The familiar stink of Bill Barr

Barr, speaking on FOX, echoed the Trump defense talking point that the payment to the porn star was a purely personal matter having nothing to do with the election and that therefore the prosecution of him for hiding the payment is another politically motivated Mueller witch hunt.

Trumpie had a few seconds of sex with Stormy Daniels ten years before he made the hush money payment. The reason that he paid her three days after the Access Hollywood tape was released was his fear that her story would have fatally damaged his chances to become the 45th president in a very tight race. The reason he covered up this valuable campaign contribution was to avoid the scandalous payment becoming known, right before the election, defeating the purpose of the payment. If there ever was a $130,000 well-spent in a tight presidential campaign, the payment to Daniels was it.

As for the possibility of conspiracy and fraud charges bumping the false accounting charge up to a felony, fraud, says Barr, requires a victim, as a matter of law. Voters can’t be defrauded by a cover-up, in Barr’s view, they can only commit fraud, OBVIOUSLY, even if it is fleetingly rare.

Barr also scoffs at NY being the venue for the indictment, citing New York City’s irrational hatred of Trumpie. He and Trumpie had already designated NYC as an “Anarchist Jurisdiction” (also an “AntiChrist jurisdiction”) and therefore anything coming out of there is presumed to be simply “Trump derangement syndrome” since “anarchists” hate the law and order president.

Plus, and it goes without saying, Alvin Bragg, the NY County DA, is Black and most Blacks irrationally hate Trumpie, their best friend since Lincoln.

Everything that comes out of the smugly confident Bagpiper’s hideous maw has the same stink.

The prison of our minds

There’s a famous story I’m thinking of, as I can’t find my way out of the loop of my two closest friends suddenly and irrevocably withdrawing their friendship from me. The final communication was now almost four months ago, and it was just my old friend confirming that he would not be honest in trying to resolve our senseless conflict. I have no illusion about anything involving that long running shitshow, understanding fully now how deadly any conflict is with this inexorable personality type.

Yet, almost every day, as similar things are played out constantly in mainstreamed extremist politics — projection, incoherence, lies, vilification — I am reminded of my painful struggle to prevent the fatal falling out with my two old friends. They shocked me by continually using every familiar MAGA technique to blame and silence me.

Two monks who haven’t seen each other in many years meet in the forest. They greet each other and one asks the other “do you still think about those sadists who held us captive and tortured us?”

“No,” says the monk “how about you?”

“I think of them every day and I never think about them without wishing karma to descend on them so that they hurt the way we did when they tortured us” says the other monk.

“Then you are still their prisoner,” says the more enlightened monk.

True enough.

The thought that consoles me, as I am still the prisoner of thoughts of the brutal unfairness of the mistreatment I experienced at the hands of people who claimed to love me, is that I have no ability, at the moment, to blow off much steam, to get things out of my system physically. Strenuous exercise is always good for relieving much of that kind of tension. In recent years I’d go for long, fast paced walks to clear my head, now I can only walk a block at a time, painfully, before I have to sit and rest. Try clearing your head with that kind of halting walk.

So the pain in my ailing knees reminds me to go easy on myself for not being able to break fully out of the prison I can’t think my way out of at the moment. Mercy is a great gift to give yourself. When I am back in shape, after my knee replacement and rehab, I intend to flush the rest of this ugliness out of my system, daily.

BARR is back, baby!

Corrupt culture warrior Bagpiper Bill Barr is back, full stink, baby. Never one to shrink from a fight about who is the complete, evil asshole and who fights for Christ, Barr confidently dismisses the Manhattan DA’s case against Trump as a weak, pathetic, misguided political hit job on his boy. With great confidence he dismisses the theory of the case and the sealed charges that none of us have heard yet, with charge by charge theoretical analysis, no less. He then opines at great bad breathed length about how the case is held together with paper clips, string and spit. His summary is also great, I’ll spare you the 10 minutes, you can hear an odiferous bit of it here.

