Oh, Jeez, Mom, not Context Again!

Amy Goodman reports today that Facebook stocks plummeted when it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a right-wing psy-ops for hire outfit founded by reclusive right wing billionaire Robert Mercer, had harvested the unguarded personal information of 50,000,000 Facebook users. The data was used to target personalized messages to those leaning toward voting Trump. As it turned out, they only needed to swing less than 80,000 votes in a handful of states to win the Electoral College [1]. A genius of data mining, like Robert Mercer, would have no trouble doing the calculations, district by district. The data from Facebook, and the ability to reach millions for free on the ‘social media’ platform, was apparently essential to moving just enough votes to the MAGA column.

Personally, I’d love to see Facebook go into the toilet, for its insidious role in the 2016 election and its ongoing role in society, but a CEO who has acquired $74,000,000,000 before his 34th birthday ain’t going to let that happen to his creation. He beat the odds by monetizing Facebook beyond the wildest wet dreams of the Koch brothers. He’s thinking of running for president himself, people have said, so he will definitely fix this, and find a way to make even more money off the loneliness and disconnection of most of the people on the planet. Winners win, it’s just what they do.

The Cambridge Analytica story, while truly horrifying, will be around for a day or two before Cambridge Analytica slithers back into the shadows where they do their important and lucrative work. People are too harried these days, notifications from their phones dinging every few seconds, to much remember what happened three months ago, or last week, let alone recognize any larger context. Besides, much of the conversation is just too ugly to want to listen to.

It is said that the genius of our current president is that he is a master exploiter of chaos. While he sends out his daily shit streams over a handy app called Twitter, and fights off the investigator who appears to be closing in on some of the businessman president’s more intractable financial crimes, he has already done plenty of irreversible mischief by quietly setting a record for lifetime appointments to the federal courts. Read this headline, see if you can keep the vomit in your mouth.

Melania Trump told the nation when she became First Lady that she was going to launch a campaign to fight bullying. By the looks of it she was bullied out of it. I can picture her loving husband, supportive as always “listen to me, you whore, you signed a prenup I can very easily fuck you with. As you know, I have the best lawyers and I have never, EVER lost any of the 4,000 lawsuits I’ve been involved in– not one, NEVER. If you want to be a poor Slovenian girl again, go ahead, make my day, try to launch your program to make people like me look bad.” With all the other shit that has splattered against the fan, and come rippling out at us, how many Americans even remember Melania’s idealistic vow?

How many have heard of Convict Leasing? It was a common practice in the former Confederacy, for around a hundred years. Devilishly simple program that provided slave labor for southerners who had a few bucks in their pockets. Slavery was outlawed by the Thirteenth Amendment the former Confederate states were forced to ratify, basically at gunpoint. There was a nice loophole, see if you can spot it:

Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.^[1]

Very good, yes: except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. Opposition to the Thirteenth Amendment was not based, God forbid, on the idea that slavery was moral. Supporters of slavery in Congress made numerous other arguments about the awful harms a blanket outlawing of slavery would cause [2] . Once the damned thing became an amendment, it was time to line up the Mac Trucks to drive through that loophole there. There is an excellent documentary on Netflix called Thirteenth, where you can learn the full history and see American slave laborers in American prisons, at work today, for some of our greatest corporations.

The original idea of how to control, and continue to profit from the unpaid labor of your inferiors was not long in coming, after the Thirteenth Amendment was rammed down the craws of the former slave owners. Here you go: create a crime, like vagrancy, which is defined as, say, being on the street without fifty bucks on your person. Nobody you like is ever stopped and forced to turn out his pockets so no decent person need ever feel threatened by such laws. Like the drug laws today, they are selectively enforced, in the interests of “quality of life” and “Law and Order”. The police will tip their hats to people in the fancy part of town and say “good afternoon, ma’am. How are you today, sir?” You only stop and frisk people you hate or fear, better if they’re big and strong and capable of hard physical work. Thankfully, you, as the lawman, have the gun, taser and billy club, and backup, when you stop these potentially savage criminals.

Across the former Confederacy these laws, part of the Black Codes, supported a system of perfectly legal slavery for a hundred years after the barbaric practice was outlawed by a constitutional amendment following the bloodiest war in American history. It worked in two ways. Before anyone was convicted of anything you could now go down to the local jail, pay the bond for a group of Negro detainees, essentially post some portion of the sum that would free them from a vagrancy charge, and let them work off their debt to you. You could rent this work crew out to anyone you wanted, you basically owned them, until they paid off what they owed you. With food, clothing, rent and sundry expenses deducted from their minimal pay, well, shoot, it could take them a lifetime or more to pay off their debt.

You could also lease a convict work crew directly from a warden who’d send ’em over in leg irons to work your fields. There was little danger in this, you had a few white men with guns in charge and, to keep the convicts in line, the most dangerous and brutal prisoners on horseback, trustees, armed and ready to ruthlessly enforce order among the workers. Life is bad for the criminal class, and why should it not be? Parchman Farm was one notorious prison/plantation where the old ways, from back when America was first great, were considered the best ways. Prisoners died there regularly, sure, but, you know, bad shit happens to you when you’re a criminal.

