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Breaking Free

Here’s a joke I’ve told hundreds of times. It’s very offensive and it always gets a laugh:

“What did the Polack in the police lineup say?”

“That’s her!”

I do not know whether I have told this joke to assault victims, though I’m pretty sure I’ve told it to a few people of Polish ancestry. But, without wallowing in the tedium of explaining why something’s funny, I do want to point out that a key element of this joke’s humor is its insensitivity to the audience. Insisting that comedy should avoid touching wounds, or that it be sensitive to its audience’s vulnerabilities reduces its capacity to make people laugh. Jokes trespass. 

Movie stars lead carefully managed lives. The biggest movie stars, the ones who can get movies funded and produced regardless of story quality, the ones with tens of millions of social media followers, the ones prominently featured on billboards in Times Square, employ dozens or even hundreds of people to fine-tune their public image. Every public statement, appearance or performance is meticulously calibrated to win more public adulation, and even though the publicists, stylists, dieticians, personal trainers and dialogue coaches work very hard to trick millions of people into believing they know these actors, only a select few have the charisma and talent to captain this team effort. It is inevitable that movie stars suppress their own impulses, cleansing themselves of outward displays of inner urges, often by substituting relatable foibles for authentic ones. OMG, I loooove to eat a whole pizza all by myself too! But what’s going on beneath the persona? Is the authentic self completely extinguished? Or is it lurking, perpetually seeking outlets of expression? 

Most people interested in movies have heard some anecdote about one star or another’s kinky secret life, whether it’s a certain teen idol’s late night cruising for young men to extinguish cigarettes on his bare flesh or a recent America’s Sweetheart who was reputed to allow her husband to sodomize her with a shotgun while she sported a Hitler mustache made out of excrement. Sordid gossip is titillating, and rarely true. But it does reinforce the suggestion that bizarre secret lives are one way that stars can compartmentalize their true selves so they can sell the more marketable version to an increasingly invasive public. 

All childhoods involve trauma. I don’t know anything about the childhood trauma of the man who in 1996 became the biggest movie star in the world and continues to command a top-5 salary for delivering top-5 box office performance. One thing I do know is that when this actor appeared in the film adaptation of a Pulitzer-winning play, the producer of that play said he hadn’t seen an actor that professional or well-prepared since Katherine Hepburn. I know this because that producer was my father-in-law. The actor already had a successful music career and starred on a silly, iconic sitcom created by a frequent contributor to the New Yorker. 

In 1997, this actor married one of the most beautiful women in the world. They have a son and a daughter, both of whom have successful entertainment careers. While anyone reading this (thank you both!) already knows who we’re talking about here (and why), I will now mention that this actor and his wife are Black. And without farting through a bunch of Sontagian exigencies, I think we can all agree that being Black entails a set of challenges that being a peckerwood does not. So this man, who is arguably the most successful entertainer of all time, has projected an image of Black Excellence for nearly 30 years now. That’s a really hard job and, to say the least, he’s done it really well. And while he would not have attained such Apollonian heights of success without some constraints, a lot of smiling when he wasn’t actually happy, a lot of places he had to be while convincing EVERYONE that he genuinely wanted to be there, somewhere in there is a real person with real feelings, mangled and marred by the obligations that fame demands. 

Last night, with about three steps to go along a multi-decade, zillion-step journey to the pinnacle of his profession, Atlas shrugged. 

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We’re All Gonna Get It

COVID-19 is the most successful virus in recent memory. No wait, that’s not true. The most successful virus in recent memory is Nasopharyngitis, otherwise known as the common cold. Viral success is measured by infection rate, not be scalps. COVID-19 is extremely contagious. The common cold is even more contagious. The reason colds are so widespread, aka successful, is that they are considered more nuisance than menace. This is because significantly less than 1% of all colds are fatal. Well guess what. Pre-vaccine COVID-19 had a roughly 0.05% fatality rate. And now, thanks to vaccines and improved treatment, that rate is even lower. Data supporting this is available on cdc.gov. Data. Unfortunately, we are still in a place where educated, vaccinated people look at a map, see a red splotch on it, and call that data. It isn’t. Data says you have a less than 1% chance of even catching COVID-19 (you have to meet more than 100 people to get exposed), and then if you do catch it, you’re very unlikely to get very sick. If every case were severe, it would have been easy to identify every case and lockdowns would have ended long ago. But the American public still hasn’t grasped the concept that mildness of infection is precisely what enhances contagion. On one hand, this speaks to the inherent benevolence of our society, that we have upended our lives to protect the very small segment of our population who is genuinely threatened by COVID-19. The vast majority of us are unlikely to be exposed and even more unlikely to develop serious health problems as a result of our exposure. And this is even truer among the vaccinated. 

