A vision of hell

Waking up to an explosion, your home on fire. Men with guns running, crouched like crabs, firing bursts of bullets. As you shake your head a man grabs your mother from behind and expertly cuts her throat. The car other members of your family are trying to flee in is hit by a shoulder launched explosive, becoming a fire ball. You run, imagining how you are going to be killed.

Or a quiet, airless morning, no explosions, no gunfire. No food. Flies. Dying children who expire without a murmur. Hyenas and vultures casually dining together, no snarling and posing, there’s enough carrion for everyone, with left overs to drag home.

Or a person at a console, pressing a button and pumping a fist watching the screen as the targeted city is vaporized under a dramatic canopy of fire.

We lament all these hellish things even as we sigh at the inevitability of them, debate the correctness of employing them. Homo sapiens are sometimes monsters, we reason, and sometimes there’s nothing for it but to use every weapon available to destroy these evil creatures. Obama, who, in fairness to him, I must say I hate mostly for not being anywhere near as great a president as he was a candidate, did his share of this reasoning.

He yielded to military advisors who agreed it was best not to put American “boots on the ground” but to instead use a top secret targeted killing program to assassinate suspected terrorist enemies with missiles launched from remote controlled pilotless aircraft called drones. Not to do so, or stopping the program, he likely didn’t need to be reminded, would make him look weak. The numbers of civilians killed would not be revealed. All dead males of military age, in a generous range from young teenager to middle aged, are presumed to be enemies killed in action, or EKIA. Fair is fair. They could very well be!

Many are horrified when they learn that authoritarian governments use Death Squads to terrorize the opposition. One photo of a pile of slaughtered nuns, their humanitarian mission cut short, is usually enough to get the world press howling. The armies of freedom will sometimes march against such regimes, provided the regime is not allied with a huge business concern who has a say in the deployment of the armies of freedom. Most authoritarian governments enjoy such alliances. The armies of freedom have supported many such monsters over the years. I realize I’m not going out on a moral limb saying any of these things. Are you going to argue that Death Squads are cool?

Now the world shudders over videos of workers in a Syrian town desperately trying to save dying babies by hosing them off, in an attempt to wash away the irreversibly murderous nerve gas a power-crazed dictator attacked his own citizens with. Dead children are carried off and respectfully laid out by stoic rescue workers.

The current president of the United States, an angry and impulsive man, instantly does what the reflective, calculating Obama, who was lambasted as a weak and indecisive leader for refraining from massive retaliatory killing, did not do. With the horrific images of the nerve gas attack against civilians, and the dead children, fresh in everyone’s mind, our decisive new leader does not hesitate or ask Congress or flinch in any way, he immediately orders two destroyers to launch more than fifty tomahawk missiles at Syria, presumably hitting some strategic asset of the Syrian dictator’s, the very air base he says the gas attack was launched from.

Our president glares meaningfully at the camera as he announces he doesn’t need anyone to tell him what the right thing to do is. After all, this is not some drone-launched missile fired by the well-meaning army of freedom that inadvertently kills a wedding party, severely maiming the few survivors, this is a targeted, proportional response to a regime using poison gas against it’s own children.

I don’t want to jump on this president, who gets so little love from most Americans, who is routinely mocked and ridiculed by every late night comedian. I am writing this simply to underscore how routine such state violence is, and how little we concern ourselves with it, even abstractly.

If there is a better way, we reason, there is nothing we can do about it anyway. Powerful forces, often at the command of raging psychopaths, are regularly unleashed to slaughter anybody who stands in the way of valuable natural resources or anything else the powerful forces want. Innocence or guilt has little to do with who will live and who will die. This world is not a meritocracy, after all, nobody but those closest to you gives a rat’s tutu about how moral, kind, empathetic you are.

The guy who is launching the missiles, named after the close fighting weapon of the people slaughtered by the armies of freedom, certainly doesn’t give a shit. It enrages him that a dictator would kill babies in such an inhuman way and he takes decisive action.

Thirty-six children are said to have died in the poison gas attack. Yesterday our ambassador to the UN asked rhetorically “how many more children have to die before Russia cares?” We note here that according to one source over 700 children have been killed by US and Coalition airstrikes in Iraq and Syria since August 2014. The recent SEAL raid in Yemen killed a bunch of children, at least one of whom, a pretty little girl, was allowed to writhe in agony, untreated, for hours before she finally died of the American bullet in her spine.

In fairness to our current president, why should he care what his critics have to say about his unauthorized use of millions of dollars worth of deadly missiles against an unabashedly evil regime? What are you going to fucking do about it anyway, big shot?

