Thursday, October 3, 2024

THE COMING ELECTION IS EVERY BIT AS IMPORTANT AS IT FEELS

 On Ari Melber's show this afternoon I heard three guests, all former Trump employees, talk about their choices for president. The woman will vote for Harris on the ethical grounds that she cannot put a liar and a cheat back into the most consequential office on earth. Good choice. The man (one certain ambassador who was involved in Trump's first impeachment) will vote for Trump because Biden has sent this country into an economic tailspin. Hearing that, I had to reevaluate my positions on a few issues. I concluded that he is right...if creating a world's record employment status and building infrastructure at a pace that's never been seen qualifies as means to economic disaster. Really interesting convoluted sort of point .

But regardless of the manifestations of  policy decisions by Biden's administration vs Trump's previous turn at the reins, what I find disturbing about the ambassador's stance is not what he accounts for but what he ignores:

Donald Trump is ready to do evil. That is not a conclusion I have  had to surmise. The man has told us! He's ready to grasp absolute power, prosecute and punish his political enemies using his own made-to-order Justice Department, ignore whatever law he must to take up his nasty habit of throwing people out of the country, with or without their families, or, say, destroy the structure of the Executive Branch of government based on paranoia of something nonexistent (consider how weather predicting will fare when taken out of the hands of life long meteorologists). And the list goes on.

Here's a thought I haven't heard expressed: fascists don't pick and choose whom they're going to oppress. They get a particular group under control (toward whom they have bias, usually based on nothing material). And then they rest on their laurels. NO! They don't! Mr. Right Wing Christian Nationalist Caucasian Person may think Donald Trump is his best friend. But he has only to look at certain facts in evidence about how Trump operates to know that Trump knows no loyalty, no commitment to any person, thing, or idea. Trump WILL find something Mr.....Caucasian Person has that Trump wants. And he will devise a way to take it for himself. (Two likely candidates for the pilfering are money and freedom.) The saddest aspect of the MAGA movement is that this group is paving the way for their own eventual demise and have no idea they are halfway there. They think they're winning something.

They will accomplish the annihilation of many others first. Also the shredding of the fabric of a fairly  healthy society.

We wonder at the stranglehold this Trump religion has on the masses. In fact, it's pretty basic: it has to do with that sickness of greed that takes over the human soul when The Golden Rule gets buried in rhetoric. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you": the wellspring of that most healing of qualities, generosity.

A man who cannot stop himself from lying and blaiming has given more than enough proof to anyone who has been paying attention that he is the last person to whom a nation could or should entrust its safekeeping. 

Saturday, February 4, 2023

SIDEBAR

BREAKING NEWS!...........FAKE NEWS!  

hee hee.........THIS JUST IN!.......HUDDLE

UP!..........first string only...........= all 4 blog

followers + Coach Werthellouben?...............

....this's good stuff, ready?!

 

I've been writing this little column for 38 years, drowning my 
sorrows in Wild Turkey and fresh grapefruit juice (it's good) 
every time I publish, around, uh, 1.07 times a year, average.


Now, not one single goddam natural Christian soul has left a 
comment, in all these years. So I figured not one single solitary JewChristianMuslimBuddistHindewWhathaveyou had even
looked at the thing. Why, I even wrote myself a comment once...
and answered it! I'm a shrink, dudes, I can hold a therapy group
anytime I want. I am perfectly cognizant of when I'm whom...

I digress.

Here's the NEWS! You Howdy-Dowdy-Doody-Precious-Sunny-
Beaches-Bubbas have been writing comments all along and I just 
couldn't find them!!!!! !!!!! !!!!! Either that or somebody did a real 
nice hack for me on my 70th birthday. Thank you. I'm 70. [Just got 
back here from a reality rewrite of the first 5 years of "This is Your 
Fucking PTSD Life."] My psychoanalytic therapist of 25 years also 
suddenly ran off with his dying wife (true story). But I'm fine now. 
I'm here, aren't I. That was not a question.

So. This one is just for you guys. Nobody else is allowed to read it. 
Like I need to say it. Like, I should say, "Y'all aren't allowed to read
it." HA! 

NO!!

I just wanted to say thanks for sticking with me all
these years. The sweat. The blood. The gastric juices and shit. All
for YOU. I LOVE YOU GUYS!!!!!!!!!!

Got some real amazing insights for you in the next one. So don't
change that dial! It's coming right up :)





Thursday, March 26, 2020

SIDEBAR

BREAKING NEWS!...........FAKE NEWS!  

hee hee.........THIS JUST IN!.......HUDDLE

UP!..........first string only.......... = all 4 blog

followers + Coach Werthellouben?...............

....this's good stuff ready?!

 

I've been writing this little column for 38 years, twice a year on
average, drowning my sorrows in Wild Turkey and fresh grapefruit
       juice, it's good. Every time I publish, 1.3 times a year average,
because not one single goddam NaturalChristianSoul left a com-
ment, that's where you break huh? between the mms?...yellow plain
on the left red peanut on the right? sorry! So I figured not one single
solitary JewChristianMuslimBuddistHindewIDon'tCare had even
looked at the thing! Why, I even wrote myself a comment once...
and answered it! I"m a shrink, dudes, I can hold a therapy group
anytime I want. I am perfectly cognizant of when I'm whom...

I digress.

Here's the NEWS! You Howdy-Dowdy-Doody Precious Sunny
Beaches been writing comments all along and I just couldn't find
them!!!!! !!!!! !!!!! Either that or somebody did a real nice hack
for me on my 70th birthday. Thank you. I'm 70. Just got back here
from a reality rewrite of the first 5 years of "This is Your Fucking
PTSD Life." My psychoanalytic therapist of 25 years also suddenly
ran off with his dying wife (true story). But I'm fine now. I'm here,
aren't I. That was not a question.

So. this one is just for you guys. Nobody else is allowed to read it.
Like I need to say that. Like, I should say y'all aren't allowed to read
it. HA! No, I just wanted to say thanks for sticking with me all
these years. The sweat. The blood. The gastric juices and shit. All
for YOU. I LOVE YOU GUYS!!!!!!!!!!

