The New Feudalism

“So, you seem unduly upset to be living under a new feudalism.  That’s really as silly as a serf back in the middle ages being upset about it.  It’s the world you live in, Elie, much as it might chafe your ass to pay fealty to the legally created psychopaths that are your lord and master.  Pay your bills and be quiet,”  said the skeleton of my father from his grave outside of Peekskill.  

“On the other hand, you really should write up your insight about the nuts and bolts of how the new feudalism actually works, on the ground.  I like that idea about contract law replacing constitutional rights, but I didn’t go to law school, you did.” 

It hit me the other day, the actual mechanics of how this new feudalism actually works. Current contract law trumps many of our other rights as consumers in the American market place.  In corporatocracy, corporations dictate the terms of all contracts, making them favorable to themselves, disabling the consumer to the fullest extent allowable by laws they lobby for, while retaining an outsized voice in how those contracts are construed by courts– or even if a consumer has a right to take the contract to court.  I give our accomplished Chief Corporatist John Roberts a lot of the credit for this, as I will elaborate on in a moment.  

Students in civics class learn that our rights as U.S. citizens flow from our original contract with our government, the Constitution.  The constitution enumerates the rights and responsibilities of every citizen, and every branch of government, under our laws.  Every law we are subject to must pass Constitutional muster, in other words, must not infringe on rights guaranteed to us as U.S. citizens.   The Supreme Court is the final arbiter of what is constitutional and which laws must be struck down as unconstitutional, as every American student learns.

“The little inside joke of all this, of course, is that a group of lawyerly men appointed for life, joined in recent decades by a few lawyerly women, decide, unappealably, what rights of yours a white man is bound to respect,” said the skeleton.

Indeed.  You had a century where the Fourteenth Amendment, enacted to protect the rights of newly freed former slaves, was not enforced.  The Supreme Court ruled, a decade after the end of the Civil War, that ‘the day of the Negro as the special favorite of the law is at an end.’  

“Well, you know, favoritism has always been frowned on in this country, especially for those who don’t deserve it, especially by those who don’t have to worry about such things,” said the skeleton.  

There was, as you know, never even a federal anti-lynching law, even the revered FDR couldn’t sign it.

“He had to put it in a drawer, the pocket veto, as they call it, he’d have lost all the swing-voting klansmen Democrats of the South who voted for his New Deal if he’d taken control of their Negros away from them,” said the skeleton.

Naturally, we’ve had any number of pieces of shit serve on the Supreme Court over the years.  There’ve been some good ones, some smart ones, some mediocre ones and some outright foul pieces of shit.  

“That’s democracy, you take your political appointees as you find them,” said the skeleton with a noncommittal shrug.

So here’s what I realized the other day.  The bulk of our rights under law are controlled by the terms of the one-sided contracts we sign with the corporations who provide services to us.  We are routinely required to sign a take it or leave it agreement before we can receive virtually any service from a corporation.  

There used to be a doctrine in the law that you cannot sign away, in a contract, a right you have under the law.  There was also something, also considered quaint today, called a contract of adhesion.  The contract of adhesion was a take-it-leave-deal imposed by a powerful party on a party with no bargaining power.  Courts at one time could throw out such contracts on the grounds that they were contracts of adhesion.

I was looking for that case you told us about, where parents of Ivy League graduates had sued to get their tuition money back on the grounds that the university had broken an implied promise to impart wisdom, enlightenment and good character to their spoiled children.

“Why do you assume the children were spoiled bastards just because their wealthy, litigious parents tried to weasel out of paying for their Ivy League educations?” said the skeleton.  

I’m a hater, dad.  When it comes to litigious rich fucks, I simply lack basic tolerance.

“Not very Christian of you, son,” said the skeleton.

No.  Anyway, searching in vain for the case, and the judge’s great language, I came across a law review note, written by a graduating law student, analyzing the law. It was written in 1976, when the doctrine of contract of adhesion was still something courts took seriously, and contains a good definition of a contract of adhesion, to wit:

One contract doctrine working in favor of the student-plaintiff is that of contracts of adhesion.44   This doctrine cuts against the general rule of freedom of contract and allows a court to refuse to enforce contracts that are excessively one-sided. “Standardized contracts .. .drafted by powerful commercial units and put before individuals on the ‘accept this or get nothing’ basis are carefully scrutinized by the courts for the purpose of avoiding enforcement of ‘unconscionable’ clauses. ’45 … While the doctrine is most often applied when there is a near monopoly on a supply of goods or services,” it has also been applied when there is what could be called a “de facto monopoly”-a large number of suppliers offering the same harsh terms. (source)

In contract law there is supposed to be a ‘meeting of the minds’ between the parties, some kind of ‘mutuality’, particularly if the parties are of unequal power. Each party, in classical contract law, must give the other some concession, called ‘consideration’, in order to make the contract legally binding.  The legal niceties of constitutional case law are complicated and boring, but the dispute turns on the precise technicalities of each of these ‘terms of art.’

“Okay, you completely lost me, Elie.  I’m with Shagsbee– first thing we do, kill all the lawyers,” said the skeleton.  

Well, that sounds like a good start, but, as always, the devil is in the details.  Also, of course, that character Shakespeare has say that is a villain who wants all the lawyers out of the way so he and his friends can ride roughshod over the populace without lawyers taking action to enforce inconvenient laws.

A concrete example, then.  John Roberts was a well-paid corporate attorney and a very accomplished lawyer before becoming Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.  One of his great innovations as a high-priced corporate lawyer was the ‘arbitration clause’ which became standard for contracts with large corporations.  In consideration of being provided such and such service, the customer agrees to forego the normal right to take the corporation to court and instead must participate in arbitration in the event of any dispute.   

It seems like a small thing.  Arbitration is faster than a lawsuit, it is designed to expertly resolve particular issues that would fall within a contract dispute.  

“What happened to my right to sue?” asks the consumer who now has one less arm as a result of the services received from the corporation.

“You waived that right, explicitly, right here,” says the lawyer, pointing to the applicable language in the contract.  

“But this is obviously an unconscionable contract of adhesion I was forced to sign. Any judge should strike the whole thing down.   Plus, I thought I can’t waive any legal right I have by signing a clause hidden in a twenty-five page mouse type contract,” protests the injured consumer.

“Tell me about it,” says the lawyer.  

“So, nu?” says the wounded customer.  

“The arbitrator doesn’t care about any of that, in fact, the arbitrator has no authority to even hear you complain about it,” says the lawyer.  

“What the fuck?” says the consumer.  

“You make a valid point,” says the lawyer, as the billable minutes tick off on the clock.  

In addition to things like John Roberts’ arbitration clause, we now have the provision in virtually every contract, that if a court finds any single provision, or even multiple provisions, of the contract unenforceable, the rest of the provisions of the contract remain in full force and effect.  

“Full force and effect,” says the lawyer, now also missing an arm and part of one leg.  

In the very rare event that your important federal case eventually gets up to the Supreme Court, guess who at least two to four of the justices will rush to defend?

“Wait,” said the skeleton, “I know.  The legally created fictional ‘person’– the psychopathic corporation.  Am I right?”

As right as you get to be today, old man.

A Genteel Taste of Poverty

“OK, while we’re on the subject, and since there will no doubt be a detailed chapter of my life story about poverty, a subject I am an expert on, let’s dance this one out a bit, shall we?” the skeleton of my father said, extending a bony hand in a courtly gesture to a dance partner.  

“You have never lived in poverty, let’s stipulate to that from the beginning.   You grew up in a cozy little house, not far from winding, tree-lined streets with mansions on both sides.  You’ve been ‘broke’ many times, as they say, by choice– thinking of yourself as some kind of artist for the first half of your life– and although you avoided it until the age of 40, you have been in debt, like most Americans, for a third of your life now.   The ‘poverty’  you’ve experienced is the elected poverty of a privileged middle class person, you have had only a whiff, the smallest possible nibble of the bitter thing that is poverty in the richest nation in history.”  

