Infinite and Finite

In our finite world scarcity and competition for limited resources are facts of nature, taken for granted. We are hard-pressed to see the world we live in except in terms of winning and losing. Most drama in our world centers on the burning question of who will take the lion’s share and be safe in their home and property and who will starve or die young of preventable diseases or violence. Most live anxiously in between, taking distraction and pleasure where they can, and there are people who will kill you for the money in your pocket.

Other things in this world are infinite and as precious as clean water. Empathy is infinite, if allowed to flourish, and it saves lives. The gift of being listened to, heard and understood, having someone take the time to understand — a sadly rare gift that costs nothing to give and is potentially infinite. Imagine the pain and violence that could be spared, if a person on the edge of rage had only had someone to hear how much they were suffering and ready to give even a small comfort.

I heard a great radio interview a few weeks ago with a woman who worked in an office in a school. A distraught maniac came into the school with an AK-47 and 500 rounds of ammo, ready to kill and then, as the maddening saying goes, “turn the gun on himself” or commit “suicide by police”. She was the first person he encountered there, and she was in the midst of a day of great personal trouble already when he walked in. She saw his agony and spoke to him kindly, told him he was loved, called him sweetie, assured him that his life was going to be better than it felt in this terrible moment. She wound up calming him enough that he didn’t shoot anybody, didn’t turn the gun on himself.

Many gun-toting maniacs who barge into schools are far past the point of hearing anything, the kindest words in the world will be cut off by their gun shots. But her actions that day saved many lives, including her own. They don’t make a movie about her, but she’s a greater hero than most that movies are written about. Antoinette Tuff is this hero’s name. In looking her up just now I read that a few days ago they sentenced the 21 year-old with the AK-47, who shot at police before Tuff talked him down. Looking at the photo of the beautiful Ms. Tuff, and reading about her hard life before her heroic moment, they might very well make a movie about her. She has a book out now and is doing the interview circuit.

Also infinite, the violence rage produces. It is as inevitable as the “fuck you” many in a hurry, or dealing with their own troubles with no time left, might feel reading something like this on some fool’s blahg. Abstract bullshit with rose colored shades on, where is the actual content? Oh, wait: it’s better to be amazingly kind than to be a common fucking bastard, eh? Deep.

Our minds create the world we live in, it is said. The organ of mass media plays upon our senses, all the time, selling without rest, pulsating in our pockets, on a billion screens, it’s echoed by the crickets chirping in the darkness. All of human genius is focused on perfecting this ever more incredibly sophisticated sales machine. We cannot see our world without seeing the inevitable — war, competition, violence, hatred, revenge, infuriating piety. Infuriating piety is as bad as the rest of the plagues, it’s maddening to listen to someone piously announce the difficult truth, presented with a pious idiot’s simple mindedness, leaving no room for discussion. The certainty of pious people can be maddening, that’s understood.

Picture two kids and their prospects for a happy life and I’ll duck back behind the curtain. One child, when she wakes afraid in the dark, has an adult who comes, puts a soft hand out, speaks quietly, listens and reassures. The other child wakes afraid in the dark and is met by an angry adult who waits for the child’s wailing to get out of control and then barges in snarling “you’d better shut up or I’ll give you something to really cry about!”

That this goes as well for adults as for children is too self-evident to even try to show. It is even more important for children, clearly, and for the future of life here.

Isolation Chamber

Solitary confinement is probably the cruelest form of incarceration, as has been noted in many contexts and by various schools of experts.

Youthful offenders subjected to periods of solitary confinement may suffer irreversible damage, to pull a dramatic sounding, likely indisputable, fact from a nether cavity. Routinely, for disciplinary reasons and others, teen prisoners in America are shut into cells by themselves and allowed to stew for days or weeks. It is very cruel, but apparently quite usual, just the way we do business here in the U.S.A. these days.

“Ah, another soapbox!” says my old friend.

“Just so,” says I. And I’ll tell you something else, isolation is not an isolated problem restricted to forced detention. Look at the wild popularity of social media, which is neither, strictly speaking, social nor media. It is a constant contest for attention in a distracted world that has only so much attention to pay to any of its hundred million media creators. How often do we note that people with 10,000 friends on Facebook don’t have one to call when they are feeling down? 140 characters, gaily and bravely tweeted out to the world, somebody…. follow me. Into the breach, follow me!! Hello? Can I get a tweet back? Retweet? Ping? Hello?

“Turn that burner down, partner, your pot’s about to berl over, and you’re sounding a bit… crazy…” my friend says.

