life?    Isn’t it fascinating that a career politician whose unprecedented, unfounded (and unprincipled, for that matter), misleading public disclosure, days before the 2016 election, had a definite effect on the  outcome of that contest between two historically hated candidates is now doing the circuit of talk shows as a kind of hero because he is standing up to the man he helped elect, who then fired him?  

We Americans have a famously short memory and almost no attention span, and this is by design, as far as I can tell.   That lack of attention is handy for those who profit from our inattention, our snarling about celebrity personalities instead of open public debate on the issues that matter most, like the foreseeable end of our inhabitable planet.   Add in the unchallengeable corporate right to conceal, withhold, classify, assert numerous legal defenses to prevent publication, prevent most lawsuits, and you have a perfect storm.   We do terrible things, in secret, then describe these things in modestly heroic terms that even a distracted seven year-old can understand.  

The PR industry knows exactly how to do this.  The spinmeister’s battle.  According to your preference, grievance, tribal loyalty (three factors pithily cited by Hayden for our current political impasse) you will come down firmly on one side or the other.  There is no space in between those two sides, you are either with us or against us, you either love freedom or you’re with Hitler.  Unless, of course, you are one of those very fine people who love freedom and also admire Hitler.   In that case, just make sure to wear an American flag pin.  The swastika is held in bad taste by those who… well, why even go there?

Reminder: Thou Shall Not Kill

I hurt my knee.  It hurts like hell in certain positions, like a scalpel being inserted point-first into the patella.   If I sit too long and try to stand, or even just straighten my leg, scalpel into patella time.   I am trying a knee brace, not bending the leg when I sit, but it’s not always possible to avoid the searing pain of trying to straighten my once sturdy leg. 

Finally went to the doctor, who sat on my foot and pushed and pulled my knee from different angles.  The only thing that hurt was the direct pressure on the patella when I tried to straighten the leg.  The doctor told me to go have an x-ray, which would then allow my insurance to pay for an MRI if the sports medicine practitioner needed to do an MRI.   

I called my current insurance company, Healthfirst.  I declined the robot’s kind offer to take their customer satisfaction survey for the “service you are about to receive” by pressing two.  It was only a few moments before Jackie was on the line, very pleasant, bright, sympathetic.    She tried to walk me through the website, which was buggy today on my end.  It displayed completely differently for her than it did for me.  The search function did not seem to be working correctly on my end.

She found me a nearby x-ray place, then a sports medicine doctor, both of whom took my specific Healthfirst insurance plan.   Then an opthamologist, so I can get a prescription for new glasses, then a gastroenterologist for my overdue colonoscopy.  We truly had a great chat while all this was going on.   At the end of ninety minutes of customer service I thanked her, we had a last laugh and parted as great friends. I began to make the calls.

The nearby x-ray place does not have an x-ray machine, it turns out.  They do several other forms of diagnostics, have a lot of sophisticated equipment, but no x-ray.   The receptionist there gave me the name of another nearby x-ray place, and the phone number.   It was a fax line, I learned when that eerie squawking began.  

I called the sports medicine doctor, figuring they might have an x-ray machine on site, save me a few steps.   The doctor, it turns out, does not accept my particular Healthfirst plan.  A first time visit would cost between $320 and $640, if insurance paid nothing.   I asked the receptionist what determined whether the visit was $320, $435, $508 or $639.99.   She had no idea.

You walk into a restaurant.  There are no prices on the menu.  When you ask the waiter how much the BLT is he tells you not to worry about it, the sandwich is delicious.  In three months you’ll get the bill in the mail.   The EOB from the third party that deals with the restaurant informs you that the BLT is billed at $640, but since you have insurance the negotiated price is only $120.  Your copay is $50.  You made out like a fucking bandit.  

We can’t tell you what it will cost until the provider sends us the bill and the billing codes.    That is the standard line and it is perfectly legal under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.  You see, until the provider tells us the exact price, nobody can predict anything.   That’s clear, easy to understand.  How is anybody to possibly know that this hospital charges $44,000 for a bag of chemicals they will infuse into your body?   No possible way anybody could possibly know that, prior to the procedure, the submission of the billing codes, and the calculation of the EOB.  Jackie confirmed as much when I asked if the $44,000 bag of Rituxan that may be in my immediate future is covered under my current plan.  There is simply no way to know in advance.  

The first appointment with this sports medicine doctor who will charge between $320 and $640 is a month from now.    Your aching knee is nobody’s fucking problem but your own.  You should have made this appointment weeks ago, you’d be almost in line to see the doctor by now.