That nibble has been enough for me, continues to be more than enough for me.  

“I don’t dispute that, Elie, I’m just pointing out at the start that being treated like a powerless asshole– which all Americans in our corporate culture pretty much are, let’s be brutally honest about it, shall we?– is only one part of the horror of poverty.  You focus on that because you are being fucked around by the embattled Welfare State in terms of not receiving adequate medical care and so forth, the many long battles you’ve had to even learn what rights you actually have under your beloved Obamacare, and finding out you have virtually no rights a white man is bound to respect is maddening, I understand.  But you experience but one of the many torments of poverty, I assure you.

“If the so-called War on Poverty had been fought with anywhere near the zeal and expense of the War on Drugs, or, God forbid, the War on Terror, it could have been won generations ago.  Some presidential wit, it may have been that bright bulb Reagan, announced that the War on Poverty was over, that Poverty won.  He was as good as his word, though it would fall to another popular Republican president, Bill Clinton, to truly make good on those words.  

“I know some of your readers will take exception to this, good liberals that they are, but our first black president, as he was then called, the Honorable William Jefferson Clinton, was like that fisherman Malcolm X talked about.  Not everyone who throws food to the fish is a friend of the fish, Brother Malcolm said, sometimes that food is on the end of a sharp hook, tied securely to a line and fishing pole.

“Refer your liberal friends to the right wing legislation the charismatic compromiser Dollar Bill Clinton signed:  Welfare “Reform”,  NAFTA, the repeal of Glass-Steagall after lucrative corporate mergers illegal under that FDR-era law– lucrative, economy-crashing mergers it would cost the taxpayers a trillion to bail out,  “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”, the later overturned Defense of Marriage Act that banned homosexual marriage, the 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill that fueled the privatized prison industry and led to even more mass incarceration of the poor.  Anyone can ask Jeeves about Clinton’s conservative accomplishments, they are legion.”

Jeeves is gone, dad, nobody knows anything about Jeeves any more.  That Ask Jeeves search engine is long gone.  You should just say “google it”.  

“Well, you can ask Jeeves about that, I suppose.  I don’t really stay up to date about technology.  I’ve been dead for twelve years you know, as of this April 29th.  Might be a good deadline to fix, the twelfth anniversary of my untimely passing, to have some publishing irons in the fire.  You’ve got to eat a pound of dirt before you die, Elie, and a writer has to eat a pound or two of rejection letters before beginning to collect the ducats and the literary prizes.”  The skeleton of my father nodded, to emphasize the indisputable truth of these statements.  

Yes, sir.  Consider it done, April 29th is my deadline to have literary irons in the fire.  

“You want a gentle taste of poverty?  You tell  your closest friends, middle class people living decent middle class lives, some of the horrors of the medical mistreatment you’ve received under Obama’s compromise with the powerful corporations that provide medical services to Americans at two and three times the cost the rest of the industrialized world pays.   You begin to describe the latest horror and they cut you off, say you told them already.  They get it.  It may be a different horror story entirely, there is no shortage of detail and new detail, but they get it, they can only hear it as part of the same unlistenable song, which it also is.  Yes, the latest, sharpest, galling bone in your throat, to you, but to them– the same distressing bone.  You made a poor choice not working hard and buying a decent home and having decent health insurance provided through your work.  Now you want their sympathy because you’re too good to live a life like the one they all chose?  

“Here, in a word, is the most destructive part of poverty, something you’ve tasted in the most diluted form, corrosive as that taste may have been to you: hopelessness.  Try that on for a couple of days, the feeling that nothing you do, no matter how hard you work, will make the slightest difference in your life or in the life of anyone you love.   As a thought experiment it has the feel of torment, but the imagined feel of torment is much different than the torment itself.  

“What does a poor child learn from day one?  As often as not that mommy is always upset, short-tempered, preoccupied, that daddy, when he’s around, is cranky, prone to outbursts.  That’s a caricature, of course, just as not all super-rich people are greedy, self-absorbed assholes, not all poor people fit this stereotype.  I’m just giving an example.  What the child in generations of inherited poverty imbibes with his mother’s milk is a deep sense of hopelessness.  

“That child may be deeply loved, many poor children are, hard as that is for some people to believe.  Your sister taught several very poor immigrant kids who were clearly well-loved.  They were kind to other kids, and gentle, and polite.  When she met the parents, they were the same way.  It may be significant that they were immigrant kids, from Central America, rather than kids born into a tenth generation of violent American poverty.  Why is poverty violent?  Ask Mother Goose.”

Mother Goose?  

“Well, you tell me Jeeves is dead.   I hope you don’t have bad news for me about Mother Goose.”  

No, she’s as well as she’s ever been.  

“I’m just making the point that poverty lays out a program for a kid’s life.  In the slums poor kids go to the worst schools, as you know, you used to teach in some of those schools.  They learn from ancient textbooks, the ones wealthier public schools discard.  The physical plant of the school is often in bad shape.  The neighborhood they walk through is filled with drug dealers, murdered pit bull puppies, the constant threat of a stray bullet, a rabid gang member, an altercation and early, sudden, violent death.  Check out the life expectancy for a child born in the roughest slums versus the average American life expectancy, check out the infant mortality rates in slums.  

“But you see, man, this is all statistics, cold, imagined horrors.  None of this shit touches anybody who does not have to live it.  Hunger.  You can’t imagine the torment of being hungry because your parents don’t have the money to feed you enough.  In my case, my mother, may she rest in peace, insisted on giving some of the little money we had to charity.  Unbelievable, really, poor as we were, and we were grindingly poor, she felt she had a religious obligation to help the less fortunate.  There were none less fortunate than us, but look for logic in religion and you may be searching for a lifetime.”  

A couple of seagulls screamed as they flew by over the graveyard off Cortlandt Road and the skeleton turned to consider them.  Hudson River seagulls, a long way from the ocean, but there you go.  Just part of the miracle of nature.  

“That’s God right there,” said the skeleton pointing up. “You know, you were always mystified about how African slaves, enslaved by white Christians who cited the Bible for their right to own slaves, could become devout Christians.  People take comfort where they can get it, and the notion of an eternally merciful Jesus waiting for them when they died, and a better life in the faithfully imagined world after this one, was about the only comfort they were going to get.  Plus, massa would give them an hour or two to worship Jesus Sunday instead of picking cotton under the lash of overseers not as keen on Jesus, perhaps, as their employers.  You got to like those hours off on Sunday morning, don’t you, Elie?”

Yep, you certainly have to like that, dad.  

“Look, we’re not done talking about poverty, and powerlessness, and the soul crushing weight of hopelessness, obviously — but you have to scurry on down to the Civil Court now to answer a personal appearance ‘subpoena’ threatening you with fines and imprisonment for an alleged failure to return the questionnaire you are 99% certain you sent back weeks ago.  You can’t fight City Hall, son, few should be more keenly aware of the many reasons for that than you.  Just get dressed, walk down there, humbly turn yourself in and wait for them to tell you what they plan to do next.  You’ll just have to be a Christian about it, my son.”   

Yes, father, something I always strive to be.

The skeleton made a clicking sound with the side of his mouth, the two-click sound you associate with encouraging a horse to get a move on.

Expect No Sympathy and You’ll Be Happier when you Get None

“Look, obviously I can’t give you any advice, as much as I know you wish I could.  I really can’t advise you, Elie, sad to say.  For one thing, it’s easy for me to say anything, I’m dead,” said the skeleton of my father, gesticulating at the gravestones around him.  “For another, you would never take my advice when I was alive.  You recall…” 

Yeah, one of the few times you really showed vulnerability.  You almost sniffed as you complained that my sister and I had never asked your advice about anything.  We were standing outside the kitchen, you had your back to the living room.

