A serf boy asks his father why they pay rent to the Baron. Not only rent, says the boy, the Baron gets ninety per cent of our crops. And I notice, says the boy, that mom sometimes goes to the Baron’s, in his carriage, and while she’s gone you’re always in a violent mood. “Why do we have to pay tribute to the Baron, who doesn’t even seem like a nice man?”
“We pay tribute to the Baron so that he will protect us from other barons,” says the father, the boy staring at the man’s clenched fists.
“You know, Elie,” said the skeleton of my father, as weary of this long posthumous chat as I have been lately, “your trouble is that you feel like you have to hit a six hundred foot home run now. The legend says Babe Ruth hit one almost that far, you can ask my man Jeeves about it and get time and place. It was hit in Florida, if I recall, in some kind of Spring Training or other exhibition game. Your boy The Mick supposedly hit that tape measure job in Washington D.C. that went 565 feet, I think that was the mythical number the Yankees’ creative PR flack immortalized in the press release after the game.
“You read the whole story of that tape measure shot that left Griffith Stadium and went over a row of houses across the street from the park in Jane Leavy’s great biography of Mantle. It may have gone that distance, 565, it certainly was hit out of the stadium, a rare feat, it went an impressive part of that amazing distance, for sure. It may have dented a car, and bounced, and finished rolling another 40 feet away where a kid showed the guy with the tape measure where he found it. The details are not important (though this is a cool read, thanks, Jeeves).
“Mantle was, at the time of that home run, a young man of prodigious physical strength uniquely adapted to hitting a baseball, thrown at ninety miles an hour, a long way. The physics of how someone his size hit a ball as hard and as far as he did is discussed in a chapter of Leavy’s book. It’s not important now. Nor is it in any way significant that he hit that ball, if I’m not mistaken, in the year you were born, 1956, the year he won the Triple Crown.”
Your boy Jeeves informs us he hit it on April 17, 1953.
“Fascinating to have the world’s accumulated facts at your fingertips, isn’t it? This is what I want you to realize, Elie. Mantle was a twenty-three year-old superstar at his physical peak when he blasted that pitch on an atmospherically perfect day for a legendary home run to fly. Babe Ruth was a force of nature, his like will never been seen again, he would have been a first ballot Hall of Famer as a pitcher, for fuck’s sake, and nobody has approached his lifetime slugging percentage — and even he is known to have hit only one or two that distance.
“You’re standing at the plate, knocking dirt off your spikes, sometimes hitting the fuck out of the ball– but in an empty stadium. You imagine, and I know you do, because I’m in your head, as you know very well, that you need to hit the ball over all the seats and out into Shitshow Avenue. You figure if you hit the hell out of that heater up in your wheelhouse, somebody will have to take notice. This is not a reasonable position, for a number of reasons.
“First of all– you have to hit the ball where there are people to see it, paying customers with their fannies in the seats. Second– you don’t have to hit the fucking ball 600 feet. You’d be better off, in some way, blowing the general manager, if you want to be brutal about it. If you hit a single and a double every day, by July you’re still hitting .420, a very big story without any fancy tape measure home runs.
“But it isn’t about baseball at all, is it, Elie? You’re not a baseball player. I mean, obviously, it’s a metaphor. You recall that hothead relief pitcher who claimed he could strike Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth on six pitches? He got some shit, smirked and said ‘for Christsakes, man, they’d be over a hundred years old!’ Do you think even Ted Williams could have hit the ball 600 feet at your age?
“Look, I understand you never did what every professional in the world does, unless they have a famous father (and you could have, if you’d been smarter about it, of course)– that is, position yourself in an industry, make useful connections, get yourself powerful mentors, learn to use the tongue for more than witty badinage. You never learned to make the connections successful people make. You dropped out early, did not go to a college where the best and the brightest meet to rule the world. You were open with your disdain for the ambitious, those young people willing to do whatever it takes to ‘make it’, to ‘do well’ and so on.
“I take some part of the blame for that, you know, because I also always openly despised careerist opportunists. More blame comes to me because I was such a relentless fuck and I kept the rage hissing full blast all the time. I am not deaf to the great irony that my book, no matter how well-done you manage to make it, will never see the light of day because I disabled you from taking the needed steps to get some influential corporately adept genius to champion the book.”