The Skeleton checks in

“About time,” says the neglected skeleton of my father from his sopping grave outside of Peekskill.

Well, you’ve been reading my blahg…

“When I get a chance,” said the skeleton. “Look, I have to say, and you’re not going to like to hear it, but you’re doing the same thing you always did. You know what Moms Mabley said ‘if you do what you always did, you’ll get what you always got.’ I know you want to highlight how maddening it is to be at the mercy of a merciless system, but, in the case of this dermatology fuck up, all you have to do is pick another fucking doctor….”

Or five more fucking doctors…

“or however many fucking doctors you need to call. Are you going to prove your point about the murderous state of American health ‘care’ by dying of too late diagnosed melanoma?”

You make a not unreasonable point.

“No, YOOO make a not unreasonable point. Don’t forget how immature I was most of my life. You’re giving yourself this advice, Elie, and my two cents is ‘take it’. Seriously, you don’t know this young, conveniently located dermatologist from a weirdly-shaped mole on your ass. Call another one. Make a goddamned appointment. If the doctor turns out to be an unredeemed asshole like that Russian-speaking one a block from your apartment is reputed to be, go see another one. Everything in life is the roll of the dice. You might get lucky, you might get unlucky. Keep going forward, my son. Don’t be like me.”

The skeleton rose from his grave, gracefully extended his arms over his head and did a slow, perfect pirouette. He danced for a while in the pissing rain, surprisingly well, while I searched for something more for either of us to say.

Happy Day for Motherfuckers

It’s pouring outside, rain gurgling merrily in the air shaft, a perfect day to do a little writing. I’m working on a book about my father I’ve been neglecting recently and I thought of a great little chapter about his generosity. I am also working on a book proposal for a much easier to complete book that I have more than half-written. I’m also working on a letter to the New York State Attorney General, to convince him to propose legislation to regulate the out-of-control fraud of unregulated health insurance companies who do their lucrative business, sometimes enhanced by sharp practices they are not accountable for, in our state.

But first, I needed to make two key medical appointments. These having been hanging over me for months; in the case of the dermatologist, for three or four years. The new kidney doctor (the excellent one I saw a few months ago is not on any QHP I could find) needs to tell me if my membranous nephropathy has yielded to my low-sodium diet and ban on non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (ibuprofen) or if I need to go on an auto-immune drug regimen to avoid the worst case scenarios of dialysis or a kidney transplant. The skin doctor needs to look at a variety of odd things growing on my skin and tell me which, if any, I have to worry about.

A nurse friend found me a nephrologist the other day and in a relatively short time today I was able to make an appointment. I’ll see the new doctor in a few weeks. Thank God for friends in the field.

I have the number of a young dermatologist I’ve been trying to make an appointment with the last few days. I was referred to her by my current insurance company. I am paying literally ten times what I was last year, for a “higher” level of medical insurance and better care than I was able to get last year. This doctor’s name came up, and as I found nothing bad about her on-line, I’ve been calling her office to make an appointment. Although she’s listed as in-network on the “provider” list for my specific silver-level QH fucking P, her office doesn’t think she’s in-network. They were going to get back to me, but you know how that goes. When I called yesterday Melanie had no update for me, so today I asked Norma, an extremely nice woman at Healthfirst, to make the appointment for me.

Norma laughed when I asked if she could put me on hold without the Dr. Mengele String Quartet, and she was able to do so. I heard only a few notes of their infernal nerve-jangling sawing. We soon had another receptionist at the dermatologist’s office on the line. We learned, about 40 seconds in, that the dermatologist was not able to see new patients because she didn’t have an NPI number yet.

If you live in the cocksucking United States of America, and do not have insurance through work, or enough money to buy an expensive but good private plan, and sign up for the PPACA’s mandated product, you quickly learn about things like NPI numbers, which are site specific (the doctor with multiple offices apparently has multiple NPI numbers, or maybe not) and CPT codes, which, if not perfectly transcribed, prevent treatment. Wrong NPI number? You pay. Incorrect CPT code? No service.

You want to call someone to fix this? Call your insurance company, baby, they work for you. New York State, is there any state agency I can call to get this straightened out? Uh, no, first work this out with your insurance company, everything’s going to be fine. Or call this 800 number for the New York State Department of Financial Services which puts you into a cul du sac from the hell our smiling former commander-in-chief, and our glowering present one, for that matter, ought to be frying in.