“Well, that’s true, Elie, and it hurt like hell that my children never once came to me for advice,” the skeleton said.  Then he waited.  

No idea what you’re waiting for.  Do you think something is going to change about that truth?  Do you want me to lay out a few of the best reasons we never came to you for advice?  Do you remember how amused you were by that lawsuit filed by some litigious college graduates, around 1970?  You read an excerpt of the NY Times article to us at the dinner table, or quoted it, maybe.  You probably told us the story then got the article to read the judge’s remarks.

“Yeah, the judge in that case was great.  The graduates had sued the university to get their tuition back because the college had not imparted wisdom, good character and enlightenment to them.   They styled their suit as a breach of contract, I think. The judge reamed those snot-noses a few new assholes, and his language was beautiful.  Yeah, that’s apropos of what we’re talking about, I suppose.  

“We are not guaranteed wisdom, long life, happiness, sexual satisfaction, jack shit, really.  There is luck, and genetics, work, connections, lack of connections, fairness, nepotism, who you know, who you blow, blah blah blah, this list of almost random factors is as long as your list of complaints against the merciless status quo.

“There are countless myths about reinventing yourself, the triumph of the determined will, people who rose from obscurity to become the biggest, most powerful and overbearing assholes who’ve ever lived, myths enough to make you vomit.  We have the American Exceptionalist myth of the lone brave man with the gun seeking his fortune in the wild west, killing whoever desperately needed a’killing, and ending up fantastically rich and powerful.  

“These are mainly myths about materialism and glory as the only cures for what ails a person, simple myths for people who naively believe that a limitless supply of money, or the esteem of a million strangers, is the end of all human troubles.  You know where the real pay-off is, I’ll say that for you, Elie, and you keep going for it. I have to give you that.  That desire of yours to get to the bottom of things is as much a blessing as a curse, I suppose, to see the glass half full, or as much of a curse as it is a blessing, to put it just as fairly, if more somberly.

“All this is beside the point really, I wanted to hammer home the point tonight that empathy is rare enough in this world, in this competitive, zero-sum society in particular, and empathy that leads to any kind of meaningful help is ten times as rare as the ordinary kind of rare empathy you can once in a while encounter.  You see somebody in trouble, your impulse is to help, that’s a good thing– Kant called it the ‘categorical imperative’, that you could will your action become universal knowing categorically that it would make the world a better place.  What’s Jeeves give you on that, Elie?”

Act according to the maxim that you would wish all other rational people to follow, as if it were a universal law. 

“Yeah, so a decent impulse to help a guy struggling to wheel his wheelchair in the pouring rain– because anyone in his position would need the push and anyone walking and able to give the push should do it– should be the norm.  It’s not, but we can agree that the world would be better if people did this simple thing, with no argument.  Guy’s struggling in a wheelchair, it’s raining, you are in a pancho-  push the guy to the nearest shelter from the rain.  You’d want him to do it for you, it’s a good thing, better world if everyone did it.

“Hypotheticals are easy, of course.  Real life– your friend suffers from severe depression.  Hah, there goes your hypothetical.  Life is complicated and few people acquire any real insight.  Insight, we laugh about that now, don’t we, Elie?  Your lifelong insight was that I was being a complete asshole when we fought, when I lashed out, using my well-honed adult skills to batter a boy.  How much did that insight that I was wrong help you?  

“Did it feel good when I admitted, the last night of my life, that I’d felt you reaching out all along, and that you’d been right and human to reach out to your father, and that I was entirely to blame for the long senseless war?   I know it probably felt good at the time, but as I’ve been slimming down here, surrounded by the fertile upper Westchester earth, I’m sure that admission has taken on a more and more hollow tone.”

That’s a fair way to put it.

“Well, look, you’ve heard it over and over from every unhappy person you’ve ever known — lower your expectations and you will experience less disappointment.   If you stop expecting the expression of true feelings from people there will be no sting when people are a bit false.   This is kind of a cliche, you know, protect yourself from the cruelty of the world by expecting no less than cruelty.  Hey– look, that person didn’t whip me in the face!  My lucky day!  

“The fact is, you are pissing uphill, Elie.  It may be a better thing than pushing that giant boulder up the hill, as you were for several years with that idealistic educational workshop you developed, but you are still pissing uphill.  What I mean to say is that nobody you know can offer you what you actually need the most.  This is a sad reality of life, most worldly success comes from a lifetime of steadily making useful contacts with well-connected professionals.  

“If I may digress for a moment, it’s hard for me to understand why you would post this draft in progress on-line in the first place.  For another thing, if you persist in doing that, why not at least post a copyright notice with your actual name instead of the name of your late lamented cat Oinsketta?  I suppose you put the posts on line in hopes of getting feedback, it’s a natural enough impulse, especially in this social media universe.  Talk to our marketing people, Elie, and you will see the laughable folly of your approach.  

“The point is, I applaud you in this effort.  There are some fine pages here, and you do me an honor.  You have already moved some hearts with a few of these stories.  Do not expect anything from your readers.  Seriously.  For one thing, they have no fucking idea what these many pages are intended to add up to.  How could they?  These pages are a random jumble and bear no resemblance to a book.  With a book, the first page either hooks you or you open another book.  A book is a promise, made in an intriguing enough way that the reader invests the time to read it, a story that unfolds in a reasonable order.

“So don’t wait for anybody to tell you any of this is good, or important, or that it moved them or might make an interesting book some day, if you can get an agent, an editor, a publisher and all those other things lined up.  It’s like poverty, Elie, that’s the best analogy I can give you.  You can’t explain it to or talk about it satisfyingly with someone who has never tasted it directly.   We can all agree it’s a horror, but unless you’ve actually lived it for any amount of time, it’s an abstract horror in the same unknowable category as many other terrible things.

“You’ve had a tiny taste of the enforced powerless of being, what used to be called, and still is by folks who lack the good breeding not to pronounce the entire banned word, ‘niggers’.  I put the word in quotes because it’s a sickening word.  I hear you say it all the time now when you wax tourettic out of frustration and it makes me cringe.  I know you don’t say it because you’re a racist, but snarling the word ‘nigger’ because you’re being treated like one does nobody any good.  I understand where it comes from, and I empathize more than you know.  I also understand that the power of a hateful word comes from the hate it still conveys, and most of our old curses are completely fucked out as far as conveying real rage. ‘Nigger’ is the exact word for the sickening powerlessness you’re talking about, but it is also a sickening fucking word.

“But there’s the crux of the thing: until you are held totally powerless, treated with complete contempt, in a permanently galling situation where you have ‘no rights a white man is bound to respect’, in whoremaster Roger Taney’s immortal summation of the Founder Fathers’ original view of the Negro, you cannot truly empathize with somebody in that situation.   Your friends can be sympathetic for the pain you express, but no eloquence on your part can enable them to truly understand, let alone actually empathize with, the death of a thousand cuts that is living 200% above the American poverty line.  They can feel your pain, but only an abstract shadow of it.

“If the Wall Street casino doesn’t take another big hit in the next couple of years, you can eke out a few more years of subsistence.  Personally, I think it’s stupid for multiple reasons for you to try to live like this — many fine writers held down jobs and wrote their asses off before and after work — but I get that you can’t work for anybody but Buddha, and he doesn’t pay anyway.  

“The thing to keep in mind is that nobody you know can help you write this book.  It may feel good that a reader tells you they liked this line, or that post, or were moved by such and such a story.  I understand a writer needs a bit of that, any worker needs to have a little praise to motivate further good work.   You had a link to that sisyphic work discussion, put it here, would you?  Gracias, that’s a nice fellow.  