“Are you right to be distracted at the moment, filled with hate that the beloved liberal former president who left among his great legacies a health care plan that requires you to jump through several flaming hoops, in a fleeting sixty day period, to have a chance to reverse their mistake that makes your current health care ten times more expensive than the shit care you had last year? Sure, hate away. In the end, if all goes well, you’ll pay what the law says you should pay. In the mean time, figure out how to get a tax transcript, the correct one, there are six or seven, you know, and make sure to upload it and perfect your administrative appeal within the next few weeks or lose the right to any appeal whatsoever. I mean, fine, be enraged. What has it to do with your duty to me, with your filial piety?”
“I may be a selfish prick here, and I see I’ve reduced you to tooth sucking silence, but I want you to finish this book. Not only for my sake, and I say this in all honesty, but for your sake as well. If the book is not a mammoth home run, if it gets you a very low advance and sells a few hundred copies, it will be a greater reward than I deserve. It may also position you to get paid for what you do, for what you have spent the last few decades doing, whatever else you have been doing. As so many assholes have pointed out, and every lottery winner knows, you have to be in it to win it.”
“So stop sucking your teeth, get your tongue out of your cheek, and find the right anus to gently probe with it. You already know a literary agent, stop pretending you don’t. She may not be the agent you want or need, but she’s a place to start, the best place you’ve got. Can’t you even do that, for fuck’s sake?”
A friendly guy often stood in front of Sekhnet’s building having a cigarette. Sekhnet hates the smell of cigarette smoke, and noisily protests whenever a whiff of it rolls over her, but she and I became friendly with this guy who always had a big smile and small talk when we ran into him in the street. He worked as a contractor of some kind, with only modest financial success, and his hours were odd. You could run into him smoking out there during the day or at two a.m.
His girlfriend lived in the building, he lived there too, in fact. She wouldn’t let him smoke in the apartment, and fair enough, so he went down to the street, stood in front of the building, and cheerfully shot the shit with people coming in and out. It emerged that his girlfriend, a fairly agoraphobic woman, was deeply involved in the rescue and fostering of unwanted cats. They had two adopted strays, Sid and Gus. When our cat, Skaynes, was suddenly very ill– on the eve of a two week trip we had planned— these two lovingly trundled him off to the vet for daily treatment of his newly diagnosed pancreatitis. Along with the son of old friends, on hand in the apartment to otherwise take care of the cat’s needs, these three literally saved the Baron’s life.[1]
We had dinner with them a couple of times, I read the dark play the guy’s father had written about his life in prison, culminating in a smuggled razor blade, presumably to end his life, tucked somewhere safe as they transported him to another prison, or a death chamber. Father and son had had a reconciliation before the old man died. Actually, it was all good, it’s just that the older man had spent much of his life locked up for crimes he claimed he’d never committed. Lived out the last years of his life a free man.
Now we fast forward a year or so, troubles in the relationship between these new friends of ours. The man also had untreated heart issues, the occasional pains in the chest, shortness of breath. He’d been told he had heart issues, but didn’t have insurance so had been reluctant to see a doctor. He got a stern lecture about smoking every time Sekhnet passed him having a cigarette downstairs. There was a self-destructive side to him, certainly.
Then, a phone call. The woman had been having problems with her phone, when they got fixed she heard the message from the man’s mother. He was in the hospital in New Jersey. He had signed a DNR. They had taken him off life support. “He looked good,” she reported after visiting the young, healthy-looking man lying unresponsive in the hospital bed, disconnected from all life support. A day or two later he was dead.
[1] Among his names is the title Baron Von Doghead
It’s hard to imagine my father’s thoughts in the dark car as he headed out to Bethpage after dinner for his second job. Bethpage is on Long Island, in Nassau county, a fairly long jog east from Queens. The roads were not as good back then, the Long Island Expressway was narrower and did not extend as far, and I picture him tooling along bumpy, unlit roads at about 45 miles per hour, the stretches he did on the highway. This would be after a dinner spent snarling, sometimes shouting, at his children, a pair of merciless pricks who took time out of their war against each other to gang up on their father.