Meantime, Rupert Murdoch’s fair and balanced propaganda machine keeps pumping it out. As the imbecilic Jim Comer claimed on Fox yesterday, Alvin Bragg only thinks he has more power than the Congress of the United States of America and he’ll learn that when they drag him down there kicking and screaming (like the sick, deranged animal he is), subpoena be damned.

You have to picture it from these racists’ point of view, it would be like being a high ranking Nazi in Germany and having all these Jew lawyers drag you in front of Jew juries presided over by Jew judges. Who in their right mind would consent to a rigged game like that?

The uninterestings

The smartest woman in the room, a Harvard graduate with a successful literary agent practice who has read countless books, loved The Interestings, by Meg Wolitzer. It is the epic fifty year story of friends from summer camp, who met the summer after my closest friends and I met at summer camp, and stayed close thereafter, their lives intertwining over the decades, as, amazingly, ours had. My two closest friends were so excited by the book that they bought me a hardcover copy, in large print, no less, a kindness to my old eyes I always appreciate.

I began reading the book, which starts from the point of view of an insecure, working class teenager Julie, a girl who is flattered to be taken in by a group of the coolest kids at camp, who rename her Jules. This little group, The Interestings, forms the dramatis personae for the rest of the book. I confess, I had a hard time making progress with the book, it struck me, from the start, as profoundly uninteresting, though context may have played a large role, as I will describe. I got the audio version from the library and listened to it, determined to hear the whole thing.

Toward the end of the book the depressive husband of Jules tells his wife that her lifelong fixation with these Interestings has always been a mystery to him. Aside from sharing an intense bond as teenagers, what was actually so interesting about any of these interestings? He certainly spoke for me, and I suspect, many readers.

The pretty rich girl who was the queen of this little group wound up rich and successful, and married to a billionaire. Her brother, a charming kid much loved by the females, wound up an expatriate in France, when it became clear he might be indicted for rape. The eccentric, creative kid who couldn’t stop drawing and making little animations, became a billionaire, which is what happens to real geniuses, I suppose. The musician became an engineer, I. forget what became of the rape victim, though I think she remained friends with the others. Jules became a social worker, I think.

We didn’t wind up talking about the book my friends of fifty years had loved so much they bought me a copy of it. Now that I think about it, we’d rarely discussed any books we’d read in common, beyond a thumbs up or a thumbs down. It was not terribly long after I read The Interestings before a fifty year friendship with my two closest friends was over. That’s fairly interesting, I think.

My friend flew into a rage at me over a conflict that, were she not so angry, could have been easily resolved. Her righteous husband forced her to apologize to me the next morning, after I’d had a sleepless night, traumatized that my closest female friend had glared at me with a contempt I’ve only seen from my long dead father. This famously willful woman’s loss of control, the show of rage, and the forced apology, I now understand, were mortifying to both of my old friends.

Although I immediately accepted her crabbed apology, which, while blaming me for the entire incident seemed nonetheless sincere and the best she could do, they couldn’t accept my apology the following day for using the fucking “f-word” in a moment of anger. Her husband rallied to his wife’s side, telling me I had no right to expect him to understand my feelings, because he was too upset by what I’d done (the f-word!) to hear about them. In the space of two days, it was grimly clear these lifelong friends were no longer my friends. It took me over a year to stop agonizing and see the obvious because it all made no sense to me.

My old friend called after the hellish five days in a beautiful rented house that ended our friendship and began “wasn’t that a great vacation?” It went quickly downhill from there. Next stop, a month or so of silent treatment from a friend I always communicated with a couple of times a week. Then a demand to meet, and at that meeting, his wife beside him, he began “I’ve walked away from friendships for less than what you did to me.” Instead of verbally punching him in the mouth, which, in hindsight would not have been unreasonable, I reassured him of my friendship and he accepted my assurance, handed me a great book they’d bought for me.

Reading this book, some part of me must have understood the superficial aspect of the whole thing, the intimate friendship beyond question, the need to tell the same cover story, stick to the dramatic script, swallow hurt because your hurt is humiliating to someone who claims they love you like family. And, like family, you simply have to unconditionally accept the faults of your parents, your siblings, your flawed uncles and cousins.