“Most friends will wish you well, tell you a bit they liked, offer line edits, point out a phrase they think is not as elegant as it might be, express confusion about your larger plan, hazard a guess, support your idea, as basically incoherent as it still appears to be. The best you can hope for is the occasional attaboy, and it’s a shame, we can all agree, but– at the same time, a shame you just have to shut the fuck up about if you’re going to turn these ramblings into a book, you read me, Elie?”

Like a book, pops, like a book I can’t put down.

 

Intro January 23, 2017

I am trying to structure the book of my father’s life, to fully describe his often dark, tragic life amid flashes of his tremendous potential.   My father’s story would be inspirational, if it wasn’t so damned sad.   There is inspiration there, but a very subtle form.

Irv Widaen was an obscure man who rose from extreme poverty in America in the unprecedented era of opportunity after World War Two.   It is very rare, in this country today, for someone to emerge from poverty to live any version of the American Dream.  It’s harder to come out of poverty here than in most wealthy countries.  Yet my father was no outlier, millions followed the path he did when he got out of the army in 1946.  It was still possible in those days to work hard, get a little government assistance, and move into a comfortable middle class home.

I don’t think my father was unusual in his attitudes as a college student at Syracuse and Columbia, which he went to on the GI bill.  He, along with millions, truly believed they were living in the dawn of a better world and were helping to bend the moral arc of history toward justice.  

In 1949, when he was twenty-five, a concert was organized in his hometown of Peekskill, NY.   It was a concert for brotherhood, a call to fulfill some of the goals of the recent world war, long overdue things things like ending racism in America.  Irv was part of a young generation that had just fought and defeated racist regimes who mass murdered their racial inferiors.  

The headliners at the Peekskill concert were Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger.   They were there to inspire the crowd to stand up to bigots, racists, to educate deluded haters.  Bigots, racists and deluded haters carried the day, however, lying in wait along the narrow entrance drive to attack those going to the concert.  Bloody heads, laughing bigots, indifferent cops; the concert had to be canceled due to the riot.  Reorganized, with a shoulder-to-shoulder human wall of young union men in t-shirts around the perimeter, it came off a week or two later without violence. 

It wasn’t until inspired concert-goers got into cars, passed out of the grounds and headed south, along Cortlandt Road, where my father, from his present-day grave, could throw a stone through a passing car window, that stones were thrown through car windows, stones the size of fists, raining down on the heads of those who believed in fairness, thought the Nazis had been soundly defeated by the end of the war.  

“You don’t win the war against Nazis, Elie,” said the skeleton of my father, sitting up in his grave a stone’s throw from Cortlandt Road.  “You can only stop them once in a while, for a short time, when they are completely out of control and literally millions of their victims find themselves wide awake in a blazing nightmare.   I don’t need to remind you how many of the most vicious Nazis wound up living privileged lives in America as well-paid guests of our good anti-Communist government after the war.  You often say the Nazis won the war, and looking around at some of the current practices done in our names, and the methods employed, it’s hard to disagree.”    

The device of my father’s skeleton chiming in struck me as a bit stagy, the first time he sat up in his grave to voice objection to something I’d just written about his difficult childhood.  It startled me, the first time he spoke up.   I figured I could always write the skeleton out later during the rewrites, and went along with his running commentary.  He has refused to be written out of his own life story, insisting on his right to be a corrective against any bias I might bring to the telling.  So be it.  The truth is, I have come to greatly look forward to our conversations.

“Not so stagy now, is it, motherfucker?” said the skeleton of my father. “We’ll leave aside the question of how you expect to get this unlikely book, the critical biography of a nobody, authoritatively written by another nobody, son and grandson of nobodies, into print, past the marketing people, out into the hands of people you’ve never met, to, presumably, open a discussion that might resonate with many people: is a full recovery possible, from an early childhood of brutality and rage?  

“Me?  I did not recover from brutality and rage, though an argument can be made– even if a feeble one– that you took a couple of big steps.  At any rate, I’ll leave that to you to describe.   You know, we’ve had our disagreements about how much a person can heal himself, to put it mildly. you know, ‘disagreements‘.  You’re more optimistic than I was, I’ll say that for you, you poor bastard.”

As always, I appreciate the support, dad.  If I manage to organize, cut back and rewrite what I have here in the 800 pages written in the last year, I believe a book worth reading will emerge.  

“You’re more optimistic than I was, I’ll say that for you, you poor bastard,” said the skeleton, expression deadpan, yet also insanely gay.  

“I can’t help that grin, you bastard, I’m a skeleton… Jesus, Elie,” said my father, a man who had many subtle facial expressions while he was alive.  The sterner of those looks caused my sister to dub our father the Dreaded Unit, the D.U.  Now. twelve years after his death, his only face is the mad, beaming, yawning or silently screaming perpetual grin of the skeleton.

“You won’t truly understand it until you’re dead, I suppose.  No, I take that back, not even then.  You would have to have somebody else conjure you, animate your skeleton, in order to understand anything I’m telling you about death.”  

My father never spoke much about his actual past.   His reluctance to talk about personal things contrasted with how strongly he expressed his opinions on virtually all matters.   Many key moments in my father’s life are dark, matters of conjecture, leaving only what I can imagine, in light of how well I knew the man who was my father.   The long riddle of his life was how such a witty, inspirational moral teacher could also be such a supremely destructive weasel.    

As far as telling a tale that compels, sells, neatly ties together a hundred neat details, irresistibly, I may not actually be all that much more optimistic than my father was, the poor bastard.  

“Well, how far from the tree can the apple fall, Elie?  You have every reason for pessimism, I’ll give you that.  Still, while there is breath in your body, desire in your heart and interesting theories percolating in your head– you’d have to give yourself a puncher’s chance, would you not?”  

My father’s skeleton and I sit, as the occasional car motors by on Cortlandt Road, drinking in the profound silence these questions raise.

This new guy

Had the misfortune to hear his entire empty, cliche-infested speech.  Vile… SAD!  

On the other hand, living proof that an angry asshole can be whatever he wants to in America, if he’s born rich enough and he’s willing to do whatever it takes.

Most of all, Elie, do what you love

It’s been a year since I began the manuscript I hope one day will be the book of my father’s life.  I think it’s time to try to summarize the main story line, as I would before a Moth story audience. 

My father always insisted that, on a fundamental level, people cannot change.  It was an insistence both tragic and maddening, even as I can now see the kernel of truth there.  This belief was a self-fulfilling prophecy, as they say.  We argued about it over the years, as I changed, as he remained stubborn in his insistence that the only change one can hope for is on the most superficial level.  

It was one of his favorite themes, dismissing all hope that things could ever be different, no matter how much one changed one’s actions and reactions. His life had taught him harsh lessons it was his sad duty to impart to my sister and me.  He was dogged about removing the illusion that one might evolve past one’s genetic predispositions and childhood difficulties.  

On the other hand, he always insisted that childhood injury had nothing to do with a mature responsible adult’s life.  You take responsibility for your own life, and your own happiness, and you don’t blame your parents, or whatever bad luck may have led them to be less than the parents you might have hoped for.  This duty apparently started, for a young man, around the age of eight or so, when it was past time to stop acting like a child and time to start behaving like a goddamn man, for fuck’s sake.   

This much out of context generalized detail and emotional nuance, of course, would be hacked through by a director from the Moth, who would keep urging me to get back to the essence of the story.  Make it simple, it’s a story, people have to be able to follow it from start to finish.

My father was an idealist, extremely bright, well-read, quick-witted and funny as hell.   He was also, sadly for my sister and me, a man crushed by a brutal childhood who could not help replicating the cruelty that sometimes flows from such terrible childhoods.  