“’My friend’…” I think, recalling Napoleon’s great remark, to his diary, about friendship. After noting that he regards man as base coin existing merely to gratify his passions he records that he fully realizes he has no true friends, only people who suck up to him because he’s powerful, charismatic, etc., he sniffs to his diary “as for me, you don’t suppose I care?”

“To his diary, you say?” says my friend, getting the ironic point I will belabor briefly now. Napoleon denied that he needed friends, intimacy or anyone to confide in. He denied it to his best friend, the journal he confided his most intimate thoughts to.

I know very well I have no friends, I say to this apparition, this flimsy literary device, “my friend”. To the extent that I can make people laugh, or think, or feel something, I am a wonderful guy and liked just fine. Like Napoleon in power, I know I will have all the friends I need as long as I remain as I am. I recall walking with a group of friends on a long hike a few autumns ago, first with one, then another. We caught up, exchanged a few anecdotes, touched base. Before I left each friend they were laughing. I left ‘em laughing, each one, and each in a unique way. That’s neat, I remember thinking.

“But you say these people are not your friends?” he asks.

“You need to shut up too,” I say, very, very tough.

Here’s the thing. I was in mid e-conversation just now with somebody about a business mentor, and setting up a meeting with a business solutions specialist when I realized I was no longer online. “Hello?” I had a response ready to send to one, was phrasing one for the other when… “hello?” The line was dead. Silent. The dreaded silence descended like a gigantic, hideous, world masking testicle.

“There goes a gigantic, hideous darling you should murder toot sweet, that gratuitous and disgusting testicle image,” says a friend with a keen editorial bent.

Isolation does things to a person who lives alone. I can tell you for sure. The internet suddenly winking out looms like a major catastrophe to people who communicate largely on line. Silence.

Oh, you have plenty of people you interact with every day. I understand. You make sales calls, have meetings, colleagues, discuss business, consult, talk to clients, josh with customers, prospects, make dinner plans, plan trips, talk to waiters, drivers, talk to strangers while waiting on line at the movies. You chat up everybody, and I don’t begrudge you that small, important pleasure. I don’t even ask you to consider what I’m writing here—there is no reason to ask or to consider.

The entire exercise — gratuitous. Maybe that subway poster advertising The School of Visual Arts back in the 1970s hit the mark and will always hit the mark: having a talent is not worth much unless you know what to do with it. Talent is worthless, they intimated artfully, unless you monetize it. All art is commercial in a commercial society, you dig?

“Art…” Hermann Goring grunts in disgust, although he plundered more than his share of valuable Degenerate Art during the Nazi gravy years, “when I hear the word culture I reach for my gun.”

Hard to blame the Nazi bastard on that score, you know? I don’t own a gun, except for the metaphorical one I fire off here from time to time.

“You are a chattering rictus,” an observer observes.

“Yes,” I say, “but I’m sure you don’t want your guts blasted with this metaphorical Glock 9.” End of that particular story. I stop, turn full face and flash my adorable rictus, gentle reader.

Horrible Wiki with a Happy Ending, kind of

African-American resistance to lynching carried substantial risks. In 1921, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a group of African-American citizens attempted to stop a lynch mob from taking 19-year-old assault suspect Dick Rowland out of jail. In a scuffle between a white man and an armed African-American veteran, the white man was killed.

Whites retaliated by rioting, during which they burned 1,256 homes and as many as 200 businesses in the segregated Greenwood district, destroying what had been a thriving area.

Confirmed dead were 39 people: 26 African Americans and 13 whites. Recent investigations suggest the number of African-American deaths may have been much higher.

Rowland was saved, however, and was later exonerated.

Please Tell Me You’re Kidding Me

“So you, a man without a megaphone, with no idea of how to get a megaphone, have as your goal giving a megaphone to poor, feral kids who have no voice in the world?” she said, not as a question.

“An uncharitable way to say it, but yes,” he said.

“Are you starting with the ‘he’ again?” she asked, her smile catlike.

“I leave that to you to figure out,” he said. These conversations with the internalized victimizer were tedious, but sometimes unavoidable. The thing was to be patient with the cruel voice in his head, he reasoned.

“Yes,” she said, “be patient with the voice of reality, the voice of the world, the voice of sanity and reason, the voice you’ve made it your life’s work to be deaf to.”

“Of course,” he thought. It was true he was taking a beating. No rest in his slumbers, eyes tired as soon as he opened them, the world a slippery uphill slope from the time he put his foot on the floor by his bed. He could not escape the several ironies, heavy as anvils, clumsy as tortured metaphors.

“You are so talented!” his friends’ children often told him in childish amazement.

“You should monetize your art,” many a shrewd friend of a friend had told him years ago. “Get used to rejection and just keep sending your stuff out, it’s as good, or better, than much of the stuff that’s selling. You can make a fortune, with persistence and a little luck.”