The rap goes like this: being family means that nobody ever has to hear or understand why what they’ve done hurt the other family member. Family is a sacred bond that cannot be broken, except by vicious, unforgiving, treacherously angry people falsely claiming to be hurt and who can’t let go of their childish grievances. You understand that if I hurt you, I love you more than you are hurt, so it’s a wash and stop trying to talk about whatever you claim I did to you. It is your problem, not mine, not the family’s, dummy up, be quiet, swallow our version of what you think happened quiescently or you’re going to be fucking sorry. You don’t threaten the family, you fucking filthy mouthed fuck!

Interesting, maybe. On their influencer daughter’s Substack page recently there was a long post with advice about how to endure difficult people, presumably those who intrude with strong opinions and feel they can never be wrong. These people, she suggests, must be placed on an UNSAFE list and only dealt with when you have all of your personal matters for the day taken care of. Funny to find myself on that list, but, yo, that’s family for yuh! You’d have to be a reckless idiot to risk a million dollar inheritance to indulge the need for someone your family deems unsafe to have a word in your ear.

Nazis always “double down”

Trump’s DOJ told the Manhattan DA’s office to stand down as DOJ sheilded the boss from culpability for the cover-up of his timely hush money payment. The $130,000 was paid to shore up his injured campaign three days after revelation of his “you can grab ’em by the pussy” brag had hurt him in the polls. His bagman, Michael Cohen, was prosecuted, convicted and jailed for his crimes on behalf of Individual One, who was given a pass by his totally unweaponized DOJ. Total exoneration, like the Mueller witch hunt probe which led to the Michael Cohen conviction. Then, years later, the Manhattan DA investigated and brought politically motivated charges against the innocent leader. Then:

Another insane maniac takes assault rifles into an elementary school and massacres kids and teachers . Time to run the ad about how they want to call everything an assault rifle to completely disarm and slaughter us!!!

You can quibble that it’s unfair to call these people Nazis, just because they use all of the same techniques, and have the same ultimate goals. Fair enough, I suppose, if you find stuff like this perfectly cool:

Impossible letter #2 background (conclusion)

So you’re a smart, good looking young woman who has modeled herself after her dominant father, but living in a world of aggressively sexist assholes. You can’t walk down the street in NYC in the 1970s and 1980s, without these assholes making wolfish comments, giving you the entitled, liplicking asshole looks that make your blood boil. What you need is a strong, loyal man by your side to kick anyone’s ass who tries this shit with you.

That much is not hard to understand. The requirements for this guy, aside from size and imposing physical strength, are similar to our father’s requirements for his mate: good looking, charming, smart, good sense of humor, devoted and ready to do whatever I say.

Then we face the law of unintended consequences. She found this man, a handsome, athletic giant, who told her he was separated from his wife when their whirlwind romance began. He would do anything for her, wanted to sweep her away to Arizona, start a new life in Tucson. She was a New Yorker with friends and a good job, not ready for this radical new start. He eventually got divorced and they eventually got married. He was good looking, smart, strong and devoted to making her happy. The unintended part, unseen, and once seen, rationalized: the guy was sometimes a bit of a compulsive liar and probably a gambling addict.

What did he lie about? His academic degrees, his former employment, money, why he lost his job, why he needed to borrow more money, why he couldn’t pay back the money he’d borrowed, why he came home with his clothes sliced to rags and his wallet and keys gone, why he lied about a previous lie, why taking that merchandise from his boss and selling it under the table wasn’t actually stealing, why shoplifting really isn’t stealing, why pretending to go to work every day for a year while taking cash advances on your dead father’s credit cards and handing them to your wife every week as your pay is really a victimless crime and so on.

Bottom line, he was bad with money. At one point he made an excellent living, selling a lucrative yet legal product, but he also spent lavishly, extravagant orders and generous tips at restaurants, many expensive gifts and then, bad news, after a couple of years of living large, a few years scraping by, he finally had to declare bankruptcy.

