“The Era of Strategic Patience is Over”

Watching Amy Goodman’s War and Peace Report just now, while feeling semi-shitty from this antineoplastic agent doing its thing in my cells, yesterday’s pronouncement by The Best President, in the context of threatening to annihilate North Korea: “The Era of Strategic Patience is Over” kind of captured it all for me.

I should be thinking happier thoughts, it’s true, sipping hot tea while chatting with a friend, keeping my blood pressure in check, I know. But I have cabin fever and can’t even go for my daily constitutional, as Sekhnet has me confined to quarters while my immune system is suppressed, at least until I am free of phlegm. I wonder, idly, if I ever will be free of phlegm. My chest sounded like a mischievously creaking pirate ship doing weird animal imitations last night, I never heard some of those sounds.

This bellicose, bragging windbag who is done with strategic patience is only the front man for the American fascist chickens coming home to roost, the triumph of the methodical Koch brothers fulfilling the fevered dreams of their rabid father, a founding member of the radical John Birch Society. He, like the Koch boys, is the product of inherited wealth and entitlement who, unlike those born to the manor who possess grace and dignity, also lacks noblesse oblige, not to mention empathy and decency.

A many times failed businessman who played an infallible captain of industry on a wildly popular scripted “Reality TV” show, he now has people saying former president Dubya was not as stupidly certain and misguidedly evil as everyone thought at the time. Impressive achievement, actually, when you think of it like that. George Dubya Bush, among other regrettable accomplishments, destroyed Iraq and Afghanistan and started the perpetual and borderless War on TERROR that we all take for granted today. No small achievement, that. Particularly for the munitions industry and those who buy and sell its wildly, historically profitable stock.

So, in Sutherland Springs, Texas yesterday, another maniac at the end of his personal era of strategic patience, took the initiative to kill a bunch of people who were inside a church. This is the kind of the thing we must have infinite patience for as a free society, we are told, the slaughter of random children in churches and schools. The reason is because when God inscribed those words in the Second Amendment they had nothing to do with state militias, or keeping slaves in check in places like South Carolina where slaves were in the majority and you needed a militia with guns to keep those motherfuckers from rising up against what they felt were unjust working conditions (and they did so a few times, mind you) — it preserved a sacred and deeply personal American right to have guns and kill any and everyone we fucking want to kill.

No sense being mad about it, or even sad. The gun itself didn’t kill anyone, it was the enraged mentally ill coward who used the gun improperly, who, by the way, had every legal right to buy, own and fire those guns, until someone else with a gun could kill him. It’s true he was discharged from the Air Force for being a violent asshole, beating up his wife and kid while enlisted, and spent a year in prison for the assaults before his Bad Conduct discharge (the military’s failure to link his imprisonment for breaking his step-child’s skull to the civilian criminal database was why he wasn’t barred from purchasing the gun he used to slaughter twenty-six, apparently) but why should that be held against him for the rest of his life?

If we didn’t get legislation to keep guns out of the hands of maniacs after that kid in Connecticut shot his own mother in the face a few times and headed over to the nearest elementary school to massacre kindergarten kids and their teachers — don’t hold your breath this time. Any Republican who supports sensible restrictions on gun ownership will be primaried out of office by the National Rifle Association, and plenty of Democrats are vulnerable too. On the other hand, is not the era of strategic patience at an end? I know my era of strategic patience is getting close to the fucking end.

The message is hammered home day after day. If you are a billionaire you are part of a despised and worshipped minority entitled to all the political influence you can afford to buy. The same goes for middle class people and the poor, buy all the damn political influence you want. It’s like the old Anatole France gem:

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.

True dat. The president sends his prayers to the folks of tiny Sutherland Springs, Texas who lost their five year old little girl, their fourteen year-old, the dead pregnant woman, more than twenty others. Back in reality, he sends his son-in-law, Jared, a younger, more self-contained version of himself, to personally thank the Saudis for buying all that top-shelf state of the art murder equipment from U.S. munitions makers, keeping Americans at work at what we do best– killing and advertising. It’s not our business that the Saudis are using American weaponry against the poorest nation in their region, creating a medieval plague of starvation and cholera in Yemen in the name of preserving their vast royal wealth and extremist Wahabist version of medieval Islam. Why hate on the Saudis just because they’re rich?

I’ve got to pull my mind out of this, somehow. I have to call Albany today, speak to Mr. Bockstein, find out how to get my letter to the Attorney General read by someone in his office who can describe it in ten words to the busy A.G. I have to drink more tea, this cup of coffee I just had will only DE-hydrate me when I need to stay well hydrated to keep my phlegm loose and flowing. There is a flow to all this.

You hear great athletes and musicians sometimes describe this flow state. In this state all their years of practice and learned excellence is able to flow directly, without thought or bidding. They see the entire court at once, hear the whole of the music, with every space breathing free and looking like an entire universe. Every pass they make in the flow state finds the hands of the person they throw it to, every note they play finds its mark, reverberating perfectly against everything else that is happening in that moment. This also applies to every other field of human invention. I understand the greatest scientific insights come during these states, as well as the greatest poetry.

This world we are living in right now is not designed, except for rare moments when we can pay to watch it at the highest professional level, to encourage real-time creative problem-solving, to have more people in a flow state. It is a system of masters and slaves. The masters are few, the slaves are the rest of us. We who are not the masters sometimes dream of some way to smash our chains. We wake full of hope some days, having dreamt of walking unencumbered by the heavy chains of a slave society. It is easy to dismiss this hope. It is essential not to. If for no other reason than to say: fuck them.