I struck out with the other doctors’ answering machines.  Call during business hours, the first one advised me, between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m.   I noted to myself, with familiar bitterness, that it was 4:30.  Same deal with the next doctor’s machine, only by then it was 4:35.   Well, it was 75 degrees out, Sekhnet reminded me.

Soon she was done trying to cheer me up.  As I laid the merciless details on she was finally struck dumb, began crying because this shit is so frustrating when it happens to somebody you love.   It is worth noting, of course, that if the law allows an insurance company to list a thousand doctors as participating, and only a handful actually are, there is no harm and no foul.  The piece of shit, er, customer, merely has to keep making calls to different offices further and further from their home.  Eventually they will find a doctor somewhere who accepts their insurance.  No fraud where the law says there’s no fraud.  Patient Protection Act and shit.  Hey Barack, Arbeit Macht Frei.

I asked Jackie about getting evidence from Healthfirst that my recent invoice had been returned to Healthfirst by my local post office as undeliverable.  I told her the story, another short chapter in the million chapter book they are constantly updating.  That book is called How We Fuck You To Death You Fucking Piece of Shit.  The main device is never allowing the true facts to interrupt the dominant narrative.  If you can’t produce irrefutable proof, and you are not incredibly dogged, we can fuck you with impunity, fuckface.

Jackie wished she could help, by giving me the evidence that the local post office is now returning rent checks to me and insurance invoices to my health insurance company.   That could only be done by Finance.  There was no way for her to directly contact Finance.  Nobody was allowed to know who Finance is or what they do, but she dutifully made a complaint to them, asked them to send me some proof that they had received the last bill sent to me back marked “undeliverable”.   She gave me the complaint number, said I can follow up in a few days if Finance doesn’t contact me.  Finance unfortunately has no direct extension, so I’d have to get lucky when I try to follow up.

“This is exactly how they kill us, Jackie, those powerfully legally created psychopaths who make all the rules to best serve themselves. You have to admire the seamless perfection of it.”  I then described my request to see a mental health professional, as I imagined it would go.   It did not go well.  Jackie found it hilarious. When I hung up the phone I noticed I was foaming at the mouth.

I was seated on my aching hind legs, head thrown back, howling as loud and plaintively as I can.  I am doing that right now, as I type.   Easier than you’d imagine, really. 

USA! NRA!!! USA!!!!

Thought this footnote deserved its own post, in relation to the States’ Rights discussion:

Special shout out to major league asshole Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA.  LaPierre advocates a federal law allowing citizens of states that allow concealed carry of firearms to bring their concealed guns into all other states.   This insane shit idea is actually being debated and has a lot of votes in the Congress.

 These highly principled gun rights advocates have banned guns from an upcoming address  by Koch puppet and Trump’s VP Mike Pence at the NRA’s annual national convention.   All those good guys with guns who can stop a bad guy with a gun will be prevented from carrying guns when they go hear Mike Pence address the upcoming pro-gun rally in Dallas.  Way to go, Wayne!

In fairness to Wayne and his murderous ilk, the Secret Service, assigned to guard Pence against assassination, will not allow guns at the event.  The NRA is only following the law.  One still must wonder why the president’s own men have become such anti-gun freedom haters.

High school students, some of whom hate LaPierre’s freedom, pile on:

“Wait wait wait wait wait wait you’re telling me to make the VP safe there aren’t any weapons around but when it comes to children they want guns everywhere?” Matt Deitsch, a Parkland student who helped organize the March for Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C., wrote on Twitter. “Can someone explain this to me? Because it sounds like the NRA wants to protect people who help them sell guns, not kids.”

source

States’ Rights & American racism

This is a huge topic, obviously, which becomes emotionally charged when you throw the word “racism” into the mix.    America needs to confront our long history of virulent racism, and I will dip into the subject a little here.  Leaving racism aside for the moment, there are historical scholars on both sides of this long running debate over federalism, who should have the final say in local matters, the state or the federal government.  

Our federal system gives the states the final say on making and enforcing criminal and civil law, including family law and business laws.   Only certain legal matters, essential to the nation’s functioning, are ceded by the states to the federal government.   Printing currency, for example, and a nationwide postal system, have long been federal functions.  It was simply impractical for either of these things to be left to the individual states.  Other rights, such as a woman’s right to choose to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, have been extended nationally by a Supreme Court decision recognizing a Constitutional right, even if it was creatively found in the penumbra of some other Amendment.

