Personal Archaeology

Not everyone is wired this way, but for me, I need to unearth clues that help me understand the tangled progress of my life.  I learn many things way too late, and I wonder about these things, once the truth of them hits me like a wall.   Some may find this process painful and do everything to avoid it. 

I am not one of these people, I have left myself countless clues over the decades.  The challenge is to assemble them to  understand what they’re telling me about the progression of my experience.

There is a type

I’m aware now, to an extent it was impossible to know before, for reasons I could explain at length, of a type that is truly incapable of emotional growth.   They are also unable to be honest, which is a big factor in their inability to grow, mature, to evolve into better, wiser people as they go through life.  They were brutally crushed at a young age and their entire personality is an exercise in never being hurt again.   They can be charming, generous, funny, gracious, hospitable, helpful, sympathetic — until they can’t be any of these things.

The crux of their situation is that they were humiliated, early and often, their noses rubbed in their powerless to do anything about it but suffer.  They grew up in frightening circumstances with no loving adult to look to for protection.  They remain hypervigilant against anything that can embarrass them, make them look bad.   If they are confronted with something hurtful they did, no matter how gently the point is raised, they react with fury.  They are always one twitch away from a disorientingly familiar, bloody war to the death that they are bound to lose badly.  They fight with childish desperation. 

I’ve known a variety of this type over the 68 years of my life.  They come in several variations.   A common trait is an inability to see things from someone else’s point of view.    They tend to be judgmental, too.  They often have a reflex to piss on other people’s parades.

The adult daughter of one of these tragically deformed souls wrote recently online of always being amazed, as a little girl who grew up in the suburbs, by the thought that every giant apartment building in New York City had a thousand windows, with a unique life and universe behind every one. She eventually, around six, managed to express this to the adult driving the car. She referred to this person as “the adult” and later used the person’s pronoun, “she”. The response of the adult, a woman I know very well, is a perfect illustration of this kind of crabbed, damaged, damaging personality.

She told her six year-old, marveling at the variation of human experience, “that’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”   Crushing the little girl in the back seat, as this type does in order to feel superior, and therefore not subject to the agony of their own emotional limitation.

I am not a man given to hatred or motivated by revenge.   Revenge is in my heart lately, directed toward a small intimate lynch mob of my once good friends.  I understand and forgive myself for the impulse, though revenge is not something I’m enthusiastic about in general.  I’ve never been a hater.  But, in a real sense, I hate this little girl’s soul crushing Nazi of a mother, eternally reserving her right to hurt anyone she feels like hurting, because she’s entitled to.   And because she’s terrified in her stunted soul, as all such empty human shells are.

Merry Christmas everybody

Thank the Lord we are all once again free to utter those beautiful words in the United States of America. There’s nothing woke, unwoke or deep asleep about uttering a traditional holiday greeting to our Christian neighbors. Feliz Navidad, y’all.

That said, Jesus, of course, is probably quite unhappy (and rightfully so) about what his most public megaphones are representing as his principles: fuck the poor, screw the meek, child poverty is God’s will, as is pediatric cancer, competition beats cooperation every time, obscene wealth and unslakable greed are the Divine’s way of rewarding the righteous, guns don’t kill people, burning toxic things doesn’t cause pollution, spit on and beat homosexuals, make raped girls give birth, as God intended, etc.

But let me not tar American Christians with the ugly sins of perhaps only a hundred million or so of them. One of the finest people I ever knew, smart, funny, irreverent, mischievous, died a few weeks ago at ninety. Rose was a religious Catholic and went to mass every Sunday, until she was unable to and began attending by video link. When I was overwhelmed, and she was out of ideas, she’d tell me to put my faith in God and let God take care of things that caused me anguish. I would gently remind her that prayer and faith had been ruined for me early on by the staggeringly idiotic hypocrisy of the Hebrew school/Jewish center I attended. She understood, but urged me to try it anyway. I’d deflect with a joke and she’d respond with one of her trademark wisecracks.

To be loved by someone who is religious can put the whole exercise of religion in a much more sympathetic light. Sure religion is an engine of control, enforced conformity and, sometimes, murderous intolerance of other faiths. Of course people who become very wealthy, influential and powerful promoting religion quickly become corrupt hypocrites, if they don’t start out that way. An old Jew I once knew used to say “the longer the beard, the bigger the thief”. No religion has a monopoly on evil in the name of God. It is good, in the face of such common ugliness in the name of religion, to remember the blessing of true belief in a moral system ruled by a just Creator.