Got some real amazing insights for you in the next one. So don't
change that dial! It's coming right up :)







Thursday, June 2, 2011

What I Did in Psychotherapy Today

Today's therapy session was outstanding, all the more because I couldn't make it in and we talked over the phone.  But with the trust built on a dozen years of work, and my understanding that a good session begins with no agenda, I started blind.  What we very quickly got into was the sorting out of two of my most important relationships: how they originate from the same place and yet are so entirely different.  In one I must not be who I am if I am to have any relationship with this woman at all.  I must listen very carefully to her, respond at every turn to her moods, her needs, her desires, her wishes, and give her the empathy she needs at that exact moment regardless of my mood, need, desire, or wish.  This is a great deal of work for me...as much work as if I were in my chair marked "Therapist" in my consulting room.  The sad reality is that she believes that she is doing all that for me also but in reality she is not hearing a word I am saying, even when I am empathizing with her.  She is carrying on in her own world, and there I am attempting to carry on with her, being so little noticed as to not be there at all.  Within that relationship, I am not.  Or, in the luminous words of Martin Buber, there is no I-THOU relationship between this woman and me. 


The above is sad.  What follows is the devastation.  For the past forty years of my life, I have believed exactly the opposite of what is reality.  I have believed that she and I were in it together; that she was tracking with me as I was tracking with her; in short, that we had a relationship in which I was being my genuine self.  None of it is true.


About that other terribly important relationship in my life: it has been tumultuous since the day I was born.  Full of love and hate and envy and adoration and loathing and camaraderie and eroticism and every-flavor feeling.  Now, through the adversities of  these past 3 years of life, we two characters have found a new rejoinder to each other: a deep and abiding respect.  At a level approximating that at which plate tectonics function, we intuit that throughout our lives each of those emotions, and the accompanying behaviors, has been blatantly honest, forthright to the bone.  Each of us, for our own reasons, has journeyed toward enlightenment and we have lately caught sight of each other on parallel paths.  We have become steadfast friends who can, and only do, tell each other the truth in all things; we rely on each other when we can and wait patiently for each other until we can.  We have a relationship in which I can be, in short, my genuine self.


All that was discussed in my session today.  Also discussed was that without [my dear] Dr. H. none of that could have been discussed.  Such was the trust held over a tenuous telephone  connection in this other inimitable I-THOU relationship which holds and strengthens me to shed light on the truths of my life, the greatest of which is that I do not and can not ever take for granted that I will trust myself as being seen in any given relationship.  I must remember, with every person with whom I converse, to remember myself.
_________________________________________________
My post script is odd but necessary.  It is written to a remark made by Rush Limbaugh years ago.  He commented on his radio show that psychotherapy is a forum in which people can blame all their problems on their parents.  Rush Limbaugh's total ignorance in 1988 still makes me sad and angry--perhaps because I have so little reason to think he has had impetus to improve his insight into this most serious of the healing sciences and, thus, has continued to misinform his legions.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Are We America?

Harken back to the heady days of the 1760's and 1770's, when the streets of Philadelphia and Boston and New York were ablaze with the pamphlets of Tom Payne and the letters home from Ben Franklin and the ideas of Tom Jefferson, and Alexander Hammilton getting ready to go his next round with James Madison over Federalism v. Populism.  And all the while these men are anxiously awaiting the next round of communiques from France, Germany, and Spain with their grandiloquent ideas as to how to next decide the questions of the day, lest the Mighty Methodists gain too much power over the Secular Unitarians, or the Fighting Federalists founder Madison's Mamas.

Not so much.

Yet as Egyptians teemed with the overthow of the exact same kind of autocracy in the last few weeks, American and other world leaders imperialistically worried over the future of Egypt's government as if the people of Egypt were too stupid or too gullible or too mindless of their religious fanatics to do so for themselves.

But note an article in today's New York "Times" Blog which recounts the history of an enclave of a section of Cairo, Imbaba, long thought to be held by the Muslim Brotherhood, where young people are standing up one by one to discount the influence of this religious conservative faction and voice their hopes for a secular government that will deliver jobs, economic security, and a modern way of life to this and all areas of Egypt. 

These are voices not unlike those in our once proud, honorable society, clashing with a true oppressor.  Not the voices of right wing conservatives who by their very nature must take the stance of victims of whatever form of government exists, and extend their logic to the degree of paranoia if necessary to make their point, as is happening in this country.

It is a given that Glen Beck and his Tea Partiers rail at the United States government "as if" it had taken freedoms from them commensurate with the freedoms the autocracies of the Middle East have long usurped from their peoples.  Had our government in fact acted in this manner, we would not have heard from the Tea Party except on carefullly guarded Facebook pages.  [But that obvious irony of the woeful moaning Tea Victims is best left for another discussion.]  The point here is that, while leaving our own citizens in relative perfect freedom, the United States government has played fast and loose with the citizens of the world's nations, while fostering and maintaining autocrats and powermongers and outright theives as national leaders, forcing entire nations into slavery, all in the name of national security for decades upon decades.

This two-faced take on democracy is not the ultimate responsibility of "Our Government".  It is "Ours, The People's".  If we want to organize a meaningful Tea Party, let us wrest this control over the people of the world back from our Executive Branch and its innumerable slippery fingers, such as the CIA and the Justice Department; the Congress, with its impossibly many secret budgets and its first loyalty to coporate lobby money; and let us make our uncompromising will made perfectly known to the Supreme Court by standing on its steps, as the Egypians stood in Tahrir Sqare for as long as it took.

Yes, the proud and insular people of these United States have much to learn about humility and purpose from the citizenry of the Middle East. 

And yes, our American Tea Party has much to teach us about how to organize.  It is unfortunate that so far, the Tea Party's goals are no more far-sighted than the end of their tax forms. 