The absolute right of the States to decide the laws for their citizens, without federal interference, has long been an area of controversy.   Some states have outlawed the death penalty, others, like Texas, are perennially among the world leaders in death by execution.   Several states were “dry” before Prohibition became the law of the land for thirteen lucky years (for organized crime) and a few states, and many counties and towns, remained alcohol free after repeal of the 18th Amendment.   Some states allow concealed carry of handguns, others allow open carry of rifles and handguns, others restrict the right of citizens to carry guns anywhere [1].   Certain states are leaders in environmental law, for example.  California has passed strict emissions and gas mileage laws for cars sold in California and driven by its citizens.   Our new president is challenging California’s right to impose environmental standards higher than the federal mandates, put in place by his hated enemy Obama, standards which he is now lowering.   This fight over States’ rights has been going on since our nation’s earliest days.

The classic States’ rights battle was over an American’s right to own Negroes as property.  At one time chattel slavery, an ironclad right guaranteed by three of four discreet clauses in our the Constitution, was left up to the citizens of the states to vote on.   The introduction of slavery to a new territory or state was always a matter of bloody contention.   Trouble is, whatever you want to say about the “Peculiar Institution” now, slavery was lucrative as hell for the people who sold and owned the most slaves.   Certain crops, like cotton, were not nearly as profitable if you had to pay the people who did the difficult picking.    Those super-lucrative crops, planted year after year on the same fields, quickly depleted the soil, which meant that periodically moving the plantation to new fertile territory was essential for the continued profits of those who employed the vast majority of the enslaved.  It’s why the enormous Louisiana Territory, and later the annexed Republic of Texas, both came in as slave territories.

The Civil War was not waged by Lincoln to abolish slavery, as he stated succinctly to abolitionist publisher Horace Greeley and others.  Lincoln prosecuted the war against the states in rebellion in order to preserve the Union, and he would have given ground on the issue of slavery to achieve that end.   More Americans spilled their blood, and lost their lives, in that war than in any other war in U.S. history. The total dead was greater than all Americans killed in all other wars since 1776 combined, until the police action in Vietnam finally tipped the scales over a hundred years later.   You could look it up. 

I am always trying, or most often trying, to be as objective and fair as possible in analyzing things here.  We live in a nation as divided as it was in 1854, the year the Supreme Court declared that slavery was protected by the federal government everywhere in these United States, that there was no such thing as a “free state” for a slave to escape to.   A few years later we had the Civil War.   A hundred years later, to the year, the Supreme Court finally whacked another hornet’s nest– segregation.   It was held to be inherently unequal, and in the case of public schools, was ordered to be stopped “with all deliberate speed.”   People were enraged and people died after this decision too.   In every state that favored segregation, and they weren’t only in the former Confederacy, mandated desegregation was seen as federal overreach.

Where I feel I may have been unfair the other day, in bringing up this issue, was when I called today’s States’ Rights advocates racists.  That is such an emotionally charged word.  We live in a racist society, to put it plainly.   Segregation is still pretty much the rule here, although it is now de facto rather than de jure segregation.   There are no longer laws that demand continued separation of the races, it is just what’s generally done here, it’s the way most Americans act.  

It is impossible to live here without noticing the racism.  Token blacks become fabulously rich, and powerful, which gives the impression that we are “post-racial”, as racist pundits and conservative jurists like to claim.  A mulatto was even elected president a few years back, though he was subjected to ruthless personal attacks about where he was born, in an attempt to delegitimize him and defeat all of his policy initiatives.  These symbols of post-racialism aside, for the masses of blacks in America today, as for many “non-white” immigrant groups, racism is still a big, often murderous, monster.

I am trying to think of the States Rights argument divorced from racism.  It shouldn’t be so hard to do.   Community standards determine what is or is not pornography, for example.   There are many things that should legitimately be matters for the locality to decide.   Like if you want an oil pipeline bringing toxic tar sands sludge across your watershed.  Or if you want to ban powerful toxic chemicals used by agribusiness from your local farms.   Powerful forces have ways of defeating massive local resistance.   If there’s enough money in it, watch how quickly, whenever convenient, federal sovereignty is invoked to clobber the will of the local citizens.    Monsanto/Bayer is in the process of doing this to eliminate local opposition to their toxic agribusiness products.

