Where is my piece of shit emoji?

Smugly entitled turd, smirking the quiet part out loud:

“My conservative colleagues for the most part support Limit, Save, Grow, and they don’t feel like we should negotiate with our hostage,” said right-wing Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL).

Our hostage, the American people and the world economy, fuck them, you know.

Leaving aside, genius, that the hostage is not a party to the negotiation.

Heather Cox Richardson ends her great piece today with this:

Those taxes helped to pay for the [Civil] war and, after it, to repay the debt. And in 1866, when Confederate-sympathizing Democrats tried to undermine support for the government by changing the terms of that debt to make it less valuable, Republicans wrote into the Constitution that “the validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

source

I know it sounds impolite, but fuck the KKK caucus.

Democracy oligarch style

Below are the numbers reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Supreme Court margin that ended enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. Effectively restarting the clock on the long fight to end racist, partisan voting practices across our great democracy, for the advantage of entitled, seething anti-majoritarian oligarchs.

Shelby County v Holder was a strategically engineered case that sneakily challenged reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act by eliminating enforcement in historically racist jurisdictions, like Shelby County.

The carefully tailored lawsuit was brought by a secretive cabal of billionaire reactionaries, who secretly paid a lot of money to at least two of the justices in the 5-4 majority, to overturn the will of the people. And they won 5-4.

Check out these numbers again.

At least two of the justices in the five-four majority had glaring appearances of impropriety. The chief Justice’s wife had been paid millions as a headhunter finding talented reactionary lawyers to work for law forms, including the one representing the plaintiff in this case. The wife of Clarence Thomas, Ginni, a far-right activist lawyer with much more than a housewife’s power (on board of directors, Council for National Policy) and influence, was secretly paid a tidy sum by Leonard Leo of Federalist Society fame, by way of a non-profit that was also supporting the plaintiff in this democracy destroying case.

Can you say 5-4 suck it cucks? Sure you can.

USA! USA!!!

Belated Happy Birthday, Mom

My mother, Evelyn, who died thirteen years ago today, would have turned 95 years old yesterday. I had intended to write something touching about her, and started on this yesterday, but … shoot, sorry, mom.

I found myself sitting at the piano yesterday working out a song she used to sing, a popular ditty from the 1940s called Mairzy Doats. My father would be driving the car, we’d be on a longish trip somewhere, and suddenly my mother would burst into song, with only slight self-consciousness, imposed by her husband. He was also a good singer who’d soulfully croon a handful of notes, the hook of a beautiful ballad, and cut himself off after five or six syllables. My father was well-known for singing just enough to let you know that he could actually sing, but not a note more, and he was equally famous for inhibiting my mother’s singing.

Evelyn loved to sing and my father’s side-eye as he drove was not always enough to make her stop, though it did make her a little self conscious. Nonetheless, as we drove across some bridge she’d suddenly sing “Mairzy doats and dozy doats and little lamzy divey, a kiddleedivey too, wouldn’t you?”

Now all these years later, being a proficient guitar player finally, and surprised to find a certain facility on the keyboard lately, which helps me work out songs I’m trying to learn, I find Mairsy Doats is a pretty hip little tune to play, in a nostalgic, artfully written pop tune kind of way. The singer explains in the B part, “and though the words may sound queer to your ear, a little bit jumbled and jivey, say ‘mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy.” And this B part, if I may say, I could play the hell out of this B part on the guitar, and it works out just fine on the keyboard, thank you.

And as I played and sang the song on the piano yesterday, with the sheet music from an actual paper song book, Songs of World War Two, which also, of course, had the lyrics, I called out “Happy Birthday, Mom!”

I thought to myself what a goddamn shame I couldn’t have played this simple, jumping accompaniment thirty or forty years ago and let my mom just sing it. Same with “Do Nothing till you Hear From Me” another genius tune from the genius Duke Ellington, my father would sing just that riff, with the opening line, the riff that Ellington placed over three different sets of chord changes to such brilliant effect. I could have backed both of them on a tenor ukulele, if things had been different.

But again, as in my mother’s actual life, my love and birthday greetings for her get mixed up in a lot of bullshit that has little or nothing to do with her.

It was my mother’s love, and, as I realize now, that she never gave me reason to doubt her love, that literally saved my life in the brutal war zone my sister and I were forced to grow up in. As I emailed the day before yesterday to a genius from high school (truly, one of only two I’ve ever met in this long life of mine):

Tomorrow I’ve got to write something sensitive about my mother, who’d be 95 tomorrow.  I’ve realized only very recently that in spite of [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] she never let me doubt her love for me in that war zone I grew up in and in the end she always listened to me.  Even if I couldn’t change her mind, which I sometimes did, she always eventually heard me out — which is no small thing.  Probably saved my life, actually.