There is much for us, as American citizens, to share with the world about the true benefits we have lived with for 235 years under democracy.  If the time comes that we find our true collective moral compus, perhaps we will join together in our true collective moral purpose, despite the quagmire that deigns to call itself our federal government, to assist in whatever way possible peoples like those of Egypt who truly could utilize assistance in moving toward a peaceful democracy.

We are a people who have lived for over two centuries, in relative peace, with free elections, a non-police state, actual freedom of speech, and the myriad other benefits of a democratic society.  Who better to share with those struggling people than "We, the People" of the United States of America?

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Status Report

The treatment team met this morning re: blog immediately below.  I will summarize reports from each of the participants:
  • Nursing staff report the patient has been cooperative with all orders, taken meds with no trouble.  She has been eating fairly well, ~70% of her trays, no snacks.  She has remained quite aloof in the milieu but responsive, polite, occasionally even humorous to specific questioning.  Appears to sleep comfortably through the nights.
  • Psychologist reports that patient has participated actively and very thoughtfully in thrice weekly therapy.  Is in psychoanalytically oriented work as this approach is successfully uncovering underlying conflicts to which the patient is responding with new material and appropriately intense and varied affect.  Work will continue at this level though admission and after.
  • Occupational Therapy is seeing the results of intense therapy in the broad range of emotion and affect patient both presents and applies to her work.  Also sees frequent confusional states which patient is able to work through with Irving, to whom she has formed an attachment.  On occasion patient requires extended time away from the other patients in order to collect herself; is then able to return to the group.
  • Group Therapy-Pt follows the context of the group; occasionally offers a powerful insight, but for the most part is unable to maintain a consistent presence in the group.  Has developed an empathic interest from several patients rather than having built up a level of hostility from the group because of her low level of participation, which is seen as a hopeful therapeutic sign.
  • Psychiatrist: have increased antidepressant to full therapeutic dose.  Patient requires low dose antipsychotic to alleviate massive anxiety caused by childhood PTSD.  Will continue working with her to work on social skills on the unit.
Overall prognosis continues to slowly improve, remains guarded.

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Where to Hide...

This entry is written to somebody specific--I don't know whom--but they will know. It is a love letter to a person who thinks he/she is crazy. But I know he/she isn't, just as I know I am not crazy. I also know that I have been deeply (almost mortally) psychically wounded in my life. I know that I began at about the age of one year to develop ways to handle the psychic trauma I endured. Although I am now in my seventh decade, sometimes when I sustain wounds that are reminiscent of psychic wounds I received as a child, I respond now in the ways I did then.

My characteristic response to danger of any kind is to retreat. Specifically, when I begin to trust that a person has come into my life and is available to me, responsive to me, and honest with me, and then I come to doubt whether any of that is true, I become confused regarding whether the person has turned on me or whether I have misread the myriad clues about that person's true nature. It is in that state of utter confusion--confusion about the external (the trustworthiness of the person) and confusion about the internal (my ability to trust)--that I retreat.

You could look at me and not know I have gone away. Actually you'd have a hard time looking at me when I am in this state because I stay inside my house, very often not dressing for days on end, very often not leaving my bed.

My away place is a psychic place that is as real as a transparent column. It exists parallel to my real life, but the person who occupies it is not my real self. It is a physical person who does not feel physical. She feels as if she has no body. She is not connected to anything of this earth. The inside of her head feels hollow and just on the edge of vertigo. She looks at her arms and legs and does not recognize them as belonging to her. She can use her eyes to read and her ears to hear, but her hands do not want to respond to a ringing telephone. Her legs do not want to respond to the call of a full bladder. Walking is a risky proposition for her, even to go to the bathroom 10 feet from her bed. Even removing the blankets and exposing her extremities to the air seems too harsh for her to endure.

She has lost all sense of time. It could be Sunday morning; it could be Wednesday afternoon. It doesn't matter.

Nothing matters. She is safe here, in this place where she does not have to explain anything to anybody. She doesn't have to ask for anything. She has no future and no past. She is time out of mind. She is not connected to anything or anyone, and nobody remembers her.

Her store of food diminuishes; she eats whatever she finds in the cupboard whenever she feels stomach pangs. She falls into and out of blessed sleep, round the clock. She is far, far away, numb...

...until!...Reality inevitably forces itself into her private space. Damn Reality...That force that causes the blood to start moving again through her body. Such pain!...the pain of feeling coming back into her legs, her arms, her mind.

Pain of lonliness, pain of betrayal, pain of abandonment, pain of hatred, pain of feeling the physical and mental shell that contain the emptiness.

Her dearest and most loyal friend (who also knows all this for himself), her brother, comes to her and transports her to her only safe person on the planet, her psychiatrist. She can tell him everything about how she can't feel, doesn't want to feel. Inside those four walls she knows from experience that she can say all of it and not be judged. Better yet, she is taken seriously, accepted totally, and in no danger of reprisals. This man is a full partner in her life. He wants to work it through with her, help her feel, help her heal.
_____________________________________________________________________________

Damn that excuse for a human being who told her for four months that he loved her, was fascinated by her, was going to be close to her for a very long time. Damn him for calling her every day, sharing his secrets, laughing at her jokes. Damn him for living 1500 miles away, writing those hundred emails over the months. Damn him for coming to within 60 miles of
her and just dissapearing from her life.Damn him for breaking his proomise. Damn him for saying it was her fault. Damn him to Hell. He can find her in Purgatory on his way down.

She will come back to life at some point. Not quite yet. Soon maybe. For now the parallel existence is a safe enough place. In case he decides to call he won't be able to find her in her hiding place. But her brother knows where she is; he has a key to the transparent door.

Wednesday, December 8, 2010

How to Fabricate the Truth Without Even Trying

Ten minutes ago I ended a 14 hour death match with a $4100.00 insurance claim check.  The check had come in yesterday afternoon.  I immediately opened the envelope, made a copy of the check, took the check back to my bedroom and put it in my billfold in my purse.  Then I returned to the study to check off what items Blue Cross had paid of the items I had sent in.  A couple of hours later two delivery men brought a television I was expecting.  Anticipating their arrival, I had gone back to get some cash out of my billfold for a tip.