He did this a few days after borrowing ten thousand dollars from his father-in-law, the DU, for last minute expenses related to the upcoming closing on the dream house he and his wife were about to buy. A lovely home with a beautiful back yard, where their soon-to-be born son would grow up playing with his big sister. The guy was a practiced liar with the gift of looking disarmingly sincere, and vulnerable, when he lied. He borrowed the ten grand from the DU on Monday, waited for the check to clear. On Friday he told everyone he couldn’t repay the loan or buy the house, he’d declared bankruptcy earlier that week.

All of these details are humiliating to have set out in front of you, granted. The only other option is to dummy up about all of it, as he always pressured me to do, about things like his refusal to pay me back money I’d loaned him, back when I still spoke to him.

The vow of silence on sore subjects required to maintain a sociable relationship includes a big IXNAY on any mention of the death threat when his wife finally called him out about his psychopathic untruthfulness.

To be fair, the death threat was a one off. The wife flew into a long overdue rage that had been building for years, after the surprise bankruptcy that ended the charade of closing on the never to be attained dream home. He angrily shot back that he was going to lock her and the kids in the house (I think a bicycle lock and a piece of heavy machinery came into play in this threat to seal them inside– my nephew had been born by then, was a young baby) get in his car, drive the mile to his in-laws, murder both of them with their biggest kitchen knife, come home, kill the children and set the house on fire, burning himself and his wife to death.

In fairness to him, he never did any of this, although the graphically detailed threat got everybody’s attention for a while.

The little family was also teetering on the edge of bankruptcy number two and I offered to look over the family budget, see where they could make cuts to save money.

There was no family budget, no accounts or receipts except for ones showing the interest rates paid by poor people who buy luxury items, like a giant flat screen TV, on the predatory terms imposed in payment plans. I reacted badly to the obscene interest rates that doubled the price of the giant flat screen they were still paying for, years after buying it. I see now, thinking about it again, that it had to have been humiliating to be made to feel bad for just trying to live a decent life.

“You have to explain to your kids why you’re so angry at your husband, otherwise all they see is an irrationally angry mother always grim and stressed out, for no apparent reason,” I told my sister. She wasn’t ready to reveal any of this, assured me her kids had no idea that she was so angry at their father. I assured her that they were well aware of it.

For one thing, she’d been sleeping with her young son, in his bed, for several years, until the kid threw her out one night, old enough to point out the obvious and say “this is weird, mom.”

“They do know,” she told me one day, not long afterwards. She’d been at the kitchen sink and heard the kids out front talking to the neighbors’ kids. She’d heard them describe how much their dad loves their mom, but that their mom doesn’t love their dad.

I offered to be in the room when her husband explained to the kids why mommy had a right to be mad at daddy sometimes, as he’d promised her he’d do, at my urging. Daddy, it should be pointed out, was always playful, gentle and affectionate with the kids, their best friend. Mommy could be demanding, grim and dreaded if crossed, but daddy was a giant, humorous, always a loving pussy cat. He loved to cuddle

I was in Florida for two weeks and offered to help my sister inform the kids of some of the reasons she’d been angry at their loving dad. She agreed, but kept putting me off, in the end assuring me that he’d promised to talk to the kids with her, as soon as I left Florida. No warning I could have given her would have made any difference.

A week after I got back to New York my mother called me. “You’d better call your sister, I just heard from her, today was the day that R____ was going to tell the kids about his sordid past, it didn’t go well. She’s driving a hundred miles an hour on 95, I’m afraid she’s going to crash her car.”

My sister, who was indeed very upset, told me the story. Her husband started his mea culpa to the children by putting things in context for them. “You know how your mother has a hard time forgiving people sometimes? Well, years ago I made a little mistake…” and, as if proving his point about what an unforgiving monster their mother was, she exploded, raced out the door, gunned the engine and started speeding on the highway.

There are things in life you cannot fix, irreparably broken things you had no hand in breaking. No amount of nuance you can provide will change a black and white world view into a gradient where everyone strives for the best, with needed compromise along the way. In the world of someone who must win, and always be in control, everything must be viewed in terms of victory or defeat.