Speaking of criminals and prisoners, I’ll show you a chart (reproduced in Matt Tabibi’s excellent, sickening The Divide), before I shuffle off to make myself some lunch:

Locking up drug addicts and low level drug dealers does not seem to be halting the illegal drug trade or reducing the numbers of Americans with drug problems. In 2017 we set a new record, on the way to making America great again, 67,000 dead of drug overdoses. They have been calling it the Opioid Epidemic, Jared Kushner was supposed to solve it in his spare time. Driven by wildly profitable Big Pharma players like the Sacklers, owners of Perdue Pharma (inventors and marketers of the lucrative, “non-addictive” time-released painkiller OxyContin) the craving for such drugs has been exploited by criminals now, too. Our president has a solution he is starting to speak of regularly: Kill the motherfuckers who sell the drugs. The death penalty, the only thing that can possibly stop them.

It’s the only way, as history has shown over and over, the deterrent power of the death penalty will discourage anyone who is not insane, desperate or very wealthy, from engaging in illegal behavior that will result in execution. It will certainly work as well as the trickle down economics that are at the heart of the president’s plan for the masses of American losers, even if it doesn’t put a dime into the pocket of the selfless CEO of our once great nation. It will work as well as mass deportations and protective tariffs, let’s be honest here.

By the way, thinking of some of the Stable Genius’s recent moves to Keep America First, two big initiatives Hebert Hoover used to try to stave off The Great Depression were mass deportations of illegal immigrants and protective tariffs for American-made goods. He imposed tariffs on thousands of imported products and, while deporting a lot of ‘undesirables’, manfully avoided any impact on Americans from the worldwide economic Depression that followed from a decade of wild speculation and record profits for entrepreneurs and organized crime alike, (coupled with the ongoing demand on Germany to pay all costs associated with protecting the world for democracy during World War One). Herbert Hoover, a truly great president, rolled up his sleeves and fucking solved the fucking crisis. You could look it up. Or simply check your phone, that notification is from one of your 20,000 closest Facebook friends.

[1] The U.S Supreme Court yesterday refused to hear the appeal of aggrieved parties in Pennsylvania who want to overturn the ruling that Pennsylvania’s gerrymandered electoral districts must be redrawn because they impermissibly favor Republican candidates. Trump won the electoral votes of Pennsylvania by a whopping almost 47,000 votes, a robust 0.7% of the votes cast there. source

[2] With no Southern states represented, few members of Congress pushed moral and religious arguments in favor of slavery. Democrats who opposed the amendment generally made arguments based on federalism and states’ rights.^[29] Some argued that the proposed change so violated the spirit of the Constitution that it would not be a valid “amendment” but would instead constitute “revolution”.^[30] Representative White, among other opponents, warned that the amendment would lead to full citizenship for blacks.^[31]

Note that current American politicians, guys like our beleaguered Attorney General, make identical arguments, one hundred and fifty years later. USA! USA!!!

Walking down the street where I grew up

Strolling in Queens the other day I turned the corner and walked up the hill to the little house I used to live in [1]. As I walked up the incline Michael Siegel or I used to sprint down chasing a ball that got away, or where we made our networks of twig and blossom dams to try to halt the flood from the sprinklers in its race to the Turnpike, I was thinking of that old cliche ‘you can’t go home again’. My childhood house was right there, tastelessly retooled, with a car that left muddy tracks on the sidewalk parked at a rakish angle on the unkempt lawn. “Classy,” I thought, as I snapped a picture for my sister. The lawn is now mostly dirt.

You can’t go home again, unless you want to be arrested for breaking and entering. Even then, of course, nothing remains of the home you once knew. The people are strangers, the ones you shared the home with once now mostly dead, the decor is completely different, the smell of the place is unrecognizable. A pointless exercise looking at what has become of your former home. Home, of course, is kept in your heart, in the memories of the time you lived there. The comfort you felt there you can feel anywhere, in a way, as the entire world is now your home.

The little house my father grew up in was a place of abject misery. His rough uncle Aren owned the house and paid the bills. My father’s father had two eyes, a nose and a mouth, and tried to keep an unaccountably mischievous expression off his face as he shrugged through a life of extreme poverty. There is a hint of that expression in his eyes in one of the two existing photos of the man I am named for.

The photo is taken in the dark sanctuary of the First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill where he worked as an unpaid janitor. He wears a suit and a fedora, stands next to the wife, wedded to him in an arranged marriage, who hated him, his younger son on the other side of the wife, also in a suit. My father must have been off making the world safe for democracy when the photo was taken. That elusive expression on Eliayhu’s face, close to breaking out into a chuckle, but well-practiced in holding it together, one of the only clues I have about my grandfather.

There is no hint on my grandfather’s face that this is a man capable of rage. It certainly was not allowed him, that much is clear. I would imagine that only my grandmother screamed in that house. In the little house I grew up in we all screamed at each other. Progress, I suppose, if you want to think of it like that.

I stood in the street between my old home and the Gerwitz house, and smiled to see the little jockey, much tinier than I remembered him, still holding his arm in the pose that he used to hold the lantern. A wooden sign with the address, minus one digit, has replaced the lantern. Gerwitz was a rich man, my father told me, but his former home, a showplace at one time, in the old parlance, has fallen on hard times. Like the American Dream itself, I thought, as I took out my phone again to immortalize the joint in a photo and share it with friends and strangers on a website here in Cyberia.