“Norma, I’m sorry to be venting like this to you…” but Norma was fine, so many customers are experiencing similar horrors. She worries for her kids, living in an out of control plutocracy with two working parents, a country where it’s no national scandal that tens of thousands die every year for lack of decent medical options, while billionaires compare taxation to Auschwitz. She worries about the increasingly demonstrative boa constrictor that is life for working people in our great nation. She is fine with my complaints, interested in my analysis. But it helps neither of us, helps nobody.

When I venture my opinion on the precedent, created by our recent two-term chief executive, of killing American citizens without trial or charges, passed on to this angry, unstable fellow occupying the oval office now, she becomes quiet. It is horrible, she agrees. Then I cross the line, as one ranting and venting while caught in a chafing trap often does.

“When we droned a sixteen year-old American citizen, not charged with anything, and the press secretary said, in response to a question at a televised news conference, ‘he should have been more careful about who his father was’, the proper response for the reporter was to break the press secretary’s nose. To show that unaccountable violence by the State, in our names, is an unacceptable answer– wipe up your blood and try again. The American people will no longer accept that kind of crap… our government is not a reality TV show where anything flies that makes people tune in and the cash registers cah-ching.”

Now Norma was silent, and I didn’t blame her at all. A patient and empathetic woman, she’d been wonderful throughout a long, frustrating chat. This was more than she was being paid for. I told her as much, thanked her for her kindness. She told me, gently, that it had been her pleasure, wished me luck and I sat down to type. I figured that was as good an option as going to fuck myself.

I’m going to call my nurse friend and ask her to get me a recommendation for a dermatologist. If I have to travel an hour from my place to get my skin scanned, as I will to see this nephrologist to have my urine and blood re-tested, so be it. Now just sit back and enjoy the rain, it’s another happy day for motherfuckers.

45,000 dead Americans

What do you call 45,000 uninsured Americans who die every year for lack of medical care in the wealthiest country on earth?

The price of freedom. The cost of doing business in the Free Market, bitch.

At the risk of seeming to pile on the president I voted for twice, a charismatic man beloved by millions even as he killed American citizens by remote control without trial or charges (and gave that power to his unstable successor), even as he repeatedly lied about “transparency” and prosecuted those who exposed government abuses under a draconian law drafted in the hysteria leading up to American entry in World War One, a law designed to crush dissent, even as he did much for the wealthiest among us and little for the rest, while delivering inspiring speeches at every turn– I have to say, I really do hate the motherfucker. Someone with his intelligence, expressed ideals and talent as an eloquent and convincing salesman should not be such a tool of the status quo— in my opinion. Yes, I know, half of Congress are not unsympathetic to the Klan and all that, rabid partisanship and racism are off the hook and so on, but, still.

“If you like the doctor you have, you can keep your doctor,” was, of course, POTUS-speak for “I won’t come in your mouth.” Most of us make promises in the heat of the moment, sometimes it’s hard to keep them, I certainly understand that. The side-effect of this untruthful statement, for me, the deal sealed by the immensely complicated PPACA drafted by the affiliated American medical industries, is that I’ve had to change doctors several times, pursuant to changes in the ACA in New York State in recent years, though for years I had good doctors I liked and was able to easily see.

Slipping through the cracks the last couple of years, as I’ve been forced to change networks and doctors more than once, and largely my own fault, was a visit to a dermatologist for a skin scan. I almost saw one a year ago, paid for the visit out of pocket, though I also had insurance. What scared me were the unforeseeable lab costs and possible follow-up surgery costs. In hindsight, very stupid. I’ve already had skin cancers removed from my nose and my arm. Why am I fucking around?

In less than an hour yesterday I was able to find the names of dermatologists (“providers”) who accept my current QHP (“qualified health plan”) and rule out one who appeared, by the many similar comments about him on the web, to be something of a complete asshole. A young woman dermatologist in a nearby office seemed like a good bet, nothing good or bad about her on the web. Clicked on her office to make the appointment, typed in my insurance and was notified:

out of network.JPG

After only twenty minutes on the phone with the insurance company I was assured that the doctor is definitely in-network for my QHP. The woman at the insurance company sounded very confident, offered to call the doctor’s office for me and make an appointment, but it was already after hours.

I called today to make the appointment. I gave all my information and when it came to insurance there was a pause. The doctor is not enrolled in the QHP with that insurance company. I explained that I’d been referred to the doctor by the insurance company’s provider look-up, verified with the insurance company that the doctor was in the plan. She asked me to hold and as I did, the Dr. Mengele String Quartet sawing away at an adrenaline-fueled classical piece scored for the highest registers of their instruments, I felt my blood begin to boil.