Thanks again, mom, for giving me life, and saving it time and again, by simply listening with an open mind and a loving heart.

❤️

When being conciliatory becomes a problem

A friendly readiness to compromise, be agreeable and conciliatory becomes a handicap only when you find yourself in a conflict with someone who has to win, no matter what.

This type quickly makes a deadly weapon of the benefit of the doubt that you keep extending to them. In this moment, it is very important to listen to what that unsettled feeling in your stomach, in your lungs, your muscles is telling you.

You learn agreeable behavior as a baby, as a matter of survival. You must be easy to get along with, easy to love. It is good to be easy to get along with, until you find yourself locked in a struggle with someone who sees the world only as domination or submission.

These motherfuckers play a game where only one person walks away alive at the end. Learn to see the deadly game as early as you can, learn to get away from them as soon as you can. If necessary, learn not to feel bad if you have to kick them hard or punch them in the face to get away from them. They will do much worse to you if you stick around and keep trying to reason with them.

Clarity v Clarity

Life is complicated, confusing, sometimes maddening in its perplexing complexity. It is natural for a person to search for clarity and simplicity when everything is overwhelming. The feeling of seeing things clearly is a great help for mental health. Clarity is a much better guide than confusion for knowing what to do, how to act, what is right and what is misguided. Clarity is undeniably a good thing.

The most common form of clarity is based on general consensus, shared views on right and wrong. Everyone around you agrees about the basic issues, you agree on the proper authorities and experts to consult for confirmation, and you don’t have to constantly fight your way through painful conflict over every detail of every single aspect of everything in a sometimes aggravating life. This kind of clarity is normal, commendable, and at its heart based on love, trust and faith, the highest reasons to believe anything.

There is another kind of clarity that some insist is more substantial and more useful than the clarity of general consensus, faith, love and absolute loyalty. This kind of clarity requires a little more work, and a little less faith. It is slightly more difficult to get, since it seeks evidence and some kind of reasonable confirmation rather than just general agreement.

This kind of clarity is also often seen as more supremely annoying, abnormal, superiority-based and frankly provocative as fuck, this “so-called” clarity based on doing the work to think things through clearly, reconcile conflicting points of view and reach conclusions that can be explained clearly to others.

Practitioners of faith and love-based clarity find this “reasonableness based” clarity profoundly lacking in the three most important aspects of human life — love, trust and faith. We love each other, trust each other and we have faith in each other. Nothing could be simpler, or more commendable, better or more praiseworthy.

The practitioner of so-called “reasonableness-based clarity” already admits that love and trust are not enough for him, nor faith, absent the so-called reasons he claims allow him to see things more clearly than “normal” people, those he feels pugnaciously superior to.

You see where we’re at here. It is elementally human to want to feel you are right, that you are not wrong, that you are not talking out of your ass, out of a blind need to feel right, not wrong, not talking out of your ass. Love covers all those things, of course, since your motivations and intentions are of necessity spotless, if they come from love.

The cold-hearted person who keeps demanding so-called Reason (and for some reason this type likes to capitalize the word Reason in the context of a principle of thoughtful life derived from fact, evidence, experience, trial and error and so forth) will always be lacking in that most important single thing in life — love (and its close cousin loyalty). They also, those who keep delving, and thinking, and digging in emotionally difficult terrain, lack trust and faith, clearly, as shown by their very actions.

They cannot accept that a deity arranged this miraculous universe in a way humans can never fully understand, and that all human attempts to understand the will of one so omnipotent, omniscient, ubiquitous and all-loving are merely the vanity of the flawed creations of this perfect being, creations made in his perfect image… so how can you expect them to understand?

It is easy to understand that people who strongly feel they already have perfect clarity would be offended, even angry, at the assertion that they have taken the easy way out of a difficult problem by accepting something less than ideal, for the sake of peace of mind. I’d be offended, as I am, when people attack my notion of clearheaded analysis, often certain of my position before I can even express it. Homo sapiens, the “wise ape”, is also a reflexively self-justifying, warlike ape.

