Mala in se vs. mala prohibita

I was once friends with a judge, a very smart man, who hipped me to this important distinction, which goes back to to the roots of Common Law– the principles our legal code is based on. There are two kinds of crime: the malum in se— a common sense crime that is morally wrong and hideous in and of itself (cutting the limbs off a healthy baby only to cause agony comes to mind) and the malum prohibita, a crime that is a crime only because a law makes it so.

It is a distinction most people never even consider. For purposes of sometimes racist law enforcement in America, for example, by those who cry out for “Law and Order!”, no distinction is visible between these two very different kinds of law. It is part of the ignorance and self-righteousness of fucking racists who rail against criminals and it’s the driving force behind America’s world leadership in mass incarceration and criminalization of the poor.

In 1925 in America it was illegal to buy or consume whiskey or beer. That was Prohibition, when the Constitution was actually amended to make that the law of the land. The experiment went badly and was abandoned about 13 unlucky years later when the Constitution was amended again to repeal that disastrous attempt to “legislate morality.”

What was the moral issue being legislated? Not that it was wrong to have a drink of alcohol once in a while, but that it was a grave social ill for masses of poor men to spend all of their pay getting drunk, starving their family and beating them. There had been a widespread epidemic of drunkenness and violence among mobs of underpaid American working men in the decades before there were any labor laws in the country. It was a massive social problem, the unfortunate synergy of hard work, poverty and alcohol.

It turned out not be a crisis that could be cured by banning alcohol and locking up people who wanted to drink it. After a bloody criminal reign of terror that made millionaires of criminals who organized into national syndicates to circumvent the law, and a social problem only made worse by an ill-designed law that criminalized a popular form of recreation and punished everyone (while causing millions of Americans to hold the law itself in contempt), the nation came to its senses and the law was changed.

During Nixon’s first term as president he needed a harsh law to enforce against a generation that hated him. Nixon is on tape referring to his many enemies by words I shouldn’t write here unless I put them in quotes: “fags”, “homos”, “kykes”, “niggers”, “spics”, etc. Nixon could not make a law to imprison these despised minorities directly, so he targeted something many of his more outspoken enemies enjoyed: marijuana. The Controlled Substances Act criminalized the use of certain drugs according to their “dangerousness”. Marijuana was placed in the most dangerous category of drug: highly addictive and with absolutely no medicinal value. It remains there today, in spite of its many known medicinal uses and a wide consensus that it is no more harmful, is even far less harmful, than alcohol. The Controlled Substances Act, enforced strictly, allows the police to arrest people en masse, under a federal law, if they are smoking pot, say, during an otherwise lawful political protest.

Remember mala in se and mala prohibita. If you criminalize something, like marijuana, it gives you license to stop and frisk someone you suspect might be carrying it. If they resist a search, a policeman can legally use a bit of force. If things escalate, and the suspect (suspected of a malum prohibitum) tries to run, rarely, if ever, will a cop be prosecuted for shooting the fucking defiant criminal in the back.

I am thinking of this in context of the current president’s most recent noise about doing something about the opioid crisis in the United States. The crisis was created largely by overprescription of deceptively marketed, highly addictive prescription opioids sold in a lying, multibillion dollar pharmaceutical scam orchestrated by a very rich executive of dubious morality, a person who will never be held accountable anywhere, a scumbag named Richard Sackler. Trump spoke of the opioid crisis, during his campaign, to audiences in poor areas where hopeless people were turning to opioids in despair, and they cheered, because the lying Reality TV superstar was promising people in the rust belt and coal country that he’d give them their shit jobs back when he was president.

Tens of thousands died of opioid overdoses last year, about 150 Americans are dying opioid caused deaths daily now, according to the CDC. Trump signed an executive order in March, scrawling his name bigly on an order creating a commission to study how to best end this crisis. We heard little more about it (the super-qualified Jared Kushner was at one point tasked with ending the crisis, remember) until he once again rightly called it a National Emergency in an August speech, and promised, with his usual sincerity, to take immediate steps to deal with it.

The other day he ordered his Health Secretary to get busy fixing the opioid crisis, calling the crisis a National Public Health Emergency. A man with a shaky grasp of nuance, the president may or may not have known that the funding for a National Emergency (which his own commission urged him to declare in July) can tap into billions, while funding for a Public Health Emergency can tap into a fund of only $57,000, at present. You can read about that here, if you have the stomach for a short article.