Pretty shabby looking manse for the richest guy on the block. Of course, during my childhood, having a million dollars made you a rich person. Nowadays that’s like having a quarter. Chump change. A million dollars will hardly buy you membership and annual dues at Mara-Largo, if you intend to do anything else with your money. Back when Gerwitz was rich a Cadillac cost $6,000, same as a year’s tuition at Harvard, at the time America’s most expensive university. Nowadays… forget about it. I don’t know where Sam Gerwitz got his great wealth, he may have been a lawyer, or possibly in advertising. The source of his fortune is a mystery I have I no worries about. Sad, though, to look at the shithouse his once-majestic showplace is now.

If you are born to a family with enough money, and you do nothing to get disowned, all you need to do is grow up, inherit it and watch your fortune grow. You are entitled to feel entitled because you don’t rely on entitlements like the poor people, parasites who grow fat like tics sucking on the wealth of others.

Back in Germany at one time these “takers” (as opposed to ‘job creators’) were classified as “useless eaters”, they lived their lebensunswertesleben (“life unworthy of living”) until the state made the arrangements to be done with them. The German State in the late 1930s started its infamous mass killing program with eugenic euthanasia, gassing mentally defective German citizens, clearing their madhouses and asylums of people who did not deserve to eat.

The family members of the murdered were lied to about the cause of death of their random institutionalized defective. Few others in Germany knew or much cared what happened to a weird and unproductive group of chance mutations, Mongoloid teenagers, demented men and women in their forties, fifties and sixties, the retarded, schizophrenics, adolescent catatonics.

Civilized people, moral people– informed people who learn about a program to kill ‘useless eaters’ — people with feeling human hearts, of course, largely would not agree to their government rounding up, roughing up and killing society’s most helpless citizens. It is a historically high bar, though, this simple morality. When angry, desperate people are whipped up enough, and pointed at the enemy, as often as not the blood of the weak will run in the streets.

[1] The Little House I Used to Live In is also the title of a beautiful instrumental by Frank Zappa, a wonderful version of which he played on the Live At The Fillmore album I was in the audience for back in 1971.

Individuals part 2

It is good to remember that individuals, while generally better than members of an enraged mob stomping off to do something atrocious, are still individuals, subject to immense variation. I was reminded of this two or three times after I wrote yesterday’s feel good piece.

The sympathetic woman who took my initial call about a brusque postal supervisor who gave me a polite “tough, fucking shit, sir” when I complained my rent check had been inexplicably returned to me, and the equally nice woman, a Ms. Linton, I was later informed, who fielded my follow-up five business days later, were two very decent individuals. The first, whose name I did not get, was not, as it turned out D. McNeil, the woman who was out to lunch when I spoke to the second kind individual at the Postal Inspector’s.

Ms. McNeil knew nothing of my complaint, her name had simply been on the automatically generated email that had been sent to me confirming that my complaint was being seriously investigated. She confirmed that it was being investigated at the local level, by the person best suited to evaluate it, the brusque postal supervisor in question, who now had my confidential complaint in his hands, with my name and address.

Ms. McNeil knew nothing of the case, put me on hold to read the case notes. Five minutes later she was back, still not sure why I had wanted a return call from her. The case had been ‘escalated’ to the individual post office level. I asked her what the sense was to have my complaint in the hands of the man who had created the problem when, instead of being helpful, gave his tour de force of super-cool tough guy customer service. She sort of agreed there was only a limited point to him investigating himself.

Unlike the others, Ms. McNeil didn’t bother to apologize on behalf of the Post Office for this Clint Eastwood-like customer relations specialist, though she did agree that it would have been better customer service to have told the customer holding the mistakenly, inexplicably returned rent check, “this should not have happened. I will put it on the truck now and your landlord will have it in two or three days.” She said it would have been better if he’d said something like that, instead of handing me a fake complaint number to call, instead of crossing out the barcode so the idiotic mistake would not be repeated. She agreed that had he said that an apology of any kind would have been unnecessary. She asked me wearily what I expected her to do at this point.

“For starters, I still want the Post Office to deliver the rent check they’ve returned to me twice,” I told her. She explained again about the bar code, how it had to be crossed out and covered with a label. Sadly, there was no guarantee it would be delivered this time either. She then mentioned the original idea I’d had– have the post office put the thing in another envelope, readdress it and send it again. Ms. McNeil liked this idea. Eventually she told me she would ‘escalate’ the complaint, sending it to the area supervisor, the person to whom all branch supervisors answer. I asked for the email address to send my photos of the twice returned envelope. She placed me on hold. While holding I was treated to an endless stream of upbeat ads about the many unbeatable services offered by the Postal Service. I listened, for as long as my patience lasted, which was about three minutes. I hung up and dialed the number I had for D. McNeil.

A pleasant recorded voice told me the person at this number had not set up their voicemail and then announced I would be transferred to a representative to assist me. There was a beep, then another recording. It said “your session cannot be continued at this time. Goodbye.”