After the delivery men left and I had set up the TV, I prepared to go to the bank to deposit the check.  I looked in my billfold for the check to make out the deposit slip.  The check was not there.  My anxiety ran up the scale like a thermometer headed toward appendicitis.  Within seconds I had pictured several scenarios in which the check had been misplaced, lost forever, or stolen.  As my homemaking is not altogether, um...efficient, I have spent the better part of the last 14 hours going through piles and stacks, looking in certain places, going again through piles and stacks, looking again through the same places (perhaps not efficient because obsessive), and gradually adding piles, stacks, and places to my frantic search, for a while in this room, then again in that room.  What I put off and put off was digging through the two huge bags of trash I had put out just before preparing to leave for the bank.

In most endeavors I use an open (if scattered) approach to the task.  If a new detail or idea occurs to me, I tend to follow it.  While digging through something in the study I spied the workbook in which I had checked off claim items against the BCBS Explanation of Benefits that came with the check.  I knew it was illogical to look there, so vivid in my mind was the memory of having put the check in my billfold before I started that task.  Perhaps it was my ironclad resistance to sorting through garbage that allowed me to plunge ahead through the cognitive dissonance of having an impulse to look in a place that totally contradicted such a clear memory.  But plunge I did...straight to the location of the check.

If cognitive dissonance had been uncomfortable, think total ambivalence.  My first reaction was actually spoken (to an audience of two kitties?  More likely God) and is unsuitable for reproduction here.  My next reaction was the kind of relief in which one feels the body melting. 

If in this case there was thesis, then antithesis, there has yet to be synthesis.  I do not anticipate that melding any time soon.  Giving in to the idea that a memory (which I still experience) was actually something else entirely, say, a wish (Dr. Freud certainly would have) requires a certain grace to which my narcissism will be loath to hand over the reins any time soon.

But why go into such detail about a relatively minor life event?  As it happens, very recently I carried on a very exciting and intense communication, by email, text message, and telephone, for over five months with a high school friend.  We exchanged over 200 emails; over time we began to talk on the phone, up to two hours per night.  We became very close and got to know a great deal about each other.  We looked forward with great anticipation to his trip to Dallas, very close to my home.  Based on our conversations I had very high hopes for our face-to-face meeting. 

And meet we did.  I needed something less than two seconds to read him (facial expression, body language) and know that somewhere between the speaking and the hearing of the words by telephone, the great Universal Truth in Advertising Law had been smashed into a thousand broken fantasies, never [think Humpty Dumpty] to be put back together again.  Even as I write, some three weeks after these culminating events, the memories of what I read in text messages and heard on the phone are as real as the kitty on my lap.

But the last 14 hours bring a new experience which must be integrated into my understanding of Dear Things Lost.  Essentially this is a situation of my existentially experiencing what Mr. Einstein told us about the the Law of General Relativity: when I am in fifth gear, blowin' and goin' with my hair on fire, I can never be sure exactly where I am or how fast I'm moving.  So how in this universe could I ever pretend to think I know where I've been?

The inability to rely on memory I describe is not the phenomenon brought on by age.  It is the universal human phenomenon directly proportional to desire: in my case with the check, a desire to have done the safe thing; in my case with lost love...to have not.  Put another way, to have had the fantasies running in my head alongside the telephone repartee be as real as an iPhone.  When desire is that great, one is apt not to know, or much care, at what speed the train is traveling.  The speed feels slightly manic when desire is undifferentiatable from reality, and manic is always more fun...until, as can only happen in the human mind (so far as we know at present) the train gets headed back into itself and reality crashes into the cherished desire.  This is the moment of truth: those of us who are blessed with mere neuroses begin to understand what's what, undergo the agonizing grief of giving up what we thought was real, and begin to pick up the shattered pieces of our lives.  All of which I am going to do right now...beginning with a good long cry, I think.

Sunday, July 11, 2010

A Word on Behalf of Neli

The first anniversary of my father's death will arrive in 2 days. It has been a hard year, absolutely filled to the brim with active grieving. Giving up the most loveable, loving controlling-alcoholic-narcissistic father on the planet has been complicated for his immediate family, and expecially for his extremely middle-aged baby daughter.

But even the closing of melancholic doors opens windows to fresh air: in this case empathy with a family who has difficulties worse than any ours ever faced. This family has come into opposition with the police state at constant but so often dead silent work in this the land of the free. Their misfortune came about by the accident of a child's genetic miscoding that resulted in autism, that resulted in eccentric behavior, that met with a reaction of UNACCEPTABLE to a police officer on duty. And now a man-child with a misunderstood, terrible neurological disorder languishes in jail.

Eighteen year-old Neli Latson's story was printed as a headline story in today's Washington Post online news, due to the monumental work his mother, Lisa Alexandra has done to get his story out via the social media. You can find it at http://avoiceforneli.com.

I have visited Neli's site, signed her petition, made a contribution, and contacted Lisa. I hope someone will read and do the same.

Sunday, May 16, 2010

On Discourse and Opinion

I sat at dinner with my friend the other night. We wet our toes in the discomforting waters of politics and accomplished, at most, the amazing feat of concluding the paragraph of conversation without a single curse word.


What haunts me is that we, two relatively more intelligent than average bears, accepted the exchanges we made as if they were substantive. The subject was the legalization of marijuana. I, being the tree-hanging, heroin gulping, female substitute-little-pink-flags-for-bullets, left of your right cortex liberal that I am, would like to see the national discourse (if not quite yet the ballot ) swing intelligently in that direction, was for the proposition. My friend was against it.

Here is where things went wrong: the reason my friend was against is that he had had two friends in college (some 40 years ago) who had tried what we then so lovingly referred to as "dope" who had both gone on to meet tragic ends, one of whom, he vaguely remembered, had experimented with "harder drugs" and then at some point had died in an automobile accident (drugs or possibly no drugs involved, or possibly alcohol involved). But you see the great arc of his reasoning: experimenting with marijuana => tragic end. Therefore, marijuana.