I calmed myself with the thought that it is truly nothing personal. 45,000 Americans will die this year for lack of medical treatment. Some are fuck ups who just don’t go to doctors until their symptoms are overwhelming and by then it’s too late. Some have no health insurance and are scared by doctor and hospital bills. Some are just fucked. No reason to take any of it personally. There is nothing personal here. I am no more special than any of the other tens of thousands of Americans who will die this year because profit for a few is deemed much more important than the lives of enough American losers to fill a large stadium. Fair enough.

The thought didn’t calm me that much, though. When Melanie came back on the line she told me she’d contact the office that coordinates the dozens of insurance companies and QHPs the provider group currently participates in. She said it was possible that the doctor had recently been added and that they hadn’t updated the system yet.

I was relatively restrained in giving Melanie a succinct and dispassionate version of what I have written here. Melanie was nice, she has offered to call me tomorrow to follow-up. As I sit in the chair tomorrow on the last day of a multi-visit root canal I will think of Melanie, ready to call her as I stagger from the dentist’s office. I will keep my fingers crossed that none of these things growing on my skin are anything to worry about. Then I will continue my search for a participating nephrologist for follow-up about the progress of my kidney disease.

Repurposing “The Deep State”

Because Americans live, increasingly, in echo chambers where our own views are endlessly confirmed– and there is no overestimating the power of the confirmation bias– the same term can quickly become a weapon for each side. During the recent presidential election much was made of “Fake News”. Both sides used calculated untruth and incendiary stories composed largely of bullshit to stir their troops, though the right seemed to use it more, and to more galvanizing effect.

I saw a stat right after the 2016 election, fake news skewed something like 2:1 right, but that’s still a lot of outright bullshit from the left side. I couldn’t find the original cite for the statistic, but here’s the Grey Skank and Steve Bannon/Robert Mercer’s own Breitbart on the well-known phenomenon. I must say, both accounts read well and appear to be, without more research that most news consumers don’t have time to do, plausible. Let us assume for our purposes today, and to avoid the typical distracting argument, that the left and right were equally guilty of lying during one of the ugliest campaigns in our history.

My point is that Mr. Trump and his people, who set new standards for untruth during the campaign and since (hah, so much for my fairness caveat directly above) , introducing us to “alternative facts” and so forth, quickly co-opted the term “fake news” to increase skepticism toward the corporate mass media. One should be very skeptical of corporate media driven entirely by advertising dollars and the bottom line of shareholder profits and enormous compensation packages for its executives. But look how quickly the term “fake news” was pointed back at the exposers of right wing ‘fake news’ and neutralized. Who owns fake news now, bitches? Two wrongs do make a right, yo.

Now the same has happened to the term “The Deep State”. This description of the powerful forces that profit mightily from our globalized “Free Market” and the endless wars we are now embarked on, has been captured by the right. To the right the Deep State is the liberal-biased intelligence community, fanatically determined to bring the new president down. Trump’s people now openly deplore the “Deep State” and everyone is right to deplore it.

A former long-time Republican government budget analyst, Mike Lofgren, spoke to Bill Moyers a few years back about the Deep State. The permanent shadow government is not a new thing, the interests it represents go back to our original one percent, the Founding Fathers, but it’s entrenched and protected in ways we couldn’t have imagined generations ago. Lofgren described The Deep State as ‘a hybrid association of key elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States with only limited reference to the consent of the governed as normally expressed through elections.’

Lofgren set out the workings of our current deep state*, now organized largely around, and justified by, the so-called War on Terror, that bold war against fear itself. It operates by deregulation, privatization, deindustrialization, financialization of the economy, Wall Street as the only casino in town, widening wealth disparity, permanent war, surveillance state, etc. It all takes on the air of the inevitable, a massive conspiracy, but its only deliberate design is to maximize profits for our wealthiest citizens.

Like the deal-makers in the administration we have now. Exxon-Mobil was the first company to research the effects of carbon on our planet’s climate. They made alarming discoveries, decades ago, about what became known as Global Warming and later was re-branded as the less alarming Climate Change. Exxon scientists learned that carbon emissions, like the ones from burning millions of barrels of fossil fuel, were indeed making the world a less habitable place for human and other life.

Then Exxon spent decades funding Climate Change Skepticism. To their credit, and against a mountain of evidence from most reputable climate scientists, they created a sizable block of Climate Change Skeptics including, apparently, our current president.