Here is the official position of the Trump administration on our nation’s overall drug crisis, voiced by Jeff Sessions, a man deemed too racist to be confirmed as a federal judge (imagine how fucking racist you have to be not to hop over that bar):

AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this year, Attorney General Jeff Sessions vowed a major revival of the so-called war on drugs. This is Sessions speaking at the Department of Justice headquarters as he rescinded two Obama-era memos that encourage prosecutors to avoid seeking inordinately harsh sentences for low-level drug offenses.

ATTORNEY GENERAL JEFF SESSIONS: Going forward, I have empowered our prosecutors to charge and pursue the most serious offense, as I believe the law requires, most serious, readily provable offense. It means that we’re going to meet our responsibility to enforce the law with judgment and fairness. It is simply the right and moral thing to do. … And we know that drugs and crime go hand in hand. They just do. The facts prove that so. Drug trafficking is an inherently dangerous and violent business. If you want to collect a drug debt, you can’t file a lawsuit in court. You collect it with the barrel of a gun.

(the rest of an excellent discussion is here)

Now let’s parse Sessions’ statement for just the ten seconds it deserves. We have laws that allow us to punish people for a legislatively created crime. Let us harshly punish these criminals who are, by definition, committing crimes, and often deadly crimes in furtherance of their other crimes. “It is simply the right and moral thing to do,” says the moral dwarf, simply, citing irrefutably circular logic based in an unamended Nixon era law.

I’ve often thought the proper term to refer to an outspoken homophobe is, simply, “fucking homo,” though I know it would not be politically correct to do so — as well as offensive to my gay siblings. Think about it, though. A loud anti-Semite should be publicly referred to (by Jews, of course, only by Jews, yo) as often as possible as a “fucking kyke”, I think. What would hurt these hateful types more than constantly being referred to as what they hate?

Tempting as it is to call the racist Attorney General, our nation’s top law enforcement official, a “nigger” (and what could be a crueler blow to the pride of this prissy, racist bitch of the southland?) I’ll refrain in the interests of not alienating anyone who would be offended by the objectively offensive term. What would be the point of my giving such offense, suh? It would simply not be the right and moral thing to do.

Then again, right and moral are such problematic terms, as we see every day. And mala in se and mala prohibita are often two very, very different things, the latter often driven by political calculation, preservation of privilege and perpetuation of lack of same. Look at our prison population for a moment, and see the disproportionate lock down and disenfranchisement (another desired outcome by the Sessions crowd) of minority criminals who pled guilty to selectively enforced mala prohibita involving randomly criminalized substances.

Makes me wanna holler.

How To Kill Creativity

Perhaps the single most important thing to do, if you wish to extirpate the creative impulse, is to remove joy and spontaneity. Replace that flush of love that makes somebody dance with a formula to master that will allow them to know exactly where the beat is that they are dancing on. When dealing with a young person, crushing, or perverting, a love of creativity is fairly easily done. Take something like singing, which most people like to do and do quite naturally.

Form a group of children, call it The Singer’s Group. Make them sit quietly while you tell them all about the joy of singing, the history of human song, the mammalian love of vocalizing going back to the songs of the whale and before. Then, tell them what they will sing and instruct them, note by note, pausing to point out wherever they have overstayed a dotted half note.

By this procedure you will find out two things: which children are most anxious to please their teachers and their parents, and which are most hellbent on being creative at any price.

It’s just me, probably, but I would infinitely prefer to play in a room full of the second kind of child.

Cross section of a piece of shit (a few pieces, actually)

Patrick Radden Keefe in the current issue of The New Yorker:

Richard Sackler worked tirelessly to make OxyContin a blockbuster, telling colleagues how devoted he was to the drug’s success. The F.D.A. approved OxyContin in 1995, for use in treating moderate to severe pain. Purdue had conducted no clinical studies on how addictive or prone to abuse the drug might be. But the F.D.A., in an unusual step, approved a package insert for OxyContin which announced that the drug was safer than rival painkillers, because the patented delayed-absorption mechanism “is believed to reduce the abuse liability.” David Kessler, who ran the F.D.A. at the time, told me that he was “not involved in the approval.” The F.D.A. examiner who oversaw the process, Dr. Curtis Wright, left the agency shortly afterward. Within two years, he had taken a job at Purdue.

USA! USA!!!

I got a kind solicitation from a bot/person recently who wrote, of a fairly incoherent first draft of an ambitious recent post on this blahg:

Would it be OK if I cross-posted this article to WriterBeat.com? Therev is no fee; I’m simply trying to add more content diversity for our community and thought this was insightful. I’ll be sure to give you complete credit as the author. If “OK” please let me know via email.