One of my favorite bits of hypocrisy, from otherwise staunch States’ Rights folks, usually political conservatives who claim to favor “small government”, is ongoing federal enforcement of Nixon’s draconian Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 .  That law classifies marijuana as a dangerous, highly addictive drug with no potential medical use.  The necessity, almost 50 years of medical research later, to have a national prohibition on drugs like marijuana?   Uh… it’s the fucking law, fuck face!!!!   Only evil people smoke weed!   In the case of something like PTSD, marijuana has been shown to be as effective as, and sometimes more effective than, the cocktail of pharmaceuticals currently being served up to a population that kills themselves in large numbers every week.   140 desperate U.S. war veterans a week, according to Obama one Veteran’s Day.

Even the enforcement of Nixon’s federal drug law has a large racist element to it, which is part of its design [2].  The Controlled Substances Act has been applied to people of color way out of proportion to their numbers in society.  When Nixon passed the law it was envisioned by him as a way to keep his enemies on a short leash.   Hippies, Yippies, blacks, Mexicans, musicians, liberal intellectuals, young anti-war protesters, homosexuals, often seemed to prefer marijuana to good old American booze.    Nixon got drunk every night during the final phase of his presidency, but nobody would accuse him of being a pothead.  The numbers of people prosecuted and locked up for long prison terms under this federal law, and its many state analogues, are disproportionately “minority”. 

So I’m not just gratuitously badmouthing these racist fucks when I call them racists. We can look at the situation on the ground dispassionately and call a spade a spade, no?   The resistance to federal Civil Rights laws, including the ongoing attacks on the Voting Rights Act, like the derailing of anti-lynching legislation for a hundred years, was led by racists.   There is no way to sugar coat this.  If a state does not prevent lynching, and resists federal efforts to do so… do you have another reason, outside of good, old-fashioned American racism, handy?    The antebellum South, we were told with a straight face for decades, was a place where God set the superior white race as rulers and protectors of the inferior black race.  If you want to call that racist, go ahead.

That said, the most racist place I can recall visiting, and that includes areas between New York and Florida we drove through when I was a kid in the early 60s, where unimaginably squalid shacks could be seen by the interstate with unimaginably ragged black kids playing out front, was Boston.   We went to get ice cream at a famous Boston ice cream place, I think it was called Steve’s, and our route was blocked by a gigantic protest march.  It was 1974 or 1975.  The white parents were livid, red-faced, screaming.  Twenty years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, it was still not time to have their children taken out of the neighborhood to sit in classrooms with “niggers.”   They roared the word, it was no secret back then.

It is no secret now.  We may call it the “n-word” and agree to ostracize any non-black person in public who says the word “nigger.”  It is a hate crime for a white person to speak this word in virtually any context.   Racists have always been sly.   You never heard Obama called a nigger, not by any public official, though he was brazenly treated that way by his obstructionist Republican rivals.  He was, you know, nothing to do with his race, simply illegitimate, a liar, someone who cynically and flippantly pretended to be qualified to be president, someone who hid a telltale birth certificate that proved he was… well, you know, that’s how all those fucking people are, idn’t it?  They will lie, pretend, speak very well, make high-sounding arguments to cover their treachery.   Obama was called a secret Muslim by the same people who attacked his militant black Christian preacher.  

I can’t imagine being a black American today, born in a neighborhood where the infant mortality rate is higher than in some third world countries.  Life expectancy for black Americans… well, the NY Times has great news, the gap is closing, down to only about four years longer for whites.  Read all about it here.  How does a black person look around at our great and wealthy nation without fucking screaming?  I am a “white” Jew (an oxymoron, according to most non-Jewish racists) and I feel like hollering every day, though I can go anywhere I want with virtually no possibility of being stopped, frisked or shot.

Nothing to see here, folks.  We post-racial now, baby, and some of those folks marching with Nazi armbands and Confederate symbols, chanting “Jews will not replace us”– some of the finest people, the finest people, believe me, believe me.  It is on us to discuss this shameful history and continue to find ways forward, even as it is a difficult conversation to begin after centuries of ruthless silence.  The kids today are doing a much better job of ignoring racist distinctions than any other generation, by the looks of it, but we should all be talking about this, even our finest people, especially our very finest people.

 

[1]  Special shout out to major league asshole Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA.  LaPierre advocates a federal law allowing citizens of states that allow concealed carry of firearms to bring their concealed guns into all other states.   This insane shit idea is actually being debated and has a lot of votes in the Congress.

 These highly principled gun rights advocates have banned guns from an upcoming address  by Koch puppet and Trump’s VP Mike Pence at the NRA’s annual national convention.   All those good guys with guns who can stop a bad guy with a gun will be prevented from carrying guns when they go hear Mike Pence address the upcoming pro-gun rally in Dallas.  Way to go, Wayne!