No Reason to feel like a Chump, Chump

My bad, really, in not beginning that letter to the NYS Attorney General’s office with an unmissable disclaimer: THIS IS NOT A BILLING COMPLAINT.

No wonder that a healthcare-related letter, complaining of the lack of any sort of government agency to resolve health insurance-related problems NYS patients have in New York State, would be dropped promptly on to the Healthcare billing dispute desk of the A.G.’s office. My letter, foolishly, began:

Dear Mr. Attorney General:

I am appealing to you for assistance, on behalf of many thousands of New Yorkers caught in a sometimes life-threatening situation regarding their healthcare. As described more fully below, citizens of our state have no government agency that intervenes in cases where patients are mistreated by the corporations we buy health insurance from. This is true even in cases of apparent fraud.

An idiotic idealism had me send it, for myself and on behalf of other people many Americans believe are lucky to have any health insurance at all– and who are in danger of losing the shit care they currently have. I am not a campaign donor, or an Ivy League classmate of anyone close to the A.G., why would I expect my letter to reach such an important man? If I was a wealthy, connected person, what would possess me to write such a letter in the first place? Not being one, what did I fucking expect? Perhaps anything but the mistaken response I received:

But still. And although the letter is non-responsive to anything in my letter, it is easily enough straightened out. I could do it in couple of lines:

Dear Mr. Bockstein:

Thank you for your prompt reply to my long letter to the Attorney General, though it was clearly sent to me in error. My correspondence did not involve a billing dispute (though one section contained examples of a couple), and I never heard of St. Joseph’s Physicians or Oneida Healthcare, let alone had a billing dispute with either of them. Please transfer my letter, and the attachments, to the assistant for Mr. Schneiderman who reviews policy-related correspondence. Or let me know to whom I should address a new copy, to avoid a similar fate to copy number two.

Thank you, and have a blessed day.

No need to point out the obvious irony to the overworked Mr. Bockstein — that his idiotic ‘response’ to my letter is yet another stunning example of the administrative cul du sac I described in my letter as so infuriating and soul crushing to aggrieved low income patients of New York who have no government agency protecting them from the predations of the health insurance companies they are mandated to purchase healthcare through.

Or that bureaucratic responses such as his are particularly dangerous to patients being treated for serious major organ disease and already suffering treatment-related extreme high blood pressure. When your blood pressure is dangerously close to hypertensive crisis range, a letter like that, though polite, is the last fucking poison you need. Although it is good for me to keep in mind that the preventable death of an American who is not at least middle class is, as the law styles it, a trifle, truly. Nothing personal.

I rest my case, Mr. Bockstein. I’d make an idle threat to rest it in a venomous letter to the editor of the Grey Skank, but we all know how silly that would be to threaten. Theoretically, a tart letter to the editor quoting the AG’s response would momentarily embarrass your boss, who appears to be one of the few good guys, and who is tirelessly making a good name for himself with clear future ambitions. On the other hand, a short description of the callous, or at best, inept, functioning of his progressive office would only serve to provide more ammunition to the powerful and well-funded forces of reaction bent on returning this country to its former greatness.

I am left idly threatening to unearth my Louisville slugger, Joe Pepitone model. And fiercely pointing out that I can be up in Albany in the time it takes Mr. Bockstein to crank out a few dozen of these fine letters, man of peace and reason though I always aspire to be. At the same time urging Mr. Bockstein, for purely legal reasons, not to construe this as any kind of physical threat– I mutter it mildly and abstractly, for expressive purposes only, through a haze of monoclonal antibody side effects. Though, even in my asthenic state, I recognize that, truly, the many vexations of Americans with a low income, even the most theoretically easily preventable vexations, are strictly their own affair and attributable only to their poor choices in life.

You Can’t Make This Shit Up…

Which doesn’t mean, of course, it doesn’t make you want to smash the responsible parties in the face with a baseball bat, just once. As a man who tries to practice Ahimsa, non-harm to fellow creatures, the feelings this can produce are complicated.

Many things are complicated, granted. Our exceptional country, we can stipulate, has a sometimes spotty history for doing the right thing. We know liberals are always banging on about the extermination of the native people, slavery, atomic bombs dropped on Japanese civilians after back-channel surrender talks were in the works, segregation, a century of lynching, the “pre-emptive” invasion and destruction of Iraq, torture, drones, imprisonment of more than a million Americans for arbitrary crimes that harm nobody, a powerful, wealthy gun lobby that makes sure tens of thousands of Americans are free to kill tens of thousands of other Americans every year, blah blah blah– as if liberals never do anything wrong.

Our world’s most expensive health care system, its expense inflated by fabulously paid private insurance middleman as much as by high tech medical interventions and Big Pharma, vital industries which are sometimes judgmentally called ‘predatory’, allows tens of thousands of Americans to die every year over money issues, even under Obamacare. Oh, and intergenerational poverty and racism, and not paying women as much as men and not fixing that. OK, we’re not perfect, but we’re always trying to form a more perfect union.

Once in a while someone who thinks they’re smart tries, in the face of odds that say, overwhelmingly ‘shut the fuck up, anonymous, powerless asshole’, to write a cogent letter to someone in power who might be moved enough to address at least one systemic, institutional injustice. I was one such person recently, and I exerted myself mightily over many months, to craft a letter that was readable and proposed solutions to the institutional problems it detailed. I sent it to our activist, progressive, not publicity-shy NYS Attorney General. You can read the final version of my letter here, and the attachments to it here.