Twenty minutes later Ms. McNeil called me back with a fax number where I could fax all the photos I wanted. I told Ms. McNeil I’d gotten rid of my fax machine years ago. I asked again for an email address. She sighed, having no idea why I was being so difficult about these simple things. She was sure they probably had an email address, would I like to hold while she searched for it again?

I thanked her and walked over to the local post office. The two Chinese American clerks there had always been very nice. But all the one I spoke to told me is that she could cover the bar code, send it out for sorting again and hope for the best. “But,” she told me in strongly accented English, “some Postal employees do not do what they’re supposed to. You can never tell.” As for putting it in another envelope, they had no such envelope, I had to go to the main post office for that service. She agreed it wasn’t fair to make me pay more postage for another envelope, the only option available. Then she looked at me with intensity and said “But if I give you envelope I have to pay, nobody pay me for the postage. You think that’s fair?” I didn’t. They had no supervisor available at their little Utopia Branch (heavenly though the place otherwise is.) The two Asian-American clerks regarded me seriously until I agreed it wasn’t fair that one of them should be forced to pay.

I had a sudden thought that none of this was fair. Our fucking world is off the fucking rails, every business we encounter here in America, with rare, beautiful exceptions, is managed from the style book for psychopaths. I bought the envelope, it cost me 63 cents. I paid in cash. I addressed the blank envelope and re-mailed the twice returned rent check to my landlord. I apologized to the wide eyed clerk, who had begun staring at me, seeming truly hurt by how I seemed to be making such unfair demands of her. When I handed her back the envelope I said “thank you, ma’am.” She smiled. I walked back into the sunshine trying to get over the feeling that I had been successfully pissed on, for more than a week.

“Greeked” for posting on this website. The envelope was addressed as neatly as circumstances yesterday allowed.

Peace be with you.

It’s the individuals, stupid

We have to be honest here — as a species homo sapiens is very fucked up. We are violent, irrational, clannish, destructive, greedy, prone to hatreds, even in our religious life, which should incline us to love our fellow humans, to protect the weak, to oppose evil, instead of routinely burning starving heathen babies to death. Our work here, as a species, has long spoken for itself. An angry homo sapiens given power will as often as not act as you would expect a weak, spiteful, pissed off ape to act.

Funny as it may sound to hear it from me, I strive to give a happy, or at least upbeat, ending to my stories. This ongoing stand-off with the Post Office, although I act like there’s a larger principle about accountability involved, is also a story I am shakily driving toward a happy ending. The missing element of hope has been provided by two lovely individuals in the Post Office I have spoken with about this, one on Monday, one on Friday.

Individual homo sapiens are capable of the most touchingly human acts. Part of my distaste for hierarchy, and corporate structure, is that people are forced to act according to the will of their masters. They must do things that many of us would not consider right in the name of feeding their family. There is no choice in these situations, you do as you are told or take a goddamned hike and your family goes hungry — and until recently, without the possibility of affordable health insurance.

I called the number for D. McNeil, the first woman I spoke to at the Post Office. She was out to lunch just now but her colleague was equally aghast, equally apologetic, equally generous with her time and sympathy. It appears the office the complaint was forwarded to was the local Post Office, Umar’s place. Umar, being the best situated Postal official, was supposed to investigate this complaint about himself, determine whether he’d done anything wrong, and get back to me. In the meantime, he caused the rent check to my landlord to be sent back to me a second time. Needless to say, Umar’s investigation of himself is ongoing and complex.

She told me at the end of a long call that she’d written down everything I’d told her, to add to the record. I apologized for her writer’s cramp. She laughed, told me she had taken shorthand in school. “Must have come in handy,” I said. She told me Ms. McNeil would call me when she comes back from lunch.

Apparently Mr. Umar didn’t cross out the barcode at the bottom of the envelope that told the machine to return the envelope to the customer instead of delivering it. The woman I spoke to just now pointed this out, along with the fact that the machines cannot see arrows, even if Umar had drawn a dozen. He should have known to cross out the errant barcode. Unless he was being spiteful, which is my best theory.

“So either he was stupid or vengeful,” I said, “not to put words in your mouth.” She laughed and told me she indeed hadn’t said that, but that Umar should have known.

I now have to hold the envelope up to a strong light, read the landlord’s contact phone number on the invoice, and let them know they will have the rent check I’ve been trying to send them for ten days, by Tuesday at the latest. Meanwhile, I am off to the little local Queens post office where the staff is always so nice. I am optimistic that they will be helpful. If not, I’ll buy a stamp and send the damn thing again from their place.

The women at the landlord’s office were cool, promised to call me when my check arrives.

Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion of this asinine tale. I am hoping to send you on to your next internet surfing stop with a smile of some kind on your face. Remember: we are always dealing with individuals, as well as the systems that constrain them and often make them act like jerks accountable to nothing but their lowest nature. As individuals, homo sapiens most often will not lynch, rape, burn villages, design weapons more terrible than you can imagine. Individuals laugh, feel concerned about each other’s troubles and will most often try to help. Like Bill Clinton famously said, as he was signing a law that would vastly increase the prison population, “Ah feel your pain.”

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Coming soon: the dark comedy thriller “I Married O.J.”