Everyone who knows me is sick of my “Covid Speech” in which is echo actual medical opinion, which is that we will never eradicate this virus and that, presuming vaccinations don’t offer permanent protection, we’re all gonna get it sooner or later, the same way we get colds and flu during cold and flu season. The argument that COVID-19 is so much deadlier than those common viruses is neutralized by the development and widespread availability of vaccines and therapies. And to return to data, regardless of our frustrations with widespread vaccine hesitancy, at this very moment, we’ve got about 39 million cases in America. And 205 million Americans have received at least 1 dose of vaccine. We are not unsafe. Please consider how and why you are being led to believe otherwise.

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We Are So Fucked

I’m going to try to articulate some ideas here and nobody is going to read them, which is central to what I want to say. Our society is splintered in dozens of ways, nearly all of which are reparable. Most people I know consider themselves virulently anti-Trump. Most Trump supporters I know consider themselves battle-scarred free-thinkers who had to shrug off a gauntlet of corporate media propaganda to arrive at their views. Meanwhile, the anti-Trump camp considers Trump supporters overweight, underdressed knuckle-draggers. But if Trump’s base seems less educated, less wealthy, less sophisticated, is that a reason to scoff? Why are so many Americans susceptible to what Trump is selling? Racism is too facile an answer. But whether Trump’s base is willing to tolerate intemperate language if it leads to greater economic opportunity, or they prefer white supremacy to diversity, why hasn’t the intellectual firepower of American liberals brought enlightenment to rural Michigan? What do urban anti-gun activists know about varmints? What do outspoken advocates for racial and economic justice know about the vacuum of capital where heavy machinery manufacturing used to thrive? 

Meanwhile, after staying couped up for months, we took to the streets to proclaim neither passive nor homicidal racism would be tolerated any longer. We all know the names George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. But going back to what we do and don’t know based on what’s beamed onto our screens, note the kinship we feel with unarmed black victims of police violence and the contempt we feel for the trailer park. Injustices are occurring all over the place. Some we have to research to understand or even realize exist, some are bombarded at us by the media and some we’ll never know about. How does it get determined which stories get headline treatment, which get buried on back pages and which get ignored? And who is involved in those decisions? 95% of the people I know with advanced degrees believe whatever the New York Times tells them to. And more than 50% of the people I know without a bachelor’s degree recognize that major media outlets, be they Fox, Comcast, Disney, Viacom, Facebook, Google or Amazon all apply manipulative criteria to which stories get amplified and which get muffled. 

It feels exhilirating to see beyond face value, to be contrarian and even iconoclastic and have your rebellious impulses validated by the most powerful man in the world. What sort of comparable thrill is the woke crowd offering? Lockstep agreement on language to use around current reckoning with historical atrocities? Will that work? Has it thus far?

None of this is to take Trump’s side and pooh pooh his opposition. It’s to get the opposition to take a break from mocking the rubes who voted for him in order to recognize manipulative forces at work on Blue America. And it’s to call attention to how readily we disdain. We all carry pain, we all process it differently. There is a very great fear out there that acknowledging pain is a form of weakness that could lead to societal collapse. The rise of the beta male. I’m not ready to invalidate that fear. Maybe that’s me. But one person’s hurdle is another person’s doormat. An obstacle to you might be an on-ramp to me. Or vice versa. So I’m slower to condemn just about everybody. Is anybody deliberately trying to be awful? Offensive, maybe. But awful? No. So when somebody presents objectionable views and employs risible logic to defend those views, that doesn’t mean that that person’s terrible. It means that person is doing the best they can and might make a good friend if given the chance. Views can be discussed. Disagreements can be managed. Being right or wrong on a given issue is not a definitive stamp on the quality of a person’s soul. Why do we act like it is? 