I visited the site, and read this insightful piece:

How to debate the subject of inequality with liberals

by Ari Silverstein Oct 2, 2017 – 8:22am

Of all the issues that separate liberals from conservatives, I’d argue inequality is the one where the two sides are the furthest apart on. Typically liberals vent about the pay of corporate CEOs or bankers and compare their salaries to minimum wage workers, teachers or anyone that gets paid less. Then they advocate for higher taxes on the rich or higher minimum wages as the means to fix inequality. Conservatives usually counter with something along the lines of “the free market should decide what we make for what we do.” Many than add “In America we promise equal opportunity not equality of outcome.”

If you’re a conservative, never say something like that!

It’s impossible to have equal opportunity for all. The rich will send their children to the best schools, their children will then exit without the burden of debt and be handed a good paying job from a successful relative. In other words, opportunity to succeed for the wealthy is bound to be far superior to the opportunity of success for the poor.

My advice to all Republicans/conservatives is to embrace inequality as being something completely healthy and natural within any capitalist system. Only under socialist governance is the liberal dream of equality possible and we all know what socialism does to economic growth. Of course liberals will counter by saying that “inequality has gotten worse” but they’ll fail to count the increase in food stamps, unemployment, housing assistance, EITC payments. But now we’re into the weeds, stick with the concept that equality isn’t something to be celebrated and there is no such thing as equality of opportunity.

Good point, avoid the specifics and stick to the fact that some people just have to be brutally fucked so that others can have obscene wealth in a society whose laws are written by their paid hacks. Made me hope Ari isn’t Jewish, reading this, though, his name suggests otherwise. We Jews have enough trouble being a light unto the nations without this kind of insight. (I’m only glad he didn’t get paid for the article).

I’m also hoping the philanthropic Sackler motherfuckers who have profited so handsomely from the opioid addiction/overdose crisis are not Jewish. I guess I may have to read the rest of this article.

Oh fuck:

Arthur and his brothers, the children of Jewish immigrants from Galicia and Poland, grew up in Brooklyn during the Depression

Oy yoy yoy…

In 1997, Arthur was posthumously inducted into the Medical Advertising Hall of Fame, and a citation praised his achievement in “bringing the full power of advertising and promotion to pharmaceutical marketing.” Allen Frances put it differently: “Most of the questionable practices that propelled the pharmaceutical industry into the scourge it is today can be attributed to Arthur Sackler.”

Snapshot of a Complete Asshole

I should not let myself be distracted, I should not let myself be distracted…

A couple of weeks ago four U.S. servicemen were killed in Niger. Two were named Johnson, one black, one white. One was named Black; he was white. Why they were killed in an unarmored vehicle in Niger, although the military is still actively investigating the weeks’ old the incident, is obvious — fighting a secret worldwide war on TERROR. Duh!

We must, we are told, wage a relentless and borderless war against TERROR and be eternally vigilant until we have killed all of those violent extremists who hate us enough to resort to TERROR. Our leaders have kept us all aware of this terrible, uh, fact since the World Trade Towers came down and the Pentagon took a hit in the fall of 2001.

The WAR ON TERROR, although plainly impossible to win with military force alone, has been used as the excuse for a lot of inexcusable mischief, mayhem, murder and manipulation, but that is another story for another time.

The body of one of the four dead Americans, Sgt. La David Johnson, was apparently not found until 48 hours or so after the ambush. When the four dead Americans were eventually sent back to the U.S., their coffins draped in American flags, the widows, at least in the case of La David Johnson’s wife, Myeshia, were not allowed to see the dead bodies inside the coffins. Maybe it was because they were beyond recognition, I don’t know. La David Johnson’s widow cried that she was prevented from seeing so much as his hand, to be sure it was really him in the box.

Our president called the widow of La David Johnson. A condolence call, of a certain style. The widow was apparently not consoled by the call. Our president called the widow a liar, claiming angrily that he had fucking consoled her. (In fairness to the president, he claimed only that he’d been very respectful, that she was lying about him not remembering her husband’s name and that a “wacky” congresswoman who’d SECRETLY listened in on the call was a fucking liar). *

He had his four star general Chief-of-Staff John Kelly make a long televised speech, during which Kelly lamented the lost dignity of our society, the mistreatment of women included, how nothing is sacred anymore. Kelly then surrendered the shaky moral high ground he was shifting on, claiming that the self-aggrandizing Democratic politician listening in to the president’s call to the widow had been eavesdropping, that the nosy Representative had deliberately distorted the president’s words of condolence (Kelly neglected to mention that the widow and the representative were in a car together, or that the call was on the widow’s speakerphone, creating the impression that the Florida representative had a sinister ability to wiretap at will), was an “empty barrel”, talking shit, a lying partisan viciously trying to politicize a tragedy, someone who had falsely claimed credit for securing funding for a new FBI headquarters in South Florida.