It was never a dream, making a fortune, or being loved by rich people. The dream, somehow, had been making a difference, somehow. The dream always involved brooding over people, particularly young ones, who were irretrievably fucked by the bad timing and placement of their birth.

“Bingo!” she said, “now look in the mirror. Happy Birthday!”

“I take my spirit and I smash the mirrors,” he said, singing Jimi’s triumphant couplet. The song died in the cluttered room. There was much to do, but where to start? He’d heard a spot on the radio about New York City Business Solutions, a great resource for small businesses at any stage of development. Prematurely thankful for this piece of luck, he went on-line and got the number.

“The number has been changed,” the recording said and he jotted down the new number. This new number turned out not to be the number for the office he was looking for, but one in Harlem where he was invited to leave a message. He left a cheerful message but had no answer on the third business day.

He called 311, which gave him yet another number, which connected him to someone in the wrong office, a bright young man named Adam who promised to set things straight, and by the end of the day, spoke to the supervisor of the proper office who cheerfully promised him an appointment that week, which would be set up by Carlos, cc’d on the follow up email.

“Thanks so much,” he wrote back three business days ago. Perhaps they construed it as sarcasm?

“Are you not used to the fact that virtually nobody ever gets back to you on matters of any importance at all?” she asked, yawning ostentatiously.

“I’m going to call Adam back at the Lower Manhattan office,” he said.

“Sure you are….” she said, letting her voice trail off annoyingly. “Oh, by the way, that excellent application you wrote to the New York State Small Business Mentor Program, did you ever hear back on that? It was really a wonderful description of your program and your needs, very well-written and positive sounding. You put on a good act, anyway.”

“There were some business mentors in Utica, Buffalo, Ulster County, Onondoga County, Syracuse and other places who were sent off as automatically generated possible mentors…” he said.

“Did you ever hear back from their help desk after you checked ‘please help me with this application’? Did you ever get a return call on your voice mail seeking assistance?”

“I said, I’m going to call Adam back at the Lower Manhattan Office,” he said with great determination. What he was thinking was ‘somebody tell me you’re fucking kidding me with this fucking shit.’

Trying to Negotiate an Old Friendship in A Partisan Nightmare

I have known this woman since childhood, when she worked with, loved and, later, was psychologically pummeled by, my father, who sometimes couldn’t help delivering an onslaught of blows to someone who loved him. Back then she was a member of MENSA, a folk-singer who hated war and intolerance, and an outspoken leftist who worked hard at a difficult and idealistic job in the newly integrated NYC high schools. When she moved out of NY, some time after the disillusioning ugliness with my father, I lost track of her. Fond memories led me to look her up on the internet some time before my father passed away. As I recall they had an amiable chat about old times a few months before his sudden death.

It is a few years before he died, the wreck of the smoldering World Trade Center is still emitting its foul, toxic smell. I get an email from her describing the recent political revelation she’s had. The world is dangerous, we are surrounded by deadly Islamic enemies intent on slitting our throats, and destroying Israel. She has moved from her former political stance and embraced the politics of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. They are friends of Israel and not afraid to do what is necessary to combat enemies from hell.

Though she considers herself politically independent, most of her views align with the right wing in American politics. She supported the invasion of Iraq, supports torture, would defend Sarah Palin’s unfairily maligned statements, is critical of the Liberal Media and disgusted by liberal guilt. She asks, since all of her former liberal friends have cut her off, if we can have a reasoned discussion of politics. She tells me she’d greatly appreciate it.

It turned out we could not have a reasoned discussion of politics. The aggravation of trying to have one led me to cut off communications with her finally. Years later we resumed emailing and agreed to leave politics out of our correspondence. It has been a 99% excellent correspondence since.

In the name of seeking common ground, she once in a while sends me a political piece she thinks I might agree with. Most of these pieces originate from passionate people who do not attempt to give a nuanced view of what they are describing. Although I delete many, I find myself beginning to reply to some of the more incendiary ones. The substance of most of my critiques is about the emotional nature of the emails, the citing of convenient facts and the omission of any that might weaken the emotional punch. I write and don’t send these, there are a few in my drafts folder.

It’s pointless to send them, since it has been her practice to respond not to the substance of my reply, but to the righteousness or veiled anger in it and it’s pointless, and poisonous, to get back into the emotional cul de sac of partisan back and forth. I do not believe a police choke hold that results in the death of an unarmed citizen is ever an appropriate action to take in response to a non-violent crime. Though she would probably agree with that statement, she would probably also see some nuance there.