“I work two fucking jobs so these ingrates can give me shit…,” he is muttering to himself as he backs the car on to the tree lined street where he has situated his children’s cozy childhood. Then he drives the twenty odd miles over dark roads to an office in Bethpage. He parks his car and walks up the steep staircase to his second floor office in that little structure. His small office, which looks somewhat like an attic, takes up the whole second floor of the house, or maybe the third. He sits at a desk and begins making phone calls in a circle of lamplight. At least that’s what he did the night he brought my sister and me with him to Bethpage.
“There is somebody else you should contact,” says the skeleton of my father, “you should be in touch with Rom, the artist formerly known as Peanuts. You know how to reach him and you know what a good guy he is. He’ll give you another point of view, will shine some needed light on these dark musings of yours. I didn’t just sit at that desk making phone calls, I visited each Young Judaea club in Nassau-Suffolk region. I drove out to Smithtown and Riverhead, wherever a few Jewish kids got together, I was an ambassador and organizer to high school aged Jews on Long Island. I was director of Nassau-Suffolk for years, you don’t think I made a few friends?”
I have no doubt you did. You had Donnie Ingram and Artie Friarman, to name just two. Rom, I’m sure, has a couple of good stories, remembers you as a great guy, a funny and straight shooting bastard, no doubt.
“Which I also was, mind you,” said the skeleton, holding up a finger.
Which nobody can deny, which nobody can deny.
“Look, Elie, you’ve got to stop this neurotic shit already and start taking steps. You have to take steps, Elie,” said the skeleton of my father, from his grave outside of Peekskill.
Steps, yes. There are steps to be taken.
“Rebate” for over-payment of Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act premiums for 2015. I can look forward to a much larger one for this year’s over-payment, some time in 2018, or 2019 actually… hopefully.
Going to put this in the ATM today, I wonder how long it will take to clear.
Frank Zappa had a song called “The Torture Never Stops”, which is about right. Like pugnacious people looking for a reason to punch someone, it’s one of those things that hums along in the background of our enraged, maddening world. Here’s a seemingly random one, crosswise in the old throat, that I will try to briefly dislodge.
That’s one of the beauty parts of writing. Describe it well and experience a moment of relief. Why am I foaming at the mouth, you ask? Let me wipe away the foam, like Mr. Hitler delivering a coherent, if amoral, description of effective propaganda in a book otherwise composed of rabid dog spittle, and give myself that momentary illusion of relief.
The current figurehead of our Deep State, an entitled, irascible and seemingly unhinged reality TV big shot, has promised, among other things, to abolish and replace Obamacare. That he is the man to provide America with a health care scheme like the one citizens of every other wealthy nation depend on is as ridiculous an idea as his modern day Great Wall of China proposed for our long southern border. I have critiqued the corporation-friendly, cynically-named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act at length. You can click on the Obamacare link stage left (to the right for you pogues) to read the disheartening details. I am no friend of Obama, a probably good man with a record of accomplishments as shameful as Bill Clinton’s. Depleted uranium and cluster bombs dropped in Syria? Not done by Mr. Trump, that was the handiwork of my man the Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Anyway, in the last phase of Mr. Obama’s second term, New York State came up with a pay-as-you-go Medicaid plan for New Yorkers living slightly above the poverty line. It’s called the Essential Plan. The name turns out to be apt. You can essentially get the health care you can force someone to provide under the plan. Based on my income I qualified for this no-frills plan. In fact, I was forced to enroll, or have no health insurance and pay a fine as a scofflaw come tax time.
My experience with this “Essential” plan was literally sickening. I wound up so sickened that my visit to the ER resulted in my being hospitalized for cardiac tests. Follow-up care was deemed unnecessary, an undue burden, no doubt, on the corporation to which I paid my low monthly premium.
When I enrolled for health insurance in 2017 I was determined to pay more and get a plan that could provide me with some measure of actual health care. My subsidy level, and choice of plans, would be determined by my projected 2017 income. It had to be above a certain level, to allow me to choose anything but the Essential Plan. My actual 2016 income would have doomed me to the Essential Plan. Luckily for me I was not asked my actual 2016 income, I was asked to project my 2017 income.
After hours on the phone I learned what was not available anywhere on the internet– what the income threshold to choose a health plan was, somewhere around $29,000. Nobody could tell me if this was gross or net income, so I declared my 2017 income to be a robust $32,000, to leave myself a margin for error.