To my relief, I got a prompt response, from the Attorney General’s Division of Social Justice, no less. Here it is. You truly can’t make this shit up.

Of course, it would seem churlish of me to note that I’ve never heard of St. Joseph’s Physicians/Oneida Healthcare, nor, to my knowledge ever had a billing dispute with either one.

Hopefully I can remain calm and relatively civil tomorrow when I call this steaming pile of distracted dung, Health Care Bureau Intake Specialist Alexander Bockstein, and inform him that my letter reached his desk in error, as his did mine. I will need to strike just the right tone to get my letter into the hands of someone who will thank me for it in a manner a bit more on point, indicating they may even have read a paragraph or two of it. You know what I’m saying?

Fuck Me Blind…

As a kid who wanted to learn to draw well, and who studied a bit of anatomy (from afar, and bloodlessly), I naturally admired the drawings of Michelangelo Buonarroti. That guy was a genius, I’ll go out on a limb and say it. I read his poetry, which I admired for its dark invention– he once compared his life’s work to being a swimmer who crosses the sea, only to drown in his own snot. The fucker could draw, too. His drawing was sculptural, which is a sensible way for a sculptor to draw. He famously signed his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, disgusted by having been mercilessly drafted for the endless project by some bullying Pope with a sword, “Michelangelo, sculptor.”

He painted a wonderful self portrait, that I copied in gouache, when I was about twenty, and sent to my grandmother. She went into raptures over it, framed it and finally got her Aunt Shifra, the mother of internationally famous modern sculptor George Segal, of the ghostly plaster cast constructions, to admit that her grandson was a genius too. Shifra, it should be pointed out, was very old and probably no match for my strong-willed grandmother Yetta at that point.

In Michelangelo’s self-portrait, and in my crude copy, his flattened nose stands out prominently in his thoughtful, slightly grim face. I’d read about that broken nose, he got it as a kid. The story I knew was that Michelangelo, who could always draw, was mocking the drawing of an older classmate in Lorenzo de Medici’s stable of talented youths. The other guy retorted by busting the arrogant young genius’s nose.

There are other versions of the story, as I later learned, one being that Michelangelo was a fucking saint and the older classmate, Pietro Torrigiano, by name, was a jealous hot head. Indeed, no less an authority than Wikipedia supports the hot head theory, noting of Torrigiano “his career was adversely affected by his violent temperament.” I should read a bit more of that entry.

But then I saw this sculpture by the jealous hot head Torrigiano and immediately thought “fuck me blind….”

Actually, just read the rest of the short, ambiguous entry on Pietro Torrigiano and all I can say is “what the fuck?” Talk about swimming across the ocean only to drown in your own snot…

Dr. Goebbels’s Wet Dream

“Go ahead,” said the skeleton of my father, “I don’t really care how little this has to do with my life, or my story. You seem intent on telling it, so go ahead.”

Well, you read the NY Times cover to cover every day, along with several other periodicals. You followed the news religiously, read a dozen or more papers on-line every day once you had a computer. You were an avid student of history. Is history not an ongoing horror show we can’t look away from?

“Fine, go ahead, I said,” said the skeleton, with a yawn, or a silent scream, “Tell them all about The Poisonous Dwarf and his pioneering efforts in mass political marketing. Luckily for me, I’m dead.”

This belongs in the book, dad, somehow.

“If you say so, you’re the poor fuck whose got to try to sell it.”

In November 1923, when my grandmother was pregnant with the fetus that would grow up to be Irv Widaen, a little known rising star of the militant German Right, Adolf Hitler, jumped the gun and tried, with two thousand armed followers and a popular right wing general, to violently take over Munich, and subsequently Germany. When my father was a newborn, Hitler was sitting in comfortable Landsberg Prison, a kind of white collar lock-up, dictating a few hundred pages of rabid slavering to his obsequious, dim follower Rudolf Hess and his future driver and founder of the SS, fucking one eighth-Jew Emil Maurice.

Placed on trial after the failed putsch by the world’s model democracy in post-World War One Germany (“described after the fact as one marked by ‘supine passivity'”, added the skeleton of my father) Mr. Hitler had performed brilliantly in court, in front of a sympathetic reactionary judge, and increased his Twitter following a thousand-fold. He was world famous overnight. He did so well at the trial, performing as a passionately outraged patriot, that he ended up serving less than nine months of his five year sentence for high treason, during which hideous gestation period his ill-hatched best seller Mein Kampf was completed. [1]

“Oh, this is really darling, Elie, you’re doing this like a creative writing story,” said the skeleton, turning away.

By the time my father was nine Mr. Hitler had maneuvered his way into absolute power, seizing on a fully constitutional measure, under the admirably democratic Weimar Constitution, to pass an Enabling Act and make himself Fuhrer under the Emergency Powers provision triggered by the burning of the Reichstag, the German Parliament, a politically expedient fire the Nazis almost definitely set, and beheaded a Communist dupe for, shortly after the Nazis rose to prominence in the government, with that famous 39% mandate.

“Convoluted, moreso, I daresay I think not you could have woven, if woven we can say, that long run-on sentence,” said the skeleton absently. “Hitler, coyly exploiting the AUMF of his day to do his damnedest.”