Defeat is the most humiliating thing in the win/lose world and the fierce competitor will do anything necessary to avoid the shame of losing. You can continue to love people, you can be willing to compromise, do your best to be supportive, understanding, accepting — bear in mind, none of this shit will help you when you are trying it with someone in conflict who can never be on the losing end of anything.

Mistakes. These wrong things you accuse me of doing are simple human mistakes, when I make them. When you do bad things, you evil fuck, well, you are completely in the wrong. But my mistakes are merely the mistakes of an imperfect person with no hurtful intention behind them, you merciless, hypocrite fuck.

Get into a wrestling match with an alligator and you get what you get, sucka.

After my mother’s funeral in 2010 we were standing on Mott Street in Chinatown, on a sweltering, humid NYC evening. Me, Sekhnet, my sister and my niece, sucking on cold bubble teas in the elbow of Mott Street. My niece was about twenty at the time. We were exchanging stories about this high strung woman, the older sister of the high school friend at whose house my sister and niece were staying. The woman, a doctor, really was a bit of a cartoon character, a female Yosemite Sam. I listened to a few funny stories and told about the one time I met her.

Her brother and I had arranged to meet at a Queens restaurant he’d been raving about, his brother and sister would be there with him. I sent him an email saying I was unlikely to be done with work in time to join them at the appointed hour, but that they should have appetizers and I’d hop on a train and be there as soon as I could. I got there about thirty minutes after the appointed time. They were sitting in a car in front of the restaurant, which was closed. This was before the age when everyone had a smart phone in their pocket, and besides, I’d been on the subway for the previous half hour. A woman stuck her head out of the front passenger seat and angrily told me that I was an inconsiderate fucking asshole. I said “nice to meet you, Ellen”.

“But if you really want to hear stories about her, ask your father,” I said to my beautiful, smiling niece “he knows her best of all, they were married.”

My sister made a desperate throat slash/ixnay IXNAY!!! gesture behind her confused daughter’s back. I had no idea the father’s previous marriage and divorce was a deeply guarded family secret. My niece opened her eyes wide and looked from me to her mother, back to me, back to her mother, totally confused.

“Mom, what?! Was dad really married to her?”

My sister assured her that dad had never been married to anyone but her. I stood in the street, at a loss for words. I should have not been at a loss for words, and I rarely am, I must not have been ready for nuclear war with my sister at that moment. She’d already nuked one of my major cities, true, by insisting that Uncle Elie was either crazy or a liar, or both, but I stood in the street, not ready to launch my counterattack. I don’t operate that way, blasting first and cleaning up afterwards, for all of my skill at disemboweling desperate enemies with my sharp tongue.

As soon as I was alone with my sister I told her she had to straighten things out with my niece. She had hammered an intolerable wedge between me and the niece I loved. My niece now had to consider if her uncle was insane or just a compulsive liar who couldn’t help himself from spewing whatever gibberish came into his head. My sister told me she understood, and she’d talk to her daughter, explain everything.

Of course, there were a lot of conditions placed on that talk — both kids had to be informed at the same time (what this had to do with my nephew, who wasn’t there, was never explained) and they had to be informed at a time when their father wasn’t there, which he always was. It would be tricky, she told me, but she’d do it as soon as possible.

I know what you must be thinking, dear reader, now that I’ve set out this story for you with the full illumination of hindsight. “You know how your uncle is sometimes really angry and unable to forgive people who didn’t actually do anything to him?”

A year later, the next time we saw each other, my sister told me that she’d tried to keep her promise, but that the time had never been right to tell the kids what she’d promised to tell them, without their father there. Seriously, though, looking at it in the context of the rest of this, how did I not yet understand the world my sister lived in? I wasn’t ready to let her and her children go, couldn’t admit to myself that they were probably already gone.

When our father was dying, during the last night of his life, I asked him to record a little message for his daughter, in the event that they didn’t get a chance to speak before the end. He hesitated for a long time, and everything he said afterwards applied to himself as much as to his daughter.