She sent one recently with a photo captioned “this is what a broken orbital bone looks like” and it was horrendous. The side of the guy’s face was bashed in and all around his smashed eye socket it was a hideous purple, the color of a flayed cow’s torso. The photo illustrated an email slamming the notorious Liberal Media for repressing this photo of the officer who shot the threatening black thug in Ferguson, MO. in self-defense warding off a vicious and deadly attack. I wrote back pointing out that the caption of the photo hadn’t claimed it was a picture of the officer who shot the kid, and that it was surprising the right wing media wasn’t showing this photo everywhere. I suggested it might be a hoax and, after a few moments on google, sent her a post identifying the subject of the photo as a race car driver after a 2006 accident. She wrote back aghast, but still didn’t appear totally convinced, that photo or not, the kid hadn’t bashed in the cop’s face or done something else violent that justified the officer shooting him to death.

Since I greatly value this woman’s insights in all other regards, but can’t stand any more right wing emails, I asked her again, with a long explanation, not to send me any more political email. I wrote the following to her. She wrote back that she promised not send any more and underlined everything in my email that she agreed with, just to show how much we can still actually agree about even contentious things. Naturally, I found the things she didn’t underline very interesting.

I wrote:

I want to err on the side of not having to engage any of this ‘political’ stuff. I’d rather not have to parse or vet any of it because so much of it just upsets me. I have enough in my life at the moment to vex me without fear of opening an email from you containing something upsetting.

The deeper horror, to me, someone gravely injured by a childhood lack of response and honest engagement, is that most of this stuff is just a way people express their anger and doesn’t lend itself to productive conversation of any kind. Any comments I make are met with complete silence most of the time, like in the recent case with the hoax article.

It surprises me every time I get something from you, an otherwise thoughtful, sensitive and insightful person, that is clearly a reflexive jerk of the right wing knee– like the recent one claiming the black kid who was killed by the cop in Ferguson, MO. bashed the cop’s head in and deserved to die, in spite of the easily discoverable truth or falsity of the incendiary– and false– assertion.

We live in a violent, polarized society that is going the way of all empires, it seems, one ready example: militarized police forces in riot gear and tanks use tear gas against American protesters that would be a war crime if used on a battle field in war. Our country is as divided, hypocritical and poised to kill each other as at any time since the Civil War (what was so civil about it, I wonder).

In the midst of our fear, rage and powerless we focus on what we believe to be the source of our problems. To the right it is the entitled “takers” those race baiters who wear their victimhood aggressively and demand “reparations” who pay nothing and demand everything. To the left it is the moral descendants of the slave holders, extremely rich and powerful people manipulating everybody else to increase their already extreme advantage: no teacher contracts beyond one year, “right to work” no unions, fight “minimum wage” increases, no abortions for any reason, cut food stamps and other safety net programs that keep millions of children and seniors from hunger and starvation, stop funding the EPA, unlimited guns for the free and privatized prisons for the bad guys, alcohol yes, marijuana no, stop hating our freedom and engaging in class warfare, your envy is sickening.

There is truth in both of these views, though you and I weigh the relative truth on very different scales. No more, OK?

Make love, not war, as you Californians say. Do you understand what I’m saying?

Peace, out.

Ixnay on Ein-May Ampf-Kay

The other day I was reminded that I’m no Vonnegut, nothing like the writer who started writing as a corporate PR man, who worked long and diligently, and faced years of rejection and lack of appreciation, to make himself into a marketable commodity, both his writing and his folksy wit on the speaking circuit. After many years of hard work he wound up well paid and beloved for both. Today I was urged not to use the word “struggle” in the title of the book I might work on, if all else fails, as appears may well be the case, my imaginary city burning as I fiddle here.

“Not ‘Struggle'” my friend said, to remind me of what I myself noted a few weeks ago here– people don’t want to read about a losing, against the odds struggle, unless the protagonist miraculously prevails, in which case he becomes an inspiring winner and the story an uplifting fable about the power of individual imagination, resourcefulness and perseverance.

I assured him I’d call it something else, tempting as it is, as I indisputably struggle, to puckishly riff on Mein Kampf, after the shortened German title editors insisted on as an improvement of the original “My Struggle Against Seven Years of Lies and Hypocrisy and the Fucking Jews and Other Filthy Maggots Who Want to Bugger Me Even Though I Have Never Enjoyed Buggery of Any Kind and I’ll Kill Anyone Who Says I Like To Take It Up The Ass!“. The future Fuhrer was persuaded that the book would sell better with a strong, forceful, more succinct title. “Those first two words, so powerful and perfect!” he was assured obsequiously, “the rest of the title, excellent though it also is, would be a distraction, and hard to fit on the spine.”