(Although, in fairness to everybody, and not that it’s a gigantic detail in the overall hideous picture — except coming from the mouth of a general speaking in the context of respect for the fallen, and perhaps to the family and colleagues of Jerry Dove — the second murdered FBI agent referenced by Kelly was named Jerry Dove, not Duke as Kelly said. You’d think somebody on the general’s staff could have hit Google to fact-check the speech before Kelly gave it, wrote the correct names of the two dead heroes on a card for him. No attention to detail in President ADHD’s post-reality administration. SAD!). [1] [2]

The widow was interviewed shortly after Kelly’s news conference. She explained that the congresswoman, a long time mentor to the family, had been in the car when Trump called and had reported the president’s remarks accurately.

Our thin-skinned, bottomlessly needy president attacked Myeshia Johnson vigorously on Twitter for not being grateful for something that had been very difficult for him. He might as well have called her a lying cunt. We would expect no less from the man, but still.

* Screen Shot 2017-10-26 at 12.53.42 PM.png

Adroitly done, Lyin’ Don.

Poem

I spend my days
with a dying cat,
conversing with
a talkative skeleton

The cat is brutally cute,
but mean as a snake,
the skeleton is witty and
sometimes insightful,
but long, long dead

I am clearly the
one
pulling his strings
in conversation
as the cat looks away

My friends, shed no tear
for me
I’m doing what’s needed

there is no greater calling.

Tying Up Loose Ends

“Well, you know, Elie, the idea of closure is pretty much a fantasy,” said the skeleton of my father. “I mean, it happens once in a while, I’m sure, but it’s so often featured in popular drama that we’re led to believe it’s something to expect. Closure is like hitting the perfect bullseye in a darkened room, it’s the dazzling exception, not the rule. At least that was always my experience. If you’re looking for closure here, you may be at this for the rest of your life.”

He had a point.

“I know you’d rather continue this conversation than do the hard work ahead of you to get paid, get this book finished and out into the world. I don’t blame you for that– though, of course, when I was alive I’d have been the first to give you shit about your inability to finish your project. And having a long history of incomplete or failed projects, it would have stung you like a squadron of angry wasps. I’m not going to do that, it’s not my point here. Two years is not a long time to work on a first book, particularly as ambitious an undertaking as this one.”

That’s kind of you, dad. Better late than never, I suppose, even if I do have to put the words into your mouth myself.

“Well, that’s the way a lot of things work, Elie,” said the skeleton. “Maybe that’s your closure right there, writing a better ending than life handed you. Although, to be honest about it, I think our last conversation gave you a better ending than you yourself could have written.”

It was a kind of closure, actually. To be told, with virtually your last breaths, that I had been right, or at least trying to do the right thing, all along, while you’d been the angry adversary too frightened to be a human being. Nice dramatic arc to that senseless struggle, eh?

“I told you how much I regretted having seen everything as black and white, as a zero sum game. It’s the worldview of a fucking moron. I should have been smarter than that,” the skeleton shook his head on a rattly neck.

“Well, anyway Elie, we’ve got to wrap this up. I’ll leave you with a very simple example of how easily anyone of our deadly conflicts could have been avoided. Take our long bitter argument over whether people can change or not, obviously if I was not being an eternal two year-old, of course people can change, many things about themselves, we see it all the time. And of course, there are also inborn dispositions, innate talents and disabilities, a disposition to be unafraid, or easily deterred. The tendency to get frustrated easily — you can learn to do better but the tendency will always be there, waiting for a moment of weakness.

“It was idiotic of me to fight for some ridiculous absolute victory in a complex argument with a lot of validity on both sides, instead of just allowing for the human nuance that can, and should, be part of every intelligent exchange between two people. You made some excellent points, I made some, why not take the best of the two points of view, learn from each other, instead of strafing and dropping bombs?”

You’re preaching to the choir director, pops.

“So look, one tangible result of this long war we had, the history of our tormented family, the screaming atonal opera around the dinner table every night, is that this book you’re working on has to be a bestseller, in your mind, or you will have failed again. Failed in telling my story, failed in doing something amazing and award-winning. Hitler will have won, our large family massacred and consigned to the septic tank of history for nothing, no fucking McCarthur grant for you, genius boy. That’s partly on me.”

Not any more, dad. You’re resting in peace now. All that shit is on me, and I’ll take it. Put it in a to-go bag, would you?

“Taking it home to Whippie the Slave Dog, are you?” said the skeleton.

Yep.

“Tahn-gah-NYEE-eekah! Tuss-KEEEE-geee! Brrrritish Emmm-pire!” said the skeleton, in an outburst of unfathomable glee.