“You can’t blame your childhood, or your parents, or bad luck, you have to take responsibility for your own life,” he always insisted.   At the same time, he also insisted a person could not change on any fundamental level– what you were at five you would be a fifty.   Even as a child this struck me as an idiotic and self-defeating idea.   We argued about it, me a child, my father a grown man.  Later as two adults we continued to wrangle over this issue.  

“I’ve seen a tremendous change in you,” my mother once observed to me during a discussion my father and I were trying to keep civil, about the difficulty of change.

“Well, you can change certain things, on a superficial level,” my father yielded, “but the baked-in responses, those genetic traits hardened by experience, the reflexes you are born with, things like a bad temper, which you have, no matter how you try to conceal it with your lofty vows to remain mild and so forth, remain.  You cannot change on a fundamental level, certain things will continue to enrage you if you are wired that way, you can only change the surface aspects of your personality.”  

I told him that if anger was a problem in life, in our relationship, and I learned to control it enough to maintain a dialogue instead of being drawn into a fight, that was a significant change.  

“Superficial,” he said, dismissing any benefit not reacting with anger could have for anybody.  “Deep down, you’re still mad as hell, boiling mad, like you were when you were a baby, and at five and as a teenager.”  

I finally saw the futility of having this argument with my father.  He was very smart, and very skilled at the art of verbal war.  He was always armed and dangerous.  There came a point when his desperation to be right at any cost became clear to me.  

Paint that specific moment in the den in Coconut Creek,  hand-delivering that third copy of the heartfelt letter he kept denying he’d read, month after month.  

“Oh, that letter,” he said with the casual nonchalance of a charismatic psychopath,  “yeah, I read that letter.”  

He paused to fix me with a look and then said ” you have to respect my right not to respond.”  

The hideous, specific flavorful details are needed for a reader to grasp the full exact truth this story is tying to convey.

I realized at last that there was no benefit to arguing against something he would defend to the death, no matter how mutually destructive that thing was.  

I believe we can change things about ourselves if we are miserable enough about the thing that needs to be changed, determined enough to do better.  I have seen changes in myself and in old friends.  They are the result of long, hard work and such changes are always works in progress, but I see the changes and their benefits.  I can also see my father’s point of view– restraining the impulse to be enraged is not the same as no longer feeling anger.  Even though learning to restrain and tame the impulse is the first step to a less enraged, contentious life.  

Whatever the case about changing oneself, it is 100% certain that one cannot change anyone else, and so in the end I realized that my poor father was a lost cause and that arguing with him was only throwing fuel on a fire that should not have been burning in the first place.    

Not to say I stopped chewing on the perplexing riddle of what made this anti-racist, friend of the underdog, funny, humane, otherwise very smart, hip and likable man such a brutal dick.  I spent many hours with my father’s first cousin, Eli, an old man living in a little retirement cottage about an hour north of me.  I’d drive up the long, twisty parkway to listen to stories about our family and my father’s unimaginably awful childhood.  

Eli loved my father in a way he couldn’t love his own children, to whom he was often quite brutal and from whom he was mostly estranged.  My father loved Eli, who was 17 years older, as much as he feared him.  Eli was a warm, generous, very funny man capable of great savagery when angry, which was often.  There was no doubt of their mutual love and there was no doubt of Eli’s genuine desire to give me insight I could use to understand my destructive old man and get along better with him.  It was through Eli that I finally got helpful insight into my father’s tragic life.

Predictably, my father was defensive and angry when I reported the fascinating conversations I was having with Eli.  

“Eli’s full of shit!” he said with great conviction, “he has his own twisted version of history.  Yeah, listen to Eli, he’s a great historian, did he tell you how many times he would have become a millionaire if some asshole hadn’t screwed him?  Ask his kids about him, what a loving soul he is– Eli has never been wrong about anything, he’s always the victim, always the righteous man wronged by vicious assholes, even when he’s smacking his kids around…”  He went on in this vein for quite some time.

This reaction did not surprise me.  After all, it was a yelp of pain.  It made sense to me now, in the context Eli had imparted to me, quietly and deeply aware of the full pain and horror of what he was telling me.   Eli’s beloved aunt was my father’s mother Chava.  Eli witnessed Chava’s violent rages many times including when she turned them on her infant son, from the time he could stand.  

“She had a drawer next to where she sat at the kitchen table where she kept the cord to her iron.  You remember those old cloth wrapped electrical cords they used to have?  Heavy cords, with a rough burlap kind of wrapping.  She would reach into the drawer, grab that heavy cord and whip little Irv across the face with it.  I saw this myself.  After a while all she had to do was rattle the drawer and he would stand like this,” and Eli did one of his uncanny imitations, a terrified child, rigid and shaking, eyes cast to the ground.  

This image was like a light going on in a darkened room.  I was flooded with sympathy for the poor bastard even as I knew that my father would kill us both before he’d ever talk about something this painful.  He was simply incapable of it, I realized thinking about his life from the perspective of a face-whipped infant.  It explained many things I could never understand.    

The last few years of his life, as my father was becoming greyer and weaker, hollowed out by the undiagnosed liver cancer that finally killed him, I pretty much abided by his wish to stick to superficial conversation.   We could talk about politics, a subject we were largely in agreement about, or history, something that fascinated both of us, but most of the deeper conversations were out of bounds and I stopped trying to have them.  Predictably, in a story like this, I got a life-changing phone call during dinner with old friends.  

We were gathered around a table to retell a story my father had told us every year, about the spiritual journey from slavery to freedom that our ancient ancestors had undergone.  In every generation we must learn this lesson anew– because we were strangers harshly mistreated in a foreign land we must never tolerate the mistreatment of anyone, if we have the power to oppose it.  

“The D.U. is in the hospital,” my sister told me.  “The E.R. doctor knew within two minutes that he was examining a dead man, he touched his swollen stomach, looked at me and said if your brother wants to see him, tell him to get down here right away.”  

There were two doctors around the table who gently reassured me that ascites, the accumulation of liquid that gathers around the organs at the end stage of something like liver cancer, could result from several different things (all pretty much deadly, as I soon learned), and that I should go visit my father and not assume the worst until I talked to his doctors.  I was on a plane soon after.  

I drove to the hospital at around 1 a.m. on what turned out to be the last night of my father’s life.  He was ready to have the conversation he’d never had the courage to attempt.

“You know those conversations you had with Eli, he pretty much hit the nail right on the head, although he probably spared you the worst of it.  My life was over by the time I was two years old,” he began.  “I felt you reaching out to me many times over the years, and it’s my fault I was too fucked up to respond to you like a human being instead of a belligerent asshole.”

The book of my father starts with this conversation and imagines what we would have shared if he had not died the next day at sunset.   I have been in regular dialogue with his skeleton for the last ten months or so and am happy to report our communication is now excellent.

Thank you.

 (imaginary applause)

Obamacare dramatically reduces preventable American DEATHS!

Before the puckishly named Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act became law, 45,000 was generally accepted as the number of Americans who died every year of conditions that would have been curable, had they not been diagnosed too late in an Emergency Room.  Thanks to Mr. Obama’s inspired and innovative health care scheme, that number may now be as low as 25,000 dead Americans a year for lack of health insurance.  Almost half of the 60,000,000 previously uninsured Americans are now covered under the PPACA.  An achievement anybody would be proud of, any way you slice it.   Shoot, 7,300 American veterans take their own lives every year in this country, for Christsake, as the president informed us on Veteran’s Day (20 American veterans take their own lives every day).

Admittedly, the PPACA health insurance system is still not perfect, even in states that adopted it early and eagerly, like New York State.  If you want a wee taste of the PPACA in action, and a very dry little chuckle, read the helpful paragraphs below and click on the link to see the list of providers.  This is from the New York “State of Health” “Marketplace” website.  It is for sure worth a quick click:

On this page, you will see the plans that are available for you to purchase. You can search plans by different criteria such as how much you will pay each month (monthly premium), the category (metal) of the plan you want, and/or the health insurance carrier you prefer. You can search for plans based on their quality ratings.