In fairness to Wayne and his murderous ilk, the Secret Service will not allow guns at the event.  The NRA is only following the law.  One still must wonder why the president’s own men have become such anti-gun freedom haters.

High school students, some of whom hate LaPierre’s freedom, pile on:

“Wait wait wait wait wait wait you’re telling me to make the VP safe there aren’t any weapons around but when it comes to children they want guns everywhere?” Matt Deitsch, a Parkland student who helped organize the March for Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C., wrote on Twitter. “Can someone explain this to me? Because it sounds like the NRA wants to protect people who help them sell guns, not kids.”

source

[2]     I quote:

In June 1971, President Nixon declared a “war on drugs.” He dramatically increased the size and presence of federal drug control agencies, and pushed through measures such as mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants.

A top Nixon aide, John Ehrlichman, later admitted: “You want to know what this was really all about. The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”  Nixon temporarily placed marijuana in Schedule One, the most restrictive category of drugs, pending review by a commission he appointed led by Republican Pennsylvania Governor Raymond Shafer.

In 1972, the commission unanimously recommended decriminalizing the possession and distribution of marijuana for personal use. Nixon ignored the report and rejected its recommendations.        [Talk about the fucking N-word… ed.]

source

Corporate personhood

“You’ve got to stop thinking about this stuff all the time,” said Sekhnet just now with great concern.   Living on the dark side, and marinating in it this way, takes its toll.   A ticket to the madhouse.  Say you are shining a light into the darkness and a friend may from time to time cluck sympathetically about something you illuminate.  It is still a ticket to the madhouse, I realize that.

This will not be a history of corporate personhood in American law.  We can condense that history to its essence by outlining how corporations acquired more personal rights than most American citizens.   After the Civil War, which is still being waged by sometimes powerful people we benignly call racists today (though there are, of course, some very fine racists, the finest racists), Congress forced the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments down the throats of the militarily defeated Confederacy [1].  Forced to ratify these amendments in order to receive federal funds to repair their decimated infrastructures, the former slave states signed on, but bitterly, and determined not to be enslaved by these punitive laws.   

The 13th Amendment outlawed slavery, “involuntary servitude”, except, coyly and significantly, as punishment for certain crimes.  The 14th Amendment ensured that no state denied citizens the full rights of American citizenship.  The 15th extended the franchise to black men, though it would be almost a hundred years until a federal law was passed, the famous Voting Rights Act, so that black people could actually cast ballots.

The 14th Amendment was used, mostly unsuccessfully, by former slaves being fucked over by repressive state laws.  The Amendment’s scope was severely restricted by a series of Supreme Court cases in the decade immediately after its ratification.   In its intended role as a civil rights remedy, the 14th Amendment was effectively nullified for almost a century.   Unless, of course, some state interfered with your right to use a navigable interstate waterway.  I know of no case brought for that infringement.  There were few remaining causes of action for individuals under the unappealably reinterpreted 14th Amendment.  

Of the hundreds of cases brought under the 14th Amendment in its first fifty years, a few dozen were complaints of discrimination against black citizens.  They rarely brought any good result, because the Court had severely restricted application of the 14th Amendment almost immediately.   The bulk of the 14th Amendment cases were brought by clever lawyers for corporations, aggrieved “persons” for purposes of the 14th Amendment, deprived of the human rights of citizenship that were guaranteed to all Americans by the Amendment.   As the families of lynching victims found no relief in federal courts, corporate “persons” won a series of important cases, until we got to where we are today.

Bill Moyers said it all very succinctly a few years ago.  “I’ll believe corporations are people when the state of Texas puts one to death.”   These bulletproof legally created persons, many of them too big to regulate, jail, not bail out with taxpayer funds when they are in financial trouble, etc. do not get the kind of power they do by not being willing to break a few heads when necessary.  We know what kind of person the corporate person is: a psychopath.   Like sharks they have only one imperative: to move forward and eat.  

Actually, that is unfair to sharks.  They are only swimming in the ocean God gave them, doing what nature provides, occupying their place in the food chain, trying their best to survive. [2]   Corporations, by contrast, have created the legal ocean they swim in, made nature itself conform to their desires.   Their desire is only one two-part thing: profits and power.

Why rattle on about this, belaboring the obvious?   Corporations make our laws, laws that protect business interests, and the sacred feelings of these lawyer-made “persons”, above the interests of the ordinary human citizens.   It is not only in America, corporations are now global and have no particular allegiance to any state or nation.  Yeah, yeah, we know all that, but it’s the only game in town, why go on and on about it?  Because of how it shapes the world we live in, I suppose.