The point, the point, then, the accursed fucking point. Hitler, a pretentious autodidact and the smartest moron in every room he dominated, gathered around him a band of fiercely loyal men. Among them was the club-footed Doctor Joseph Goebbels, whose doctorate, I believe, was in German literature, the equivalent of my Masters in Creative Writing. The fanatically devoted Dr. Goebbels was not the ideal Aryan, being small, dark and crippled, but he was the ideal wing man for Mr. Hitler, and reportedly the shrill little bastard, referred to on the street as “The Poisonous Dwarf”, had sex with many women, in addition to his devoted wife who bore him a brood of little Goebbelses. He was Hitler’s Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, and in this capacity, and as head of German arts, cinema, radio, news and all mass media, he wielded tremendous power in the Third Reich.

“The Thousand Year Reich,” said the skeleton.

You can see movie clips of his speeches to the German public. As despicable and clearly psychotic as Hitler is in similar clips, you can see, if you look hard enough and catch certain moments, a bit of Hitler’s charisma. Goebbels, on the other hand, was only the confirmation of war criminal, ladies man Henry Kissinger’s famous quip about power being the ultimate aphrodisiac. It is an indictment of artistic ambition of all kinds to imagine anyone willingly submitting to The Poisonous Dwarf’s, eh, charms, but there you have it.

“The point, the point, Elie, the point,” said the skeleton.

Yah-vold, mein herr. Hitler recognized the necessity of political propaganda in selling ‘ideology’. He admired the Allies skillful and heartless use of outright and inflammatory lies to enflame their armies and their populations to vicious hatred of their enemies. He described and applauded it in the only lucid passages of Mein Kampf and consciously set about doing it in his own cause after his failed Beerhall Putsch in November 1923. He had a certain artistic flair for propaganda and branding– he came up with the Nazi flag, the dramatic red flag with the swastika in a white circle. Can’t beat that for a symbol.

“Can’t beat it with the femur of a dead Jew,” said the skeleton. “By the way, I’d appreciate not being used as a semi-comic prop right now.”

Yah-vold, mein herr. Goebbels, for all his many repulsive attributes, was a master of propaganda, he was the man for the crucial job of convincing Germans that Hitler was an infallible leader sent by God for a holy mission they should all be willing to lay down their lives for. In the end he’d do it himself, shooting, or perhaps poisoning, his wife, children and himself in the bunker on the day Hitler shot his dog, and Eva Braun, and himself. Tragic, really, that they didn’t do all that necessary euthanasia decades earlier.

“But you digress,” said the skeleton.

I’ve described this elsewhere on this blahg, I have no idea where and my current drug-induced asthenia prevents me from searching, but Goebbels was the first to grasp the importance of real-time public feedback in determining how to most effectively sell the Nazi version of reality to the public.

“Here you go, courtesy of the WordPress version of Jeeves, you put this up in May,” said the skeleton, “to wit:”

Back in Hitler’s time his party made unprecedented use of social feedback to continually adjust and sell their policies. Every speech Hitler gave was heard over millions of radios. Every listener’s reaction was reported up the chain, each apartment building had a captain, every block had someone who reported these reports to a gauleiter higher up the food chain, to Goebbels himself.

Dr. Josef Goebbels, Reich Minister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, quickly had feedback on how the public was buying a given load of crap from candidate Hitler and later from the Fuhrer. Having, and being able to analyze, such data is crucial in selling anything, marketers run ad campaigns based on these invaluable insights. Political campaigns are about branding and marketing. The side with the most emotionally effective “messaging” wins.

Fast forward through almost a century of politics, commerce and technology to Josef Goebbels’s wet dream. On the internet, an international entity virtually everyone in the world who is not in dire poverty uses many times a day, individual choices are continually collected and analyzed by algorithms to target specific demographics for marketing purposes. It’s done instantly, silently, seamlessly. I am, for example, what emotional right-wingers would instantly recognize as a commie, anyone who reads a bit of this blahg can see at once that I am a man who hates unregulated capitalism. But I am a commie who plays guitar and ukulele, draws and loves well-designed, reasonably priced, one-handed folding knives. My friends may not always recall these things about me at birthday time, but Google and Amazon never forget these enthusiasms of mine. I get colorful reminders on-line all the time.

What Goebbels and Hitler pioneered in the years leading up to, and all through, the Thousand Year Reich, real-time political market research, is now within the affordable grasp of every politician or salesman of any and every stripe. So when you see these cocksuckers from FaceBook and Google dancing in televised senate hearings about why they didn’t recognize that 126 million FaceBook friends would see false and damaging political ads purchased, in rubles, by Russian troll farms, well, what is there to wonder about?

The religion of our great nation is the bottom line, expressed through the indomitable will of the Free Market. These are the winners, the most brilliant and successful businesses in our country, on a par with the pharmaceutical and fossil fuel industries. Who is some elected cocksucker in the senate to question the practices of user-friendly multibillion dollar corporations that most Americans rely on for access to virtually everything?

“OK, Elie, calm down, you’re not winning anybody over here,” said the skeleton.

There’s nobody to win over, dad, you should know that better than anybody. The big bucks are made confirming the confirmation bias, selling masses of scientifically selected individuals exactly what they themselves most fervently want to believe, based on their constantly expressed preferences.

“You make a not unreasonable point. Now go take a nap, Elie, I have to lie down myself.” And, with a dramatic flop, he did.