“You have stuff to add to this account, and even more to subtract, but, take a tip from a wise old skeleton and wait until you get your advance before you start that hard work. You’ll have your hands full first just preparing a succulent enough slice to help you get an agent.”

Righty-Oh.

“Nighty night,” said the skeleton, with what could have been a wink.

Politics in America

Americans, it is said, are like children when it comes to politics. We are not really children, we are consumers continually sold snappy, brand-name products, including politicians. We are marketed to around the clock, from the cradle to the grave, and our political system reflects this. There are powerful reasons for this sad state of affairs.

I was often critical of President Barack Obama, a genius on the campaign trail, a perfect political product, a man I voted for twice. I criticized him, in part, because I’ve been personally victimized, many times, by his compromise that left rabid corporate foxes in charge of the healthcare henhouse– not to mention many millions still uncovered by health insurance, and the tens of thousands who continue to die preventable deaths each year in the wealthiest nation on earth.

Obama, like all presidents, did many bad things, quietly, as he gave inspiring speeches about our values. Tragically, he lulled much of progressive America to sleep with his beautiful oratory, giving stirring speeches that often directly contradicted his actions; like when he told the correspondents at the annual dinner that they had been his partners in transparency, in keeping American democracy well-informed and robust. We know, if we look at all, that Obama’s administration was not transparent; it was as opaque as the secretive, aptly named, Dick Cheney’s.

That said, Obama was one of the better presidents of my lifetime, perhaps the best, sad to say. A friend with a brilliant talent for argument beat me down thoroughly in a long comparison of the presidents of our lifetime. He drove the point home. Sure, Obama did some fucked up, inexcusable things; massive secret “signature strike” drone killing in multiple countries, repeated use of the 1917 Espionage Act to punish “traitors” who revealed shameful government practices, the secrecy about the actual terms of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but on the whole, may have done less harm, and attempted to do more good, than many of his predecessors. The scale of presidential atrocity is now being re-calibrated by an insane idiot, as he scrambles to dismantle everything positive that Obama managed to accomplish, in the face of massive, organized obstruction. All future presidential comparisons will be skewed by this petulant outlier we have in there now.

The first test for an American presidential contender is one that should disqualify them: that he or she truly believes they should be the most powerful person in the world. They must secure massive financial backing and sell that sincere, if grandiose, self-belief to voters on television (and, increasingly, via social media) while at the same time assuring the most powerful entities in America that they will do nothing to affect the bottom line. This process self-selects a certain egotistical, telegenic, born politician. Branding and marketing, and skillfully deployed soundbites, will decide the battle.

The successful American presidential candidate must be prepared, and demonstrate a willingness, to do unspeakable things. I’ve often thought there is a psychopath test for any serious American presidential contender. Maybe it’s a kid, strapped to a chair in some secret room, that the candidate has to kill, in front of the most powerful CEOs in the nation, to demonstrate he or she has what it takes, won’t hesitate to do what must be done.

Presidential candidate Bill Clinton rushed back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of a brain-damaged death row inmate. Candidate Dubya mocked the final plea of the brain-damaged Born Again death row inmate he famously refused to pardon. They had to, politically. America needs its president to be tough. Look how many kudos Trump got, from everyone, when he made himself “presidential” by launching tons of senseless missiles at a Syrian airfield, or when he dropped the Mother of All Bombs in Afghanistan. How jealous Saddam would have been! Imagine how presidential Trump will be if he gets to drop nukes on Little Rocket Man’s people.

The world is dangerous, mobs of people are maniacs, murder is rampant all over the place. As sea levels rise and natural disasters grow dramatically more devastating, the danger from and for humans is getting worse. Maybe we need a president who can kill, who will not flinch, when the situation demands it. But let’s look for a moment at the rest of the picture.

Obama’s winning personality, clear intelligence, gift for the felicitous phrase, encouraged those of us who voted for him to believe he was a decent person, a man of conscience. He played one on TV, and perhaps he truly is. He came off as thoughtful and fairly honest, to those of us who didn’t hate him, telling us early on that we have to push him to accomplish the hope and change he promised. We can’t expect any elected official to do the right thing unless we push him relentlessly, he pointed out. On the one side some people quietly tried to push, on the other side a few very powerful “persons” representing gigantic market forces generally prevailed. Good, individually powerless people didn’t band together into a mass movement and push hard enough, Obama chided us when he was criticized from the left, while the people with all the power paid powerful experts who pushed harder to influence public policy.