Advertising is essentially propaganda, one-sided, persuasive mass communication to advance a worldview, in the case of advertising, a product.  Advertising is commercial propaganda that shapes our values.  Living in a culture where advertising is ubiquitous and unavoidable it is easy to see this relentless influence machine as part of nature.  It is not part of human nature, any more than the occasional mass murder is just part of the human condition.   The irresistible urge to grab a pitchfork, or a torch, and head out to the lynching — just human nature, regrettable as it also is.  Corporate personhood is just some gigantic force acting on all of us that we are unable to do much about, outside of, hopefully, profiting by investments in the most successful ones, if we have the money.  Better to think of other things, if we can.

So, again, why am I kvetching about corporations today?  Because more and more interpersonal human interaction is now based on the corporate/psychopath model. Never apologize, justify, shift the conversation.  Don’t admit wrongdoing of any kind, counterattack.   It’s not truly a lie if it is effective in advancing your cause.   Bad shit happens, nobody’s fault, even if it is done in our name, with our money.   There are two sides to every story, equally valid, except that your side is irrelevant bullshit.    All men are created equal.  Free market.  They hate our freedom.  Freedom is on the march.   

Natalie Portman, a dual American-Israeli citizen, recently turned down an invitation from the state of Israel for a prestigious award with a $2,000,000 check attached.  That’s four MacArthur  genius grants, if my math is correct.   She said, through her spokesperson, that she could not accept an award from Netanyahu’s government.  That government is aggressively  conducting an endless and often brutal occupation of Palestinian territory, the brutality has escalated in recent months to the Israeli army’s ongoing shooting of unarmed civilians in Gaza.     

Portman’s principled stand has provoked outrage among the loudest official voices of American Jewry .  We jerk our knees, instead of engaging in honest discussions about complicated, and horrific, issues of human rights, decency, basic fairness.  This clamp-down on real debate is the corporate mode.  Portman, say influential American Jewish public relations firms, is an anti-Semite.  You’re with us or against us.  Black or White.  Jew or Anti-Semite.

Every psychopath in the world can relate to this formulation.   Psycopathy 101.  It’s our way or the fucking highway, asshole.   America right or wrong, kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out.  

Simple is better, we feel.  There is so much incredibly complicated injustice and horror in the world today that we simply can’t expend emotion on too much of it.  Anything that doesn’t touch us directly we are usually glad to exclude from our universe of moral worries.    That Palestinian teenager shot in the head by an Israeli sniper recently, the long shot caught on camera, along with the hooting of the sniper’s colleagues, impressed by his amazing shot?  Maybe the boy shouldn’t have been so fucking infuriated at the anti-occupation protest earlier that day.  OK?  Good enough for most of the world, sad to say.

While I was writing this I had a call from a 212 area code.  The woman identified herself as working for the corporation that provides my health insurance.  For security purposes, she said, she needed my phone number.  I told her it was the same number she had just dialed.  She called me Eeloit instead of Eliot, suggesting that she was calling from a country where nobody is named Eliot.   She informed me that she could not continue the conversation unless I gave her my number.  She acknowledged that I had every right not to give the number and told me I could call back to find out why they were calling.

A great weariness falls over me as I try to tell this little anecdote as quickly as possible.   To save myself the hassle of being on hold while they valued me as a customer,  I gave her the number she already had, barked out my date of birth.

 “Thank you for that, Eeloit.  The reason we are calling, Eeloit, is to confirm the address we have for you.  Your last invoice was returned to us by the Post Office as undeliverable.”

Umar, you fucking piece of shit, was my first thought.  Umar is the gratingly polite supervisor of my local post office, a man offended that a customer would complain about a properly stamped business mailer being returned to him.  It could have been Umar, on his way to an early shift, leaning on my buzzer at 5:30 a.m. the other day.  Or, like the insurance invoice sent to me and returned to sender, it could have simply been random stupid stuff that happens in our random world.  

Whatever the case, the nice woman who called me from Hyderabad said she’d be unable to send me the returned invoice, in it’s marked envelope, so that I could make a formal complaint to the federal postal inspector about the interference with my mail delivery.  She understood why I’d want it investigated, but, unfortunately, Eeloit, we cannot contact the mail department, they are the ones who would have received the returned bill and there is no way to contact them.  I am only calling to inform you that your invoice was returned to us.

