Terrorism — context

A friend followed a link from the first footnote of my previous post, in connection to Paul Robeson’s ill-fated meeting with President Truman.  My friend was sickened, though unsurprised, after reading about the horrifying incident that led to the meeting.  I hadn’t read about the July 25, 1946 murder of four black sharecroppers in Georgia (two of them women, one seven months pregnant), a cold-blooded lynching that Robeson discussed with Truman.  I clicked the link (this one) and … fucking hell.  Literally.

It is our practice here, in the land of the free and the home of brave, to keep things simple.  Because we are exceptional.  No nation has ever been as exceptional as we are.  Simply: good vs. evil, with us or against us, freedom vs. tyranny, democracy vs. totalitarianism, Blue vs. Grey, Red vs. Blue, Freedom on the March, Manifest Destiny, Remember the Alamo [1], the War on Drugs, the War on Terror.   

The War on Terror (we are long past critiquing the idiocy of this term)  is specifically a war on practitioners of terrorism like the ones who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001.   Suicidal fanatics, most of them Saudis, killed thousands of us on that terrible day.  The mass murderers were members of a radical Sunni Islamic group following in the ideological footsteps of violent religious fundamentalist Sayyidd Qutb (Koo-tube) [2], the intellectual father of this kind of unthinkable savagery.

Terrorist, in the U.S., is a synonym for radical Islamic militant.  Let us keep things simple, as we do here, because nuance will only make everything much more complicated.  Terrorism is radical Islamic killers, evil fucks like the militant Sunni outfit Al-Qaeda (the 9/11 attackers) or Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) or Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham Islamic State (ISIS) or by it’s Arabic acronym Daesh, or any of the other brutal radical Islamic terrorist organizations out there. 

The strategy they employ is terrorism — inciting terror by dramatic and horrific acts of violence which are then broadcast all over the world as gruesome advertisements for what will happen to any sacrilegious people, or states, who interfere with their version of pure Islam.  Islamic scholars could probably tell you how many ways these true believers are violating the Koran, but that is another conversation.

In America the term “terrorist” is pretty much limited to talking about violent, fanatical Islamist killers.   There are other kinds of terrorists here in America, always have been.  We, in fact, have long grown our own here and I’d put ours up against the worst of theirs.  Motivated by violent hatred, when they are not lying dormant, waiting, they kill children and torture women and men.  They use violence to intimidate.   They blow up places of worship whenever they can, just like ISIS does.   They subject their victims to brutal, terrifying deaths, just like other extreme terrorists do.    But we don’t usually talk about these white American motherfuckers the same way as we talk about regular terrorists, especially in the “Post 9/11 world” of Dick Cheney and company, but they are made of the same evil shit.

Let us take a little trip down memory lane, or the memory hole (we tend not to recall this kind of ugly American shit), to a late Spring day in 1946, to Walton County, Georgia.  On that day, in a car, was a white man, driving, one J. Loy Harris, and four of his employees; a black man, his seven month’s pregnant wife and another couple, two other black sharecroppers.  Harris, had bailed his worker out of jail not long before.  One of the black men had been locked up for allegedly stabbing a white man.   

They drove a remote country road and then stopped at the  bridge between Walton and Oconee counties where they were met by an armed mob of 15 to 20 white men, according to Loy Harris.  Let’s let the only witness to the events, Loy Harris, the employer of all four of his black, sharecropper passengers, pick up the story:

A big man who was dressed mighty proud in a double-breasted brown suit was giving the orders. He pointed to Roger Malcom and said, “We want that nigger.” Then he pointed to George Dorsey, my nigger, and said, “We want you, too, Charlie.” I said, “His name ain’t Charlie, he’s George.” Someone said “Keep your damned big mouth shut. This ain’t your party.”[3]

Loy Harris watched as the four blacks were dragged down a dirt trail.  He said he didn’t see them tied to a big oak tree but he probably heard the shots, three volleys of bullets from the small mob.   As if all that wasn’t sickening enough, I read this next part and wanted to shoot somebody myself:

After Mae Murray Dorsey was shot, her fetus was cut from her body with a knife.

This detail is too fucked up to believe.  It’s hard to picture the depth of depraved hatred that could reduce a human to doing that.  The most sadistic Nazi death camp guard had nothing on these boys.  Say what you want about this crowd of murderers (none of whom were ever identified or indicted, by the way), it’s instantly clear they were of the same ilk as the blood-thirstiest radical Islamist.  “Her fetus was cut from her body with a knife.”   ISIS would be hard-pressed think up a more revolting atrocity for their youtube channel.