Exxon knew the lucrative product they were selling was choking the earth to death, but they were making too much money to stop. You know the old dilemma. It’s easy to be critical, but don’t forget, Exxon is about the most profitable corporation in the history of the world. Now their CEO is our nation’s Secretary of State. How’s that for transparency in government? You’ve got to love these guys we’ve got now. They will not let the Deep State get any deeper, despite all the fake news to the contrary.

* Lofgren describes the Deep State as “the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism and the militarization of foreign policy, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure that has given us the most unequal society in almost a century, and the political dysfunction that has paralyzed day-to-day governance.”

Consumer info for people screwed by The New York State of Health

I post this as a public service for New York State health insurance consumers at the mercy of the merciless New York State of Health Marketplace.

The identity of the person responsible for the public “marketplace” where otherwise uninsured New York State consumers are mandated to buy health insurance is a closely guarded secret within that public agency. Representatives of the agency are forbidden to disclose the identity of the executive director they work for. I have confirmed many times over that this is the actual policy of this public agency.

The likeliest reason for this policy of secrecy is that she doesn’t want 1,000 overwrought letters a day complaining of the mind boggling, blood boiling, heart attack inducing inefficiency of the bureaucracy she oversees. And who could blame her? Would you want your secretary bogged down with an endless tray of badly written complaints?

Fortunately there was a letter to this elusive public official posted on the internet. Here is the unaccountable political appointee’s contact information:

Ms. Donna Frescatore

Executive Director

New York State of Health

New York State Department of Health

Corning Tower

Empire State Plaza Albany, NY 12237

Drop her a line, please give her my best.

And as they tell you at the New York State of Health Marketplace, after a long call that fixes nothing, thanks for calling and have a nice day!

And as I answered today, through gritted teeth, after a 20 minute exercise in self-control to pronounce the word “yes” to the person in the proper office to confirm that I still wanted the appeal I asked for a month or two back, “it was my pleasure.”

politics smells like meat

Back in the days when I still thought “artists’ books” were cool, I entitled one Politics Smells like Meat. Still a good, and accurate, title, since politics decides who will eat steak and whose ass will be served as that steak. The smell of grilling meat is often delicious and easily overcomes any hesitation to eat what was, until recently, a living, sentient creature.

From the excellent Jane Mayer, investigative journalist and author of the definitive story of our secret torture program, this paragraph, in a profile of reclusive billionaire libertarian Robert Mercer, friend and sponsor of Steve Bannon:

Private money has long played a big role in American elections. When there were limits on how much a single donor could give, however, it was much harder for an individual to have a decisive impact. Now, Potter said, “a single billionaire can write an eight-figure check and put not just their thumb but their whole hand on the scale—and we often have no idea who they are.” He continued, “Suddenly, a random billionaire can change politics and public policy—to sweep everything else off the table—even if they don’t speak publicly, and even if there’s almost no public awareness of his or her views.”

The rest of the New Yorker article is here.

Thwarted Transparency

The reader should keep in mind that Irv Widaen put an uncommonly high value on honesty. It’s hard to imagine him ever telling a fib, for example, much less calculating a lie to evade having to speak of an uncomfortable true fact. Honesty was his trademark, he was going to tell you the truth no matter what the cost, since honesty itself was a rare and precious thing. My father always spoke his mind and could articulate multiple sides of most issues. He liked putting every available detail on the table for discussion. He had no respect for those who deliberately distorted the facts.

He didn’t need to lie because he was adept at reframing any conversation to his needs. This way he could remain scrupulously honest without talking about anything he didn’t want to talk about.

You will read of times when my father seems to have been dishonest. There is no contradiction with his basic honesty in this, though it’s complicated.

For example, when his eight year-old son came to him with tearful questions about what happened to Grandma’s six brothers and sisters, and Pop’s six brothers and sisters back in Vishnevitz, and their parents, my father did not solemnly lay out what was known of the terrible story. Instead he angrily told his young son to stop being melodramatic, that nobody knew any of those people, that they were abstractions, that the real problem was that the pampered boy, for some insane reason, wanted to feel like a victim, a childhood victim of the Nazi extermination in the Ukraine and Belarus when in fact he was only a middle class American drama queen who never knew any of these faceless, nameless people, people who disappeared into that night and fog thirteen years before he was even born.

It’s easy to think of this evasion as an act of dishonesty, a betrayal. I’ve come to see it also as an expression of my father’s disability, his inability to do otherwise. You can picture a father quietly telling his child: the parts of Europe where our family comes from had a long history of anti-Semitism; in the winter of 1942 into the summer of 1943 followers of the mad Adolf Hitler marched into the areas where we lived and killed everybody. That’s why we fought World War Two, to kill Hitler and his mad ideas.