Except that, naturally, he started off by saying he could never understand how she could stay with that colossal asshole after all the times he’d betrayed and lied to her. I told him that his views on the subject were well known to everyone, but that perhaps he had something of a more helpful nature he wanted to say to her, before time ran out. He had a very hard time formulating anything I could play for her.

“No matter how much you praise her, it makes no difference, her need for affirmation is a bottomless pit,” said the brilliant man who’d insisted, moments earlier, that he’d been the dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill — “by far!”.

“I must I must have told her a hundred times what a phenomenally talented teacher she was, but it never made the slightest impression on her. It’s like a bottomless hole that can’t be filled.” said my father, a bottomless hole that couldn’t be filled, on the last night of his life.

“A hundred times?,” I said, not able to let that bit of dishonest hyperbole go, not in our last conversation.

“Easily a hundred,” he said. It was probably once, perhaps it was even twice, whatever it was it wasn’t a hundred fucking times. I let it go, aware that I was in his temple, the room he was dying in.

“His life was shame-based,” my sister said after he died. “His whole life was an attempt to avoid feeling unbearable shame.”

Set and match, if you pattern yourself after someone you admire, in spite of the tremendous damage he did.

I went into a fury when my sister told me she hadn’t had a chance to set her daughter straight, claiming that since it was already a year ago that the kid probably had no memory of it anyway. When I blew up, my sister burst into tears. She sobbed like a little kid, I’ve never seen an adult cry that way. She stood on the street, bawling and shuddering for a long time. Then she promised again that she’d tell her kids that she’d lied, that their uncle hadn’t been crazy or lying when he casually mentioned an objective, taboo fact.

“Hi, Uncle Elie,” my niece said over the phone a week or two later. “My mom wanted me to call to tell you that she told us that our dad was married and divorced before my parents got married.”

“Did she tell you why I needed her to tell you this?”

“No, we were both kind of confused about why it was so important to you…” she said.

“A hundred million people have been divorced, people get divorced all the time. Why would I give a shit about you knowing that your father had been divorced?” I said.

“We were wondering the same thing,” she said.

I told her the story. She’d forgotten all about it, just as her mom had predicted. When I finished the story she said “now I understand why you were so upset.”

That may have been the last time I spoke on the phone with my smart, beautiful niece. Ten years later, after periodic texts exchanged, with many heart emojis, I finally set out to write the impossible letter, to her and her brother.

MAGA wins gun debate! send cash!

A day after any major massacre of children in the USA, rich, powerful parasites will run ads stressing that taking away people’s assault rifles is a tyranny akin to putting them in death camps.

YouTube ad from US Concealed Carry Association for SAVING LIVES (“good guys with guns”):

Because while some may claim that bullets are now the number one cause of death for American children, only more good guys with all kinds of unregulatable weapons can protect them from those who would drink their blood after they cut your throat in your bed or murder you moments after your innocent birth. Send $50 and join the Winner’s Circle in our fight to Make America Great Again or be on the wrong side of righteous retribution!

Impossible letter #2 — background

The impossible letter, I understand now, is any letter written to influence somebody who has unquestioning, unreasoning belief. The greatest letter you can conceive will not change deeply held beliefs, unless the heart of the recipient is already inclined toward what you have to say. It’s natural to suspect a nefarious motive when you receive an attempt to persuade you of something you’re not inclined to accept, coming from someone you’ve been warned against. A charming, personal letter from Hitler, no matter how beautifully written, would have little chance of changing my mind about anything.

Impossible letter number two was written to my only two living blood relatives, my niece and nephew. I was disappointed, but not entirely surprised, to have no response from either of them. The back story is long and complicated, though also simple and straightforward.

The roots of this insoluble impasse to-the-death, like most things of a deadly emotional nature, are in long-ago childhood. I have avoided writing directly about this particular tangled emotional web but at this point my need to set things out is greater than my need to be senselessly discreet. When you’re forbidden to talk about things, and they continue to bother you, the most obvious option, for those who sit down every day to write, is to write them out. To me clarity is a much better option than blind emotional commitment to a strong, unreasoning feeling. If you’re like me, the impossible letter eventually begins to take shape in your head, you imagine the clear telling that will set everything straight, in a perfect world.