This is simply the way it was in many parts of this exceptional country, for a century after the Civil War ended.   As far as white people were concerned, blacks still had almost no rights a white man was bound to respect, as Justice Taney wrote before the Civil War.  You see, our great democracy was unable to prevent these kinds of things because, well, because of the right of the individual states to decide how to handle potential criminal cases.   Criminal law is the exclusive domain of the states, in all but a few exceptional cases.  There was nothing that exceptional about an armed gang of  local white men willing to drag blacks out of a car and kill them, particularly in Georgia, which led the country in lynching many years in a row.  It was complicated, you see, the law, the Dixiecrats, states’ rights, the overbearing federal government, unreasonable, demanding blacks, outsider agitators, trouble makers, liberal elites, complicated, complicated.

It was not until a team of smart, determined Lawyers Guild attorneys went down to federal court in the south, in 1965, to invoke a federal statute that had been unenforced for almost a hundred years, that any white terrorist who killed a black person for the purpose of intimidating other people could be prosecuted.   They brought the federal suit after the 1964 killings of three civil rights workers, Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, two white, one black, near Meriden, Mississippi.    (PBS history of the case here)

Since that landmark federal case in 1965, section 1983 of this federal statute, which was created to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment, the post-war correction to our constitution designed to protect all citizens from oppression, has been used literally tens of thousands of times in federal courts all over the country.  

A quick google search gives us this:  The Civil Rights Act of 1871 is a federal statute, numbered 42 U.S.C. § 1983, that allows people to sue the government for civil rights violations. It applies when someone acting “under color of” state-level or local law has deprived a person of rights created by the U.S. Constitution or federal statutes.

But until 1965, at the earliest, well,  the criminal case had to stay in the local Georgia court and, shoot, in a local Georgia court people tend to stick together, everyone has known each other forever, couldn’t find nobody to finger any of those people who allegedly shot those four negroes to death and supposedly cut the fetus from the body of one of the dead women.   No reason to disbelieve an honest man like Loy Harris, gentle ladies and fine men of the jury.   And Loy testified that he didn’t see anything and didn’t know any of the men who did it, had never seen any of them.  

But, of course, the case never even got into court, the Federal government had given up the power to hear the case almost a century earlier. So Loy never had to testify under oath or be cross-examined about what he’d seen.   Georgians in his tight-knit area probably figured Loy had already suffered enough with the loss of the four negroes and being treated so shabbily himself by that armed mob.

This is why Paul Robeson got so angry when Truman tried to explain why it was politically impossible to get a goddamned federal anti-lynching law passed in 1946.  Right before Truman had Robeson thrown out of his office.  Truman had thrown a shit fit of his own and sent the FBI down there with a big reward for information leading to indictments and convictions, but nothing.  It turns out all they had to do was enforce an anti-Klan law that had been on the books since the 1870s.

When we speak of terrorism, you should consider how White Supremacists have long operated here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.   Terror and violence was used to maintain order during slavery, whites were the minority on plantations, terror and violence was used to protect the status quo in the days of Jim Crow, intimidate anyone who refused to obey.  The main strategy these White Supremacists used was terrorism — inciting terror by dramatic and horrific acts of violence,  advertisements for what would happen to anybody who dared to say they were equal to a White Christian.  Christian scholars could probably tell you how many ways these assholes were violating the teachings of Jesus, but that is another conversation.

We currently have a man in the White House who sees nothing wrong with fine, law-abiding White Supremacists marching by torchlight with swastikas and Confederate flags and politely chanting things about groups they hate.  Freedom of expression here in the most exceptional land God has ever shed His grace upon, and I can dig that.   I love free expression and practice it every day myself.  But still.

Nothing to see here.  Stay numb, y’all, and don’t forget: a lot of good deals coming up on Presidents’ Day.

 

[1]  To take one example, an alternate explanation to the heroic history book version of “Remember the Alamo!” that does not limit it to an epic battle between American freedom vs. Mexican tyranny.   We become smug now about information, because any detail about anything is almost instantly attainable through our phones.   We can get as much info as we seek, in any form we like, in this age of instant access to information and opinion.  Some of the information is actually accurate. 

“Remember the Alamo!” was a cry raised by Americans with land grants in the Mexican territory that was soon to become Texas, once America took it in war.   These Americans owned huge tracts of Mexican land they’d gotten cheaply from the government of Mexico.  Some of these heroic men were slaveholders who had violated their agreement with Mexico not to bring slaves into Mexican territory.   Of course, being industrious Americans keeping an eye on the bottom line, the owners who could afford it brought their slaves, in violation of Mexican law.  Mexico had outlawed slavery.   Not all of the Americans who owned land in Mexican territory were rich slave holders.  Some of them were.  There were tensions.   Texans to this day are sensitive about this origin story:  

(Here is a contemporary Texas historian on the subject:    