There is a sickening truth to this lack of American political will, except among extreme right-wing zealots, it seems. We, who don’t share their values, have been reduced to a nation of handwringing spectators, waiting for our leaders to do the right thing. Historically, this hopeful passivity has not been a good bet. There were literally thousands of labor strikes during FDR’s first and second terms, when an uncommonly bold president seized the momentum for change to create a social safety net to save the country from Communism.

Frederick Douglass hit the nail on the head in 1857:

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.

A century and a half later our first “post-racial” president presided over a nation as divided as on the eve of the Civil War, surrounded by in your-face racists intent on rendering him powerless, while membership in white supremacist hate groups rose dramatically and, mobilized, carried the president we have now into office. With all of the threats we currently face, as a nation and a planet, are we still really watching wealthy talking heads argue over whether racism is bad and whether men and women are really equal? While a global climate catastrophe gathers steam, no less.

Americans are trained from our earliest days to be consumers, to consume politics and culture as well as everything else. We are trained to want, to feel a stimulated need, to buy, to binge. Imagination and creativity is the realm of a small group of professionals who make huge sums to create the content we are all the audience for. We are numbed now when it comes to our own powers, and overwhelmed with monetized distractions. We leave the heavy lifting to the professionals, that’s why they get paid the monster bucks.

There is a deep sense of futility in America. We have an opioid crisis that kills tens of thousands a year, Americans overwhelmed by hopelessness. One person with a powerful argument, a hundred people, a thousand, a million, are often outmatched by a single billionaire who can spend whatever it takes to have their free speech heard everywhere. We watch the results time after time and it beats us down. Not only can’t you fight City Hall, you can’t fight one very rich asshole with a giant twenty or fifty million dollar megaphone and a skillful top-shelf media team. Free speech, baby, take all you can afford to buy.

Yet we have Bernie Sanders, energizing millions with a real critique of the indefensible status quo here in a wealthy nation that leads the world in death by gun violence, incarceration, military spending, health care spending and annual preventable deaths by citizens too poor to afford the world’s most expensive health care. With his average campaign contribution of, chant it with me, crowd, “$27”, Sanders reached millions and made himself a legitimate presidential contender.

He did this based largely on his vision of a better, more fair America, as opposed to promising incremental change as the best we can hope for, or idiotically vowing to turn the clock back to the days when America was great, when you could openly wish everyone a Merry Christmas, when women were not so disgusting, when you could call an assertive black person a “nigger” without fear of losing your job for not being politically correct, where traumatic brain injuries to football players was not an issue, they knew what they signed up for and should be allowed to hit and be hit as hard as possible, where military widows respectfully shut the fuck up, etc.

I don’t really fault this piece of shit we have in the Oval Office now, in a way. I fault myself. I fault everyone else who is addicted to the opiate of American celebrity. What is this spoiled man-child in the White House celebrated for? Being a born-rich, vulgar, relentlessly self-promoting jackass who made 185 million dollars producing a long-running “reality TV” show where he fired people every week. That show was his only purely successful business venture, in a long, public career of mostly fuck ups, but it was more than enough to create his brand.

He became a celebrity mega-brand as he decanted gallons of toxic kool-aid during the presidency of Obama, insisting, to the end, with no evidence whatsoever, that Obama was an illegitimate president, born in Kenya, a secret Muslim and a liar. Today we’ve got the 1% president our system deserves, America’s racist, self-regarding, entitled chickens coming home to roost.

The percentage that put him into power, and continues support him in spite of his performance in a job he is completely overmatched by, seems to be around 39%. Like their president, they know only how to “double down”. In my recollection 39% was also the high-water mark for German voter support of the energetic, no-holds-barred Nazi party. Of course, once they had that 39% in Germany, the rest, as they say, is history. It was 100% soon after that, no matter how many Germans may have opposed it.

We need to get off our couches now and back into the streets. We must be vigilant and take nothing for granted in the Age of Trump. American political arguments are not won with logic, they are won by masses of people doing the hard work.

Angels and Inspirations

“Demons, Elie, they are always with us,” said the skeleton of my father. “You put faces to them, which is a very nice touch. The specific facial expressions, and the emotions behind them, are a key feature of those merciless fucks. There’s nothing like the look of a smug sadist daring you to defy him, with a gaggle of angry henchman waiting to kick your ass. Nothing like it, my son.”

Yes, that’s certainly true. We should not, however, neglect to mention the angels we encounter sometimes. Like that nurse in your death chamber. Absolute perfect casting.

“A no bullshit black woman with a heart of gold and a dry sense of humor to match,” said the skeleton. “Mutual love at first sight, I would say. It’s like they looked through the book of my life and some merciful genius picked her out– ‘here, you take Irv.’ An angel, no doubt about it.”