I instantly received a Notice of Disenrollment. What I mean is that, this shit popped up on my screen within seconds of clicking in that income number. I got a document emailed to me at the same time, helpfully labeled Template 09, like all the others, which informed that I was no longer qualified for the Essential Plan. Good news, I naively thought.
I will spare you a hundred details and tell you that my Navigator (the website and marketplace are so opaque it literally requires a navigator to help you get around) informed me that my income level qualified me for a subsidy of about half the monthly premium. Meaning, with the subsidy I’d pay an affordable $230 a month for “Silver level” Obamacare with only a $1,200 out of pocket deductible. Meaning that’s what I should be paying, under the law. Except I’d had another notice telling me, erroneously, that I was not entitled to any subsidy. Fair enough, we have already had vivid illustrations of what contemptible morons the administrators of the complicated and opaque program are.
It will take about six months to have my appeal heard, my Navigator (also an attorney at a New York non-profit mandated to help consumers) informs me. In the meantime I will pay $453 a month and have a $2,000 deductible. Although, once they correct their mistake and reinstate my subsidy I will get a tax refund, some time in the second half of 2018, for the overpayment in 2017. All I need to do to get an appeal of their clearly mistaken determination is to submit a letter, my 2015 tax return (the last one filed) and a Tax Transcript from the IRS.
What the fuck is a Tax Transcript, you ask? No fucking idea. Click this shit to learn all about it: https://www.irs.gov/individuals/get-transcript.
OK, easy enough. The IRS will send you an electronic one, chop chop. All you need to do is create a log-in and request one. They assure you it’s quick to create a log-in, only about 15 minutes. Easy. Except that each of the four times I have tried so far, over the course of more than an hour over two days, punctuated with Tourretic outbursts that have terrified, and horrified, Sekhnet, they log me out, sometimes because their system malfunctions, other times informing me it’s done for my own protection, before I can complete the process. There is no 800 number where you can speak to a human being for assistance.
So, I can just relax for Presidents’ Day Weekend, since there is nothing to be done at the moment. Two days in a row, unable to complete this easy log-in business. No reason to get excited. Just keep loaning this giant insurance company $230 a month, since I’ll, theoretically, get it back a year and a half from now anyway. Assuming this Orange Winner does not actually make good on abolishing the whole plan and replacing it with something terrific.
I feel much better now, thanks, I really do.
My father always wore glasses, even at the end of his life when, after laser surgery, his vision was almost 20:20.
“I couldn’t stand it, he looked so weird, we had a pair of glasses made with plain glass lenses,” my mother said. I think she told me that after he died and I tried on his glasses, which I had never been able to see through, and I saw plainly without having to whip off the glasses in pain.
20:400, my father told us, is considered legally blind. Being legally blind was not, apparently, an obstacle to serving in the armed forces in World War Two. My father was drafted and inducted. By sheer luck of his assignment, reading the manuals for aircraft when the mechanics got stuck, he didn’t find himself in Europe until after the remnants of the Nazi government surrendered.
I picture him, the twenty one year-old Jew, arriving in the epicenter of the madness, looking around through those strong corrective lenses he wore. I can’t imagine what was going through his mind, and he never spoke of it.
Thinking of it now, I wonder how he managed the first few years of his tortured childhood, legally blind, trying to see the world that was always blindsiding him. It wasn’t until well after he entered school, I’m fairly sure, that he got his first pair of glasses. His untreated legal blindness was probably another reason he believed he was the dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill — unlike the other kids in his class, he simply couldn’t tell a vowel from a consonant.
“The reader will want to have a physical description of me,” said the skeleton, “you know, before I was this universal soldier we behold now, as you slink toward your own old age.”
I am always struck by an uncanny resemblance to James Earl Jones. The face, the eyes, the deliberate dignity with which he carries himself, the set of the downturned mouth, the body type, with the assertive, athletic thrust of its belly-prominent torso. Every time I see James Earl Jones it strikes me again how much, in his looks and the way he presents himself to the world, he looks like my father.
“Wow,” said the skeleton, “that’s a weird one, I have to hand it to you.”