Recently I heard a caller on a radio talk show state matter-of-factly that Sam Houston stole Texas from Mexico, and a recent book on the Alamo characterized the men who died there (and by extension virtually everyone who took part in the Texas Revolution) as greedy, land-grabbing slaveholders — and those without slaves as yearning to own them.   source

Then he went on to explain why each charge was unfair to the founding fathers of Texas.  In 1835, when these events took place there were only an estimated two to three thousand black slaves in the territory, according to the author.   It was true that by 1860 there would be, regrettably, more than 180,000 slaves in Texas, but that alone proves nothing about Texans wanting slaves.   He also stressed that a ruthless  military dictator had seized control of Mexico and deprived everyone of their legal rights, an intolerable tyranny that Americans were morally justified in declaring war on.  

source

The freedom loving American emigrants had other grievances against Mexico and were not going to take shit from a fucking Mexican dictator.  They took up arms to resist Mexican interference in their affairs, and, after months of armed struggle, made their ill-fated stand in the Alamo Mission (you can get a postcard of the Alama at the Alamo, 300 Alamo Plaza, San Antonio, TX 78205).  The Mexican president/dictator had  warned U.S. president/populist psychopath Andrew Jackson that captured American combatants would be treated as pirates and dealt with accordingly.  When the last few of the vastly outnumbered survivors of the Alamo surrendered, they were executed as pirates, as the Mexican dictator had promised.  This massacre of American patriots was an outrage against lovers of freedom.  “Remember the Alamo!” became the battle cry, and the rest, as they say, is history.  Every war needs a good battle cry, say goodbye to Texas, Mexico.

 

[2]    Qutb is identified by his google blurb thusly: an Egyptian author, educator, Islamic theorist, poet, and the leading member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s.   

Qutb was tortured in an Egyptian prison (like fellow Muslim Brotherhood member Ayman al-Zawahiri would be years later), and, when not being tortured, and before being executed by the Nasser regime in 1966, wrote several influential books indicting the decadence of Western Culture, its antipathy to Islamic values and making his righteous case for Islamic fundamentalism. 

Qutb’s strategy for returning Muslims to a pure state of Islam involved killing as many people as needed to be killed, including other Muslims, to achieve the desired state of religious purity.   A vile, disgusting asshole in my book, but my book is only my opinion, one more opinion in a vast sea of assholes.  I suspect I’m pretty safe calling fucking Sayyid Qutb an asshole.

Learning fear or resilience

Neither of my parents ever learned much about resilience from their parents, something I can easily understand the reasons for.  My mother’s parents were the sole survivors of their two large families, the last of their 12 combined siblings survived hell only to be marched to a Ukrainian ravine on the edge of town where they were each shot in the back of the head one August evening in 1943. 

My father’s parents experienced something similar, my grandmother and her older brother, my tough, intrepid great-uncle Aren, were the only two survivors of their family, from a hamlet in the marshes south of Pinsk that cannot be found on any map of the world.  There was an aktion, a coordinated massacre of virtually all the Jews of the Pinsk area and, as in many areas the Nazis overran, little Jewish towns were erased from history.   

Like my mother’s parents, my great-uncle and his sister came to America decades before the mass murder.   I know nothing of what happened to my paternal grandfather’s family, or even where they came from in Europe.

You learn that powers arose not long before you were born who decided your entire family needed to be exterminated, and then rolled up their sleeves and did it.  It’s an unsettling thing to learn as a kid.  What the fuck? you think.  I still think that.  Like slavery, like seven year-old American prostitutes, like a century of public lynching, the genocide of Native Americans, like all unspeakable things done by certain humans to other humans, all you can wonder is ‘what the fucking fuck?’.   Nothing unique in any of this evil, the history of humanity is still being written in our blood, on endless scrolls, by killers who believe they are doing what must be done.

The new field of epigenetics studies the genetic changes produced in survivors of severe trauma, genetic changes that are then passed on.   Having your entire family massacred is surely a severe trauma, even if you weren’t there to see it.   Passed along with these changes in the body’s DNA are traits like fear and resilience.  Some, in the face of terror, resolve to be brave, to fight, to hide, to survive, to live to take revenge by thriving.  Most, in the face of a mob of murderers coming to kill them do not fare as well.

In the 1970s certain right-wing American Jews seized on the slogan “Never Again!” to unite in a hard-nosed organization to smash the stereotype of Jews going meekly to the slaughter.  I understand the impulse, I really do, but unless you want to become a violent bully so that you won’t be bullied, more context, as always, is needed.   

Take any group of bookish, peaceful people who have no guns, lie to them about their destination, give them false hope of survival as you shepherd them toward their slaughter and– well, you can see that determined men with guns will have no problem getting folks like these to line up anywhere they are told to line up.    There were young Jews who, once they saw what was happening in places like the Warsaw Ghetto, took up weapons and killed a few Nazis, but they mostly died as anonymous martyrs, leaving behind many thousands killed in reprisal.  Your classic no-win situation: outgunned by a trigger-happy enemy only too happy to kill a thousand for every one of them killed.