If you ask me, it’s spiritual poverty. We’re so busy and so worried about so many things, most of which are balmed with terrible tv and even worse music that getting right with ourselves without being SELF-righteous feels like a luxury beyond our means. But stopping to consider this might cost you that promotion. That’s an obtuse example. But even attuning our personalities to thrive in professional environments can make us less available to our families. How many successful people do we know with miserable home lives? How many unsuccessful people do we know with miserable home lives? Success isn’t an arbiter of happiness, but it’s worth recognizing just how difficult cum elusive a happy home life is. Will it get happier when you get that pool? Again. Obtuse. But the point is that we’re harried and bent out of shape. And that’s how you get politics as dysfunctional as ours. All that fundraising. All that apathy. All that ignorance. All that bullshit criteria. 

I dunno. More later, I guess.

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What Rear Window Taught Me About Our Current American Moment

I have always wanted girls to like me. When I was younger, I studied leading men in movies and on television, hoping to develop an arsenal of moves and phrases that would keep my lips in business regardless of my proximity to jukeboxes I would coax music from with one perfect slug. But somehow, my voracious gaze usually internalized the quirky sidekick so instead of accessing my inner Fonz, I wound up acting more like Ralph Mouth.

In retrospect, I understand that my chief obstacle to achieving studliness was the fear that for all I wanted from whatever girl I liked, I had little to offer her in return. I was too young to recognize how badly I was objectifying the fairer sex, and too cowardly to realize that I’d learn more from talking to them than I would from men onscreen, but I did sense there was something fundamentally unjust about my approach to women. To glorify my girl troubles, I convinced myself that undermining my own desires was a form of beauty worship- that I was protecting the people I liked by keeping my filthy paws to myself (which of course, I did with vision-compromising frequency). Maybe I sensed that the comic relief was also more introspective and self-deprecating than the hero and thus more kindred with me. But whatever the explanation I was an absolute mess of competing desires and fears. I lacked clarity.

So of all of the lady killers I guru-ized, from nebbishy Dr. Bricker charming the pants off of passenger after passenger to street smart David Addison making some weird toast to a lady at a bar and jump-cutting to putting his clothes back on the next morning to Brando wiping an eyelash out of a damsel’s eye as pretext to kissing her, the strongest impression I got was from Jimmy Stewart’s portrayal of J.B. “Jeff” Jefferies in Rear Window. While Jimmy Stewart wasn’t as obvious a surrogate of romantic overachievement as Richard Dreyfuss or Woody Allen, he neither was as beautiful as Paul Newman or Brad Pitt. His attractiveness relied heavily on his personality. Hoping against hope that my own personality was still fledgling enough to sculpt into something charistmatic enough to make Grace Kelly throw herself at me, I replayed every interaction the two actors had, hoping to crack the code for what made a creature that delicious fawn so shamelessly over a tortoise-like fuddy duddy, and maybe more importantly, how he handled it without betraying any sense that his reception of her unbridled affection sullied her beauty. And what I found was that, in line after line, he remained steadfast, unruffled by any temptation his girlfriend offered to coax him from his principles. Never mind how easily he was drawn into Perry Mason’s backyard intrigue, the more interesting story for me was how he faced off with a woman far more self-possessed than any I had ever met, and emerged equanimous, his code dominating hers. The chief quality his character exuded was clarity (romantically, at least).

To extend the analog, I did not start ferreting out heinous national crimes until George W. Bush was sworn in. Much like our current moment, my outrages and heartbreaks were daily. And really it was not until his winning a second term (still can’t call it a re-election) that I was able to calm down and realize that the apocalyptic tenor his opposition assumed was a tad overheated. It’s not that I thought he was a good president or even decent human being, overseeing the most violent foreign policy of my lifetime and snickering all the way. But I began to understand that my own life was only different by knowledge of events far away from me. And the local injustice I did combat had very little to do with W. None of his supposed draconian domestic policies affected me at all. And moreover, I noticed how unflappably Bush administration officials would react to damning evidence presented by news program moderators. And while I question the validity of the principles they clung to, there is no question that they withstood the onslaught of opposition through firm rooting in some central idea that was more important than whatever cudgel of facts Tim Russert employed to unmoore them.