Those who may happen on these opinionated posts of mine, please don’t mistake me for someone who accepts that an all-powerful, all-merciful creator has dreamed up a world perfect beyond my comprehension and overflowing with a divine love I have locked my heart against. As Neil DeGrasse Tyson points out, it is not possible, in the face of acts of God like earthquakes, tsunamis, plagues, killer floods, events that kill thousands of innocents, including children, that the same God whose acts these are is all-powerful and all-loving. If he was all-loving, you know, and if he was all-powerful, you know.

Leaving God out of it, those who get clarity through ideology, accepting a belief system without questioning what it is made of, what motivates it, what the likely results of its goals are, God bless. Not for me, though. Getting clarity is the only way through the dim night. It’s often more strenuous than serene acceptance of an explanation that gives maximum comfort, though the serene acceptance method often has unintended consequences.

Believe what you like, I say. I don’t proselytize, it’s against my religion. I say what I have to. You take in what you’d like to and disregard the rest, it’s still a free country. God, it is said, created freewill, the basis of human life and all human misery. Human freewill, of course, is God’s get out of jail card against the blasphemous charge that He is not all-powerful and all-merciful, for any evil that humans encounter is the fault of human freewill, God’s gift to mankind, and no fault of an all-powerful, all-loving Creator. I’ll leave it to more pure minds than my own to fight that one out. I have to go now.

Accepting things we should not accept

The world is, more often than not,  a war zone, a very tragic thing considering the miraculous nature and boundless natural beauty of the besieged place where we spend our fleeting lives.  Think too much about its potential to be a peaceful place where neighbor does not lift up sword against neighbor and your heart will break. 

Right now, worldwide, a violent war is raging over who will own everything – a few people with the power to impose their will on those with less power, even if it comes at the price of destroying the habitat all living creatures depend on to survive — or the rest of us.  The powerful will spend unimaginable sums of their vast fortunes to ensure that their will becomes permanent, inviolable law. 

They will hire huge armies, capable of exerting whatever terrifying force is necessary to silence dissent and all alternatives for the present and future.  They will divide us all and make many angry enough to kill, and make sure they have easy, legal access to the firepower to spray death as easily and terrifyingly as humanly possible.

They will destroy all records of the past, rewrite history by rewriting the laws to prevent the dissemination of history they find repugnant.  They will obliterate all avenues to compromise that could help create a more perfect, more just, more sustainable world.  They want total war because they see the world as a war zone and they have the means to win a total war.  Most of us don’t.

Antisemites call this small group of willful, powerful people with immense wealth, hellbent on destroying morality, controlling governments and imposing their hateful will on the rest of humanity The Jews.  Racists, who can’t give the race they hate credit for being intelligent enough to have thoughts of their own, attribute their feeling of lost power to the Jews, who are replacing them as the power bloc in democracy with brown robots programmed to do the infernal work of the Jew, so they can impose their sick vision on the rest of the good, God-fearing people, the rest of the people like them. 

You don’t have to be an antisemite to reduce the war-torn world to this kind of paranoid cartoon.  Just think of the unknown aged billionaire who legally left Leonard Leo, architect of the 6-3 extremist Federalist Society Supreme Court majority,  a war chest of $1,600,000,000 to strategically spend doing whatever is necessary to finish creating the world this small, powerful minority hopes to see in perpetuity.

We learn the names of most of these creepy reactionary billionaires (and, to be fair, there are some billionaires who bankroll Democrats hence corporate Democrats) only in their old age, after a lifetime of dirty deeds: The Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson, reclusive Robert Mercer (patron of Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, Cruz turned Trump patron), secretive Jeff Yass, Ken Langone (Home Depot), Betsey DeVos, Erik Prince, Harlan Crow, who bought his own far right Supreme Court justice, Peter Theil, Elon Musk, among others on the far right with money to burn. There are dozens of these motherfuckers, all cursing George Soros, a Jew, for being the evil radical left puppet master/bankroller of pedophile Democrats.

The Age of Reason, we are reminded, was an aspirational age.  Like the Warren Court, that expanded rights and greater justice to all citizens of our democracy, The Enlightenment was an outlier in human history.  Most of our bloodstained past is written by ruthless rulers, in the blood of the oppressed.  Oppression itself, with its attendant atrocities, is so ubiquitous in human history that we have many words to describe it over the ages, including serfdom, slavery and genocide.   So let’s not talk about any of that anymore, shall we?

The larger war sadly rages in our personal lives too, when conflict arises and empathy disappears.  Damage done to us by damaged people who were in turn damaged by damaged people lingers, may become all we can see.   For a feeling of safety in a hostile world, for the comfort of attachment to others, we sometimes accept things we should not accept. 