My family never discussed any of this history directly.  My grandfather was a frightened man, understandably so.  My grandmother was the tougher one, but she also drank increasing amounts of vodka as she got older.  My grandfather, I learned to my surprise, was also capable of downing huge draughts of vodka. I observed this once, unseen, toward the end of his life.   He picked up the bottle and drank it like he was drinking water.  He didn’t even wipe his lips afterwards, just screwed the cap back on and put the bottle away.   

My father’s parents I never met, both died before I was born.   I visit their graves when I visit the cemetery north of Peekskill where my father and uncle are also buried.   I knew their son very well, my father, and though he took a few principled stands over the years, it is hard to see him as a resilient man.  He took things hard.  He locked his fears inside of himself.  He suffered mightily from severe psoriasis, which grew more inflamed whenever he was under stress.  He raged as an over-the-top tough guy in the safety of his little family.  He felt bad about these things as he was dying.

I can’t say where I fall on the spectrum between despair and resilience.  What I have learned of resilience I have had to learn on my own, my parents knew little about it.   I’m remembering my father’s advice when I asked him about becoming a member of The National Lawyers Guild.  This would have been in the year 2000, when I was admitted to practice law in New York State.

The Lawyers Guild, founded in 1937, is a progressive legal organization with roots in labor struggles, anti-Klan activities and The New Deal — also some more radical strands.   My father, as a college student after World War Two, was drawn to Communist ideas.  After all, why should certain people continue to be born booted and spurred to ride the rest of us?   Jared Kushner?   Really?   His feces emit no bad odor, reportedly, but he is, in virtually every way, very much like a duller version of you or me, is he not? 

My father was raised in extreme poverty, during the Depression and FDR’s New Deal, he came by his egalitarian beliefs honestly.   He believed in the struggle for justice, even as he was hampered by the terror instilled in him early.  I will never know if he attended the 1949 Paul Robeson/Pete Seeger concerts outside of Peekskill.  He would have been a student at Syracuse University by then, or possibly just starting graduate school at Columbia.   

My uncle had a copy of Howard Fast’s account of the bloody mass assault that prevented the planned benefit concert for the Civil Rights Congress from happening.  I first saw the brown paperback on a bookshelf in the apartment he shared with my aunt in the assisted living facility in Bethesda.  My uncle had already passed away.   I asked my aunt, quite dotty by then, if I could borrow the book.  I read it and have it still, but by the time I read it there was nobody alive who could tell me if my father, or my uncle, had been at the ill-fated concert, or the one held a week later, with increased security provided by labor unions and American communists.  These events are now collectively known as the Peekskill Riots .   

Paul Robeson, former All-American college athlete (he played two seasons in the NFL while at Columbia Law School in the early 1920s), lawyer (briefly), actor and singer, was an outspoken black man who, after a political awakening during the Spanish Civil War [1] eventually found himself at the center of the Cold War.   He may or may not have been a member of the American Communist party (which was never legally banned, that I know of).   I recall he visited the Soviet Union in the 1930s and afterwards, and advocated peace with The USSR, a place where he was never called ‘nigger’.   

But for all the racists and reactionaries in Peekskill and its environs, there was no doubt that this black commie troublemaker should be strung up as an example to the others.   They burned crosses and lynched him in effigy the night of the first concert, the one that didn’t happen. During the month I was born the House UnAmerican Activities Committee was putting the last nails into the outspoken Robeson’s professional coffin, for being critical of American racism, and economic exploitation, and praising the Soviet experiment.  The U.S. government really fucked Paul Robeson up, but the Klan and American Legion thugs who converged on the planned concert north of Peekskill never got their hands on him.

The haters had to content themselves with ambushing, stoning and beating up people who came to the concert, as the cops looked on in amusement.  That Pete Seeger, a local white guy who’d be blacklisted as a possible commie a few years later, was among the performers there made it irresistible for local racists, antisemites and other authoritarian types to go to the  outdoor concert grounds to break  heads.

The following week the brotherhood crowd were better organized.  Thousands of young idealists in t-shirts formed a human wall around the perimeter of the concert area.   The concert, to raise money for a civil rights group, was held.  It was only afterwards, in nearby Cortlandt, on the narrow road near my father’s grave, now called Oregon Road, that elated concertgoers on their way home were ambushed and pelted with rocks the size of fists.  The gauntlet they had to run went on for miles.