“You lay it all out so beautifully in the book, Adolf, no point giving away all that for free in the title. Build the suspense a little. Make them buy the book if they want all that,” another cajoled, fawningly. The author of that book, a strong-willed mentally deranged autodidact who had dictated it to a functional illiterate, was not a man to be trifled with. He was a writer who needed flattery more than most. In later years he’d have men hung by piano wire for offenses far less grave than second guessing the best title for his own book about his unspeakable struggle against forces hell bent on making the world a nightmare. In that department, he was an expert.

“Did something bad happen to you today?” she asked, eyes looking sad.

“Shut up,” I said.

“You’re no Hitler,” she snapped, turning back to her computer game.

I understand. Anyway, Mein Kampf was a main source of Hitler’s livelihood until he went on the public payroll years later as Chancellor of Germany. It was a best seller in Germany during those wild years. The best selling book that nobody ever read, it was a popular wedding present and also given for birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, confirmations and, by black-humored wags, bar mitzvahs. Try reading it some time. It’s impossible to get through more than a couple of pages, although the short section on propaganda is breathtakingly chilling and very well presented.

Much as I am biased against him, horrific as his own nightmare childhood undoubtedly was, as much as I hate the man, if I’m being totally honest here, I have to give him this much: he was a visionary as far as how to sell an idea to the public and he forever changed the way it’s done by most governments and virtually every advertiser of political campaigns:

You want to influence the masses with facts and reason, logic and persuasion? HA! You stupid bastard, I’ll hang you from a meathook by your ass! You want to influence the public, my friend? You stir their emotions, shake their emotions, stomp violently on their emotions, mainly their fear. You TERRIFY THEM! Yes, that’s what the Allies did, inspired terror and hatred of the German army in the World War. That was the right thing to do!

Our commanders were no different than others, in fact, a few vomited when they saw what the fucking Turks did to the Armenians (don’t get me started on the Turks, or the Armenians, for that matter). But our propagandists took the high road in the Great War and lost the war for hearts and minds, the war itself, even though our military was far superior. They idiotically stuck to the truth, told our people that we were a superior culture and a great nation and that we deserved to win because we represented the highest values civilization had so far attained, and the Americans, English and French were inferior and contemptible. All true, but useless as engines to drive war machines of hatred and revenge.

The Allies were smart and effective, they were ruthless and not hobbled by quaint scruples about what was true, sportsmanlike, decent. They knew that primal fear and visceral hatred motivate far better than intellectual appeals to pride and contempt. They used any lie they could think of to make their people, and their troops, fear and hate the Germans. The filthier the lie, the more brazen and sickening the lie, the better. The Allies had it right, alas!

FEAR and HATRED, I’ll say it again, that’s the goal and the more explosive and terrifying the lie, the more gigantic and atrocious the lie, and, YOU KEEP SCREAMING IT UNTIL THEY ARE QUAKING IN THEIR SMELLY BOOTS, the better. You get them TERRIFIED! TERROR!!! You fill them with nightmares until they shit themselves. BOOO!!! VOOO-OOO!!!!! Then they will listen eagerly when you tell them what they must do to save themselves, they are ready to obey, march in columns to kill. Their savior will assure them with absolute confidence: we will face this fearsome enemy together, bravely, our complete and glorious triumph is preordained by GOD. Follow me and we will KILL THE MONSTER! And they will lean forward, hushed and expectant, to hear the details, commit any acts necessary to KILL THE MONSTERS!!! You have them in the palm of your hand, agents of your will, if you keep them in terror. And simple, terrible, unimaginable lies endlessly repeated are the best way to keep them terrified.

Not long after Hitler outmaneuvered the rest of the complacent German right and had himself named Chancellor, the Reichstag, the German Parliament Building, went up in flames. The man who started the fire, amazingly in twenty places simultaneously on several floors of the huge building, was captured, tried and executed. The convicted arsonist, a Dutch Communist named Marinus van der Lubbe, is referred to in at least one famous historian’s account as a “Dutch half-wit”. The lone arsonist was tried and beheaded, although symbolic justice was eventually done.

The Reichstag fire was as instrumental to Hitler’s dictatorship as the 9/11 attacks were to extreme right wing American politicians who seized the chance to consolidate all kinds of special extra-constitutional powers in their executive and themselves. The Weimar Constitution needed no revision the day after the Reichstag fire– an Enabling Act, triggered by the national emergency, was immediately passed and Mr. Hitler ruled under the emergency powers granted by the unamended Weimar Constitution until the day twelve years later he killed his newly wed wife and his beloved dog and shot himself in the mouth. It must be noted that it’s hard to blame him for those final acts, though he might have spared his wife and his faithful Alsatian. And at the risk of sounding opinionated, the only shame is that he didn’t put the gun in his mouth twenty years earlier.