I remember, when you complained to her about being stuck so many times for tests, while it was clear you were dying.

“Well, in fairness to them, they got paid $1,000 every time they stuck me,” said the skeleton. “As you and mom later found out when the hospital sent my bills, which fortunately Medicare paid.”

And she said, when you complained about the endless drawing of your blood, “Irv, just give me the word. You don’t want to get stuck anymore, I’ll make them stop.”

“And she did make them stop,” said the skeleton. “Jesus, you’re right. She was an angel. God, did she make me feel understood, and loved.”

I’ll tell you something else about that angel. I don’t think anyone ever looked at me quite the way she did when I left your room around 3 a.m. that last night of your life. The door to your room had been open, it was otherwise silent on the floor, and she’d been sitting outside in the hall. That look she gave me, I don’t know how to describe it. It was pure, selfless love, happiness for you, I guess, and relief that you got to say what you needed to say, and that your son wasn’t an asshole in the end.

“Well, sometimes we have the luck to meet one of these creatures,” said the skeleton.

I can think of a few in my life. I wonder how many you came across in yours.

“Hard to say,” said the skeleton. “You certainly don’t come across them often. I wish you could remember that nurse’s name.”

It haunts me to this day that I didn’t go back to the hospital to find her, hug her, give her some flowers, tell her she was an angel. I can’t even remember if she hugged me as I left the hospital that last time. I certainly felt hugged.

The skeleton looked off toward the unseeable river beyond the graveyard. Birds circled and a few of them screeched. A car crunched by on Cortland Road.

“You have noticed by now, Elie, that we have to take our angels where we find them and let them into our hearts. It’s as natural as a baby drinking milk, to take an angel into your heart. We can’t help but do it,” said the skeleton. “You had a couple that I know of, angel and inspiration both.”

You’re talking about Florence, who was both of those things. One of the great single strokes of luck in my life, making that trip out there that frosty night, bringing her Thai food, and bullshitting with her for a couple of hours. Two days later she checked out. Goddamn, talk about an angel.

I should also mention your good friend Arlene. She had an angelic moment on a hill near the Delaware Water Gap.

“Do tell,” said the skeleton.

We were walking on this lush, endless green field. She told me that developers were already making plans to convert this perfect patch of earth into perfect homes for yuppies. It was near sunset. The place was beautiful. She brought out a little pipe and we each had a few hits. It was the only time I ever saw her smoke weed.

“Well, Russ was a prodigious head, it’s no surprise that she would smoke a little grass,” said the skeleton.

Then she spoke a few words that turned on a light in a dark room for me. She told me that you and mom were two of her dearest friends. I knew how much she loved you and how much you and mom loved her.

“We did, we do,” said the skeleton.

Then, like she was reaching up to pull one of those chains that turn on a light bulb she said she was going to tell me something I might not understand fully at the moment, but that I should just file it for later. She told me, correctly, that I felt somewhat responsible for my parents’ anger and unhappiness. Then she said I was not responsible for it. She told me that you and mom were very unhappy people, and that your unhappiness was not on me. I felt a slight lifting of a very heavy weight off me as she told me that. Over the next few years the truth of it began to set me free, as far as one can be free in this world of slaves.

“Arlene was a great woman,” said my father’s skeleton.

The sun was going down now over the cemetery. The blue of the sky melted seamlessly into that gorgeous gradient of orange by the horizon. It reminded me exactly of the moment after I closed my father’s dead eyes.

Demons and the Repetition Compulsion

“Well, you may have a point there, Elie, about the faces of the demons we fight,” said the skeleton of my father. My father, during his life, was always silent about the particular demons he was up against, although he made mention of the demons every one of us must grapple with.

That mad, but brilliant, classmate of mine in law school told me about the “Repetition Compulsion.” It is a compulsive need to relive, and re-litigate, painful personal transactions of the past. You find yourself drawn to types who have some salient aspects of the people who bludgeoned you early on. As you were my bludgeoner-in-chief, it’s not surprising I found myself in close contact with people who exhibited your most personal traits.

“So these people were brilliant,” said the skeleton.

Brilliant assholes, pinched and needy, bent on ‘winning’ at any cost. Worthy adversaries, until they were not.

“Youch!” said the skeleton.

I’ve got to be honest here, dad. It’s all I can do, particularly in a world like ours, where the media increasingly gives equal weight to the comments of the studious and thoughtful and to the careless stylings of talking, shit-smeared assholes.

“Well, talking, shit-smeared assholes tend to rule, Elie,” said the skeleton. “It’s a matter of opinion anyway, who is smart and who a shit-smeared asshole. One man’s shit-smeared asshole is another man’s no bullshit, straight shooting president. Ask the 39% if you don’t believe me.”