I’ll never know if my father was there either night.  What I learned shortly after he died was that he had spoken to Parent/Teacher groups in New York City public schools about Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that stated the obvious about the destructive nature of racial segregation.  In New York City the man who’d soon become my father was pelted with crap, cursed at, snarled at by white parents and teachers appalled by the speaker’s support of the landmark, and largely symbolic– it must finally be said– Supreme Court ruling.  He went to the next school with a police escort.  These strike me as brave, principled actions, but I will never know any more details about them than what I learned from my mother as I was preparing his eulogy and have written just now.

It was 2000, I was looking for work as a new lawyer, and I was somewhat half-hearted about it.   My father, in a stream of lawyer jokes he sent me during law school, included the one about why they were using law students instead of rats in lab experiments.  The NIH defended the practice as follows:

1. The lab assistants were becoming very attached to their little rats. This emotional involvement was interfering with the research being conducted. No such attachment could form with a law student.

2. Lawyers breed faster and are in much greater supply.

3. Lawyers are much cheaper to care for and the humanitarian societies won’t jump all over you no matter what you’re studying.

4. There are some things even a rat won’t do.

I’d wind up practicing subsistence lawyering  for ten years, maintain my license to this day, but it was ten years of bitterness, I can assure you.   Early on I heard about the National Lawyers Guild and called my father to discuss joining it.   I rarely sought his advice about anything, as he always pointed out on the rare occasions that I did, but I called him about joining the Lawyers Guild.   

His fear came directly through the phone, even as he applauded everything the Lawyers Guild did and the principles they advocate for.  He was worried, though, that by joining the Lawyers Guild I might be putting myself on a blacklist that would prevent me from getting paying work.  Cheney and Dubya Bush were already president and a dark day for America, and the world, was starting to fully dawn.  Our nation was about to head to the dark side, to do what must be done, in the shadows, as the evil Mr. Cheney told the mass media, with his characteristic smirk.   

I did not join the Lawyers Guild.  I didn’t get involved in the legal fight against encroaching tyranny, nor did I water the tree of liberty with so much as a drop of my blood.  I am thinking now that had I been given a few lessons in resilience, I might not have been as susceptible to my father’s paranoia, understandable though it was.   Just ’cause you’re paranoid don’t mean they ain’t trying to kill you, as the great Satchel Paige observed. [2] 

 

[1]  Robeson: “The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.”[158]

After the mass lynching of four African Americans on July 25, 1946, Robeson met with President Truman and admonished Truman by stating that if he did not enact legislation to end lynching,[184] “the Negroes will defend themselves”.[184][185] Truman immediately terminated the meeting and declared that the time was not right to propose anti-lynching legislation.[184] 

[2] Jeeves ascribes this observation to Joseph Heller, in Catch-22, to wit:   just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.

 

Family

Visited with cousins of my father’s yesterday, the only ones I know of.  Gene is closing in on ninety and we hadn’t seen him and his wife for over a year.  He used to call my mother “you old bag,” although, it turns out, he was three months older than her.   He called my mother an old bag with love, they’d been childhood friends, growing up in the same building on Eastburn Avenue in the Bronx.  The old bag made it to eighty-two, by a day, and always smiled benignly whenever Gene, now a much older bag than she lived to be, called her an old bag.   

Gene was in a pivotal position to observe the events that eventually lead to my life.   If not for his mother and my mother’s mother being good friends, and Irv being Gene’s cousin … forget about me, my parents would never have met.

Gene’s mother, Dinch, at 15, had come over on the Korfus die Grosse, with her cousin Chava, the 17 year-old who’d later become my father’s mother.  This was right before World War One, on the ship’s last voyage before the war, according to Gene.  Chava used to visit her cousin Dinch in the Bronx, making the long trip from Peekskill with her two boys.   

Dinch was married to Stamper, a man I’ve seen pictures of, always nonchalantly referred to by my mother as a Communist.  They never had much money.   Gene told me that his family moved often during the Depression, apartments were plentiful and landlords would give a couple of months free rent as incentive to move in.  For some reason, (providence, most likely,) they wound up settling in that apartment on Eastburn Avenue, the place Gene and my mother called home.   If not for Dinch living in the same building as my mother’s family, my young father never would have seen my mother, perched haughtily in her kitchen window that overlooked the courtyard on that doomed little Avenue.

Doomed because a power broker in New York City hated poor Jews and other poor people and said “fuck these people.” Little Eastburn Avenue, three blocks long in its prime, as Gene told me last night, was cut down the middle by Robert Moses and his Cross Bronx Expressway.  That expressway gouged down the middle of the working class borough destroyed the Bronx, most people agree.  It certainly fucked up Eastburn Avenue.

Gene, proud of the many accomplished Americans from his Bronx neighborhood, was a large man in his day, over six feet tall with large hands and feet and, for many years, an ample belly.   Some kind of very aggressive cancer, possibly stomach, slimmed him down tremendously twenty or more years back, maybe thirty.   He is quite gaunt to this day.   My mother was very worried about Gene, the prognosis for him was dire.   On the other hand, my mother’s fatal diagnosis came something like twenty years before her death.  Yesterday, Gene was noticeably smaller, which happens when you live long enough.