[1] Hats off to Wikipedia for this brilliant paragraph:

From Hitler’s perspective, there were three positive benefits from this attempt to seize power unlawfully. First, the putsch brought Hitler to the attention of the German nation and generated front page headlines in newspapers around the world. His arrest was followed by a 24-day trial, which was widely publicized and gave Hitler a platform to publicize his nationalist sentiment to the nation. Hitler was found guilty of treason and sentenced to five years in Landsberg Prison.^[3] The second benefit to Hitler was that he used his time in prison to produce Mein Kampf, which was dictated to his fellow prisoners Emil Maurice and Rudolf Hess. On 20 December 1924, having served only nine months, Hitler was released.^[4]^[5] The final benefit that Hitler accrued was the insight that the path to power was through legitimate means rather than revolution or force. Accordingly, the most significant outcome of the putsch was a decision by Hitler to change NSDAP tactics, which would demand an increasing reliance on the development and furthering of Nazi propaganda.^[6]

Side effects

Last Friday I spent five or six hours being infused with a drug called Rituximab, or Rituxan, in hopes of curing my idiopathic kidney disease before it does permanent damage to my kidneys. “It’s very well tolerated,” said the nurse who slipped the needle into my arm, using some perverse version of the passive voice. I read the manufacturer’s information sheet she gave me, scanned a long list of mild-seeming side effects. A dozen uses for it were listed, none related to the kidney in any way.

The other guy in the infusion room was fighting death, and death had the upper hand, there was no way he was going to beat it for much longer. He had a lot of stories, twenty-nine, Iraq and Afghanistan vet with a rare, incurable autoimmune disease he got after an IED attack (one in a million, he said, won the genetic lottery for that one) and not ready to fucking die.

I left feeling fine, and grateful to be feeling fine. I felt fine Saturday, and Sunday. Monday and Tuesday too, for that matter. Though, in hindsight, Tuesday I was feeling unaccountably weak, a bit of the old asthenia, it seems, as I took a slow stroll to Chinatown and back. Asthenia was a listed side effect, it means weakness, it turns out. Also, in hindsight, with my immune system suppressed, I probably should not have been on this crowded public conveyance late Saturday night.

Tuesday’s delicious meal in an old Chinatown haunt, and the two mile roundtrip stroll, may also not have been the best move, in retrospect. Tuesday night I came down with a bad cold, which soon turned into the mother of all colds. Was thankful for the snot channel I carve above my mustache, it came in very handy over and over as I went through a box of tissues. Sleep was hard to come by, as breathing was a challenge in a lying position. I got up many times during the night. I coughed so violently that I pulled some muscles under my ribcage I didn’t even know were there.

I reviewed the list of known side effects, which included “night sweats,” explaining why my shirt was wet when I got up to make another cup of tea at around four. Also alarming was the big spike in my blood pressure, consistently in the range just below where they urge you to seek immediate medical attention whether you have other symptoms or not. It’s still very high, apparently another known side-effect my doctor was surprised to hear about when I checked in with him last night. 5% of those treated with Rituxan get this effect, apparently, and of those, 60% are in my age range, but the doctor probably doesn’t study the FDA reports on-line the way a worried patient would. And, dramatic but largely forgotten now, the left calf that swelled suddenly to the size of a lumpy football, though that righted itself overnight. Well-tolerated, of course, being a relative term to describe an immunosuppressive drug that doesn’t completely knock the shit out of you, like the stuff my companion in the infusion suite was getting.

As I wondered why my back teeth were suddenly aching Sekhnet reminded me that flu-like symptoms were on the list and that this sometimes happens when you have a bad flu. I suddenly thought back to a visit with my cousin Eli, not long before he died, of a cancer his children thought it best not to tell him was killing him. He had a fentanyl patch on and complained of the side effects. “Read the fucking list,” he said, handing me a long scroll as I walked in.

Dry mouth? yop. Constipation. Yep. Diarrhea? Yop. Heart palpitations, painful urination, trouble breathing: yop, yep, yip. I must have read the first fifty of them, every one of which he had. I got to irritability and he snapped “what the fuck do you think?!!!” He didn’t have that much longer to be irritated, as it turned it, he was dead a week later.

Thankfully all I’ve got is a bad cold, elevated blood pressure and a bit of the old asthenia. Going to try to get some sleep and then call the nephrologist, see if this miserable cold takes me off schedule for the second and last round of this wonder drug a week from today.

Nazi-style mass rally in NYC, February 20, 1939

“Well, you recall I told you about this rally at the old Madison Square Garden, the German American Bund mounting a mass rally, those documenting it taking a page from Leni Riefenstahl, the cinematically talented Mitläufer,” said the skeleton of my father. “I was fourteen at the time, and it felt horrific enough to me to read about, but, you also have to consider the rest of my life at the time. It was just another sharp lash of the whip, among an ongoing flurry of lashes.” The skeleton looked out to the line of trees in the distance.

“You know, if we could have talked for another 60 or 70 hours or so that last night of my life, I would have answered all your questions about this pro-Nazi rally in New York City right before the war, about the first attempt and rescheduled Paul Robeson/Pete Seeger anti-fascist concert in Peekskill after the war, violently attacked by the Ku Klux Klan and their merry fucking ilk, rocks through car windows on this road behind me, the one that runs past this boneyard,” the skeleton sighed, pointing over his shoulder. “We just ran out of time, Elie.”