Here, of course, is the heart of my ghost of the conversation: that reasoning, based on a single observation [let us momentarily pretend it was a substantiated single event] informs the entirety of my friend's approach to the question, "Should marijuana be legalized in America?"

The word I used in the paragraph above was "reasoning". That word is incorrect. My friend believes he is reasoning, but he is not. He is opining.

One simply cannot take a single instance of anything and extrapolate to an entire population.

However, I would wager next month's income on the probability that in certain populations of people, I could tell my friend's story and 90% of those populations would agree with my friend, based on his opinion, that marijuana should not be legalized in America. Moreover, they would have no idea that they were agreeing with an opinion based on anecdote.

Anyone who is still with me either:

1. already clearly understands the definitions of the words "opine", "extrapolate", "anecdote" v. "antidote"; or

2. has a neurotic relationship with his dictionary.

...which leads me to my thesis: my friend is quite intelligent but he is not educated in the science of reasoning (which requires more than a college course in philosophy). Reasoning requires a thorough understanding of The Scientific Method, an acquaintance with basic statistical methods, a working knowledge of algebra and geometry (if for no other reason than to force a three-dimensional model of existence into the inside of one's brain).

These are tools that can be acquired in American high schools...that could be acquired in American high schools if enough Americans understood they are necessary tools for us to be able to reason our way through discussions rather than believe that our opinions on any given matter are of any significance whatsoever. They are not!

And yet, our national news wastes precious time getting the opinions of your man on the street regarding the most pressing issues of the day: opinions likely gained from anecdotal experience rather than from dispassionate discourse or even the reading or viewing of dispassionate discourse based on carefully gleaned and analyzed data from studies of large populations plus the insights that arise from thoughtful consideration and analysis of the issues.

The apex of this disturbing phenomenon is the fashionable reprise, "Data can be interpreted any way they want." Data can only be so interpreted if they are manipulated, the operable word being "manipulated". When "your man on the street" has no idea what "p is significant at the 0.01 level" means, he is a sucker for manipulated data. Asking "your man on the street" to know that much about statistics and why they are useful to the gathering of data is not asking too much of a knowledgeable citizen, although I suspect many a citizen will believe that acquiring such knowledge is beyond his duty to his country...another reason to make the acquisition of this information mandatory in American high schools. Then your average citizen can discern for himself, if he chooses, whether, say, the OMB or a political party is playing fast and loose with the facts. He can look into any given study by any given Administrative agency to see if their methods are in the Scientific Ball Park (the FDA alone would be stopped in its tracks if more people actually read its research, or more specifically, the withholding of its research, which is, in many cases, highly competent).

The most obvious (and, when viewed from the world stage, embarrassing) example of American opinion having conquered American reasonable thinking is the determination of the Religious Right to blindly throw away scientific work reaching back to the Renaissance, in order to hold fast to their opinion of Biblical inerrancy. I have spoken personally with some of these “believers” whose capacity to discount en masse the sciences of geology, archeology, anthropology, and genetics is chilling. They throw away the theory of evolution knowing essentially nothing about it. When they deride it as theory, they are saying, in effect, that they know nothing about the scientific definition of the word, “theory”, as in the “theory” of gravity. These people are incapable of reasonable discourse; as such, they are as great a threat to the forward progress of America as any external threat.

If ever there were a time when we as a nation must be nimble on our feet, it is in this time in the history of the world, when history is flying out from under us at an exponentially increasing rate. We can only be nimble on our feet when we are nimble in our minds, and that facility requires, absolutely, the ability on the part of every one of us to be able to turn each issue about and view it from all its aspects: a facility which in turn requires the capacity to think about the issue, tear it apart and rebuild it, consider it from every vantage point. If, after all that, we each come to an opinion on the issue, I say, “Well done!”

Or, as is my life’s motto: “Anyone who has an opinion on the matter hasn’t considered all the facts.”

 

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Everybody Should Watch Bill Moyers' Journal

Last night listening to Bill Moyers and Wendell Otter discuss the insurance industries' "texts, lies, and video-deceits" over the past 30 years, the one fact that hit me between the eyes is that the amount of the paid-in dollar that goes to actual patient care has decreased from $.95 when Clinton was trying to pass a health care initiative to $.80 today—because of pressure from Wall Street [ironic to hear that phrase in this context too!] in order to increase shareholder profits.

Wait!...Shareholder profits in Health Management Companies? Companies that deliver patient care services also deliver earnings to investors? The physician in me just automatically knows that there is a conflict of interest in this proposition, as surely as the consumer in every patient knows that it is unethical for physicians to have financial ties to pharmaceutical companies. Health care companies should never have any incentive not to deliver the best possible medical care, and they surely should never have any incentive to withhold medical care for the purpose of delivering monies to somebody…anybody else!

This country believes it has the basic premise for the set-up of insurance exactly right. And it is exactly wrong. Not only was third party payer wrong in the first place. The people of the United States sat idly by and allowed Richard Nixon to implement Henry Kaiser’s middle-man HMO/PPO plan in which now an entire extra middle layer of bureaucracy executives reap extraordinary benefits while their underlings (for paupers’ wages) do nothing more than slow down the delivery of appropriate, expedient health care.

What the people of this country need to do is get everything having to do with “for profit” as far away from the delivery of health care ASAP. Then they need to make physicians, hospitals, and hospital staffs accountable via numbers of successful surgeries, infections rates per hospital, per surgery, per physician, etc. available to the public. These kinds of numbers are being collected from hospitals on a voluntary basis today; they could be collected and published for the public by law if enough of the public overcame lobbies like the AMA, AHA, etc.

If we haven’t learned from AIG, Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, Chrysler, General Motors, and the phrase “Wall Street” itself that “for profit” in the twenty-first century means that institutions take care of themselves and to hell with everybody else, that Adam Smith’s theory of the basic good man at the root of conservative economic theory died along with the definition of the word “usury” sometime in the nineteenth century…then we just aren’t facing facts. In which case we deserve whatever the weak hearted Democrats and the theory blinded Republicans in Congress give us for health care legislation.