You can also see the plans that your doctor accepts, or plans that include hospitals or other facilities that you use. Click here to search for doctors and facilities. By clicking on the link, you will be re-directed to the NYS Provider & Health Plan Look-up website. However, this does not guarantee that your doctor accepts the plan. In addition to using the search function, call your doctors hospitals, or other facilities to see what plan they accept.

You can apply for an affordability hardship exemption if you think you cannot afford to purchase health insurance due to your projected income in the coming year. Click on Apply for an Exemption for next steps.

Disclaimer: CMS is conducting additional consumer testing regarding the public display of quality rating information.

Not to be rude, but who the fuck is CMS and when are they going to get their collective head out of their collective ass?

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2017

The myths we live by can sometimes break your heart.  Myths have sustained humans forever, brought people together, torn us apart.  Myths can teach us the most important truths or entrench us in ignorance.  I have no insight into Christian mythology, though I have been swayed in my life by the righteous voice of a Baptist minister, a voice that could not be silenced by the bullets that killed him.    It is that Baptist minister whose life and message we celebrate today.   

Jesus, born more than two thousand years ago– if he was born at all (a book I read makes a convincing case about the total absence of contemporary evidence that Jesus ever existed) — is believed by more than two billion people to be the son of God.   God, it is written, sent His only son to preach love in a world of human hatred and cruelty.  God, the all-knowing, understood that a powerful apostle of peace and kindness in a corrupt and vicious world must inevitably wind up tortured and crucified.  And so it was.

The myth continues that because Jesus allowed himself to be nailed to a cross for a long, painful death, while being mocked, believing in Him will cleanse a person of their sins, including their original sin– a concept I am a bit hazy about, I must admit.  I am no Christian, even as I greatly admire Jesus’s message of love and generosity.

It’s been impossible for me to disentangle the Christian message of peace and mildness from the Christian history of killing and enslaving in the name of God and His son;  good Christian killing good Christian in Thirty Year and Hundred Year Wars, good Christian killing Muslim, good Christian killing Jew, good Christian enslaving Africans who are then converted to Christianity, like millions in South and Central America converted under the sword.  There are many good Christians today who are intolerant, righteous in their hatred of homosexuals, in their support of preemptive wars.

The hypocrisy done in the name of Jesus, the Prince of Peace and the Son of God, ruins Christianity as a myth I can take much comfort from.   The Catholic Church’s long corporate cover-up of horrible crimes, actual sins, committed worldwide by priests and the church hierarchy adds a very bitter note to the mix.

The heart of a religion cannot be judged on the actions of those who distort its teachings.   It is good to remember that today as we celebrate a belated national holiday dedicated to Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., a true Christian in the best sense of the word, a man whose life became a legend.  

Many of us were alive when King preached, when he was sent to prison for his outrageous insistence that American blacks deserved the same rights as all other Americans.  He was a hero to many decent, God-fearing Americans, even as he was hated by millions of other decent, God-fearing Americans who believed that King was a privileged Negro troublemaker who simply didn’t know his place.  

King inspired.  He spoke truth that rings across time.  See if you can listen to his Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam speech without being moved, consider the tragedy of its unheeded, irrefutable wisdom,  without tears beginning to flow.

“An unjust, evil and futile war,” he explains in his distinct and sonorous cadence.   His conscience, he said, leaves him with no other choice but to speak of it.  The time, he said, has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war.  You can read the transcript, if you prefer reading to hearing the tones of one of history’s great orators.  

The speech connecting racism, poverty and war cost him many things, his place among America’s most admired, a canceled invitation to the White House and, a year later, to the day, his life.  More on that here.  There is a strong parallel between the story of King and the story of Jesus, especially in the endings– both were ready to die to speak truth they knew would mark them for death.  

That is at the heart of our most inspiring myths; a genius who can unharden hearts and is willing to die for the truth is the rarest of humans.   I keep thinking about the millions of American blacks who still live in hopeless, inherited poverty in a nation still deeply divided about “race”.  I often think of how little has changed for millions of Americans originally from Africa, most now several generations deeper in poverty, since the sacrifice of Martin Luther King, since the outright assassination of Malcolm X.  We will never know for certain how James Earl Ray, another lone gunman, a lifelong jailbird with at best average intelligence, and no particular resources, eluded arrest during a long international manhunt after killing King.  Speculating on who would have ordered King killed one year to the day after his Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam sermon, when he was in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers, already deep into his work to unite those in poverty, is best left to the “conspiracy nuts”.  

I have no light to shed on Martin Luther King’s murder or the horrible coincidence of his killing one year to the day after he articulated why America must address racism, poverty and a war culture, and how all three are inextricably interconnected.   The night before his murder King gave the fiery and prophetic “I Have Been to the Mountaintop” speech.  Listen to it now unmoved, if you can.  

John Lewis was with Martin Luther King in the deep south.  Lewis had his skull broken by police nightsticks in Selma, Alabama, if I’m not mistaken.   Lewis has been in Congress for decades.  The other day he announced that he would boycott the inauguration of the new president.  I didn’t hear the announcement, but heard he questioned the legitimacy of this highly questionable candidate, who lost the popular vote by 3,000,000 but managed to win the electoral college fair and square, arguably, by a margin of less than 80,000 total votes in key districts of several swing states.  

The president-elect fired back, via tweet, that Lewis ought to pipe down, that he’d be better off looking after his business in his “crime-infested” district. PEOTUS also canceled his Martin Luther King Day trip to the Smithsonian’s new  Museum of African-American History and Culture.

This was a neat bit of tweeting, for a man who reacts swiftly and strongly to any provocation.   A lesser man might have burst forth with a racially charged epithet.  The genius of this reality TV superstar is to make such things perfectly clear with printable phrases like “crime-infested.”  It conjures the hateful thing beautifully.  The crime one immediately imagines is far from the Goldman-Sachs boardroom where the most lucrative crime schemes are hatched.  One instead immediately pictures dark, angry faces, disgusted by the narrow electoral college victory of history’s most divisive and historically unpopular president-elect.

I saw a clip of John Lewis on TV the other day.  He was refuting the idea that there has been no progress for American blacks since Martin Luther King’s day.   I was glad to hear him making the point, I am glad to agree.   There has been progress.  On the other hand, for millions in generations of eternal poverty, I think of an image of Malcolm’s from Alex Haley’s autobiography. There is a knife plunged deep into your back.  The knife is pulled out a couple of inches, but is still deep in your back.  That is undeniably progress, even if not precisely the full measure of progress one might wish for.

I imagine heaven, a place where good people go after they die.  I picture Martin Luther King sitting with Gandhi and Malcolm X.   They talk about history and the long, slow bending of its moral arc toward justice.   They all agree that had they lived at another time in history they would have likely accomplished little, died unknown, instead of as international icons of hope and inspiration.  

They were each blessed to have lived at a moment in history when their voices could be heard, when they could move masses to work toward a better world.  Gandhi could not have used Ahimsa to launch a successful movement for independence except at that moment when the British Empire was collapsing.   Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were preaching and organizing at that particular moment in American history, when the country was ripe for overdue change after decades of hard sacrifice by the despised. They were good-looking, charismatic men alive during the earliest days when electrifying men could mesmerize masses of people in their homes, from a TV screen.  Had they lived at any other time they could not have been known so widely or been so influential before their early deaths.  

I imagine Martin Luther King, Jr. is the angriest of the three of them up there in heaven.  He may be less angry than I am, true, less angry, perhaps, than those who must continue to protest a nationwide pattern of police killings of unarmed black youths, but I picture him angry up there.   He was pissed off in that I Have Been To The Mountaintop speech, as he had every right to be, having endured what he had.