Granted. I think of the long struggle with my good friend Friedman. Implacably unhappy fellow, aggressively so, actually. I don’t know that he was beaten as you were, physically, but he emerged from childhood with serious and stubborn wounds. He was a guy who felt he could never win, I suppose, so everything in his life was a contest and he had to prevail. He pursued these little victories reflexively, he always had to negotiate and get the best of every interaction. The story arc of every transaction with people he met was identical– high hopes, betrayal, sullen, smoldering anger he would not admit was anger. It wearied me to death, slowly, over decades. Nothing could ever be good enough for an unhappy soul like that. He was eternally seeking some impossible ideal of perfection, eternally disappointed, betrayed over and over and over.

“Sounds familiar,” said the skeleton.

Yeah. Anyway, in the end, he was reduced to silence. It took me many years, I had my own wounds to deal with, but finally I boiled his insoluble misery down to a single issue. To my grim gratification he was speechless, didn’t have a word to say in defense of his indefensible world view, the things he expected from his friends, the impossible burdens he tried to make them carry. We sat in a Florida diner, a deluge pelting down outside, and he just looked at me, very hurt and not a little bit angry. That’s the expression of one of my demons, irrational disapproval that needs not so much as a whiff of a justification.

“Well, you always said you were not sorry you went to law school, though law was the wrong line of work for you and you are still deep in debt for loans for the tuition, it did teach you to organize your arguments,” said the skeleton. “I realized I was over my head during that last one in the den, where I fought you desperately, knowing I was completely fucked.”

It’s another argument for the people can change position. If not change, we can refine our talents, anyway.

“I won’t argue that,” said the skeleton. “What other demons you got, besides Friedman?”

Well, there was an angry woman I stayed friends with for decades. Very smart, great sense of humor, talented, but terminally angry and never satisfied, always feeling she was on the short end of things. Whipped her feckless, out-gunned husband mercilessly every time we had dinner with them. In the end, she turned her anger against me. When I responded with a long note about how hurt I was by an email she sent chiding me for self-pity and depression, I never heard from her again. It’s like she was waiting for me to tell her I was done with her, as if she’d been waiting for years for me to confirm that she was unworthy of friendship. Maybe she had been waiting, biding her time for a moment of weakness on my part. It would have been an easy matter, if she hadn’t meant to hurt me, to have simply apologized for a harsh, arguably cruel, email. She was apparently incapable of it. Or maybe she thought I didn’t deserve an apology, that I was an unredeemed asshole. In any case, her face, bored and superior, is up there when I picture my demons.

“I can see that,” said the skeleton. “It’s hard to explain to those who go along to get along, but there comes a point where a trusted friend reveals a face that you cannot unsee.”

My mad friend Andy’s smug face comes to mind.

“A face only a mother could resist smacking, although not my mother,” said the skeleton. “Well, as I understand it, the thing with Andy was his self-hatred, his deep feeling of unworthiness. I don’t know, truly, how you emerged from your war-zone childhood with so little self-hatred, but for those of us who are consumed by it, I assure you, there is nothing more painful.”

I can dig it. It goes to Groucho’s ‘I’d never join a club that would have somebody like me as a member.’ The capacity to be witty is one thing, and I always enjoyed Andy’s wit, the capacity to have insight, and act on it with integrity, is quite a different thing.

“Don’t pat yourself on the back too hard, Elie,” said the skeleton. “One man’s insight is another man’s… eh, you show me a man who finds himself insightful I’ll show you a man…. what does Sekhnet always tell you? Put a bushel over that light of yours. It’s unseemly to speak of yourself as insightful, talented, intelligent.”

Fine, I get that. The only insight I really cherish is the one I picked up as a kid at that finishing school for anti-Semites you sent me to. Hillel’s statement of the Golden Rule. What is hateful to you, do not do to someone else. I consciously try to live by that. I don’t claim to have ever had any insight remotely comparable. I’m just laying out a few particular, identifiable demons here, dad. The faces attached.

“Well, I get that. Andy had the best demonic last word, delivered to you by a third party. He made it known that he knew he owed you an apology, but that he was ‘too stingy’ to give it. The mark of a… what is that hideous word you like to use on such occasions, a true cunt, in the unredeemed sense of the word.”

True dat, dad. I admit that I was wrong, that I hurt you, that my subsequent attack on you was unfair, that I owe you an apology but… nah… not to you. I’m too stingy. Let that be the last word on our long friendship.

“Talk about a shit-smeared asshole,” said the skeleton, suddenly distracted, sinking back into his grave without so much as an adios.

Adios, padre.