As I’m unable to sleep because the replaced knee is making things too uncomfortable, for the 24th night in a row, I find myself wondering about the things damaged people accept from other damaged people that may be unacceptable.  We can accept mistreatment that damages us worse than we already are, thinking it is the price we must pay for things of greater value, like love, friendship, a feeling of community.

We are all born reaching out for love and attachment.  Chemicals are released in the brain of the baby, of the parent, to create an intoxicating pleasure in bonding.  Things do not always go according to this beautiful plan, because most people have been damaged during this earliest stage of life, including, tragically, the parents.   

Parents are often overcome with their problems and nobody bothers to teach anyone how to do the difficult, almost impossible, job of being a compassionate parent when you are beset with your own terrible challenges.  It can’t be easy, to be always loving, always kind, always patient, when you are exhausted and the fucking baby won’t let you sleep.  Behaviors arise in the parent and the child that nobody bargained for.   Then the child is an adult — and then?   We wind up accepting things we should not accept, as the price for things we need in a dangerous life that ends, for all of us, in death.

Being abandoned when you are physically impaired, is it something you should ever tolerate from people who love you?   What goes on in the group of lifelong friends when they decide “if he’s too weak to keep up, he’ll just have to do the best he can, it’s not our problem”?   

Instead of waiting, or turning back to make sure he is not in trouble, let him struggle on, if he’s strong enough, he’ll make it, We made sure he bought hiking sticks and has a bottle of ibuprofen.  If he’s really too weak, we’ll unfortunately have to go back and see what happened.  Why is his trouble walking our problem when we are out on a beautiful day, in a beautiful place, enjoying a beautiful aerobic hike?  Why would he selfishly think we’d be thinking of him if we hadn’t seen him in an hour or two?  He knows the way back to the car, it’s at the end of this clearly marked six mile trial.

When, limping, you show up at the end of the hiking trail, where they have been resting, and will rise as soon as you appear, ready to continue, they will smile at you and say “we wondered what happened to you.  Are you ready?”  Meaning, we’ve had a nice rest, for a while, since you’ve been struggling to catch up with us for the last few hours, you don’t expect us to wait longer for you to rest yourself now, do you?   

Meaning, we smile, you smile, you accept that there is nothing wrong with the strong not waiting for the weak, it is clearly the way of the world.  You have to keep up, or you die.  In the end, you did not die, all’s well that ends well and you go out for a nice meal, pretending, for the sake of old friendship, that nothing is amiss.  Why get angry just because you were treated thoughtlessly?  This is a lesson you learned as a baby, you show you’re fine by acting fine and everything is as fine as it can be.

Being abandoned emotionally when you feel most in need of reassurance from loved ones, is that something you should ever accept?  Imagine what is going through the minds of those who turn away when they know you are most in need.  Imagine what makes them so angry afterward that you can be so unfair as to question their love just because they didn’t reach out after they promised to.  Imagine the immensity of the damage that makes someone act like that. 

Whatever it was, can you really accept a lack of basic empathy from a person who claims to love you?  It harms you in a place where healing is very difficult, it attacks your ability to trust.

I feel great fear for the adult son of parents who live by this ruthless credo of strength and shifting all blame to others.  The son feels he lacks the basic strength of an ordinary person, because, in fundamental ways, he has always been struggling to keep up with the illusion of vigor, indomitability and self-sufficiency his parents have set before him.   

If he can’t accept something as basic as that, maybe he’s not ready to take his place as heir to their good name.  I wonder if they really meant to teach their children the ruthless truth that someone they love can be removed from the world because their parents insist, in spite of they guy being alive and well, and desperately hoping to speak to the one most clearly in danger, that he is fucking dead to them. 

There are winners, son, and there are losers.  Winners persevere, never hesitate, do whatever is necessary to win, they face their fear and conquer it with their will.   You, sad to say, although we raised you to win, to keep up, to never pity yourself, do not seem able to do these things.  We love you no matter what, of course, but you must accept that we had nothing to do with the sad state you are in now. 

The son smiles, accepts their help whenever they offer, winds up, days after moving back into his parents’ house,  in a psychiatric hospital.

Something very serious must have occurred for these two parents, the strongest, proudest, most admirable people any of us have ever met, to subject themselves to the shame of admitting their son to a mental ward.  They taught their adult son that their word is final, if they say people he loves, who are walking around right now, are suddenly and forever dead, those people are fucking dead. 

DEAD.