And also, at the risk of sounding opinionated and slyly insinuating, both, I note that it was not until the massive and sweeping Patriot Act was passed immediately after the attacks on September 11, 2001, that the word “Homeland” came into general use here to describe the land of the free and the home of the brave. Naomi Wolf, in The End of America, pointed out that this was a direct translation of Hitler’s preferred term for the German Reich, die Heimat. Ditto “war footing” which we were on until Shock and Awe began, which was another Nazi coinage, kreigsfuss. Not for nothing, I’m just saying.

But I digress.

We live in a world made black and white by paid haters on both sides, and the hissing flames are tended by the hate profiteers, self-made millionaire professional dealers in partisan hatred. There is a bottom line, non-negotiable and debated not with an exchange of reasoned arguments, but emotionally, from roaring throats with veins distended. Freedom or tyranny! Liberty or Death! In theory freedom is the right to do whatever increases your happiness or protects your interests without harming others. Tyranny is force used ruthlessly against the exercise of freedom.

There’s theory, and each side marshals its simplified version of the truth to support their ‘theory’, loaded and problematic terms like “the free market”, “democracy” and “justice” are angrily spat back and forth into the open spittoon of public discourse, and then there’s reality on the ground. It is in the reality on the ground, as both sides argue deafeningly over the moral high ground, where faces are being stomped into the dirt with heavy boots.

Thinking back to my friend’s excellent advice, I’ll leave the word “struggle” out of my title and work with something like “Love and the Empowering Echoes of Hope”, something that might sell in liberal arts college bookstores. He’s right, to hell with the incessant Hitler jokes. Hitler was an asshole, and about as funny as a meathook to the old trapezius.

Graveside Service

Today is the 59th birthday of an old friend who died last January 2. A few days later I joined an amazingly large group of people who went out to the necropolis, snow-covered that day but generally looking like a golf course with a few trees, to help bury a very likable man.

Tomorrow, if the determined widow’s July 21 email requesting a favor and mentioning the date is still accurate, is the unveiling– the Jewish custom of returning to the grave about a year after the funeral and pulling a veil off the engraving that memorializes the departed’s life. In this case, because of this particular burial ground, it will not be a tombstone unveiled, there are no raised markers there. A plaque at the head or foot of Steve’s grave will be revealed, and his oldest friend, a rabbi and wonderful speaker, one of the best, will read the inscription and say a few words. As our friend speaks the large crowd will nod, and sigh, and smile, and cry, and laugh, and they will go somewhere to eat and catch up and then, in their comfortable cars afterwards, life will continue on.

I didn’t agonize long before deciding I won’t be making the trip to the unveiling, outside Boston. There are a variety of reasons, I suppose. For one thing, nobody reached out to invite me, outside of the demanding widow’s slightly unreasonable July email requesting that I write, within the next few days, not about any specific memories from the time her husband and I actually spent a lot of time together, but about our conversations in the months before he died, after not seeing each other for decades. At a loss, and unable to pull something together in the sudden and arbitrary four day window I was given, I didn’t write back and haven’t heard a peep since.

I think of their wedding, and how my friend stood next to his bride and sobbed as the rabbi performed the wedding ceremony, and I remember mumbling to a friend “it is the right of every man to choose the noose into which he slips his head.” As far as I can tell Steve’s thirty year marriage to this demanding woman was a very happy one. Though both were amputees from their respective cancers, they continued to have sex right up to the end. I think that detail I’m probably not supposed to mention speaks remarkably of their love and devotion to each other.

None of our small circle of old friends has contacted me about the unveiling, on the theory, I suppose, that I could just as easily contact them. Fair enough.

An objective case could me made that it is difficult for people to reach out to me these days, as most people are reticent in the face of tragedy. Steve and I once talked briefly about how many people were unable to call him during his decline, or, if they did call, talked of everything but his cancer, although he remained consistently upbeat and much more cheerful than anyone could have expected through the long crucifixion that was his cancer death. I suspect something similar operates with me, though I feel like I’m as personable as I ever was. Lurking, behind my deft evasions about how I’m doing, is the unmistakable and terrible tragedy of someone doomed to not truly live in the same world as everyone else, despite having all the tools to flourish in that world. Like a dying man, the things I am wrestling with are not the carefree playful ones a hard-working, productive person likes to be surrounded with on a day off.