No less an authority on the subject than Pablo Picasso said that art was a lie that helps us see the truth. It’s also a matter of poetic license, as they used to call it, but if you picture James Earl Jones, you have a pretty basic idea of what my father looked like. I think it may be his lightly colored eyes, as much as anything, and the downturned mouth, when his face is otherwise at rest. A kind of defiance.
“We can assume those burning light colored eyes are the genetic gift of a white man who owned an ancestor of his,” said the skeleton.
You yourself, with your six foot two frame, rangy as a young man, as we see in the army photos, filled out to the point of bursting in later years, and your thick, jet black hair, remarked self-effacingly from time to time, and out of nowhere, about how often you were mistaken for Rock Hudson.
“I did say that,” said the skeleton.
That was like your singing, in a way. You could pull off a few syllables of a very soulful Sam Cooke imitation, or some other singer of an earlier time. It wasn’t so much an imitation as an homage, a fleeting demonstration of how much you loved soulful singers.
“Your goodbyes,” you’d croon to mom, out of the blue, “leave me with eyes that cry…” You’d sing it very tunefully, and cut it off right there, go back to cutting your steak, shoveling down your dinner. “I got a house, a showplace, but I can’t get no place, with you…” you’d sing, as mom got that odd smile on her face.
“I…. wish… you…. bluebirds,” you’d sing, with a perfectly digested sense of Sam Cooke’s other worldly timing.
“Well, in spite of everything, I saw myself as a seductive, devilishly handsome man,” said the skeleton.
I know what you mean. It reminds me of that revelation I had as a young man, that you don’t have to smile at a girl you like. If the girl likes you, that is.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said the skeleton, “but if you mean you felt handsome, or unself-conscious, or whatever, and felt no need to smile or ingratiate yourself… I know you remember me telling you that when I look in the mirror I see what I want to see and ignore what I don’t want to see.”
I do remember that, and I do the same thing. You know my sister, a good looking woman, has always placed a tremendous premium on what a person looks like. She can’t stand to hear my critique of Obama, because he’s so handsome, as well as so well-spoken. “No, please, stop talking about my boyfriend that way. He’s too handsome,” she’ll say.
“Well, Eli said that about his love at first sight relationship with my mother,” said the skeleton, “you know, how much they both were drawn to good-looking people. How they could forgive anything, if the person was good-looking.” This is one of those odd moments, since I never mentioned any of this to my father when he was alive or since.
“Oh come on, stop being coy, Elie, you know very well how this works now,” said the skeleton. “Besides, how many times, in trying to describe Eli, piece together the painful mystery that was my mother, have you set out that scene, the reunion of oldest brother and youngest sister in New York City, when Aren brought Eli to pick up Aren’s little sister, Tante Chava? Eli would have been a boy of about seven years old, right, born in 1908, my mother came right before the War to End All Wars. Eli was regarded as a very handsome young man. Uncle Aren was a very handsome man too.”
“The D.U. was very handsome in his wedding photos,” my sister points out. The D.U., of course, the Dreaded Unit.
“This is what happens at this hour, when you would really much rather be asleep,” said the skeleton, not without a touch of sympathy. “You sleep for a couple of hours and then are suddenly awake, and desperate to go back to sleep, and you get up to try to mentally tire yourself out enough to go back to sleep. If you have a thought in mind and get up to write, this is the kind of thing you might write.”
Right. I got out of bed with the thought of a clip from a great Norman Lear documentary I saw the end of tonight. Lear is 93, completing his memoir, a work that takes him eight years, years when he is also in therapy. He looks at the filmmakers and tries to explain how difficult it is grappling with feelings about his father, who let the family down by undertaking a shady job that resulted in his being hauled off to prison when Norman was nine. Broke up the family, since the provider was gone. Lear is tearful as he wrestles with eighty five year old feelings about his father. A 93 year-old tormented by his feelings about his father. In the next scene he is watching a clip from All in The Family, a show that sheds tremendous life on our family.
The skeleton regards me warily.
Archie Bunker always reminded me of you also, his hectoring certainty and the aggressive thrust of his face, his belly. In this clip young Rob Reiner, The Meathead, is trying to convince Archie that Archie’s father was wrong to be brutal to Archie. The Meathead is hammering at a single very key emotional truth– that Archie’s father had been wrong to so badly mistreat his child. The subtext is that Archie is in a rage against a world he mistrusts because of his father’s cruelty, but the Meathead is all sympathy, genuinely horrified to hear that Archie was beaten and harshly punished as a child– and takes his father’s side. They are both, momentarily, completely out of character.