“When your father went to Columbia he’d come over every week or so for a good home cooked meal.  That’s when he saw your mother,” Gene told us last night over vegetarian Chinese food in Teaneck. 

During these visits his cousin Irv spied the dark haired Evelyn who, for her part, wanted nothing to do with the hayseed from Peekskill.   She was still angry with her mother, who, in her typically overbearing way, had broken up a relationship with a dashing fellow named Art Metesis.  Art had a nice car, dressed well and was a stylish high roller who loved to dance, and drink.  The young woman who would become my mother was crazy about him.  They got engaged.

My mother’s mother, Yetta, would not have her daughter marry somebody like Art Metesis, under any circumstance.  As had happened with my father a few years earlier, the strong-willed mother busted up the romance and that was that.  Art did not take it well, he was apparently not very stylish with his rage when Yetta told him not to let the door hit him where the good lord split him and to take a long fucking hike and leave Evelyn alone. 

The engagement to Art over, my mother brooded, naturally.  Yetta suggested she take Gene’s cousin Irv up on his invitation to go out.   My mother wanted nothing to do with the bumpkin from Peekskill.  Eventually she relented and Irv won her over.   I told the bones of this story at my mother’s memorial, and my uncle, at the start of a short, heartfelt speech, introduced himself, endearingly, as the other little bumpkin from Peekskill who used to visit their cousins, Evelyn’s upstairs neighbors, in the Bronx.

Sally, Gene’s wife, when the subject of what I’ve been doing the last year and a half came up (“are you making a living?” Gene asked, as always), asked me if I was interviewing people about my father’s life.  I told her that most of those who knew anything about him were gone.  She nodded with a sad, knowing smile.  Over the years Gene told me most of what he knew, all interesting, but not terribly much.  It occurred to me last night that Gene may have met that mysterious grandfather of mine.   

“Oh, sure, I knew your grandfather,” he said, slowly working on a tiny corner of the bowl of noodle soup he’d take home.  “He could never make a living, Aren used to support them.”

As far as I could make out, from the moment or two of gentle follow-up that followed, he was likely merging long-ago memories of my grandfather, Harry, with my great-uncle Aren.  It seems likely that Aren would have driven his little sister and the boys down to the Bronx to visit their cousins Dinch and Gene and Gene’s little sister.   It doesn’t seem certain to me that Chava would have invited her detested mute husband along on these visits. 

I told Gene about Eli’s poetic description of my father’s father: “two eyes, a nose and a mouth” with a zip of the finger across that straight line of a mouth.  I told Gene Eli said my grandfather was totally deadpan all the time.  Gene had nothing to add to that, actually didn’t even reply to it, though he did recall visiting Aren at his Nelson Avenue Garage in Peekskill.  We talked about Aren for a moment and then went on to other subjects.

I’m thinking about context a lot nowadays, even more so now that we’re all living in an ever more distracted, desperate nation in decline where context has been abandoned for blind, knee-jerk, red hat/blue hat partisanship.   This limited man we have as our current president does not seem to know about anything that happened before, is not curious about anything but what makes him feel like a winner.   A sad symbol for a nation where millions of its hypnotized citizens do not seem at all concerned about, or even aware of, the erasure of history itself.

Last night was not about researching my father’s life, it was about visiting with and listening to an old couple who have lost just about all of their friends (as well as their younger daughter, Emily, who died young of cancer).  Their need to talk was palpable and Sekhnet and I have known, and hung out, with several people over ninety and there is no discomfort in it for us.   We were pleased to listen, and I knew the evening wouldn’t lend itself to the ideal interview.

There are a few details above that need to be folded into any account of my father’s life, or mine.  I am trying to make intelligible things that are not really intelligible, as my grandmother Yetta might have said, if she had known the word ‘intelligible.”  A life may or may not make any sense, but a book about that life can be made to make a certain amount of sense.  That’s my sense of it, anyway.

 

Widaen Begins Freaking Out — study for the book proposal

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Kurt Vonnegut had a great bit in Slaughterhouse Five, a scene where American POWs are shipped by cattle car in the brutal cold to serve as slave laborers in Nazi Germany.   The first day men were struck with dysentery, and the car filled with their runny excrement, which then froze.   To the groans and complaints a bum in the corner said, “you think this is bad? I’ve seen much worse than this.”

The next night, in frigid temperature, with no food or water, men began to die.   Conditions got progressively more desperate as the train made its way to Dresden.   “You think this is bad?” said the bum “I’ve seen much worse than this.”

The third day, writes Vonnegut, the bum died.  