I remember you mentioning this Bund rally at the Garden, but it’s one of those flickering black and white moments in long ago history…

“Well, not so long ago, it happened within the living memory of your father. You discovered many things trying to reimagine my life, things that shocked you. No child labor laws in the United States when I was a child, how about that one? If the economy had been better, I could have spent my early years as a fucking chimney sweep, or whatever the equivalent in 1930 Peekskill would have been. I’m glad you carried on my interest in history, Elie. It’s some fascinating shit, even if the bullshit way the story is often told removes a lot of the mystery and excitement from it, makes it a tool of the status quo instead of an instrument to readjust it.”

Those Confederate monuments, for example, were mostly erected decades after the Civil War, in the early twentieth century, when the genteel society of the South was recasting history in a more forgiving, glorious light that blamed the damned freedmen for their savage inability to act like humans, depicted Reconstruction as an atrocity, and recast the violent defenders of the philosophy of the Peculiar Institution as glorious idealists. The Dunning School of history justified segregation, on racial grounds, while vilifying the federal government’s attempt to reconstruct the former Confederacy.

“That cocksucker William Archibald Dunning cast a long shadow, having the imprimatur of my prestigious alma mater, a few of his disciples were still in the history department at Columbia when I was there, making their nuanced, intellectual arguments that blacks, being like children, were fit only for the protection of the states that knew them best. One of them wrote that Yankees at the time of the Civil War and afterwards could never truly understand the Negro, uh, ‘nigger’ actually, having been given a false impression of their capacities by ‘Fred Douglass’.”

Motherfuckers. People don’t know anything about the devilish details of history writing, who its ideology serves, behind that smug impression of seeming objectivity, who it fucks.

“True dat,” said the skeleton.

But let’s stick to other Nazis for the moment, dad. A friend sent me a link today to a short, chilling movie someone put together from found footage of the February 1939 German Bund Rally. It was posted the other day by The Intercept.

“Do tell,” said the skeleton, turning to fix me with a hollow eyed look.

The Intercept published a thoughtful article featuring a short film of the Bund rally. The piece is called ‘A Night at the Garden’ is the Most Terrifying Movie You Can Watch This Halloween. The article is excellent and the six minute movie, in which the footage is allowed to speak for itself, is indeed fucking terrifying.

“I see, fascinating shit,” said the skeleton, watching the clip and then speed reading, as was his practice when he was alive. “It’s worth mentioning, since you’re so terrified, that there were five times more protesters than American Nazis out that night. There were 100,000 on the streets around the Garden, protesting their rally, and that the police were on the side of the protesters, and that this was also the high water mark of the German American Bund’s pro-Hitler rally business.”

“On the other hand, I notice Jon Schwarz points out how this rush to organized hatred can happen to masses of desperate humans in a society that ‘rolls snake eyes ten times in a row.’ He generously estimates that we’ve, or rather, you’ve, only rolled snake eyes now four times in a row, gives you good odds for avoiding the worst. I don’t see much reason for optimism. This lying, cringingly insecure snake-oil salesman you have there now, while he’s just a clownish figure-head prone to talking and tweeting directly out of his ass, is doing the bidding of the same larger, implacable forces that brought you every mass tragedy in history.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself, dad.

“Ha ha,” said the skeleton, “I’m glad you’re feeling game enough to still joke about this, Bozo. On the other hand, comedic detachment may be the only escape valve you poor fuckers have at the moment.” The skeleton removed his left hand and playfully whacked himself in the face with it, deadpan all the while.

Jesus, dad, that’s disgusting.

“Aw, don’t be such a sourpuss!” said the skeleton. “Look, Mueller is starting to close in on some of these motherfuckers. Look on the bright side, Elie. Maybe President Orange will not get the chance to pack the Supreme Court with any more extreme right wing zealots. Of course, they have to get the Koch Brothers’ boy Mike “make the homos normal” Pence out of there too, and hold a new election, and nullify fifty year-old Neal Gorsuch’s confirmation as a Supreme Court justice for life and all the rest, on the grounds that the president who nominated him was, truly, illegitimate, particularly if he has to pardon himself for conspiracy to commit treason, but it’s a start.”

I just looked at him.

“Yeah, I know,” said the skeleton, using the detached left hand now to smack himself up side the head.

Rat in Solitary vs. Rat in Rat Park

People who feel powerless are sometimes prone to abusiveness, in addition to self-destructive behavior. The only feeling of power they have access to is the power to inflict pain on a creature even more powerless than they are, or to do something to alter their state of mind. Given the choice between endless pain and momentary relief from that pain, most will opt for the relief, however fleeting and otherwise regrettable.

“Dassum shit,” said the skeleton of my father, “but, sadly, a universal truth.”

Your mother, for example.

“May she rest in peace,” said the skeleton in Yiddish inflected Hebrew.

Look, the only image I have of her is of an enraged religious hypocrite, a tiny psycho who mercilessly whipped her first born son in the face from the time he could stand.

“Not an entirely unfair image of her, given what little you know,” said the skeleton. “On the other hand, Elie, you realize that for purposes of this particular exercise in spinning your wheels while tap-dancing on a treadmill, I am more of a cardboard cut out of a skeleton than the actual mildly endearing character you have taken some pains to create over the last couple of years.”

That goes without saying.

“Then why say it?” said the skeleton.

I know you are, but what am I?

“Look, on a given day, given that you are not going to earn so much as a copek, what is the best you can expect of yourself?”