In the home my sister and I grew up in, our father dominated our mother. Dad “won”, mom “lost” — she always compromised, he almost never did. Our mother was smart, quick on her feet, funny, competent, sociable, a better driver than our father, adroit at solving mysteries, but she always deferred to her strong-willed husband during the hollering matches we had with our dinner almost every night. She bent to whatever he needed, always took his side, out of love, loyalty, sympathy, knowing how badly he needed to be right, fear, weakness, conditioning, lack of confidence, variable self-esteem, a housewife’s expected fealty to her husband in the 1960s, some combination of all of the above. Our father was upset almost every evening, exhausted by working two jobs and the monstrous ingratitude of his two spoiled, mean-spirited children. He flew into a rage easily and in his rage was never without righteousness on his side. He was rightfully known as the DU, The Dreaded Unit, my sister’s perfect name for him.

My sister paid me a great compliment once, when we were young adults. We were sitting in a Dunkin’ Donuts in south Florida. She asked me why I wasn’t like either one of our parents. I told her that if those were the only two options in life, to become one of our deeply damaged parents, I’d have long ago snuffed myself. I asked her why she thought those were the only two choices. I had no understanding then of how inexorably our childhood had marked my sister’s life, limiting her choices to modeling herself after a winner or a loser, righteous dominance or humiliating submission.

“I’m the DU,” she told me somberly, shortly after her second child was born. She fixed me with a terribly poignant look that shook me as much as her statement.

“No, wait, that can’t be, you can’t… you have to do something about that. You need to talk to somebody, you need to do some work, you can’t replicate what was done to us. You don’t want to inflict that kind of damage on your children. You can’t do that to them, come on, they’re totally innocent. What are you going to do? You’ve got to nip this shit in the bud.”

“Being the DU means you can’t do anything about it,” she said.

Decades later I understand that if you are damaged enough to see the world as black and white, win or lose, pride or crushing shame, with nothing in between (compromise is weakness) you believe, in your core, that there is nothing you can do about it but get up every day and fight anyone who makes you feel bad about yourself. My father always argued that people cannot change on any fundamental level.

I understand now, only very recently, that it was a true statement for him. Being the DU means you feel utterly powerless against your dreaded nature. If you acknowledge that others can work and change some of the worst things about themselves, how humiliating that would be. It’s almost like you’re choosing to be too weak to face whatever makes you live in a black and white world.

(part 2 to follow)

Thoughts and prayers

Happy Birthday to Jesus from the family of Andy Ogles, the newly elected George Santos of Tennessee’s brand new gerrymandered 5th district. The place where America’s gun, the AR-15 assault rifle, killed 6 more in a Christian school the other day. Andy says we have to wait, we don’t know all the “details” of the 130th mass shooting of 2023 yet, and arm ourselves in the meantime.

Latest US gun massacre, for the moment

This murderous asshole was a female of some kind, killed three nine year-olds and three adults. Assault rifles, two of them. Number one cause of death for Americans aged 1-19, bullets.

Heather Cox Richardson, with context:

Seven people died today in a school shooting in Nashville. Three of them were nine-year-olds. Three were staffers. One was the shooter. In the aftermath of the shooting, President Joe Biden once again urged Congress to pass a ban on assault weapons, to which today’s Republican lawmakers will never agree because gun ownership has become a key element of social identity for their supporters, who resent the idea that the legal system could regulate their ownership of firearms.

In the wake of the shooting, Representative Andrew Ogles (R-TN), who represents Nashville thanks to redistricting by the Republican legislature that cut up a Democratic district, said he was “utterly heartbroken” by the shooting and offered “thoughts and prayers to the families of those lost.”

In 2021, Ogles, his wife, and two of his three children held guns as they posed for a Christmas card with a caption that read: “The very atmosphere of firearms anywhere and everywhere restrains evil interference—they deserve a place of honor with all that’s good.”
Heather