He was handsome, he was charismatic, he was hilarious. He was strong and rich and powerful and vowed he would always protect me…

How we force you to lose hope

Government, increasingly the mechanism by which wealthy corporations, and individuals, make sure their profits are robust and their schemes unhindered by things like regulation, accountability or prosecution, has learned tremendous customer relations lessons from their canny corporate cousins. We have come to expect as little protection from our government as from the makers of very expensive toxically produced shit. Right wing extremists have exploited, and whenever in power exacerbated, this disaffection with our own democratic government, now seen by so many as the enemy instead of the protector of our liberties. Such forces find it easy to crush problem consumers/citizens.

Check out this example of the fiendishly simple means by which hope for correction of even the simplest error by an institution is snuffed out, routinely, for people without power who appeal to the institutions available for relief from mistreatment.

I got snotty treatment from a Post Office supervisor. All he had to say is “whoa, that’s a mistake, that letter should have gone to the office it’s addressed to, not to the return address it was sent from. We’ll fix it, it will be where you sent it in two or three days.” Not even a ‘sorry’ needed. “Sorry” is a word that our winner society has made the exclusive domain of weak losers who have no choice but to apologize.

Instead of a reasonable response to a postal error you get, giving him the benefit of the doubt, dismissal from a tired, testy civil servant who doesn’t like the tone of the disgruntled customer. It’s not his fault that the customer waited on line to be jerked around for an excruciating five minutes by an extremely dull, monosyllabic postal clerk before being passed on to him. It’s not his fault the letter was returned to the customer without explanation, instead of going to the clearly printed address on the properly stamped business mailer. None of this is his fault, yet he is taking the full heat for a postal system that sometimes simply just fucks up. Doesn’t like the way this dick of a customer is making demands, relentless, unsatisfied with the explanation of machine error and his noncommittal shrugs. Fine. “No guarantee it will get there this time either, SIR, (the s-word) we’ll just have to hope for the best.”

The customer goes home angry, and finds a federal agency to complain to. The person he speaks to there seems to be very concerned with the story of the poor treatment the customer has received. He should not have been handed a complaint number that does not allow a complaint to be made, particularly after the brusque treatment of a customer who had every right to complain. Especially since there was no explanation given for the illogical return of the letter, except machine error, “shit happens,” and no guarantee given that it won’t be returned to him again. Not to mention the sly “fuck you” of the fake complaint number.

She promises the customer an investigation, gives him the case number and tells him a report will be emailed to him in 2-4 business days at which time he’ll be able to follow up, if necessary, including emailing photos of the canceled, improperly returned envelope.

Sure enough, two business days later, this email arrives:

Updated information regarding your recent inquiry (Case ID:137194142) (KMM50585860V79654L0KM)

Dear Elliott Widaen, [got the tricky last name right, but misspelled the first name, one L, one T]

This message is to let you know that we have received your inquiry at the Post Office.

After we review and investigate the information you have provided, we will contact you and work with you until the case is resolved.

Thank you for letting us know about this issue. We look forward to serving you.

Sincerely,

Your United States Postal Service

D. McNeil
Consumer Affairs
(212) 330-3667
NYDistrictcao@usps.gov

PS: Please do not reply to this message as this email address is not monitored for responses. Your privacy is important to us. If you would like additional information on our privacy policy, please visit www.usps.com.

Ten minutes later, a US Postal Service bot sends this update:

In order to better serve you, your recently submitted inquiry was forwarded to an office that is better suited to address your needs. It is being investigated and you can expect a reply within 2 to 4 business days.

Which office? Where is this office? Who? What? Why? Mysteries to be answered within 2 to 4 business days, if all goes well.

The following day the original envelope with the rent check to the landlord, being sent a twenty minute truck ride from the post office it was returned to, arrives back in the customer’s mail box. The issue very much not resolved.

You figure, for fifty cents I can put this small business envelope into a standard sized envelope, address it by hand, put a stamp on it and mail it from another part of town. Maybe the postal workers there will not have all been lobotomized, or addled on opioids, or drunk, or willfully assholic, or whatever the problem is when such a simple, routine task is not done properly. A fifty cent stamp and done.

But for somebody like me, raised by an angry asshole, sensitized to that asshole reflex to testily shift blame to the person mistreated — hard to bite the bullet and do the easy thing. On to another post office, in another borough (have to go there for something else tomorrow anyway), where everyone has been very nice so far, and humbly make what should be a relatively easy to make case that I have not received the service I paid for. I’d like them to put it in another envelope, with explicit instructions to deliver it to the address it is addressed to and not, mischievously or imbecilically, to the return address.

This reflex to get some kind of just result is also part of how they break you like a fucking twig. I don’t know exactly what to do about this reflex, but some part of me believes that once it is neutralized, in enough of us, the Klan will be marching down the main street of every town again, making America great again, like they did when my father was born, in 1924, at the height of their national power, 4.5 million proud members strong.

A Good Sense of Humor

A good sense of humor, being necessary to the mental health of a free person, the right of the People to have a light or dark fucking laugh shall not be infringed.

Another reminder, if one was needed, of how little profit there is telling an asshole — no matter how richly deserving a given asshole might be — to go fuck himself, if that asshole has any power whatsoever to return the favor.

Two days after Umar’s overstamp, and his two perfectly aimed arrows, this puckishly popped up in my own mailbox again. Seriously?