Trump is not like this. He’s undisciplined and insecure. But he champions one idea and it’s what delivered him those rust belt states on November 8: America First. I have paid close attention to Steve Bannon, not to look for evidence of his evilness, but for the source of his strength. America First. Strange as it may seem, no public figure has been touting that as clearly as Trump has for a very long time (with the notable exception of Pat Buchanan, but somehow he frightens people that Trump doesn’t). Regardless of their cultural sophistication, vast segments of our populace believe that American sovereignty has been undermined by soft immigration policies and globalist trade agreements. I am well aware that our current economy would not benefit from tariffs and mass deportations. But I am also aware that us coastal elites don’t give a shit about American First. Meanwhile, the Sconies, Michiganders and Pennsylvanians sure as hell do.  This is their lodestar, and why they think we’re dumb no matter how smart we think we are. Whether they’re right or wrong is beside the point. The point is American nationalism has been given a bad name and right wing talk radio has spent the past 20 years priming its audience to fight back against maligners of our sovereignty. Why does America First feel so threatening? It’s not a question to be answered by an argument packaged by Rachel Maddow or Charles Blow. It’s a question for us to grapple with individually, without all the media noise. Do we want to grant citizenship to anybody who shows up? Do we want trade agreements that bleed jobs by the millions in favor of cheaper goods? Many of us on the left expect the top 1% to pay more taxes to fund programs to help the poor. Would we be willing to pay extra for clothes and electronics if it guaranteed more jobs for men and women struggling to put food on their tables?

We are in a heated moment and if I get any reaction from this (or if anybody reads it at all) I would anticipate it to be pushback against any advocacy of normalizing Trump. And I am sympathetic to that vigilance. And I remain virulently anti-Trump myself. But I am wary of the chasm between resistence and support. Like many marital arguments, I suspect a lot of I’m right/You’re wrong could be ameliorated if not upended by greater communication. I see so much eagerness for scandal and disaster, so much longing for vindication. It’s natural. But setting aside what a gaping, fetid asshole Trump is, what idea do we have that’s better than America First? Because when the most prescient man in America doesn’t understand how resonant a message is, how can we justify skipping our own personal recalibrations?

Fight for refugees, fight for immigrants, fight for workers, fight for minorities, fight for the press, fight for your neighbors and yourselves. But while you’re at it, see if you can reconcile inclusion and sensitivity with a shoring up of American sovereignty. It’s actually not that hard. And it will help us win.

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In Defense of 2016

Um.... The Cubs?

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Elections Are Not Tragedies

I have been alive for 15,751 days and haven’t managed to get through one of them, including today, without faltering on some level. And though I take as much responsibility as I can for my failures, focusing on what I could have done better and why I didn’t, I’ve also had my share of days where I leaned on someone who seemed stalwart, only to feel him wobble.

Yeah yeah. Hardly outrageous fortune.

But Tuesday, November 8, 2016 more than half of America did one of those office trust falls and landed on the floor, concussed and betrayed. All those swing state visits, phone calls, donations and arguments with protest voters, compounded by the inherent superiority of our candidate, seemed like they were working, as we gazed lovingly at the gleaming sapphire and taunting beauty parlor grey of Nate Silver’s map. But the actions we thought were lining up those arms to catch us were actually doing the opposite. And when the gauzy polling data receded, and American bitterness prevailed, the thud was resounding.

Maybe someone more adept at self-honesty than me could make an accurate pie chart of my pain. I know I’m sad that Hillary Clinton will not be our 45th president. And I’m even sadder that Donald Trump will. And I’m probably saddest of all that so many Americans’ beliefs are at such jarring odds with my own. When Pennsylvania and Wisconsin went red, I pictured angry white people gathering in tidy streets, gleefully warping the arc of the moral universe, because it was starting to make them uncomfortable. It’s easy to think Trump supporters are wrong, that they’re stupid, unhealthy and mean.

But I’m the one who’s wrong.