But if we, the people, are willing to accept the fact that they, the “Stan’s with a Plan” [to make a buck] got it entirely wrong the first go-round, we can re-create a health care plan that makes common sense, makes nobody rich, and gives everybody who needs it just about exactly what they need. It will take a lot of work, but not nearly as much work as commitment, and not nearly as much commitment as belief in ourselves when the “Stan’s” start their “Harry and Louise” tactics to try to make us quit believing in ourselves.

But the “Stan’s” have had their turn; they’ve gotten rich and left us with a rotten system. They can’t make us quit believing in ourselves. Only we can do that. And how can we possibly give up on a revolution when nobody knows that it won’t work?! The worst that can happen is a return to a system that we know for sure doesn’t.

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Blogitition

Has anybody noticed

that it takes the makings

of a Nobel composition

to just maybe get one

comment out of any-

one on what you wrote?

We pour our little hearts out

to...
to whom exactly? Oh! That's

right..to each other.

But everyone's so caught


up in blogeting


that not one of us has


time to tell the other,


"What you wrote was Thought


provoking... Clever... Tender


...Quite arousing... Just a little

bit amusing..." No.


We're all submitting our

own entries to the


Blogitition.


Certainly can't give the other


guy a psychological advantage


(or a few more readers,


God forbid!)


So let that buttjoke keep


on sending updates that we're


5 degrees from Brad, and


we'll pretend acknowledgment


of one another isn't one

degree of human decency.


We'll write, we'll read, and
definitely

we'll blogete
as if someday your page or

mine will win


the Blogitition.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

The Sudden Scream of a Sadomasochistic Life

Those rare instances of lucidity, the rare knee-buckling moments of absolute clarity into one's true nature come not by invitation, but as if hurled into consciousness by a cosmic force beyond all comprehension. These are the realizations that cause sea changes in the way one thinks about oneself, about one's life, death, worth, necessity, raison d'être.

These emotional/mental/spiritual experiences, for of such magnitude are they, may concern realizations of lifelong habitual neurotic patterns inflicted upon the self and others, truly chronic delusional throught patterns, or other insights of astounding depth and breadth.

But among the most disorienting and devastating is the coming into focus of a lifelong tradition of a sadomasochistic nature of interaction with the world at large, stemming from beginnings in which the sadistic and masochistic patterns were at work in the family of origin in such a precisely well oiled, smoothly functioning process as to not be consciously noted by anyone within or without the family at all.

The sudden awareness is that one has carried on the majority of transactions in life with a major unconscious emotional stake in the tallying of suffering, counting every point from the most egregious to the most minute, and placing an appropriate percentage of that point in the column for each participant.

For the suffering stemming from sadomasochism is complicated: vastly more so than the Marquis would have led us to believe. For instance, the masochist is capable of inflicting great pain upon the torturer who cannot cause enough punishment and humiliation in his target to give the sadist pleasure. Likewise, the masochist is only too happy to receive that amount of pain which pleases him/her, even if it is more than the sadist had in mind to deliver and who is now feeling, God forbid!, the pain of guilt. Thus, point percentages can fly in all directions.

Later, in the rapprochement stages (for these must occur in order for any given sadomasochistic relationship to continue) the relieving of pain must occur and must, per force, overstretch and under reach, as is human wont: thus another redistribution of point percentages and another tallying...which is maybe the fun of the dysfunction.

When the masochist comes out on the short end, the cry may be, "Hurt me!" The sadist's response may be, "NO!" It is in this shrouding of the true dynamic that the whole venture can be carried on in blissful denial in so many well-ordered, normal looking households while strictly regimented, controlled patterns of behavior are in fact carried on by parents and children all.

For example, everyone in the home knows that Daddy blows his top when, after his second drink in the evening, he hears impulsive childish laughter. Everyone knows that Mommy will have the children dressed, with teeth brushed and beds made before Daddy comes home for 11:00 lunch hour on Saturdays. But sometimes Mommy feels lazy on Saturday morning and not at all in the mood for Daddy's rules, and so one of the children ends up screaming behind the bathroom door while being spanked naked. Or one of the children forgets to mind his/her tongue and tells a joke to another child after Daddy has had his second drink in the evening, and Mommy slaps both children in the face to quiet them so Daddy won't hear.

What makes these the strictly regimented, controlled patterns of behavior in this home is the fact that such slip-ups happen inevitably, week in and week out, always with the same cruel outcomes, and with the resulting enforced patterns of fear, shame, and guilt in all parties (excluding, perhaps, Daddy; he is inscrutable).

What can be taken to the bank, and invested for a lifetime's worth of behavior, is the children's responses. Practicing what they have learned in childhood, they will repeat behaviors that encourage their lovers, their bosses, their mentors to treat them in ways that humiliate, degrade, and dehumanize them just as they were so naturally and normally humiliated, degraded, and dehumanized from the time they could call out their parents' names.

Indeed, they will be recipients of visions from the gods if ever in their lives they are struck down by the heart rending realization that they are not leading lives of random suffering, but rather, have the means within themselves to control how the world deals with them by taking full responsibility for learning new ways to allow themselves to be dealt with: as the dignified, loveable, loving human beings they always have been.

Saturday, November 29, 2008

Murder in WalMart: An American Tragedy

In his blog, "Exercise in Futility" (http://anexerciseinfutility.blogspot.com), Tommy wrote eloquently today about the murder of Mr. Idimytai Damour, a temporary employee at a WalMart in the village of Valley Stream on Long Island at 4:55 a.m. yesterday morning. My thanks to him for opening a dialog on this event, which shapes the mold of the stinking, hot, rapacious underbelly of a corporate-government-led society gone amuck in this country… "Stuff" on paper for the rich; “stuff” made of metal and plastic for the rest of us, but, as Robert McFadden and Angela Macropoulos report on today’s TorontoStar.com, even as the masses grabbed their shares off Wall Street through the year, other masses pressed and churned and finally broke through the glass doors of a brick-and-mortar yesterday before daybreak, simply marching over Mr. Damour, a 34 year old worker, until shoes and boots trampling his body left him dead [the exact cause of death is not yet published by a medical examiner]. To be sure, there are “reports” by “witnesses” who saw the horror, but we can be every bit as confident there are men and women of every size and shape who did not make it home before throwing into trash bins the Nike Cross-Trainers and the Crocs Bistros that reached deep into soft gut tissue or ground rib against sternum amidst the general dull roar and the overarching single scream.