How like you this, Tetiana?

Calming a Psychopath

The psychopath will reject this title, for starters.

“Your premise is bullshit. There’s no need to calm a psychopath, a psychopath is already calm. Plus, who the fuck are you to call me a psychopath, meat? How bout I just bite your plump, tender fucking face off? Plus, shut the fuck up. Plus, you will keep my secrets because I said you will. Plus, shut up.

“Fine, I once threatened to lock my wife and kids in the house, set it on fire and kill all of them. That was after I got back from slaughtering her parents. Then I threatened to kill myself, when it was all over. That last part was the genius part: I have nothing to lose, I’m going to be dead, but just after the rest of you. Oh, yeah, like you’ve never in a moment of desperation threatened to burn two little children alive, prig. And, of course, because you’re so mentally healthy, you miss the most important part, the only important part: I didn’t do any of that! A threat is just a threat, mere words, and if you don’t know the difference between a threat and an action, you are one sad, ignorant asshole.

“And while we’re talking about you, Mr. Stable Genius, who the fuck are you to look down your long, hooked nose at somebody who hasn’t worked in years? Last I checked you were last in court a couple of years ago, doing a fucking inquest in some seedy Bronx courtroom on behalf of some guy with a cane who provoked a dentist to call him a homo and a cabron and throw some business cards in his face. Real important case, though it was the last time you got paid for anything. Oh, wait, I forgot, you’re a writer now, that’s right! You write, everyday, essential crap like this. Setting down your precious insights like you’ve learned something deep about the workings of the world of humans.

“Brilliant insights like it’s morally wrong to lie to your children, a real rare million dollar gem you got there, professor. Except that EVERYBODY lies to their children, on some level. At least I know I’m lying to my children, and I do it mostly by omission anyway, so it’s not like I’m force feeding them a lot of actual lies. Plus, I defy you to show me any way my lying has had a negative effect on either of my wonderful kids. Both kids love me, trust me, know they can always depend on me. You have no kids, know nothing about the responsibilities of parenthood. Easy for you to fucking pontificate, bring up every little long ago mistake I ever made. Like you never made a mistake in your high and mighty philosopher king life.

“I understand you’re working on a letter to me and my wife, to lay out all the so-called moral issues involved. You call it a letter, I call it your death warrant. You always whine about Hitler, ‘Oh, Hitler killed my maternal grandparents’ 12 siblings, Oh, Hitler wiped out my father’s people… the shithole they came from literally wiped from the map…’ Yeah. Blame Hitler for you being an asshole. Hitler made you a righteous asshole, I understand.

“Here’s something you should understand: I will not be attacked, by you or anyone else. Your catalogue of things I supposedly did is a dead letter, motherfucker. This war has long been over. You lost. You don’t want to talk to me because I am a compulsive liar? Fine with me. Just don’t expect my kids to reciprocate your attempts to stay in touch. They know what you are, just as they know what I am. You want to call me a psychopath? Fine, I’m a psychopath. Being a psychopath means never having to say you’re sorry.

“You got time? I could go on this way all day, don’t even need a break to piss. I piss on you, asshole. You see, the thing you’re missing is that gamblers who make a losing bet usually double down. I know a thing or two about doubling down, about not being a fucking loser, like you, Mr. American Dream. You can’t win it all back if you ain’t in it. Life is a roll of the dice. You never accepted this, think that you are in charge, somehow, that the ‘truth’ is some kind of magic shield against the randomness of life. You’re powerless, with your pompous integrity and hyperbolic sense of fairness, you’re not in charge of shit. You think your long laundry list of ‘facts’ is more persuasive than my hugs and kisses, and promises (whether sincere or made for dramatic effect)? Think again, asswipe. Possession is nine tenths of the law, counselor. You can’t take what’s mine. You can try, if you want to be crushed, in fact, I invite you to come right on.”

I brought this on myself, clearly. The psychopath makes a good point — the indisputable facts of the case only make things worse for me. The more reason for shame, the deeper the resolve to fight that shame by any means necessary. I’m not holding any cards here, except for facts nobody wants to know, and there is no price too high to pay for not knowing those terrible things.

Short version

Wrote this as part of a futile letter I am working on, an exercise in trying to digest something that is indigestible, addressed to the chef and server of the unpalatable dish. I don’t know if it has any interest, but it’s a much quicker telling of the encounter laid out in the previous post, and I will most likely delete it from the letter I wrote it in:

P.S.

I wrote this letter right after an encounter at my local post office. The encounter illustrates a personality type, all too common, that gives no quarter in defending why they are right and you, whatever the facts, are actually the asshole.

My rent check, in the landlord’s mailer, was returned to me, the stamp cancelled and no other explanation. Went to the post office to have it delivered. The monkeylike clerk wordlessly studied it for a long time before telling me I needed to talk to the supervisor. The supervisor also studied the envelope for a moment.

“Must not have read the address,” he said, pointing to the address printed on the business envelope. “Machines, we use machines, sometimes they make mistakes.” I asked him to expedite delivery of the check, since it was now a week late. He told me he couldn’t expedite anything, only “overstamp” it and put it back into regular mail, unless I wanted to pay for overnight delivery. He apparently thought I was being a dick, because he’d already admitted a machine had made a mistake, that it was nobody’s fault, and yet I was still demanding something from him. “Haven’t you ever made a mistake?” he asked me.