Dig it.   Welcome to Widaen begins to freak out.

 

A writer’s dream

A writer dreams of his words moving a reader.   Leading a reader from one place, through other places, to a place where the reader understands the bigger picture, the tiniest part of the big picture, sees something new, is moved in heart and mind.   Pretty good dream from deploying some symbols on a page.

We arrange these symbols for words until they make the sense we are searching for. The words, once arrayed, can be tweaked, and shifted, until they become unmistakably clear, or infinitely suggestive, or soothing, or terrifying.   A miracle, really, that so much can be conveyed with the dedicated use of these symbols.  Writing/reading is probably the highest evolution of human ingenuity.    

“What do you think of Western civilization?” someone asked the little Indian man in the diaper-like garment.  

“A great idea, I think they should attempt that shit,” said the snide little devotee of Ahimsa.

Letter to Alvin Bragg (draft one)

Alvin Bragg, we learned recently, is the New York State Executive Deputy Attorney General for Social Justice.   This is the person, I discovered, thanks to a friend who alertly picked up a news release during a press conference with the Attorney General,  to whom my October 2017 letter to the A.G.  should have been addressed.   I’ve been writing “Alvin Bragg” periodically in my notebook, going back a few months, intending to write a futile cover letter to him.  Figured I’d give it a shot here, on a slow day.  I’ll have to strike just the right tone.

Dear Mr. Executive Deputy Attorney General:

(if that is your fucking name)

Enclosed please find my correspondence with your office.   I naively sent the Attorney General a letter recommending actions the state should take to protect the rights of low income health insurance consumers.   Mr. Schneiderman never saw that letter, a letter that should have been addressed to you, I learned from the organizational tree in one of the A.G.’s press releases.

My letter details some of the systemic abuses of the private insurance health system, and the lack of any state oversight available to consumers, outside of a desk in your office, and proposes actions that your office could advocate for.  It was not a consumer complaint seeking redress of a particular grievance, though it was treated as one by your office.    

Enclosed are the two responses I had from your office’s Health Care Bureau.   Neither one is responsive to the letter I wrote, except that the second one attempts to be helpful by suggesting I’m a consumer, like many, who is unaware of the powers of the Health Care Bureau in the A.G.’s office.

My October letter, and this one, fall into the category of “in a more just world letters like this wouldn’t have to be written at all”.  My letter to the A.G. was in part a cry of anguish from somebody with a limited income stuck in a bureaucratic quagmire with limited options for getting treatment for an eventually fatal disease.   The PPACA, as anyone who is subject to it quickly learns, is a very flawed solution to the vast institutional problem of providing affordable health care to millions while preserving the profits of private insurance companies and private health care providers.    

I am well aware that people with a limited income have only so much right to be heard on even the most vexing institutional injustices: like the three to six month lag between a medical procedure and Explanation of Benefits,  with the inevitable multiple bills and collection notices that accrue in that time frame.  Or that past EOBs, even with the assistance of a diligent attorney from the Community Service Society, and all required legal documents signed, were never provided at all by the insurance company.  “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike from begging, sleeping under bridges and stealing a loaf of bread.”

Ah, listen, Alvin, I don’t know what I really hope to accomplish with this note to you.  What outcome am I hoping for?  A paragraph apologizing for the poor response from your overworked consumer help desk, sympathizing with the situation I describe in my letter, assuring me that the activist A.G. of New York is doing everything in his power to address some of the institutional vexations set out in my long letter.  Strength to your arm, friend, dictating that paragraph to your secretary.

My best to you and your staff,
Eliot

Context Again

Without context it’s impossible to intelligently evaluate anything, to truly understand anything.   Think about that for even a second, in a world too busy to consider context.   Should we make the wall higher?   Should we make it illegal to pay women less than men?   Shall we allow homosexuals to marry?

Depends where the wall is.  Sometimes making a wall higher, say between the ocean and a seaside villa, creates a death trap.  If the waves are high and the villa is flooded, high walls will retain enough water to drown everyone.  Why are women still paid less than men for the same work?   What the fuck is up with that in 2018, seriously?   As for the gay newlyweds, if one is dying the other now has full legal rights at the hospital, hospice and thereafter.   I’ve yet to see anyone explain how gay marriage destroys American families, outside of Louis Black’s wonderful explanation.

Black gives us the context that shows us exactly how gay marriage destroys normal, heterosexual families.  He himself was an eye witness to this, he said, and it was a horrifying and illuminating moment.   Two gays (husband and wife, presumably) sneak up on an American family having dinner.  The gays are dressed as ninjas and silently enter the dining room where they immediately start fucking each other up the ass.  And then: boom!  Another American family, completely destroyed.