The particular details of this event need to be richly imagined with all our senses. Mr. Idimytai Damour’s deeply humane soul needs to be brought into fullest relief against that grinding throng; the guilt and the shame of 2,000 plus people need to be examined before the horror of a nation…because there is a great dissimilarity between this incident (and others like it in recent years wherein bystanders insolently disregard persons being killed or tortured within feet on city streets) and the two in Mecca that Tommy mentions in his blog. In both of those incidents, the throngs were moving toward something they believed in so deeply that (as we have, sadly, learned through this decade) they were prepared to sacrifice lives to carry forth their mission. In this incident, it was not spiritual conviction but total self-interested greed that killed that young man…not so much as the common good of two or more people working for a united cause. This was a case of “each to his/her own”: fearing that the person in front or in back of him/her would claim whatever in the store “rightfully” belonged to that one person in line. Avarice killed Mr. Damour. Avarice to the power of 2000. Avarice on the part of the store who knew the crowd was dangerous and did not hire appropriate crowd-control. Avarice that reopened the store rather than leave it closed as a memorial to a man who died a horrible, needless death. Avarice not unlike that occurring all across the country yesterday.

Within 24 days of showing the world that America can work together in new and positive, progressive, potentially world-changing ways, we have ripped open our bowels in front of the world to expose the true diet of lust for the quick fix we feed ourselves. We are all accountable for this tragedy if we do not take the time necessary to reflect on what this incident means about our cultural values, our community values, our personal values, ourselves as members of the human family.

Friday, October 24, 2008

Excerpt from "The Truth About Men"

[Taken from an entry on my other blog, Anger Management]

I been distracting myself in every conceivable way in order not to see the big picture...how every single human being's neuroses just exactly, precisely, perfectly keep their just exactly, precisely, perfectly [unconsciously] chosen relationships from working out; and how, God bless me, I see men [all men] as being hobbled by their missing leg on that Y chromosome, enslaved by their piteously selfish, narcissistic myopia [the little Sun Gods] thinking their tiny penises are almighty when, in fact, they themselves are biologically inferior beings because: 1) their reproductive organs aren't even protected; 2) they have no hormonal protections against cancers, heart disease, osteoporosis, etc; 3) their role in reproduction of the species is minuscule; 4) their general stamina is sorely lacking over the course of a lifetime; and 5) genetically they're missing an entire leg...born amputees, as it were. NO WONDER they've had to take dominion. They're scared shitless of us!

What is the GREAT SADNESS is that we, the Strong Ones of the species, bought into it. The joke is on us. Obviously we can use them any way we like. As a group they are pitifully mindless--and are proud of it! They are ripe for manipulating. We really should take charge, be mindful as a group, and stop them from destroying the planet...family by family, tribe by tribe, race by race, country by country, armed conflict by armed conflict. They have just about done us all in with their incessant need to prove their power. If they had ever truly felt their power, they would have no longer been crazed by the need to display it.

Unfortunately, biologically, they have no power--and they know it. The truth is so simple. It is the dead elephant lying in the middle of every living room, conference room, war room in every country in the world: men run the show because they can't; they are driven to prove they have the control, the power they know they don't. They work as a group to keep out the other half of the tribe who does have the control, the power, the natural prowess, the longevity, the clear-headedness that prevails when rage does not dominate, the ability to reason over time. Men call that natural cycle something abominable while they simply dump their memory of their testosterone-fueled rage episodes into the void of collective male unconsciousness, or rather female consciousness, while they go about their plotting and pondering and exercising their powers of paranoia and grandiosity.

Meanwhile the women nurture the little people and the older people and the sick people and even the the men and make sure the planet holds itself together even as the men plot to destroy it.

No wonder the men come home at night, pour a tall one, and go off somewhere by themselves. As a group, they believe they are in charge. Individually, they have trouble looking us in the eye.

and now for something completely different

I've been thinking again...about things like:


1. Why, when this country is so vast and so beautiful, so many people want to live on its edges falling of it.


2. Why cities that edge up to the ocean charge a full city sales tax. If you drive west on US Hwy 90 through Biloxi, you can't turn left, so right there you're missing half a city; ergo, why not half a sales tax...?


3. What is green? Can anybody explain green, really?


4. Am I the only person on the planet that realizes Mel Gibson's Jesus would have died, like, not even half-way through that scourging? Nobody has that much blood.


5. There are two kinds of people in the world: people who think there are two kinds of people in the world and people who don't.


6. I seem to be different from everybody I know, so what am I...the third kind?

Monday, October 20, 2008

the dance

At a thousand paces I smell a metallic stench
of drool at the wait to macerate my privacy
innocent request by screaming silent demand
until integrity lies beside me like shredded raiment.
Let you near to lick my sacred juices with your
hot rotting deceits?
I know you, velvet hammer,
You were born of Adam.

I am millennia older than Your cronies.
In the dawn before time you worshiped
my million mothers, who died
in your untold ontogenetic accidental arrivals,
until only the Virgin escaped your rapacious claim.
Now, you and I remain. I transform you
and wrap you around me like mail:
Bite me and spit out your own teeth.
I am of the Goddess.

At My House

I grew up between a carrot
and a stick.
Running this way and this way
I learned to dance with both feet
off the ground,
Play statue reading book while
Breathing Mozart and the
Lord’s Prayer from A minor.
Down the hall Papa kept his blue
socks separate from the black
and the liquor key busy
on some kind of schedule.