My father wasn’t able to say something like that. Or perhaps he said something like it, in one clipped sentence like that, and maybe I forced him to say it again, in two sentences, and it was only when I persisted beyond reason that he chided me for being a self-pitying little pussy who just wanted to feel like a victim.

Someone who’d been raised by tender parents would have instinctively drawn the child close, said he understood how upsetting this terrible true story was, petted and comforted the kid. My father, raised with his mother’s lash across his face and a father who was a ghost of a man, was never given these human tools.

At eight I was a little young to be an astute historian. The only notes I took in those days were in the form of disturbing drawings. Some of them, I recall, scared the shit out of my mother. The secondary source in my memory recalls only the bad reaction of the overwhelmed father pushed to his breaking point by his anxious young son.

It is easy to see this now: my questions hurt him too much, frightened him, left him feeling powerless, desperate, angry. I get that now, though it’s taken more than fifty years.

ii

The personal, of course, is political. Consider the powerlessness, desperation and anger of the average American voter right now. Those who voted for the president are disgusted about how little respect the bad people in the media are showing their guy. Those who voted against the president are despondent that it could have come to this sorry pass in America.

Truth is the first casualty of war. “Truth” is now seen by most Americans as synonymous with Point of View. Coming to this opinion is simple if you live in the right Social Media echo chamber, and we all do. The same set of facts now automatically leads to two sets of irreconcilable opposite “truths” that trolls will endlessly goad each other about.

If the president in the blue hat orders the killing of far-away strangers based on a high-tech remote surveillance and profiling process, and you wear a blue hat, you’re unlikely to press for an investigation into possible war crimes when innocents are blown to bloody shreds. If the president ordering the extra-judicial executions is wearing a red hat, the man in the blue hat might get up on his hind legs about these high-tech assassinations that are radicalizing more and more of the world against us.

There are, still, true things. There are things as they exist beyond spin, beyond their commercial and political uses. Facts: where I was born, what day, what year. Facts: what I ate today, what I drank. Likewise in the world: if it is raining, what Cairo’s average temperature was each of the last thirty years, whether there is a law against racial discrimination in America.

Fact: the United States has the highest infant mortality rate of any wealthy industrialized nation. The political is also personal.

My father was the second child born to his tiny, red-haired, angry, religious mother. The first was a girl who died either in childbirth or immediately afterwards. This would have been in a tenement slum or a filthy, crowded maternity ward on the impoverished Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1922 or ’23.

I wonder if my father ever thought about this tiny, dead sibling he never knew. I doubt it. Speculation on such things takes you quickly beyond the realm of fact. In these pages I have tried to stay as close as I could to the facts I knew and limited my leaps of conjecture to things that were truly unknowable, like the nature and extent of my father’s love affair with the amorous young Christian widow in Connecticut.

The photos suggest they saw each other over the course of many years. I never heard my father mention her, I never heard her name. I have Eli’s quick story about breaking up that love affair and a total of three suggestive black and white photos of them together, found after Irv’s death, in a shoe box of miscellaneous photos. In one, they are captured wrestling on a picnic blanket and I’ve never seen my father look happier (the photo is here, at bottom of page). Or, here:

One photo appears to be from before the war, in the summer of 1941, when my father was 17. He is skinny, in a white shirt and tan pants, sitting jauntily on the railing of the porch next to his landlady/lover. In another he’s clearly a college student after the war. The skinny boy in the first picture, renting a room in her Connecticut house, pumping gas to pay his bills becomes, over perhaps ten years, the happy, round-faced young college graduate in the last photo. The woman appears to have made the long trip up to Syracuse to see him. The graduate wears the optimistic expression of a young scholar heading to an elite graduate school and his life of ideals beyond.

iii

A couple more details about this impulse to thwart transparency and why this thwarting bugs me so much, personally and politically.

Reframing was my father’s favorite technique — if you aggressively pursued some matter with him — ju jitsu! — shift the ground of the conversation to a pointed interrogation about why anyone would pry into such things in the first place, or whatever will make the person most uncomfortable. Put the inquisitive fucker on the defensive, there’s no defense like a good offense. It’s kind of like a mini filibuster, just keep talking, run out the clock. You can see virtually every politician today do this maneuver when in a tight spot, spout prepared talking points about something utterly unrelated to the question asked. This tactic is most often coupled with an indignant attack on the character of the person asking the uncomfortable question.