This would have been the great man’s 88th birthday.  His father lived to be 84, so his son had a chance to live a long life.  He would have preferred a longer life, longevity has its place, as he said, but he was fearing no man the last night of his life.   Ponder that for a moment, along with the ongoing heartbreak of his sacrifice, before you head out to the mall for the Martin Luther King Day sales.

Living in A Culture of Powerlessness

“Well, you know, Elie, you’ve become aware that certain readers are struck with a kind a dread reading our political and historical discussions.   People can only take so much bad news, amid the constant barrage of reminders of their abject powerlessness.  Many progressive types want to believe in a people’s champion during hard times, not be confronted by the details of that champion’s betrayal in virtually every area.  

“If Obama didn’t deliver hope to most people, or change where it was most needed, it’s not his fault, they will insist.  He’s NICE!  He’s a thoughtful, compassionate, very decent guy!   He would have loved to have been a great and courageous president, but look at what he was up against.  He was a hostage to haters, underminers and obstructionists.  His only fault was being too decent, they will say.

“You’ve seen the man’s mean streak, the sharp bullwhip sense of humor, but for the most part, he yielded pliantly to the powers that put him into office, negotiated generous deals favorable to the people who hated him.  Whatever he lacked as people’s president, he’s a born campaigner who presented and sold himself brilliantly twice.   He is the canvas on to which millions could project their hopes for sorely overdue change.  The first gay president, somebody called him today, you know, because he, as they say, led passionately from behind– as one should in gay matters, one supposes– when it was clear there were votes and public sentiment to pass marriage equality.

“This thin-skinned, angry, sleeepless, vindictive, constantly wheedling, whining, hollow victory-obsessed fuck you got now?  You will soon look back with great affection on the president who handed him the drone kill list, and the precedent of killing Americans by drone, even Americans not charged with any crime.  This new winner’s top-secret cabal of deep swamp creatures will make Obama’s opaque administration seem transparent.   Obama’s services to the fossil fuel industry will seem modest by comparison and you will forget the fact that he released huge tracts of virgin Alaskan wilderness for oil exploitation and vastly increased off-shore drilling.  Rex Tillerson was not unhappy with Obama’s oil policy, Exxon had record profits under President Hope and Change.  Plus, Obama gave several truly inspirational speeches about the need for green, renewable energy.

“But I guess one point I wanted to make last time about a culture of powerlessness is that you don’t have to be upset about any of this, Elie.  You always have the option of just shutting the fuck up.  Look, if there’s nothing you can do about it– why torture yourself?  You didn’t make the world.”

No, clearly, I didn’t make the world.  And, of course, I do have the option to just shut the fuck up, and also, in my silence, tenderly bugger myself.  It’s a funny thing, I’ve been listening to old podcasts on the iPod I got Sekhnet. Mine died and she found the iPod she hadn’t used in years, but won’t let me update it until she downloads all the movies on it, which will be wiped out forever if I update it first.  

“Uh, OK,” said the skeleton.

All this to say, the podcasts on the iPod were all originally broadcast from 2010 to 2012.  A surprising number of people, on various shows, offer a very strong critique of Obama, even back then, and highlight the gulf between his rhetoric and his actual policies.  The miracle is how easily he won re-election and it highlights his gifts as a smooth self-promoter.

“Well, he’s always clearly been one of those guys with a keen eye for the main chance.  He was elected on the power of his oratory, his looks and his electric charisma.   A progressive doesn’t immediately put the foxes in charge of guarding the recently raided hen house.    His financial team were the same geniuses who oversaw the engineering and sale of toxic, economy crashing tranches of collateralized debt obligations.  

“The president spoke sternly of their terrible behavior, but insisted they were the only people who could fix the system they themselves had broken.   The record bonuses they paid themselves after the crash of 2008?  Just another sad detail to shake your head about, their bonus clauses were ironclad and it was pay them or pay them trebly if they had to take you to court, best to just get over it.  

“Unless you get ten million people on the street, day after day, your message ain’t getting out there.   Even if you have ten million on the street every day, the consolidated corporate media has to show it on TV.  On one Bill Moyers show they discussed the TransPacific Partnership, which is supposed to be a trade deal.  The T.P.P. excludes China, fair enough, but purports to deliver a host of benefits, including, but not limited to:  promoting economic growth; supporting the creation and retention of jobs; enhancing innovation, productivity and competitiveness; raising living standards; reducing poverty in the signatories’ countries; and promoting transparency, good governance, and enhanced labor and environmental protections.

“So let’s take one laudable goal, promoting transparency and good governance.   That must be why President Obama has taken such pains to make sure details of the pact are kept top secret.  Legislators are not allowed to see a copy of it except under controlled, supervised conditions.  They are sworn to secrecy about its provisions.  There will be no public debate, just an up and down vote, which is neatly named ‘fast track’.  

“Which makes sense, Elie, since the public might be annoyed at some provisions of the T.P.P., which have been worked out by the industries affected.  The world’s largest corporations will be able to rely on an international agreement that overrides domestic laws on the environment, workplace safety and investments, among other things.  The pharmaceutical companies worked out extended patent protections to minimize the predations of generic drugs on their profits.  Oil companies wrote the chapter on hydrofracking and other environmental regulations.   If it hadn’t been top secret, you might have tens of millions in the street with signs saying NO NEW NAFTA and GET YOUR MOTHERFUCKING HANDS OFF ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION.

“C’est la guerre, Elie, and you know, you can’t spend time getting upset about every poor little Yemeni girl or Somali boy orphaned by a drone strike, or the death of first responders when a second missile kills those who rush in to rescue survivors of the first explosion, the ‘signature strike’. These policies are decided way above your pay grade. When Putin or someone evil does the same thing to innocent civilians, we can easily see these acts as war crimes. When a man as fundamentally decent as Nobel Peace Prize recipient Barack Obama orders deadly missile strikes in eight countries, he is a man defending us from terrorists. Why be upset about any of this, Elie? People are murdered by states every day, have been as long as there have been states.”

I don’t think I need to point out how much easier it is for you to be so philosophical, being long dead, than it is for those of us who have to slog through this toxic world.

“Oh, poor baby!   You should get a few jobs and start earning the money to pay for that PPACA gold plan you’ve been eyeing, the one with the low deductible. You might actually get to see a doctor! Now go fuck off in peace, my son, I have a long nap to get back to.” The skeleton waved wanly with two fingers and flopped back into his dirt bed.

Echoes of Dred Scott

“No, Elie, don’t start this now.  You have to get home today, and soon, to finish logging in and enrolling for health insurance on that constantly crashing bummer of a New York State of Health website.  You have less than five working days left to do it, during the arbitrary and stressful Christmas to New Year’s window, and the phone lines and website are going to be overwhelmed.  If you don’t sign up with a new company and complete the paperwork now you’ll have no health insurance until March at the earliest,” said the skeleton.

Got you covered, man, going to get on it as soon as this is tapped out.  I’m not going to write a full account of this infamous Supreme Court decision, just pluck out a few great lines.  

“Don’t start with this today, Elie, I’m telling you.  You have to attend to your own health issues and make sure you have insurance and see the several doctors you need to see.  You have problems with two of the four chambers of your heart, you need to speak to a cardiologist.  You have to follow up on the state of your kidneys, which are spilling protein into your urine.  You haven’t seen a dermatologist in a few years, with denials from various insurance plans, after multiple skin cancer operations.  Don’t fuck around with this, Elie.  For one thing, you have a long way to go to make these 800 pages into a book.  Don’t fuck me, man,” said the skeleton.

Jesus, dad, I wouldn’t fuck you with Eli’s dick.  

“OK, clip out those sections from Dred Scott and get on your way,” said the skeleton.   

The Court signed off on Chief Justice Roger Taney’s long, impeccably reasoned decision 7-2.    

