The insurrection continues

Let’s leave aside the question of how a brand new member of Congress gets away with tweeting the real time location of the Speaker the House as the Speaker is being secured from a mob calling for her death. If that’s not giving aid and comfort to an insurrection, I don’t know what the fuck is. Then she wins re-election by 500 or so votes. Then, along with a handful of other extremists, blocks all action in Congress for several days commemorating the original insurrection on its second anniversary. Only in America, baby.

But leave that aside, here are two pictures from the more than three hours the defeated President let his bonfire burn in the Capitol building.

If all of those hopped up idiots shown in the second picture had swarmed into the building, there would have been a massacre.

This 2:24 pm tweet, deleted by Elon Musk when he reinstated the Big Orange Turd to Twitter recently, certainly didn’t help.

As maddening as it is that none of the wealthy architects and funders of the violent riot to overthrow democracy, in the name of an enraged, racist asshole who lost the election, has been touched by the law so far, it is equally maddening to see insurrectionists in Congress, serving as obstructers of the People’s business without consequence for their treachery.

Get the indictments rolling, Jack Smith! Come on, Fani Willis. Keep going, Letitia James.

MAGA logic

On the surface “MAGA logic” is kind of an oxymoron, I know, but there is a brutal logic followed by the wealthy few who have funded and used first the John Birch Society, later the “Birthers”, the Tea Baggers, the Freedom Caucus, then MAGA itself. These pathologically greedy, entitled psychopaths knew exactly what they were doing, for their own self-interest, at every step.

So while it seems counterintuitive that the most extreme members of the MAGA “movement” are torturing and humiliating the pathetic and cowardly Kevin McCarthy, the one Trump told to go fuck himself when he called in terror from the Capitol on January 6th, it may not be. Remember McCarthy vigorously denounced Trump after January 6th, shortly before he went down to Florida to selflessly sample his leader’s crusty nether regions in order to get back into the good graces of someone at that time regarded as a traitor. An, at the time, powerful traitor, mind you.

So this shit show in the House of Representatives is bad for the country, it’s bad for democracy, it’s bad for the fucking MAGA brand itself (even though that brand is, frankly, destroy the government and democracy) but luckily for MAGA, the ends always justify the means and their base is up for anything as long as someone is hurt and humiliated by it. Ask newly minted statesman Mitch McConnell about that winning strategy, if you have any doubts…

Dead Man Walking

Sometimes the pain we experience can stop us dead in our tracks.  Feel a powerful enough jolt of pain and you may find yourself unable to move in any direction.  I know it happens to me, anyway.  Look across the gravestones and see people who once comforted you, strangers now, so intent on avoiding eye contact it can bore a hole in your heart as long as you still care, still cling to counterfactual hope. 

In a sense we are all dead people walking, and one day our walking becomes only sitting, then lying down, then less than that.  The dead can’t do anything about it and death is a final refuge from shame, anger, pettiness and every other terrible thing we must sometimes tolerate in life.  Death is a very high price to pay for that kind of relief.

I have to reschedule a cancer biopsy that was cancelled yesterday, can’t lift the phone.   Need to find a surgeon to replace my left knee, but I also need to buy additional insurance to supplement the generous Medicare that will pay 4/5 of the $80,000 operation.  I need to get the Medigap insurance ASAP, since it takes six months to become effective for treatment of a preexisting condition, like bone on bone osteoarthritis.  Meanwhile, paralyzed, as I continue the painful knee exercises.  The guy who is supposed to be making the Don Joy medial compartmented unloader brace hasn’t called me back and I haven’t been able to call him.

What I can do at the moment is sit and type.  Writing is an indispensable part of my day.  I do this now to try to move some of the awful feelings out of the way, to understand, and then compartmentalize, things that are otherwise unthinkable.  My hope is to make a few phone calls once I tap here a bit. 

My niece and nephew, irretrievably lost to me, because of their mother’s unspeakable humiliation at her untruthful husband’s shame.  Kool-aid was served up any time my name came up, it would appear, a more bitter flavor than any I know.  It has turned me into a monster and enemy to two kids I used to play with.  That this has been accomplished by lies is little consolation to me, after all, I know myself to be a truthful person of good character. 

Two of my longtime closest friends are now shambling zombies, avoiding eye contact with me in a graveyard.  I don’t blame them for feeling that way, actually.  If I had treated them the way they treated me, explicitly and undeniably for the last year and a half, I’d probably do anything I could to cover my shame.