It is encouraging for me to think of examples like Rose Cuccaro, people who lose nothing of their great and unique personalities while being imbued with faith in a divine spirit, and committed to loving and serving those around them. Religion, at its best, does that. It also brings great comfort to the dying.

At Rose’s wake, her daughter told us that her mother dreamed (two nights before she died) that she was at a great dinner party with her nephew Frankie (great guy, he died a few years back) and so many other cherished loved ones, and she named them.  “All dead,” said Adrienne.  The next day she told her “Frankie’s here to take me home” and she went with her favorite nephew (anybody else at the party would have been just as happy to escort her) for the joyous reunion with the rest of them.  

We all agreed that Frankie was the most likely guide to come down to bring her home. Whether they sent him because he was the most recent arrival (“you go for her, rookie, you’ll get a kick out of it”) or just out of Frank’s basic nature, which would’ve been “let me do this, it’s Aunt Rose, I got this one.”   Not a bad way to end this dream, if you ask me, if you can believe it.

And with that, a merry Christmas to all. May the blessings of this holiday season, centered around the shortest day of the year, and faith in the coming of Spring, be upon you.

Rule by the best, the best

Trauma schmauma.

Thankfully, there were no long lasting psychological, health, or political effects of a deadly, highly contagious disease that had portable morgues outside of hospitals to deal with the overflow of American corpses.  Americans are by nature (and national myth) too healthy and optimistic to let something like a plague stop us from doing the work of America.   This is what we have now, the answer to all of our prayers…

Trauma schmauma. Make polio great again! Bird Flu, Turd Flu, fake flues!

Inspector General Joseph Cuffari successfully oversaw permanent deletion of all Secret Service/DHS texts and phone calls from J6

You can read about this creep, appointed by Donald Trump, and wonder why, after covering up the destruction of all January 6 Secret Service texts and phone logs, and those of other key DHS officials, and paying out over a million to settle suits related to his “official acts” as Inspector General, he is still serving, and ready to do his master’s bidding again on January 20th. Read about him here.

Here’s a disgustingly flavorful chunk of that article, which notes Biden has taken no action for months since getting the report, stating:

The Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency’s integrity committee found that Cuffari provided wrongfully inaccurate and misleading answers during his nomination process to become DHS IG, spent $1.4 million to hire a law firm likely to retaliate against three OIG senior executives who questioned his qualifications and attempted to influence the firm’s independent investigation into those employees. 

Cuffari, who was appointed by Donald Trump, was also accused of diminishing and delaying reports about sexual harassment at DHS, not informing Congress in a timely and adequate manner that the Secret Service deleted text messages related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and deleting his own work-related text messages. 

I never believed for a second that Joe Biden suffers any age-related dementia. He’s slower, he stutters, he’s always been famous for being a gaffe machine, but he’s sharp and coherent every time I hear him speak. With the glaring exception of his glassy-eyed cold medication addled zombie imitation disaster (don’t get me wrong, his zombie imitation was impeccable) during the first half of the infamous debate against Trump, which only confirmed to the live audience what corporate media had been saying the whole time: Biden, unlike Trump, is not fit to be president.

That said, what the fuck, Joe? Why is this openly corrupt Inspector General still in office, four years after covering up the destruction of all evidence of what happened, from the Homeland Security point of view, before, during and after the MAGA riot on January 6th? You can’t blame Merrick Garland for this one, Biden, or the Senate committee that needs to vote out USPS Board nominees to get rid of equally abhorrent fucking Looey DeJoy. Cuffari is an executive branch employee, directly accountable to you. He is untrustworthy and has taken direct action to protect your criminal predecessor/successor. What the fuck, Joe?

Seriously, Joe, what the fuck?

Contempt is always the same

Contempt is the same thing every time anyone experiences it.  Talk to as many people as you like about what it feels like, it always feels the same.  Details leading up to it will vary, but contempt is unmistakable. 

The only people who will fight you to the death about your right to be hurt by having your feelings disregarded, and insist on blaming you for deserving to be treated as they see fit, are the contemptuous.  

As for those deeply damaged folks, seriously, fuck those putos.   Contempt is their problem, you can’t fix ’em, help ’em, save ’em, make them feel any different.  They are fucked, and rightfully so.