So, happy birthday, Melz. You were a good man and I salute your success, your many talents, your loving wife and your two beautiful, talented daughters. In other circumstances, I’d pay a call tomorrow. But you, as well as anyone and better than most, know the deal, old friend.

Standing on the edge of the ditch

In a sense, my father, who once cried about the murders of our family but always denied its relevance to our lives, was right. I never stood, nor did anyone I ever knew, on the edge of a ditch waiting for a murderer’s bullet. Not when I was an eight year-old with a terrifying imagination and first learned of it did I actually stand on the edge of a ditch with the rest of the family waiting for the order to lie down and be shot. Much less fifty years later when I am that much closer to my own natural end, after standing beside the open graves of loved ones many times now.

To be truthful, these things happened thirteen years before I was even born. I’ve never been machine gunned, or shot with even a small caliber gun, never been tied up with ropes or even been hungry for more than a few hours. For crying out loud, I’ve never even been whipped in the face or beaten bloody. My father took the manly stance that his dramatic young son was just sniveling, looking for pity in the echoes of the murder of our family back in some far away Ukrainian hellhole more than twenty years earlier. Some of us never get over anything, it would seem.

If I’d been a Black kid it would have been the fucking slave ships I’d have been whining about, the millions crowded below decks in airless holds, chained, driven insane, thrown to sharks if they grew too indignant. Then I’d have been worked up about the hundreds of years when I could have been sold, whipped, sodomized like any flesh robot you could own. It wouldn’t have soothed me to hear that life here for the former slaves was better after the Civil War, or that not millions, only thousands, of former slaves were ever beaten, raped or killed for being indignant. And probably less than ten thousand, total, who were ever burned to death or hung from trees while crowds laughed and whooped and had picnics, sold body parts and photos as souvenirs.

My father would have said “for Christ’s sake, son, they put those Klansmen on trial in Mississippi for what they done to those boys down in Meriden. The country is changing, for the better, it has changed a lot in your lifetime.” It would have been peevish to tell him only one of the murderers of those Civil Rights workers would ever see the inside of a jail cell. Or that sixty years after the Supreme Court ordered an end to segregation, schools would be as segregated as at the height of Jim Crow. Hindsight, you know what they say about it.

“Is this really what you are thinking about at 4:36 a.m.?” asks a concerned voice.

“No, not at all. I was thinking about this hours ago, but couldn’t shut off that great documentary about how they did the animated life of Graham Chapman I’d seen earlier…”

“Drawing again, I heard the scratching of your pens….”

“Yes, Sekhnet wandered in like a zombie, saw the animation on TV, looked at the drawings on the couch and said ‘Oh, God, he’s generating more papers…'”

“You can see her point.”

“Yes, I can certainly see her point. These twenty thousand fucking drawings are a plague. I do myself no favor drawing them. But listen, do you mind if I get back to what I was thinking about?”

“Who are you asking?”

“Good point,” I say.

It was an accident of birth, and dumb good timing, to be born in a place and era when I was not forced to lie face down on top of dead bodies and wait for a bullet to end my life, as all of my grandparents’ families were. Pure luck not to be living in a 2014 slum without sewers or any kind of toilets, where babies die by the truckloads from ragingly contagious excrement borne diseases that basic sanitation prevents. Good fortune not be born in a place where children are dragged from their homes and forced to kill, or are ‘collateral damage’ statistics in drone attacks, or fated to live in neighborhoods where human predators attack, or if the criminals don’t get you the cops will. A blessed accident of birth to be born wearing this face instead of one that invites real kicks and blows. The kicks and blows I receive are gentle indeed compared to real ones.

“No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.” [1] The pains we are given to deal with are painful enough for each of us, unbearable sometimes, though they’re not as painful as many more terrible things countless people are enduring at this very moment. It doesn’t give us perspective, sadly, not to be standing on the edge of a ditch waiting for the order to fall in and be executed. In a sense we are all standing on the edge of a ditch in a world where ditches for mass graves are dug all the time.

“Take this shovel, dig a hole deep as you want to be buried and stop crying and farting about it,” is about the worst thing any of us can hear. In that childhood nightmare where Nazis in storm trooper uniforms were slicing through the screen of the back porch of our house to get at us I remember thinking “a lot of good those screens did” a second before I woke up with my heart pounding in terror.

That no idea, no matter how good or well-presented, can be sold in the marketplace of ideas without properly calculated marketing? A female mosquito landing on your shoulder for a drink. That unscripted candor has no place in a salesman’s pitch? Please. That’s as self-evident as the fact that all men are created equal and endowed by our creator with inalienable rights that may vary, according to circumstance, history and financial situation. The world is just the world, although it is not always easy to keep perspective when the world is chanting something loudly and continuously enough to drown out all other thought.