At this point, the guy who should have simply said “this shouldn’t have happened, I’m sorry for the hassle. I’ll hand cancel this, put it on the truck and make sure it gets delivered tomorrow, the address is only five miles from here” was staring at me like I’d just taken a piss at his window. He slid a paper with a number he said was for complaints through the window, told me his name. He refused to give me a receipt or any proof I’d re-mailed my returned envelope to my landlord. Told me he could only give me a receipt if I paid for it.

The number on the form turned out not to have an option for “complaints” and the waiting time was 40 to 50 minutes to speak to a human. I have no idea if this dickhead gave me his actual name, whether he put my letter in the bin to be sorted and delivered or into the garbage bin. How would I know how much of a vicious psycho this guy potentially is, particularly after I finally told him to fuck himself after he told me he could only give me a receipt if I paid him? He’d certainly showed me a nice snappy catalogue of politely sociopathic traits.

With a stranger who is an asshole, this is standard behavior: never sympathize, or admit any wrongdoing, give a reason that sounds reasonable enough, deny any obligation to fix the mistake, put the complaining consumer on the spot by blaming him for being a hypocrite, and a complainer, tell him to fuck off, politely, give him a fake number to file his fake complaint and make up a name for yourself.

A loved one who does this is in a different category, no? Do you want the lesson your kids get to take with them in life to be that trust is a delicate, transactional illusion, that to live you have to learn to tell yourself, and others, any lie that makes it possible to conceal shame and manipulation?

Anger Update

Be reluctant to declare victory in the war on difficult emotions, my friends. It is important to remember that battling our powerful lowest impulses is a constant wrestling match. I had a nice reminder of the hubris of claiming victory yesterday, and the letdown in vigilance such hubris often causes, when I momentarily lost my verbal shit in the post office yesterday. This came a day after delivering learned comments about recognizing the signs that you are about to get angry, taking a breath and pulling yourself back from the explosion.

My rent check, in the printed mailer provided by my landlord, was returned to me several days after I mailed it. It was postmarked and returned with no reason for its return anywhere on the envelope. I brought it to the Post Office today to have its delivery expedited. The woman at the window studied it for a long time, turning it over and over in her hands, peeling back the stamp, turning it again, her lower lip hanging down pensively. After a few minutes of this, and before she could reach for a magnifying glass, I pointed out that she was not going to find any further information. I told her it was a rent check, returned to me in error, and that I needed it delivered as soon as possible. She asked what day I had mailed it, when it had been returned to me. She looked blankly as I told her “I mailed it Tuesday, it was returned Saturday” then consulted her phone, presumably for a calendar. After a long pause she looked up at me without expression, slid the envelope back to me and sent me over to her supervisor.

The supervisor looked at the postmarked envelope, turned it in his hands, shrugged and told me maybe the printed address had not been read through the window. I pointed out that it was quite legible, printed in caps, in fact, and in the place where every business correspondence is addressed. He countered with “machines, these are read by machines, which sometimes make mistakes.”

He told me he could not expedite delivery of this erroneously returned mailing, then, when I appeared dissatisfied with this answer, asked me if I had never made a mistake. I told him, of course, we all do, but that in the case of this properly addressed, properly posted letter I hadn’t made a mistake, the Post Office and its sorting machines had. I was asking him to correct this mistake. He said all he could do was send it again, by regular mail, and that hopefully it would go through this time. He told me he would draw arrows directing the machine’s attention to the place where the address is on the business envelope, that hopefully it would be properly routed by the machine this time.

“Arrows,” I said, “directing the machines to the ordinary place for an address. Presumably these arrows will get a postal machine to remove its head from its mechanical ass and sort the envelope properly this time.”

“Those are your words,” he said, unnecessarily.

When I still appeared unsatisfied, realizing he was dealing with an angry, implacable dick, he slid a postal form, PS Form 3849, under the glass and told me if I had a complaint, to call the number on the form. The move removed any doubt I had about being in a conversation with an immovable asshole, in this case one named Umar, but I managed, for a time, to maintain a grim cool.

This was the time, as I urged my friend the other day, to notice the signs that this was going badly, not going to end well, the physical signs that fight or flight chemicals were flowing, the familiar, climbing feeling that generally happens when I find myself confronted by a robotic attitude, by some insistent jerk sitting behind bullet proof glass who won’t back down no matter what. This was the time to walk away, there was clearly nothing to gain in this interaction.

All he could do, he told me again, was “overstamp” it and draw arrows on the envelope pointing the machine to the address, and hopefully it would get there, by regular mail, in a few days. Unless I paid extra, there was no other option available to me, nor anything else the post office would do, or had any obligation to do. “Feel free to make a complaint,” Umar told me, giving me his name. I told him to overstamp it and send it again. He did. I thanked him for his time, through gritted teeth.

Walking out of the post office I was steamed. After walking about a block I realized I should have gotten a receipt of some kind of the re-mailing, in case of future trouble with the landlord (and to avoid a $25 fee to stop the original check, in the event the letter didn’t make it the several miles to my landlord’s office).