The logical extension to this technique is to preemptively vilify and delegitimize the truth-seeker. If the truth is disquieting, shameful, criminal, best to be circumspect about it, have others respect the secret. Indiscreet persons shall be blamed and attacked immediately. You can bet your nest egg that someone is making a lot of money on the deal if it is disquieting, shameful, criminal and ongoing, and you’d be wise to dummy up.

The personal is political. Bradley Manning tried to report the evidence of probable war crimes by Americans that he was seeing on his computer screen night after night. When he made the evidence public, after being silenced by his superiors, he was made to pay a steep price: prosecution as a traitor to the United States of America. Before his court martial they kept him naked in an outdoor cage, to show he was no better than any other terrorist and just as guilty under a statute that does not allow arguments about intent.

The main thing here is punish the leaker, don’t worry so much about the crimes exposed, no need to probe into those. The probe would likely lead to good, patriotic people being punished for well-meaning mistakes made in the fog of war. The news cycle will focus everybody’s attention back on the real malefactor. Make sure everyone knows the fucking illegal leaker is the traitorous enemy, not the people nonchalantly killing in the leaked videos. Our new president, like our previous one, focuses on these fucking illegal leaker felons, understandably.

In family life, if someone considers a fact embarrassing, say a divorce nobody mentioned to the children, or quietly sitting on tens of millions of inherited dollars, or some other ticklish thing, it is a fact best left unspoken. If you mention the taboo fact in any context, you are a betrayer of shameful secrets, whether you understand the shame or not.

In a family conversation about bankruptcy, for example, if you mention that so and so once declared bankruptcy, and his adult children, who are there, don’t know about it (they were kids at the time), you may have unwittingly whacked a hive of wasps in front of some fast tap-dancing in the family room.

“Dad never declared bankruptcy!” mom will quickly, falsely, assure the children, giving the urgent eye-bugging, throat slashing sign for you to clam up. Picture the look you should try to have on your face when the adult children look at you next.

Transparency is an ideal that our culture of constant selling and spinning makes difficult to uphold. You can’t have a real discussion, effectively explore options, solve problems, without free access to all the pertinent facts. Forget about the uninformed populace of a democratic republic having anything like democracy without access to what their elected officials are doing in their name, without informed public debate.

For reasons that should … be obvious… much as transparency is to be desired, the plain facts, set out, just like that, would be… in many cases, too destructive. You can hear our thoughtful former president B.O. carefully dancing out that explanation. National security. Sovereign immunity. State secrets. Classified. Espionage Act, no defense against treason based on your actual motives in disclosing.

After all, some of our wealthiest, most lucrative corporations have staunchly guarded trade secrets that are worth billions. And if it’s not technically a trade secret, it should be, particularly if certain demographics would be outraged, and we’ll continue to treat it like one.

As I have noticed so often, opacity and misdirection are all that’s needed for every form of mischief and corruption to flourish. The worst among us love it when no difficult questions are asked.

stage-managed liberty

“When you have stage-managed elections with the public relations industry determining what words come out of people’s mouth, candidates decide what to say on the basis of tests that determine what the effect will be across the population, somehow people don’t see how profoundly contemptuous that is of democracy”

Noam Chomsky to Bill Moyers (here)

In Fairness to Barack Obama

Let me try to be fair, for just a moment, then back into the trenches, snarling. No, that sentence betrays too much, doesn’t seem fair, or balanced. Let’s wind it back a bit, shall we, make it a little more personal?

I voted for Barack Obama twice. The first time I was actually optimistic that he might be the capable agent for overdue change he presented himself as. The second time I voted for him on the theories of “fool me twice, shame on me” and the old chestnut of casting a vote for the lesser of two evils. Evil, surprisingly, has become a relative thing in our desperately polarized society. Mel Brooks’ genius definition of tragedy and comedy comes to mind: tragedy is when I break a fingernail, comedy is when you fall down a manhole and die. Evil is now seen as who is doing what to whom and how does it affect me directly?

We have been living for a while in increasingly partisan echo chambers. In one chamber we find it absolutely sickening that obstructionist politicians can brazenly ignore their Constitutional duties when it is politically expedient and offer ‘explanations’ that sound startlingly like “we don’t have to do shit because this illegitimate Muslim non-American is a fucking ‘n-word’.” This was the position publicly stated (sub silento, as they say, dog whistled) by Mitch McConnell and other prominent Republicans when Obama took office: our goal is to make him a weak one term president who can’t get anything done. True we can’t lynch him, but we can certainly fuck him up and erase any legacy he tries to leave behind as soon as we get rid of him.