They were apparently banging drums and making a racket on the hill by the ravine to the north of Vishnevets those days in August 1943, to mask the cries and other sounds of the massacre. The noise of the drums and lusty screaming, as you can imagine, was a fearful sound to the remaining ragged, starving citizens of Vishnevets, waiting their turn at the lip of the ravine.

The world of competitive commerce and war constantly and insistently beats the drums, to drown out the silence that might lead to forgetting about the drumbeat of commerce and war and allowing people to recall matters of a deeper nature, to gain a more humane perspective.

It’s possible, I suppose, that these two lusty drummings are only comparable in the mind of a madman. Then again, many things in our world are the work of madmen.

[1] Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Flick My Bic

Back when cigarette smoking was much more prevalent, still cool and not as sneered upon by society, there was a commercial often shown in movie theaters, oddly enough. Before the movie started you’d have a jolly ad designed to drive you to the concession stand to buy fantastically expensive drinks, popcorn and candy.

Then, in a quick companion commercial, two Bic lighters would walk stiffly up to each other on the giant screen, poised like two rectangular plastic erections. As each spoke the top of their metallic head would burst into flame. The ad’s tagline was a jaunty “flick my Bic!”, and the distinct cadence of “suck my dick!” was not lost on any of the fifth grade boys in the audience.

I think not of the geniuses who came up with that memorable ad campaign but of the French genius capitalist who first realized you don’t need to make fine products that people will own with pride and take care of. His breakthrough, which led to a vast fortune, was understanding that you could make a lot more money selling cheap disposable plastic pieces of shit to people increasingly addicted to convenience.

Bic pens, a revolutionary skipping ballpoint refill in a clear plastic tube, were crap, sold by the billions, used briefly and simply tossed into landfill — no problem. Bic later made disposable razors, sold a billion of them in no time. Ditto the Bic you could flick, hold up flaming at the end of the concert to ask for an encore — when its fuel was done, toss it into the gutter. You could flick all the Bics, actually. Soon every capitalist in competition with Bic was making disposable products out of the cheapest plastic they could find — the race was on. Sixty years later it’s hard to buy a pen, or anything else, that’s not disposable.

The philosophy was incredibly simple, liberating and lucrative. Use the disposable piece of crap a few times and don’t worry about it — no need to refill or reuse it — just toss it in the garbage when it’s done and take the next brand new one from the pack. Life is too short to be sentimental or worry about a future featuring millions of tons of indestructible plastic in landfills and oceans, or the loss of a sense of design, craft or pride in one’s product!

I would like to go back in a time machine to meet this genius, Marcel Bich, in much the same way, when I was ten, I used to fantasize about meeting Hitler. Not to shake his hand, you understand.

The old Brooklyn baseball fan’s dilemma: you are in an elevator with Stalin, Hitler and Walter O’Malley, the guy who moved the Dodgers from Ebbets Field in Brooklyn to LA. You have a gun with only two bullets, what do you do?

Answer: shoot O’Malley twice, make sure he’s dead.

Unfair joke, really, since it turns out O’Malley did everything possible to keep the team in Brooklyn — he got screwed by Robert Moses, an evil bastard who probably deserves to be in that elevator more than O’Malley does — and finally took the team to greener pastures in Los Angeles rather than give in to Moses and relocate to Queens.

But I digress, and although it’s probably just as unfair to blame Marcel Bich for the devastation his billion dollar idea led to, I can only say:

Fleek my Beek, Baron Bich.

from Wolfgang Saxon’s 1994 NY Times obit:

Baron Marcel Bich, whose inexpensive Bic disposable pens, lighters and razors made him wealthy enough to sustain an 11-year quest for the America’s Cup, died on Monday in Paris. He was 79 and lived in suburban Neuilly-sur-Seine.

After fixing up a leaky shed in Clichy, a northern Paris suburb, after World War II, Baron Bich and a partner, Edouard Buffard, began turning out inexpensive penholders and pencil cases. Later he obtained the patent rights to a ball-point pen invented by a Hungarian, Ladislas Biro, and formed Societe Bic in 1953. (The baron’s name and the pen’s are pronounced beek in French.)

The inexpensive pens proved irresistible to consumers, beginning with the French. The corporation rapidly expanded, with factories in many countries turning out billions of pens sold singly or by the carton. Later he produced disposable razors and lighters. Annual Sales of $1.1 Billion

is the bass too loud?

The recurring cackle is by Robin Williams, from a 2010 interview during which Marc Maron, the interviewer, elicits this reaction. I have remixed this improvised track several times. Is the bass too loud on this mix?

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