Even if you live a comfortable middle class life in America, there are many frustrations, of course.  These frustrations increase the lower you are on the income scale.  If you are well-to-do you will still sit in brutal traffic, even if you are in a comfortable car with a great sound system.  Frustrating as hell, but somehow, it is different from being on public transportation that simply stops dead while you wait in darkness in a tunnel.   After five minutes an announcement comes on. “Thank you for your patience, customers, and suck a big one while we wait for this unexpected train traffic ahead to clear up.  We should be moving shortly.”   It’s hard not to recall, at such regularly occurring moments,  how much money the CEO of this poorly functioning public corporation makes.

 The CEO will talk about all the great improvements they are making to the infrastructure of the greatest mass transit system in the nation.  I guarantee that cocksucker has never spent an endless twenty-five minutes creeping between two local stations because “we are working harder to serve you better.”  His chauffeur uses an app that routes his limo around traffic, I’m quite certain.  If you never need to ride the subway, or do it once in a blue moon, these things will not bother you nearly as much as someone subjected to this daily.  

The same goes for anyone never kicked off a government program by mistake, say health insurance, which can take months to have reinstated.   Hard as hell  to fix those kind of mistakes, though people with insurance through work will never have to deal with them.  Poor people’s lives are famously more stressful, and shorter, than middle class lives, deal with it if you want to live like a fucking monk.  Otherwise, get the job your education and skills qualify you for, make some money, buy a house, and a car, and gold-plated health insurance and shut the fuck up.

“Are you done torturing yourself yet?” Sekhnet calls from the garden [3].  The garden is really coming along out there as Spring seems to finally be springing.   There are buds on the trees, the farm is beginning to come alive again.   She is right, of course, but also– fuck, this is not rocket science I’m doing here.  It seems entirely possible that people can begin to….  

Ah, what the fuck am I talking about?  Along with millions of others I read Jane Mayer’s powerful best seller The Dark Side, which gave excruciating detail about the well-justified, still defended, secret American torture program.  The last word on that was our president saying ” with the best of intentions, we tortured some folks, best to move on”.   Jeremy Scahill’s brilliant best seller Dirty Wars clearly sets out the hellish new paradigm of American power– secretly killing those who might hate our freedom wherever they may be.  The response to Scahill’s expose was a new president universally applauded by the mass media for dropping tons of explosives in some part of the world every time he feels really cornered.

I’m going to change any hearts and minds with these pieces read by a dozen people here and there?

Better to go out to the garden, or on a plane to a beautiful place where I can forget, for a few days, at least, the relentless corporate killing field our world has become.   If you live well enough, you can get yourself to forget that the only thing necessary for evil to flourish is good people doing nothing.  And now, a word from our sponsor.

 

[1] It is noted by war historians that the Confederacy, whose soldiers fought bravely, usually against larger armies, only lost the war because of the numerical superiority of the Union, and its superior wealth.

[2]  In fact, in the moral contest between sharks and the masters of the earth who named ourselves “wise ape”, the sharks win.  Human commercial fishing outfits routinely catch sharks in nets, cut their fins off, harvest any other salable parts of the mighty fish, and toss them back into the ocean to drown.  Sharks maim and kill a handful of humans every year, in their desire to eat.  Since humans tell the story, sharks emerge as vicious corporate persons, except infinitely more primitive.

[3]  this is a wholly invented bit of dialogue, a paraphrase made under my unofficial poetic license.  OK, Sekhnet?

Loneliness (for fun and profit)

The loneliest woman in the world married the most gregarious man in the world.  She told me, during the last conversation we had face to face, that at the time they met and got married he was very lonely and isolated too.   The man was a good friend of mine, and over the years I got to be good friends with his wife as well.   He was a kind, generous person, full of good cheer, an excellent host who really enjoyed company.  The time we spent together over the years was always full of laughter and meaningful conversation.    Sekhnet only got to spend a few fleeting times with him, but she immediately felt like she’d known him always.

In a vindictive turn on the phrase my father used only to make my mother tearful, “don’t worry, Evvy, only the good die young”, my friend died young.   Suddenly, stopped at a red light just off the freeway in Berkeley.   When the light turned green his passenger said “Howie…” but Howie was already gone.  His life had winked out like a candle flame in a soft breeze.

There was a lot of crying over Howie’s sudden absence, which came about a month before my long-suffering mother breathed her last breath.  I spent many an hour on the phone with Howie’s widow.  She felt abandoned by their large circle of friends, things were getting worse at work, her old enemy had been steadily climbing the corporate ladder and was now sabotaging her at every turn.   I noted at one point that I’d never heard Howie speak badly about anyone, a remarkable thing, we agreed.   We both marveled for a moment about this saintly habit of the departed and then wondered what we’d talk about, if not for badmouthing people.  