Even with visions of electoral lynch mobs dancing in my head, I understood that the threats associated with a Trump presidency were magnified by the Democrats to increase voter turnout  (which still sucked btw). And I certainly learned Tuesday night that my prognostications are for absolute shit, so why presume to know so much about the hell the next four years will visit upon us? It’s true that we’re a country rife with bigots. That is hardly new and Trump is not the first politician to court their vote. But whatever percentage of his constituency is truly deplorable (and it ain’t small), tarring all of his supporters as sexist, racist homophobes is bigoted in its own right. Voters’ willingness to look past his insensitivites does not mean they suck. It means they’re in pain, and they have been for a long time. As a consumer of right wing media, I’ve listened tacitly, but I sure as hell haven’t taken it seriously. I doubt I’m alone in looking for excuses NOT to take it seriously.

So what do we learn from this? The last 71 days of Barack Obama’s presidency will roll by and then Donald Trump will take the oath of office. Will he act like the New York Democrat he was for most of his life? The creamsicle nationalist he portrayed to get people who don’t normally vote to vote? Will he get tired of governing by March and turn the whole executive branch over to Omarosa? I don’t know. And neither do you. How does your pie chart break down?

Here’s a couplet from a poem I like:

The nightengales are sobbing in the orchards of their mothers;

And hearts that we broke long ago have long been breaking others.

I’m sad about the election. And I’m daunted by how much of my worldview needs recalibrating to better understand my fellow citizens. But my heart is just as capable of love today as it was on Tuesday. And while good old fashioned patriotism may seem hokey to you, it’s worth noting that our national fortunes don’t rise and fall with the emotional equilibrium of the priveleged. And let’s face it, if you’re reading this, you’re hella priveleged.

The stanza concludes:

Tears are round, the sea is deep.

Roll them overboard and sleep.

It’s been three days since the most foul presidential election of my lifetime produced the most troubling result in American history. I don’t know what the Trump administration is going to do. But neither smug Drudge headlines nor Shaun King’s Twitter feed will stop me from having a pretty nice day today. I hope you do too.

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Do Black Memes Matter?

Over the past week, more than 67,000 children in the world starved to death. In America 16 million children suffer from food insecurity. More than 4 million women are the victims of domestic abuse, and 67% of female homicide victims are murdered by a relative or paramour. Overwhelmingly gruesome as these statistics are, they represent minorities. In other words, 148 million women were not beaten, 58 million children have enough (or too much) to eat, and 1.9 billion children live a scourge-free life. So let’s say that humanity, however blighted, still bears delicious fruit. However.

 However.

What captivated most of my personal acquaintances this week were the deaths of Lorne Ahrens, Philando Castile, Michael Krol, Michael Smith, Alton Sterling, Brent Thompson and Patrick Zamarripa. The internet over the past few days became a proving ground of outrage, semantic debate, hot takes, several videos of some lady with white hair and zero patience for white supremacy in even its most latent forms, and memes. So many memes.

When Jimi Hendrix lived in London, he used to go to clubs and watch inferior guitar players perform because, in his determination to expand his own sonic vocabularly, he was as interested in the sounds these hacks made by accident as those they made on purpose. To me, that’s what memes are. They aren’t guaranteed to help black skin catch less lead than white skin. But maybe one of the breakdowns of #BlackLivesMatter v. #AllLivesMatter, or Freddy Gray v. Dylan Roof, or just a multi-paragraph rant from your friend on the front lines might come at you at just the right angle to penetrate your defenses and help you get over your resistence to the fact that structural racism is real, it’s pernicious, and the American experiment is not successful until it has been dismantled. Then again, how fickle and ungrounded do you have to be to recalibrate your belief system in the face of a well-phrased infographic? Jimi may have been open to everything, but he also did an enormous amount of homework.

And while we can acknowledge the potential value of cyber-rhetoric, I remain suspicious of the cycle of online outrage. For one thing, it’s summer and you really should turn off your computer and go outside. And perhaps there is a connection between being glued to the internet and the extent to which you conflate your cyberself with your meat one. It’s certainly easier to advertise your enlightenment and compassion on Facebook than it is while on a walk in a park. And as you pass the picnics, volleyball games and drum circles, the smile you bestow on them is private, unnoticed and dubiously archived amid thousands of facets of natural splendor you don’t even notice you’re noticing. A “Like” registers publicly, and lingers until Skynet eradicates all unauthorized forms of digital approval.