Archie wavers thoughtfully for a second, seeming to consider this, and then, remarkable actor that Caroll O’Connor was, his face becomes ineffably tender as he tries describes his father. A generic father, the first person to throw you a baseball, and take you by the hand for a walk. With that faraway look he describes his father’s hand, and how his father broke that hand beating Archie, for Archie’s own good. The camera pans to the ninety-three year old Norman Lear, tears running down his face. “Oh, God, is that good,” he says, wiping at his eyes with a handkerchief.
Earlier in the documentary Dick Cavett introduces Caroll O’Connor on his show with a phrase about the lovable bigot O’Connor plays. O’Connor comes out, in a suit, smoking a cigarette, and immediately speaks in a way that makes it very clear he is not Archie Bunker. He tells Cavett and the audience that Archie is not lovable, though he may make them laugh. He talks about how much pain Archie is in, and how imprisoned he is by that pain, how limited his world is. How much more fun he could be having, if he wasn’t so damaged. [1] Cavett does not try to make a joke.
I look over and the skeleton of my father is quietly weeping. I’m heading back to sleep, with Sekhnet and the cat.
[1] O’Connor nails it succinctly and insightfully for Cavett and his audience:
Well, you said ‘lovable bigot’, I don’t know about the lovable part of it. We’re presenting the story about a man who is basically a pretty unhappy guy. People may laugh at him and enjoy him but we must look at Archie as a man who could be getting a lot more out of his life, if he didn’t have these burdens on him and these things that have poisoned his life.
“Jesus,” said the skeleton of my father, parenthetically and in a footnote, “those words could be carved on my gravestone…”
“While you’re on this legal tangent, why not refine what you’re doing here in the first place, Elie?” suggests the skeleton of my father helpfully, peeking out of the snow that today blankets his grave after yesterday’s heavy snowfall. “You know, the old ‘questions raised’ from your legal writing days.”
The question raised section of a legal argument frames the question you want the judge to answer the same way your persuasive argument, with its apt citations to precedent, will guide her to. Raising the right question, and then providing all the reasons the judge should agree with your answer, is a large part of the litigator’s art. Separates the winners from the losers, yo. Worth a shot here, I suppose.
Question raised: what is the best use of your time?
“Vague, but I like it. Ideally, if you did not have to work for a living, were content to live as a monk, did not buy into society’s notions of status and achievement, how would you spend your precious, limited time?”
I start to think of that old commie saw ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’ The most satisfying and productive-feeling way to spend my time nowadays, seeing that without a wealthy backer one can’t launch even an ingeniously designed and cost-effective program to help the children of poor people, is writing. I love to play the guitar, and I love to draw, but writing is something most people can understand and something potentially useful. Let me put it this way– no matter how well you play music or draw, many people do not get it. Simply makes no sense to them. Words– there you go. We all basically agree on what they mean, everyone can follow them if they are set out in an order that makes sense.
“No offense, Elie, but who gives a shit?” said the skeleton.
Fair enough. If you have a strong point of view about how viciously the status quo is proceeding, as I certainly do, as you did, and you have the means to express it, to persuade– maybe that is a kind of moral imperative.
“Means relatively little if you express it to a handful of likeminded people who click on your blahg to read your latest expressions of the moral imperative,” said the skeleton.
No argument here, dad. I’ve noticed that the more devotedly vicious weasels among us, guys like Grover Norquist and his buddy Jack Abramoff and people of that ilk, are tireless in the mass promotion of their beliefs, or what they say are their beliefs.
“Well, you have to be careful about beliefs, people actually believe them. Like the beliefs of the millions who cast their votes for an angry, spoiled brat who can’t get enough attention or power. You can argue, present the facts, but you won’t get very far with reason. As you yourself have noted many times, as borne out by the sad story of my life, only direct experience that smashes your belief hard enough in the face can have any impact on what we believe. We are largely irrational creatures, much as it may pain us to admit this.”