Then her complaints would continue, the treachery of those who’d always pretended to be her friends, how everyone had turned their backs on her, while feigning great love and concern.  The details were endless, the proofs she advanced very damning.  I was as sympathetic as I could manage.    

I remembered well my own mother’s loneliness after my father died.  My mother was bright, interesting, a sociable person with a great sense of humor, but my father, it emerged as soon as he was gone, had been the social glue that bound people to my mother and father.  Funny, in a way, because he always professed to be a curmudgeon who’d rather spend his time reading and my mother was the social director who arranged all the dinners and visits.  Until my father died, and the calls and visits abruptly stopped.   So I was in touch with Howie’s widow regularly, recalling how painful the isolation had been for my mother after her mate was gone.

Howie’s widow could be demanding, as I learned, shopping for and preparing the buffet for Howie’s unveiling, for example.   She didn’t always show gratitude, I began to notice, while doing nice things for her.  Over time our friendship began to feel more and more like a one way street.   Her mother, someone who’d given her a lot of grief, died after a period of dementia.   I loaned her a great book on seeing the larger picture after the death of a parent, even a difficult parent.  I wrote her a letter to go with the book.  She took the book and letter without comment.   On three separate occasions in the years afterwards she told me she’d look for the book, which she hadn’t read, and send it back to me.  I never saw my original, annotated copy of Death Benefits again.

Here is the kicker, and I notice, as it is not the first time, that a missed call is later cited as the fatal proof I didn’t give a fuck about somebody.   The first time that happened was when a former good friend, a mentally ill guy with vexing emotional problems and an unbearable amount of self-hatred, broke a promise at a very trying time for me and then left me a missed call afterwards, instead of an explanation or any kind of apology.  He claimed he’d left me a “missed call”, at any rate, my phone had no record of the call.   I was hurt at the betrayal, and angry, and didn’t return the “missed call” I hadn’t known about for several days, something that was then thrown in my face by this pant-load while shabbily blaming the emotional standoff on me, you dig, for being too petty to return a “missed call”.  That my phone recorded no such missed call was but a trifle for someone determined to defend himself at all costs.    

Howie’s widow used a similar ploy in the end to make me the asshole who’d viciously rejected her.   I had a missed call from her.  She had been calling, I learned a few days later, to tell me she was coming to New York, but she left no message, sent no email or text.  Once in New York, a day or two before she was leaving, she called to chide me for not caring enough to call her back in time.   I arranged to be available the following day, but she never called back.  I left her a message and I assume she flew off to California pissed at my betrayal.

I heard how hurtful my betrayal had been to her months later, when mutual friends were in New York.  They’d been asked to find out why I had so coldly rejected our old friend.  I told them the story and have heard nothing since from, or about, our rejected friend.

Loneliness, my friends, is a curse and often its own reward.  This woman is very active on Facebook.  I am not, in fact, I hate that shit, for too many reasons to list here.    Another mutual friend called to give me shit a few months ago for missing his mother’s funeral.   I told him how sorry I was, that I hadn’t known his mother died.   He told me it had been on Facebook.   He then gave me some grief for not being a good friend to Howie’s widow, now almost ten years after Howie’s death.   I explained, but it was no use, he wasn’t buying it.   Most likely she’d announced on Facebook that she was coming to New York, but I was too much of a self-absorbed asshole to even check her Facebook page from time to time.   He told me he’d call me back the next day, and that was the last I heard of him.

Loneliness has been monetized, friends, if you want to verify how much, just look up Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth.   I was recently at a free dinner Sekhnet had RSVP’d to attend, hosted by some financial company.   One of the speakers flashed a slide and mentioned the FANG stocks, very valuable positions in any respectable portfolio. I glanced over at Sekhnet who gave me a sly smile at the term FANG, which encompassed some of my most hated mega-corporations.    The slide showed the logos of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google.  

Every FANG stock is part of the increasingly monetized loneliness of our digital world.   Don’t go to a store, or even talk to anyone on the phone, order shit from your computer, have a slave deliver it to your door for free.  Use a device that marks you as a cool person with money to burn — sure, you can buy cheaper versions of the products Apple sells, but you can’t be COOL if you do.  Don’t interact after work, go into a cocoon, chill and binge watch shows without commercials on Netflix.  Down the fucking list of FANGS.

One of the many reminders, this apt acronym, of the vicious power of loneliness to drive commerce and finance a comfortable retirement, if you are properly positioned with FANG to do so.  God bless these United Global States of corporate personhood.