As I turned to go back to the Post Office I passed the ongoing standoff over a parking spot. On my original trip to the Post Office, fifteen minutes earlier, I’d seen one car backing in to parallel park as another nipped in quickly from the other direction. Neither car could get into the spot now, and neither driver was willing to concede an inch to the other. The two drivers were locked in their positions, neither one backing down, while a traffic jam built up behind them, a bus trying to make a turn was now blocking all traffic on Broadway. Horns were blaring. “The human condition,” I thought, as I entered the Post Office again, to enact my part.

Umar would not come to the window, though he saw me standing at the window. I called him and pounded on the bulletproof glass with my fist as he disappeared around the wall. I continued calling his name in a loud belligerent voice. When he returned, affecting the unflappability of the perfect asshole, he refused to give me any kind of receipt. Impossible, he said, unless I paid for it. I then exploded.

“This place is fucked up and you are the fucking supervisor of it!” I snarled idiotically, if also accurately, and stormed out, banging the door hard enough to break it. A moment later it occurred to me that his next move would be to reach into the bin, retrieve my letter with the rent check, rip it neatly in half, ball it up and toss it into the garbage.

The “complaint” number he gave me had no option for complaints. It was not a complaint number. The wait to speak to a human was “40 to 50 minutes”. I found myself flooded with fight or flight chemicals as I searched the web for how to make a complaint against customer-relations challenged civil servant Umar, to protect myself if he did the angry thing and destroyed my payment to the landlord. He could also simply have left it on a shelf, to sit for a few weeks.

I called the federal agency that oversees the Post Office, spoke to a very sympathetic woman (whose name I foolishly did not take, though she gave me my case #) who assured me this will be investigated and an email would come back to me within 3 business days. She told me it was a good move on my part to have photographed the returned envelope, and that I should hold on to the photo.

Odds are Umar didn’t rip it up, the landlord will have it the day after tomorrow, cash it by 3/20 and done and done. In the odd event that he did ‘go postal’ on my check to the landlord, there is at least a record, a complaint with the federal office that investigates alleged improprieties by postal workers. For whatever that might be worth.

But if that impenetrable wall of glass hadn’t been between us, and Umar had stepped toward me, I can’t say for sure, in spite of not being a fighter, in spite of my conscious attempt to remain peaceful, that I would have been able to resist what nature would have been imploring me to do. I’d had fair warning as things went from fartlike to actual shit, but it was no help in this instance.

This is one reason anger is such a dangerous thing. It is waiting, always, particularly for those of us who were victimized by angry adults when we were children, and anger can almost always convince you that you are 100% correct in your reaction. Umar had probably had a shitty day himself, didn’t feel like being reprimanded by some snotty, disgruntled customer for a simple mistake he had nothing to do with. When the customer poured salt on his shit-sandwich of day by telling him “if you had said ‘this shouldn’t have happened, I’m sorry for the hassle, we’ll get this over to your landlord ASAP,” Umar could only claim he had said that. “I told you I was sorry,” he said sullenly, then slid the fake complaint number under the glass by way of saying “lick my unwashed, crusty asshole, sir.”

There is no winner in this kind of transaction. It is best to keep them short and to the point, though that is far more easily said than done. Remain humble, do not proclaim that you have surmounted the ugly thing that will soon be ready to bite you in the ass again, hard, and with very sharp teeth.

News Tidbit — Who’s Afraid of the NRA?

After the Parkland Florida mass shooting by a disturbed teenager who posed in a MAGA hat, killing seventeen with a legally purchased semi-automatic AR-15 assault rifle, the President convened a bipartisan commission and had a camera crew record their discussion. He suggested at the February 28th meeting that raising the age for purchase of AR-15s from 18 to 21 was something that had to be considered. In a widely televised segment he chided a Republican who criticized this common sense, (though hardly problem-solving), idea for being afraid of the NRA.

Trump is not afraid of the NRA, why would he be? The gun nonprofit donated $30,000,000 to his presidential campaign, according to many, more than $21,000,000 according to MSNBC, though the real number may be a much more modest $10,000,000 or so. Let’s say it was only a few measly millions. The point is, it’s not as though the NRA owns Mr. Trump.

Yet Mr. Trump has walked back those tough, common sense comments (if only minimally impacting the larger problem) he made at the televised photo op to show his concern for American school children gunned down by other school children. He has since had a better idea. He put billionaire Christian fundamentalist Betsy DeVos on the case, telling his Secretary of Education to come up with a plan to “harden” our schools against gun attackers.

If inexperienced son-in-law Jared Kushner can solve the Opioid Crisis while streamlining government and making peace in the Middle East, why shouldn’t Secretary DeVos be up to the simple task of making our schools “hard” enough to resist attacks by determined white males with assault weapons? Kids should be reminded every day, as they walk into fortress schools, what a dangerous place our once great nation actually is.

You may report ridiculous things in a straightforward, factual way, in the manner of the New York Times. That reporting does not make the things reported any less ridiculous, or in this case, grotesque. But, yo, whatta ya gonna do?

By the way, the NRA, with its powerful lobbying arm that has fought back virtually every gun control measure for the last thirty years, identifies itself as “America’s longest-standing civil rights organization”. ^[46] It’s been around since 1871. You do the math.