Yah, mon. The beauty part is, we are geniuses at setting up rational looking structures to support otherwise idiotic beliefs. Think of libertarians– they believe in liberty for everybody to decide everything for themselves and that therefore the government should not intervene. They call the fire department when their house is on fire, call the police when they’re robbed, they drive on roads built by the government, and so forth, but the government has no right to charge them any kind of tax to maintain these things. The theory sounds reasonable if put abstractly enough: personal liberty is so important that we put it at the top of the list of what a human needs.
“Anatole France’s great line comes to mind, the one your friend the mad judge was fond of quoting: ‘the law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike from begging in the streets, sleeping under bridges and stealing bread.'”
Just so. Think of the liberty of somebody born in a tenth generation of inherited poverty, at the mercy of everyone else’s more fortunate liberty. There’s your living refutation of Libertarianism.
“No Libertarian will ever see one of those living refutations, except maybe on giant screen TV, being led away in handcuffs by a militarized police unit,” said the skeleton.
Question raised: how to get these writings presented to a larger audience?
“Next question, please.”
Question raised: how to present the story of my father’s largely tragic life as an uplifting tale publishers and readers will clamor to pay for?
“Now you’re starting to make a little sense. You know, if you type for hours every day, and make a certain amount of sense — even if you pretend you’re talking to a skeleton who can talk back to you — but you have no plan to market and sell what you write– what do you call that?”
Libertarianism?
“I’m glad you find this funny. Blessed is the man who amuseth himself, Elie.”
Amen to that, padre.
The law gives and the law takes away. Thank God for the laws we have that protect the vulnerable. These laws are not the rule, but they are something to be very thankful for, to fight to protect. Between the rule of law and the rule of violence, there is nothing to choose.
One of the most difficult things, as an idealistic young lawyer trying to make a living, was hearing a prospective client’s long, painful recitation of a brutal screwing that raised no legal issue a court could address. One of the most useful, and terrible, parts of law school is the “issue spotting” exercise. You listen to a long detailed complaint looking for issues that may be legally remediable among the many equally, sometimes more horrific, parts of the story that is regarded, in its entirety, as a trifle with which the law does not concern itself.
“You got royally screwed, no question, and I sympathize 100% with your anger at the sickening ordeal you were put through, I would feel exactly as you do,” I would begin, seeking the words to let the poor sodomized fucker down gently on his tender sphincter.
“What they did to you was unconscionable, sickening and offensively typical.” The words do not come easily, you have to give your professional opinion of the person’s odds of getting a case into court, having a meaningful hearing, achieving some victory with the law. Those odds are zero.
“This is the worst part of my job, explaining to someone who’s been brutally, deliberately screwed, against his will, that the law regards his screwing as a trifle with which the law does not concern itself. De minimis non curat lex, as the judges say. It’s Latin for ‘your client is shit out of luck, asshole. Next!'”
The issue spotting exercise is the law student’s training for hearing a layman’s complaint and finding a viable legal theory for bringing the complaint to court. Often there is no remedy at law. People who are severely screwed often have a hard time understanding this.
“You agree that they fucked me up the ass sideways,” the prospective client will protest.
“I do,” the empathetic young lawyer will say.
“You agree that it was unconscionable, your own word,” says the prospective client.
“I do, absolutely,” the lawyer will say. And so on. The lawyer knows what the prospective client cannot understand in his particular case yet– the laws are made by powerful forces that like the idea of non-consensual sex, they like it very, very much. Unless there is a provision in the law to enforce the rights of those who do not give consent to those powerful people, and other non-human entities, who love a little spontaneous dalliance, consensual or not, well, you have a trifle that the law does not need to concern itself with.
It is very troubling to see a rightfully aggrieved person standing on a phantom leg. There ought to be a law… well, I agree very much. Unfortunately the billionaire class, in conjunction with those psychopathic legal fictions called ‘persons’, with their army of well-paid lobbyists representing the tiny, powerful group whose interests they tirelessly protect, have the most persuasive voice for lawmakers.
Still, there is the human reflex, felt by many, to stand on a right they strongly believe they SHOULD have. Brings us, in an odd way, to the narrow electoral college election of this unreasonable fellow we have in office now. Millions voted for his unconvincing promise to help the little man and cut through law and everything else to get him what he SHOULD have. A promise ridiculous on its face, as we used to say at law, but there you have it. His type essentially says, pretty much irrefutably:
You have no legal right unless you can enforce it in court, asshole. Even if you have a legal right that a court will enforce, find a lawyer who will work for free or we will bankrupt you. We will bury you in legal bills! You really want to fight the power, motherfucker? We will destroy you!