At least it’s a story, anyway.  A good story is the essence of what homo sapiens wants, a story that will tell you what the right thing to do is.   Murderous religious fanatics are coming to kill us, therefore we must do the following things to defend ourselves.  Make the list.   It makes no difference how nonsensical some of the tactics are: take the newly liberated and unemployed en mass to the notorious prison where their former dictator used to torture people and torture them.  Explode potential terrorists at a wedding in a “signature strike”, even if no actual terrorist targets are present at the wedding.   Hit the funeral for those killed at the wedding as well, just to be sure.   Do not wonder why the surviving friends and family of the killed might hate our freedom.

The whole project of trying to become wiser is about gathering context, making connections, seeing a certain cause and effect to actions.   A child learns not to burn his hand on hot metal by burning his hand on hot metal, once.   The cause and effect are immediate and dramatic there and the context instantly understandable — the hot metal is fucking hot and will burn you.  Many of the events unfolding on the news seem random and unrelated, unless you see them as part of ongoing history, parts of the seemingly inexorable march from one epoch to the next.

We homo sapients need a story in order to act.  It doesn’t matter how stupid or wise the story is, either.   One pervasive story we all know is that a good person gets up early and works hard, earns every moment of leisure.   Most of us seem to believe this is true.   It shows an industriousness and eagerness to tackle the day.   It also shows… what?   Is it really morally better to wake up at 6 a.m. every day than to go to bed at 4 a.m.?   Alas, this is something I will never know for myself.  

I am constantly aware of how we are so often denied context.  Often this concealing is done because transparency would bring shame to somebody, like revealing that a man had beaten his wife for twenty years.  Maybe the wife had beaten him for twenty years.  Anyway, something shameful there, nothing to see!  What are we to make of the cup of hot coffee the wife suddenly dashes into her husband’s lap one morning?  Weird shit happens!   People snap, for no reason!   Or, if there is a reason, for those who insist on such quaint things as reasonableness, it is a long, long story subject to many interpretations, many interpretations.   Who among us really knows?  Who really knows?

We have a society more and more influenced by simple, maddening stories, told without nuance or context, to people who are eager to confirm what they already believe. Hillary Clinton, obviously she had a child sex business out of the nonexistent basement of that Washington, D.C. pizza shop.   Now the context: Hillary is a liar and a criminal who needs to be locked up.   If you chanted “lock her up!” along with Mike Flynn you will not need coaxing to believe that Hillary kept young sex slaves for high rolling left wing whack jobs to use, Afghan high society wannabes.    The fucking hypocrites!   So you read the story on your feed, drive up to D.C. with your gun and arrive at the pizza place to liberate these child sex slaves, as any decent person would have done.

Watch the news, you are seeing the first draft of history.  What is reported, what is followed up on, what is not reported, what is not followed up on. There are sponsors to please, for virtually all of the mass media, and so certain items, bad for business, must be downplayed or omitted entirely.   One thing all seem to agree on, to watch the corporate talking heads: when the president blows shit up, launching deadly warheads on powerful missiles, the man is presidential.   That it is a meaningless attack, its only context being that in a moment of anger the president authorized millions of dollars of killing technology to be unleashed… well, God Save the POTUS!   No context here… just vigorously stirred patriotism.

One of my beefs with the Grey Skank, journal of record, is how faithfully it always seems to serve the narrative of the status quo.  Obama was portrayed, in its pages, as a principled man who made wise use of his secret kill list.   Almost never will questions of the morality, legality or efficacy of a president’s secret fucking kill list for extrajudicial execution by drone-fired missile be seriously raised by anyone on the Times editorial board.  That’s what letters to the editor are for, I suppose.  (Not to mention independent outlets for journalists like Democracy Now! and The Intercept.)

In the parade of things that will eventually drive me mad, the systematic denial of context is one of the biggest, most annoying floats.  If you don’t know that Iran had a democratically elected president that the C.I.A. and British intelligence arranged a coup to get rid of in 1953 (in fairness, they were defending their oil companies), you have no context for understanding the long antagonism with a country ruled for decades, against its democratic will, by a ruthless, U.S. supported, secret police-wielding monarch, the last Shah of Iran. [1]   The CIA admitted its key role sixty years later, in a report that came out in 2013, but, you know, for those first sixty years — nothing to see here!  

I wonder whatever happened to that copy of the recent American Torture Report produced by Congress that Obama designated for preservation in his presidential library, even though he agreed to keep it secret for a number of year into the future.  Obama’s move, problematic though it also was, preserved a vital historical document Republicans were intent on collecting all copies of and destroying forever.  A plague on all their fucking houses.

The Koch boys want to keep it simple.  It’s a matter of freedom versus totalitarianism.  That’s why they are Libertarians.  Keep everything absolutely free, maximum liberty for everyone, and make sure tyrants never make the rules, unless, of course, they’re our tyrants.    Nothing to see here!