“Impeccably reasoned?” said the skeleton.  

Arthur Kinoy, my by then doddering professor emeritus in law school, cited it as an excellent example of legal legerdemain.  He challenged us to find a weak link in Taney’s argument.  Once you accept the premise of the Negro’s inferiority to the white man, he pointed out, the rest flows like a river.  I found that to be true at the time, even as my glance at it today made me wonder about some of it.    

“You know, Elie, I feel like the fish in the Cat in the Hat.  I have to raise my front fin in caution again, do not do this, do not get into this swamp.  I know you have a point you want to make, or have me make, or whatever your damned plan turns out to be, but I urge you, please, get in the shower, get dressed, get on your way.   After you’ve taken care of the fucking Obamacare stuff, return to this and finish it.  For the love of Christ, Elie…”

I hear you, man.  Just two things.  

“Oh, no!  Two?!” said the skeleton.  

The first is a very weak bit of legerdemain from fucking Roger Tawny.  

“Yeah, that’s how you say the fucker’s name, though it’s spelled Taney,” said the skeleton.

He cites, as proof that the Negro, inferior and enslaved, was never intended to be considered a human or citizen under the original intentions of the Founding Fathers, the vaunted language from the Declaration of Independence that has stirred so many hearts over the centuries.   Here he goes, the motherfucker:

The language of the Declaration of Independence is equally conclusive:

It begins by declaring that, ‘when in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.’

It then proceeds to say: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among them is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.‘

The general words above quoted would seem to embrace the whole human family, and if they were used in a similar instrument at this day would be so understood. But it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration; for if the language, as understood in that day, would embrace them, the conduct of the distinguished men who framed the Declaration of Independence would have been utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they asserted; and instead of the sympathy of mankind, to which they so confidently appealed, they would have deserved and received universal rebuke and reprobation.

“Utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they asserted, oh, my!” said the skeleton.  

Taney continues:

Yet the men who framed this declaration were great men—high in literary acquirements—high in their sense of honor, and incapable of asserting principles inconsistent with those on which they were acting. They perfectly understood the meaning of the language they used, and how it would be understood by others; and they knew that it would not in any part of the civilized world be supposed to embrace the negro race, which, by common consent, had been excluded from civilized Governments and the family of nations, and doomed to slavery. They spoke and acted according to the then established doctrines and principles, and in the ordinary language of the day, and no one misunderstood them. The unhappy black race were separated from the white by indelible marks, and laws long before established, and were never thought of or spoken of except as property, and when the claims of the owner or the profit of the trader were supposed to need protection.

This state of public opinion had undergone no change when the Constitution was adopted, as is equally evident from its provisions and language.

The brief preamble sets forth by whom it was formed, for what purposes, and for whose benefit and protection. It declares that it is formed by the people of the United States; that is to say, by those who were members of the different political communities in the several States; and its great object is declared to be to secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity. It speaks in general terms of the people of the United States, and of citizens of the several States, when it is providing for the exercise of the powers granted or the privileges secured to the citizen. It does not define what description of persons are intended to be included under these terms, or who shall be regarded as a citizen and one of the people. It uses them as terms so well understood, that no further description or definition was necessary.

But there are two clauses in the Constitution which point directly and specifically to the negro race as a separate class of persons, and show clearly that they were not regarded as a portion of the people or citizens of the Government then formed.

“Oh, God, these are great clauses, direct and specific, I’m so glad the Honorable Mr. Taney brings them up,” said the skeleton, cheerfully.  “I remember you telling me about these clauses when you stumbled on them in law school.  You seemed so shocked, it was hilarious.”

Taney continues:

One of these clauses reserves to each of the thirteen States the right to import slaves until the year 1808, if it thinks proper. And the importation which it thus sanctions was unquestionably of persons of the race of which we are speaking, as the traffic in slaves in the United States had always been confined to them. And by the other provision the States pledge themselves to each other to maintain the right of property of the master, by delivering up to him any slave who may have escaped from his service, and be found within their respective territories. By the first above-mentioned clause, therefore, the right to purchase and hold this property is directly sanctioned and authorized for twenty years by the people who framed the Constitution. And by the second, they pledge themselves to maintain and uphold the right of the master in the manner specified, as long as the Government they then formed should endure. And these two provisions show, conclusively, that neither the description of persons therein referred to, nor their descendants, were embraced in any of the other provisions of the Constitution; for certainly these two clauses were not intended to confer on them or their posterity the blessings of liberty, or any of the personal rights so carefully provided for the citizen.

No one of that race had ever migrated to the United States voluntarily; all of them had been brought here as articles of merchandise. The number that had been emancipated at that time were but few in comparison with those held in slavery; and they were identified in the public mind with the race to which they belonged, and regarded as a part of the slave population rather than the free. It is obvious that they were not even in the minds of the framers of the Constitution when they were conferring special rights and privileges upon the citizens of a State in every other part of the Union.

Indeed, when we look to the condition of this race in the several States at the time, it is impossible to believe that these rights and privileges were intended to be extended to them.

“Well, dassum shit,” said the skeleton.  “I love that bit: high in their sense of honor, and incapable of asserting principles inconsistent with those on which they were acting.  After all, Elie, the high and inviolable sense of honor and principle of wealthy and influential men who raped their slaves is beyond question.  Although, of course, it is impossible in that world of solemn legalities to call the rape of property ‘rape’, you understand, as rape only applies to a creature capable of giving consent.  By that logic, Mr. Jefferson’s liaisons with Ms. Hemmings were a discreet and purely personal matter, roughly the same as Mr. Jefferson having a favorite and well-loved sheep, or goat, the intimate parts of which he sought for tenderness and release.”  

Weren’t you telling me I have to get out of here?  

“Yes, yes, make your second point and get going.  And make it snappily– nobody wants to read all that Tawny bullshit.”  

Short and sweet, then, and containing one of the great lines ever written by a Supreme Court justice, a bit of inadvertent, unvarnished truth telling.  

Speaking of the time leading up to the formation of these United States (in five of which, one dissenting judge pointed out, blacks were allowed citizenship, including the right to vote), Taney writes:

They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics, which no one thought of disputing, or supposed to be open to dispute; and men in every grade and position in society daily and habitually acted upon it in their private pursuits, as well as in matters of public concern, without doubting for a moment the correctness of this opinion.

“No one thought of doubting or disputing any of this, of course, except for the millions who did dispute it.  Or legislators of the five states that allowed blacks to vote when the Constitution was ratified,” muttered the skeleton.   “They can read a condensed version of the dissents here, where you just saw that startling fact.”

The beauty of it, and a hideous beauty it is, to be sure, is that Taney uses the ‘originalist’ argument here, speaking of all this shit as the well-understood intent of the men who framed our republic, and by that quaint device ratifying it for the future, even as he quietly acknowledges how much times and beliefs have changed since.  ‘All men created equal,’ written now, would surely have a different ring than in 1776, he admits.  But since in bygone times white men regarded Africans as plainly inferior, we must respect this tradition in the face of those today who insist it is not so.  He speaks of the past while setting it out, pious, infallible prick that he was, as immutable law for the future.  

“With the beautiful irony, of course, from a legal perspective, that he denied Dred Scott, still held as a slave, standing to even bring the case in federal court, which should have been the end of the matter.   If Dred Scott had no standing he should have dismissed the case.   Yet, instead of dismissing the it, he rambled on at great, tedious and labored length, to explain why a piece of property and member of an inferior race had no rights a white man was bound to respect,” said the skeleton.

Beautiful irony, pops, that lives on, undisturbed, to this very day when our great nation imprisons more people than China, a ruthless state with four times our population.  The U.S. prison population, naturally enough, disproportionately non-white, many with no rights the white person is bound to respect.  Now, if you will excuse me…