In this context there is a controversy, sadly non-controversial to most Americans, that is like a fiber of celery caught uncomfortably between my molars. No floss can remove it, my tongue is constantly playing with the irritating strand every time I’m reminded of it. I don’t know if Anwar al-Awlaki went all the way over to becoming an active al Q’aeda recruiter, as his accusers claimed when they put him on the secret presidential kill list, and after they turned him into chopped meat with a missile launched by a Predator drone. I doubt it, but I don’t absolutely know for sure. Neither did Jeremy Scahill, who researched the issue in depth, but he also strongly doubted that Awlaki was affiliated with terrorists and presented a good case that no evidence whatsoever of terrorist ties was produced before his extrajudicial execution.
I know, at least in the first part of his railing against the American worldwide war against Islam, that Awlaki probably felt he had a right to free speech under the First Amendment. It’s an argument his lawyer could have made in court, Awlaki’s right to dissent, if he’d been tried, even in absentia. As an American, Awlaki believed he had an absolute right to express his opinions, to argue against the murderous policies of his government, to appeal in the strongest possible terms to the sense of justice in those he addressed.
The American president had a different idea and, being a brilliant Constitutional law professor brushed aside all the legal issues raised by the targeted murder of an American citizen for giving speeches the president deemed the dangerous incitement of a deadly enemy combatant. Brushed aside all legal arguments and zapped the American citizen with a drone-launched missile. The story forever after would be that Obama wisely and decisively took out a dangerous terrorist leader, the number two man in al Q’aeda and heir apparent to Osama Bin Laden himself, if you believe Obama’s representations about Awlaki.
I don’t begrudge Obama his accomplishments. The elimination of the obscene ‘pre-existing condition’ loophole in health insurance was long overdue and something every American should applaud. At the same time, Obama handed expanded executive prerogatives to the volatile, angry man who succeeded him as president.
Included in these prerogatives was the absolute right to say who is an enemy combatant and, based on that unappealable status determination, to take any steps necessary to make sure the dangerous terrorist is neutralized.
“Your classic slippery slope, Elie,” said the skeleton of my father. “You heard about those ALEC introduced Ag Gag laws which call for complete opacity when it it comes to the systematic industry-wide torture of animals raised for slaughter. In the states where these laws have been passed it is illegal to take unauthorized videotape of violence against farm animals.
“Violence seems like a ridiculous thing to talk about in connection with animals raised to be meat. And it is. The standard for what is acceptable in the animals-for-food-industry, of course, is determined by industry standards. If ten chickens per square yard of cage means you have to cut the beaks off them to keep them from pecking each other to death, so be it and there’s nothing cruel or unusual about it. Cruel it might arguably be, but unusual? I’m afraid not, we all do it, sir. Industry standard. Nothing to see here.
“Animals being raised for slaughter and sale as meat certainly have no rights a white man is bound to respect. But here’s the kicker, Elie. As you know, these laws allow the State to prosecute vegan activists as ‘terrorists’. Try that ass hat on for size. If you’re a PETA activist and you take a video of factory workers beating a cow or pig to death, you are a terrorist under these Ag Gag laws. What can you do to a terrorist? Some believe torture is too good for those motherfuckers, you dig?”
“But see, Elie, torture is nothing to worry about either. That’s because our Constitution protects us against a psychopathic element of the government deciding that, in spite of treaties we’ve signed and prosecutions we’ve successfully waged against torturers from other nations, Americans can legally torture people — if we secretly redefine it and call it something else.
“We all know Americans don’t torture unless the country’s most powerful skillfully play to the terror of the populace, which will allow such formerly hideous practices to become ‘normalized’. You know, like if we’re facing an enemy so terrible that all measures must be employed to destroy that enemy. You know, an enemy that has no hesitation to slaughter as many children as it takes to rid the world of what they perceive as evil.”
OK, dad. Calm down now. Life goes on.
“Not for me it doesn’t,” said the skeleton.
Not for me either, really, not all the time.