What do we do with this kind of pain, these unwanted tastes of our own death, the death of loved ones, while we are alive and, theoretically, able to talk things out, apply love and understanding to fix things so tragically broken?   Tragedy is when a beautiful thing that should be able to be mended is instead destroyed, out of anger and humiliation.   The feeling’s now mutual, pal, you are dead to me.  Not very satisfying, really, but a necessary step in healing — the discarding of people who insist they love you while demanding that only their feelings matter.   They have very strong feelings about this, understand.   Strong as death itself, it turns out. 

I think this is meant to show Trump’s greatness, somehow

We live in an amazing world, where facts can be denied because millions prefer a nice “fuck you” to anything else.  I seriously think this video is supposed to prove, although the data shows that the US had by far the highest rates of Covid-19 death anywhere on earth (and fuck “data,” you know?), that only Trump can… make us the greatest country in the world again.

https://youtube.com/shorts/8EWpuls5wWI?feature=share

The final power of silence

Among the gravestones yesterday on a grey morning, the final symbolic act of a long friendship took place.  The return of keys to my apartment.   It was done quietly, with a polite text, a short affirmative reply and the silent handover at the small New Jersey cemetery, during a funeral.  Fittingly very close to the open grave mourners were shoveling dirt into.  Now life goes on.  I no longer have to worry about how crazy my longtime close friend is or what mad act of frustration the poor, tortured devil might be capable of.   When trust is gone, that’s the ballgame.

Preceding this final moment there were long stretches of silence.  Imagine posing a question that vexes you, that you need an answer to from someone who claims to love you.  “Can you understand why that would be so upsetting to me?” for example.  Now, picture silence, in the moment, accompanied by a bland look, then turning away.  The silence stretches into days, weeks, months, a year.   “Do you get why your silence is hurtful to me?”  A long interlude of no reply, no word, no indication of anything.  

Finally you might hear “can’t we just pretend none of this ever happened? Can’t you just move on, like a big boy?   We know you had a rough childhood but why must you live in the past and continue to blame us for what you claim we did to you?”

“You’d like me to pretend you never hurt me, never dismissed my feelings, never returned my patience and concern with accusations and threats, never abandoned me when I needed help, that I’m prepared to tolerate this treatment on an ongoing basis, for the sake of… what shall we call it?  Your need to feel good about yourself, and that you are always right and a good person and all the rest?”

Of course, at this point they will become angry again, probably a few words into your statement.  The tone of reproach, and appeal to fairness, the intolerable insolence of it will enrage them. 

In the end, the greatest gift they can give you is their silence.  They might break it at an odd hour to confront you directly about how cruel and unloving you are being to them, pretending to be hurt by mere silence and torturing them over it by your stubborn refusal to accept no answer as the final answer. 

The final silence will continue until you have processed the last of your hurt, betrayal, confusion, anger and so on.   Then it just blends into the rest of this often irrational, noisy circus that is our life here, among those doomed, just like us, to breathe their last one day.

Learning lessons you do not want to know

With New Year’s Eve approaching on roller skates my mind naturally goes, not to all the great New things of the flipping of the flipping calendar year, but to mortality.  The day after New Year’s Day I’ll be waking before dawn to go to a funeral.  The woman who died was 94, sharp until her last few days, and she went peacefully in her sleep surrounded by her loved ones.  A blessed end to a long life, going the way we’d all like to go, the way we’d wish to anyone we love.  Still, her death causes lacerating pain to her daughter, a grandmother.  There is never a good time to lose your mother.  The permanence of a loved one’s death is always unbearable.

As my life goes along I more and more connect sudden professions of love with a demand, with deadly consequences.   The last three old friends I lost all told me, totally out of character, as things were winding toward their fatal end, that they loved me.  Love, I was meant to understand, means that even if I hurt you, even if I hurt you over and over in exactly the same way, even if I am deaf to your pleas to stop doing it, I DID IT OUT OF LOVE, you heartless, unforgiving fuck! 

It’s not a lesson that I’m happy to learn, that the last card an angry asshole will play before they metaphorically kill you is “I love you!”.  Any wisdom this lesson provides is no comfort to me.   We are all looking for connection in a lonely world, in a life that inevitably ends in death.  Love, like forgiveness, is a steady attitude, a desire not to cause pain to someone we love.  Not everyone lives to experience love this way, it generally has many conditions and strings attached to it.  

“If you really love me you will cut the heads off those people who hurt me by making me feel bad about myself,” is a deadly serious string, and the dutiful partner will go on the quest, decapitate the enemies, and there’s a version of love, I suppose.  Some people, for example, cannot love a fat person — put on one too many pounds and you break the deal.   Some demand total obedience, and if you disobey, you can expect a terrible punishment.  Others require telling a lie and sticking to it doggedly whenever something uncomfortable comes up.

For many, that’s as close to love as they will ever come.  It’s better than no love, I suppose, but not for everyone.