To get enough sleep and to be the best version of myself I can be, I suppose.

“Fine, so like the good advice on that sign in the City College gymnastic rooms– work good hand-stands everywhere — you are working every day to keep your tools sharp?”

As sharp as I can.

“OK, fine. You gave this piece a title. So?”

There is a little buzz, recently, about the opioid addiction crisis that kills more than a hundred Americans a day (no reason to dredge up the mere twenty or so U.S. military veterans, thank you for your service, who kill themselves every day). The opioid crisis has become news because white people are dying in large numbers now. It’s killing mostly working class and poor white people, not the children of the very rich, mind you, but still. It’s not like it’s a deadly drug epidemic confined to ghettos where you can just bring in the national guard to keep that shit contained where it belongs.

“Trump country is opioid country,” said the skeleton.

The famous drug experiment about the nature of addiction was putting rats in cages and giving them a choice between water and drug water. The drug water would get them high, and eventually kill them, but all the rats chose the drug water and eventually every one of them killed themselves with it.

This was held out as irrefutable proof that given the choice between the deadly pleasure of an addictive drug and a healthy drink of water every little experimental mammal would choose the drug that gave them pleasure. There was another experiment where they had the rat’s brain hooked up to an electrical switch. Put your paw on the button and get an instant orgasm. Every rat died, of heart failure, with its paw on the button. These experiments seemingly confirmed that some substances, by their very nature, are irresistible, physically addictive, soul-robbing and eventually deadly.

Another experimenter, noting that the rats in these experiments were all kept in solitary confinement and given the single choice of drug/no drug, tested this theory by constructing a rat playground and doing the same test. Rat Park, as he called it, was a place where everything a rat could want was found in abundance: ample space, tasty food, toys, exercise, other rats to interact with and have sex with. The rats in Rat Park had the choice of water or drug water. Few rats in Rat Park had much use for the drug water. No rat in Rat Park ever died of a drug overdose. They had too much else to do. The experimenter concluded that drug addiction was a product of despair, of lack of a better choice.

“Well, think of that kid you walked home in Harlem, the hell of his drug addict mother’s life, his baby brother’s life, his own. What were the odds of him becoming a studious high achiever and moral exemplar for his siblings vs. pursuing a life of whatever short-term pleasure he could find?”

Of course. The thing is, according to Johann Hari, who described the Rat Park experiment in his excellent book and talks, a follow-up to the Rat Park experiment was never funded, it was never repeated anywhere. There is no solution to the larger social injustices that lead to virtual mass solitary confinement and the choice of drug/no drug. The people caught in that situation, millions of us here, billions worldwide, are totally expendable. People who talk about this are sneeringly dismissed, by hardy Nazi types, as Social Justice Warriors, SJW, LOL!

“Look, Elie, tens of thousands die in America every year because the pharmaceutical industry spends untold hundreds of millions to influence public policy, to ensure that their profits remain as robust as humanly possible. Big Pharma spends far more than the oil industry. The fucking NRA spends a tiny fraction of what Pharma pays out every year in campaign funding, and the NRA holds the Grand Old Party hostage. Any Republican who speaks the first half of the sacred Second Amendment– A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State... gets primaried out of office at the next opportunity. The NRA version of that Amendment is, simply, ‘The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed’. As you know, a hundred thousand or so dead Americans a year, from guns, opioids, lack of health care, is a small price to pay for freedom and democracy.”

Yes. The maddening thing is that there is no possibility of even having the discussion, based on the actual merit and harms of each position. By way of government response we have a pompous little asshole, our nation’s highest law enforcement official, pronouncing that no matter how stupid, outdated or erroneous the law, we will enforce it to the strictest degree to make sure our people are protected from the evil of a selected drug.

“Well, of course we will. And that allows ongoing selective, color-blind enforcement of the politically motivated law and the continued disproportionate incarceration of black and brown citizens and their literal disenfranchisement in many states. No vote for felons, bitches. What’s mysterious about any of this, Elie?”

No mystery, dad. Just… fuck.

“Stay sharp, boy, and keep your eyes on the prize,” said the skeleton, pantomiming a sleepy oriental pulling on an opium pipe, as he slouched back into his soft grave.

Transparency is Crucial to Understanding

The lack of transparency, so prevalent in our unapologetic, commercial win-at-any-cost culture, is a bone crosswise in my throat. It comes up again and again, from the secret “dark money” that decides our elections, to secret national killing policies, to toxic family relations rooted in shameful secrets, and it gets to me every time. Shameful secrets shamefully kept usually create more shame, lack of trust and other serious ills. Doubt this at your peril.

Without transparency we do not have enough information to make informed decisions, our conversations are about what we suspect is the case, rather than what we can actually see and understand. Without a truthful report of the actual, verifiable facts, all we know are the rumors we suspect are most likely true. We then act accordingly.

I offer a petty but recent example to stand in for the damnable reflex toward opacity, which is also a reflex toward small-mindedness and obstinate certainty. The certainty of the lynch mob.

A baseball player, born in Cuba, hits a home run off a top pitcher in the World Series. The pitcher is of Japanese/Iranian ancestry and grew up in Japan. The hitter circles the bases, gets back to the dugout, flushed and laughing, and, sitting on the bench makes a ‘racially insensitive gesture’ which instantly becomes national news and results in the player’s five game suspension (longer than the usual suspension if he’d literally charged the mound and tried to punch the pitcher in the face).