In the other echo chamber there is little question that Barack Obama was an insidious Kenyan-born Muslim intent on destroying America at all costs. There is no doubt that he is a Negro, the son of an African from Kenya, that’s something even Hussein Obama himself cannot deny. Many who hate Obama are undoubtedly racists, others are just, to be fair and charitable, skeptical of any Democrat who speaks well, appears thoughtful, ponders nuance, displays charisma and does not openly support the urgently needed policies they hear called for on talk radio during a time when terrorists are killing one out of every five Americans on a daily basis and violent crime plagues our once-great nation as it is overrun by hordes of threatening non-white aliens. To be even more fair, some in this right wing echo chamber are just decent wealthy people who reasonably fear a loss of income from any policy that protects the weak at the expense of the wealthy via marginally higher tax rates.

The divisions in our country, and the deep corruption of our pay-to-play lobbyist-driven political system, resulted in the election of a vain demagogue who seems completely unencumbered by principle, outside of increasing his own wealth, fame and power. During the presidential campaign he promised to repeal and replace Obamacare. He promised to create a terrific health policy that would protect every single American, not including, of course, the millions at his own rallies that will be without health care once he rams through the urgent repeal of Obamacare and restores large tax cuts for the rich. While giving no specifics, he assured the gullible that his plan would cover all Americans, cost less and deliver much better health care. He often ended this promise, like so many honest people reflexively do, with the tagline “believe me, believe me.”

I don’t like to think we live in a stupid country. I prefer to think we live in a cynically manipulated country. There’s a lot of money in cynical manipulation. The genius of America, if I may modestly say so, has long been cynical manipulation. Look, we had this great continent with vast natural resources and incredible wealth. There were savages living on it, attacking our settlers, impeding our ability to exploit all this wealth. Manifest Destiny, et, voila!

I don’t like to think we live in a country that could easily return to a lynch mob mentality, even with the increased crowing of White Supremacists and the recent surge in hate crimes. I prefer to think we live in a country where, during desperate times, the homo sapiens fear and rage-driven instinct to mass violence sometimes understandably occurs. Americans are no better, or worse, as a group, than the far away brown people we kill by remote controlled drones. Americans are fair people, to the extent anyone can be fair in a world like ours.

The plan the Republicans have slapped on the table to replace the conservative, corporation-friendly health care compromise that critics called Obamacare and vowed to repeal over and over while our nation was ruled by that tyrant, should not pass the sniff test. It includes billions of dollars in ‘tax relief’ to the wealthiest 2% while cutting millions of low income Americans off health insurance, or making it completely unaffordable for those who had no option before Obamacare.

In a better world somebody would just buy some TV time, invite Paul Ryan into a pay-per-view boxing ring, and simply whip the snot out of that snotty intellectual, settling the matter once and for all. Ryan is an intellectual in the same way that a four foot tall man is a giant in Lilliput. He read at least one very long book, a novel he bases his political philosophy on. That he is driven by principle is reflected in his ongoing refusal to cooperate with Mr. Trump, the candidate he thoroughly repudiated during the campaign.

I began this piece in fairness to Obama. Here is that fairness, the PPACA is better than what existed before. The PPACA is a deeply flawed compromise that left greedy corporations in charge of most of health care, sure. But in fairness, it contained a few good and long-overdue things; eliminating the obscene ‘pre-existing condition’ insurance loophole, extending affordable health insurance to millions, focusing on cost-saving incentives based on preventative care, saving the lives of some of the thousands of Americans who still die every year for lack of affordable medical care. The big flaw was that it left the gorged, rabid foxes in charge of the henhouse, but we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the demonstrably better than complete shit, can we?

Americans like the ACA, particularly those who were uninsured before the law took effect, even if many raise their torches and pitchforks and scream for the overdue repeal of tyrannical Obamacare. That’s OK, at Tea Party rallies Americans angrily held signs telling the government to keep their evil hands off Medicare.

I don’t like to think badly of my fellow Americans. I am counting on the stink of this bill, hastily prepared and designed to give money back to the richest Americans who the Kenyan Muslim simply mugged like the common criminal they always said he was, to ensure it does not get out of the House of Representatives. There are political maneuvers available to a party that did not hesitate to shut down the government when that Negro president insisted on trying to be the president, but the backlash should be too much to allow their use.

On the other hand, the spineless opposition party is mostly blowing bubbles of saliva so far, and making those humming sounds you sometimes hear in a Special Ed class. Don’t forget, they depend on the same billionaires who supported Trump for their reelection campaigns. I guess the odds are 50/50 this big winner gets to win again. Who among us will be surprised if a few million losers lose again?