While I practiced my lines
and he was voicing his,
Mama did her part flying quiet,
supper on the table hot by six.
The food was usual,
conversation a surprise.
Some nights we ate carrots;
Some nights when the table jumped up
and smashed his fist, the silver shouted
and we all took showers from the milk glass.

Sunday, October 19, 2008

INTIMACY

He came up from the sofa as I walked in,

pulled me to him with a certain force,

turned up my face to his to kiss me

gently at first.

In the bedroom he took me so compassionately,

inhabiting me entirely,

gazing forever into my eyes

so devoted, so utterly in love with me.

Later we sat naked at the kitchen table

drinking coffee. When the phone rang

I knew after two exchanges it would be

a thirty minute conversation

with his hunting buddy about the deer lease.

I could have climbed into the freezer,

flown out through a wall, set myself on fire.

I had already disappeared in front of him.

I knew if I sat still, he might or might not see me

when he hung up. As it turned out,

he did and he didn't.

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Critique

"When you write, my dear,

write either for yourself

or for your audience.

Words are little pictures."

See the clever man?

"You do have talent.

Images. And sense

of rhythmic flow.

But what exactly is

your goal?" Watch

the video: she curls

as if in utero.

"But if you want

to publish"...Yes?

"There's far to go."

RUN AWAY HOME


Wart's Haunt

Monday, March 3, 2008

...reaction formation to last entry




Did you ever let your lover
See the stranger in your eyes?

Sunday, March 2, 2008

Journeying

Bellied up to the short end of the bar or in a singles' chat room, a woman who is ready meets that gem of the one-leg-shy half of humanity, the male who has experienced either a multitude of sorrows or a few profound losses. This man with the deep engaging eyes is not any longer King at War in his own country. He no longer has anything to prove but is thrilled at the prospect of everything to learn. His Princess Bride betrayed him years ago (at about the time he mysteriously lost interest in her anyway). He wouldn't mind having a new princess with whom to explore the remnants of his Kingdom (and kingdoms beyond). But he isn't into queen making and he's tired of the sword play required to gain approval from her royal family, her handmaidens, her mother's former suitors, her father's future pall bearers, all that.

The discerning woman who is ready to meet this man knows that very little is required of her: no gamesmanship; no competitive spirit, no struggle. Only her authentic efforts in communication, honesty, discernment, proportion, and affection, served warm with a dollop of humor--all that she has been longing to give for quite a long time now.

If this singular man and this special woman were by chance to meet, say, as two "buds", they might well offer each other a unique season in which to bloom.


[one-leg-shy = X-Y]

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

When Serum Turns to Water

THE EMAIL I WROTE DID HURT HER FEELINGS...MADE HER SAD AND PUZZLED. BUT NOT ANGRY. SHE SAID I WAS RUDE AND INAPPROPRIATE. AND SHE WAS SAD AND PUZZLED. BUT NOT ANGRY. PUZZLING.

SHE WANTED TO HANDLE THE CONFLICT BY EMAIL. SO I WROTE AN EMAIL. A VERY LONG EMAIL. IT TOOK 3 HOURS TO GET IT JUST RIGHT.

THIS TIME I WASN'T TRYING TO GET IT TO READ RIGHT. I WAS TRYING TO GET IT TO WRITE RIGHT. SO THAT I WOULD BE SATISFIED THAT WHAT WAS IN MY HEAD WAS WHAT WAS ON THE PAPER.

NOW I KNOW THAT WHAT I HAVE ON THE PAPER WILL BE READ WITH A WHOLE SET OF ASSUMPTIONS AND BIASES THAT I DON'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT, ANY MORE THAN I KNOW HER GLASSES PRESCRIPTION.

AND TO THINK...I THOUGHT I REALLY KNEW HER.


NOW I WAIT...

When Blood Turns to Serum

THERE IS NO FEELING IN THE WORLD MORE HORRIBLE THAN THAT FOLLOWING AN ARGUMENT WITH A VERY CLOSE FRIEND. WHEN THE SITUATION IS LEFT UNRESOLVED, WHEN I COME AWAY KNOWING THAT I DIDN'T BEHAVE ACCORDING TO HER EXPECTATIONS FOR APPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR, AND WORSE, WHEN I HAVE ANGRY FEELINGS THAT I CAN'T GET OUT OF ME OR OFF OF ME, THERE'S A MISERABLE NIGHT AHEAD. I HAVE NO ENERGY TO DO ANYTHING; I CAN BARELY FEED THE CATS. I DON'T FEED MYSELF. I LIE IN BED, FALL ASLEEP, WAKE UP, SMOKE CIGARETTES, DON'T CARE ABOUT TELEVISION OR UNDRESSING OR BRUSHING MY TEETH. I SIT IN A VACUUM OF THE TIME/SPACE CONTINUUM UNTIL...

I HAD AN INSIGHT REGARDING WHAT SET ME OFF DOWN THE WRONG TRAIL INTO MY BLACK FOREST OF NEUROSIS WITH MY FRIEND. I WROTE HER AN EMAIL ABOUT IT LAST NIGHT. THE EXPLAINING WAS GRUELING WORK, WHAT WITH TRYING TO GET THE WORDING JUST SO, SO AS TO MAKE MYSELF CLEAR AND YET NOT HURT HER FEELINGS ANY FURTHER. IT'S BEEN 24 HOURS AND I HAVEN'T HEARD BACK FROM HER.

MAYBE I NEVER WILL. BUT I CAN'T GO BACK TO THE WAY IT WAS WITHOUT SOME ACKNOWLEDGEMENT FROM HER THAT IT REALLY WAS WHAT IT WAS. THAT WOULD BE WALKING WILLINGLY INTO THE PRISON AGAIN, AND I AM NOT READY TO DO THAT FOR THE SAKE OF THE FRIENDSHIP. MAYBE AFTER A LONGER PERIOD OF ABSTINENCE I WILL BE ABLE TO MAKE A SACRIFICE OF THAT MAGNITUDE. NOT NOW. NOT YET.