After the game Yu Darvish, the pitcher who gave up the home run (and was knocked out of the big game not long after) and then was victimized again by racism, was surrounded by reporters after the game, under bright lights. He had just pitched terribly in the biggest game of his career. The reporters wanted to know how he was feeling about the racist gesture. Through an interpreter he made an admirable reply, under great pressure:

“Including him and I, nobody’s perfect. Everybody’s different. We’ve just got to learn from it. He made a mistake, and we’ve just got to learn from it. We are all human beings. It’s just learn from it, and we’ve got to move forward.”

Remarkably mature comment, I thought, particularly under the pressure he was under at the moment. The Cuban player apologized immediately, expressed great respect for Darvish, said he could never get a hit off him, regretted what he had done after the home run. He released this statement:

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I did a search to find a video of the racially insensitive gesture. I found it immediately. I had to scroll through the video to find the gesture, two talking heads were clucking at length over how terrible what we are about to see was. As though they were preparing us for grainy footage of a klansman tying up a terrified child he was about to string up in a tree. Trigger warning: please be advised, what you are about to see may really, really hurt.

Then, I saw it.

The player is on the bench, smiling from ear to ear, excited after his World Series home run. He appears to be sitting by himself on the bench, there is no other player in the shot. He turns his head, shakes his ridiculous hair-do, lifts his forefingers to the sides of his eyes, laughs. The micro-gesture takes a nano-second, literally.

Luckily, since this happened during an internationally televised sporting event, we have multiple camera angles and slow-motion so we can get a good long look. Let’s slow it down and show it from the left, look, Bob, both hands. He used both hands, yeah, you see that left forefinger? Definitely a two handed racially motivated attack on the Japanese pitcher. I did see that, Kyle, both hands, yeah, he used two hands, definitely. The fingers didn’t actually touch the eyes, Bob, but you could see the intent there, clear as day, here, let’s see it from another angle. Yep, it’s racially insensitive, all right, Oh my Lord, yes it is.

I watched as it was replayed several times in slow motion thinking “what the fuck?” It was unlikely that Darvish, the intended victim, even saw the gesture, unless he was staring, unblinking, at the Houston bench instead of pitching. The full mockery was done and over, based on the video which showed the same horrible gesture over and over, in the matter of perhaps three quarters of a second. Then the mob of reporters investigate, put Darvish on the spot to act like a mensch after the worst outing in a big spot in his distinguished professional career, shelled and out of the game in less than two innings. The new baseball commissioner later gets big praise for a prompt Solomonic decision: the racially insensitive player will be suspended for five games, without pay, next season, but will be able to play the remainder of the World Series.

I sent the video clip to a friend who wrote back, with characteristic slyness:

I was triggered by that gesture, so I’ve been in my safe space. I may come out tomorrow.

I sent the clip to another friend a few hours later. He emailed me back that the clip was unavailable. It had apparently been taken down by the copyright holder, or the account terminated by youTube, or both. See for yourself.

So we are left, without the ability to judge the offensive act itself, with the instructive moral lesson that we do not tolerate racial insensitivity in our great nation. Which, of course, is true, self-evident, in fact. America is a land of exceptional equality where race is never a factor in anyone’s behavior. The proof is our president, if you need proof. Never a less racist person in that Oval Office, except, arguably, Woodrow Wilson, maybe.

Seriously, how about we make the author of that racially insensitive gesture do a sincere public service announcement about how hurtful racism is, show it during baseball games. The lost five games of salary that is part of his punishment, let’s put those tens of thousands of dollars to good use by donating it to an organization that fights racism. How about something meaningful? Instead of this pious fucking feel good bullshit.

Those Americans killed earlier this month in Niger, what’s the deal with them? They are part of the now thousand American force initially placed in Niger as advisors in the War on TERROR by… oh, gosh, Barack Obama. We never heard about that. We never heard about the drone strikes in Yemen, until disloyal Americans like Jeremy Scahill investigated and revealed that American, not Yemeni, drones had launched those murderous, if mistaken, strikes. How many countries are we doing that in? Top secret, commie. Campaign donors who give more than $5,000 to a political non-profit are granted anonymity in the exercise of their First Amendment right to political self-expression. They’ve earned it.

Well, we have to take our symbolic victories where we can. Thankfully, that fucking racially insensitive Cuban motherfucker got what was coming to him.

NOTE:

Gurriel will lose $322,581 of his $12 million salary next year, which the Astros will donate to charitable causes. He also will be required to undergo sensitivity training during the offseason.

Darvish said he couldn’t decide whether Gurriel’s suspension was appropriate, but he said that he understood why commissioner Rob Manfred didn’t impose it during the World Series.

Darvish said a Dodgers employee informed him about Gurriel’s gesture, which was caught on television, after Game 3.

“I didn’t think it was going to be this big of a deal,” Darvish said. “But to me I wasn’t that frustrated at that point when I saw it the first time.”

Insightful discussion of drug addiction and the destructive “war on drugs”

This guy, Johann Hari, wrote an excellent, comprehensive and very readable book called Chasing The Scream, about the almost unimaginable horrors of the misguided century-long WAR ON DRUGS. His book lays out what he learned about the nature of drug addiction and the best policies to help addicts. He contrasts these successful programs with the endless War on Drugs which winds up killing addicts, and many others. Here he delivers a talk that distills the book (which I highly recommend) into a smart 14:42.