One could argue that even the most tacit online activism is more helpful than analog complacency, and (not withstanding how often one breeds the other) perhaps she would be correct. Even if you’ve clicked this link and bothered to read this far, I wouldn’t presume you to be assigning my absence from this latest eddy of discourse any conspicuousness. Maybe it’s because I feel the need to speak for myself rather than join a chorus. I certainly feel no need to prove a #BLM bona fides to my loved ones of color. And absent this anxiety, I am not compelled to get exercised by every uninvestigated death I hear about through the media. If this makes me a lesser ally than your meme-ier friends, I regret not being a comforting enough online presence for you. Though hopefully, you share my interest in examining some of the contrasts between reaction to media and localized personal experience (or even identifying them). A for profit press’s job is to mediate events so that they resonate with you. Whether it’s a feel good story about one animal helping another, or that autistic equipment manager whose team let him into a basketball game in the fourth quarter, whereupon he dropped 30 some-odd points that people keep posting as though it were new despite its being around for nearly 10 years now, or a death at the hands of a public employee, an event that, while being the sick culmination of state-licensed racial persecution, is statistically rare enough to undermine the accepted belief that cops make black lives shorter. If you have been directly touched by state gun violence, its statistical rarity becomes meaningless. Racism, alas, is not rare. But I perceive and react to racism immediately, through personal experience (and all too frequent lapses in vigilance against my own prejudices) and thus feel less shocked by and less reliant upon mediated information. Meanwhile, I am fiercely doubtful that anyone’s heart actually goes out to anyone else via memes. Online postings do, however, dissipate some of our fury, and allay our feelings of helplessness. But do they really help? I think Jimi would’ve been alright even if he hadn’t heard the feedback when Peter Green’s cousin dropped his guitar behind his amp.

So hey self-righteous jackass, what’s your point?

Well annoyingly stern and hypocritically indefatiguable in your own self-righteousness aspect of self, I guess my point is this: Some of what seem like the most positive features of social media are anything but. You get ginned up on despair, you find a searing infographical rebuke et voila, it’s like Tahrir Square up in here. My personal, and utterly sincere belief, is that everyone in the world should buy one non-smooth jazz album for every “enlightening” meme or political rant they post online. And while I’m no Cynthia Ozick, I do endeavour to carry thoughts beyond rant into the margins of essay.

Or whatever. Just read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book. No seriously. Read it.

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Cold, Dead Minds

300 million people live in America. 2.6 million of them died last year. Of those 2.6 million, 13,286 were from bullets. For those of you interested in mathematics, that’s 0.51%. Meanwhile heart disease accounted for 23.6% of American deaths in 2015, with cancer a close second at 22.76%.

But neither heart disease nor cancer storms into a nightclub or a school and murders innocent, vulnerable people. Even when someone young dies of cancer, we are not horrified the way we are when a mass shooting occurs. Of the 300 million people living in the United States, the only ones who like mass shootings are the shooters (and some incredibly cynical activists for whom the only good news is bad news). Let’s generously say that 1,000 people like mass shootings. That is .001% of our population, a segment dwarfed by people whose proclivities include worshipping Satan (approx. 100,000), not breathing during sex (approx. 60,000) and listening to Justin Bieber (don’t ask, though his latest album isn’t that terrible). But flippancy aside, the point is that the kneejerk reaction to parlay mass shootings into legislative action regarding gun control does not create a binary situation where people opposed to gun restrictions are pro-mass shooting. 

There is a tendency among kale-eating liberals like myself to scoff at folks who consider riflery integral to being a sportsman. And of course, gun owners and advocates have been known to refer to people excessively dismissive of their right to bear arms as, among other things, libtards.

So let’s establish a few facts that go under reported when the memes and infographs commence to flying after seemingly all too frequent mass shootings:

1) 99.999% of all American gun owners, including the NRA leadership, is anti-mass shooting. 

2) People who are horrified by mass shootings can feel doubly horrified by doing nothing. If their reaction clashes with your politics, that is not the same as them being stupid or immoral.

Now. On Sunday, June 12, 2016, Omar Mateen went into the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida and murdered Stanley Almodovar III, Amanda Alvear, Oscar A Aracena-Montero, Rodolfo Ayala-Ayala, Antonio Davon Brown, Darryl Roman Burt II, Angel L. Candelario-Padro, Juan Chevez-Martinez, Luis Daniel Conde, Cory James Connell, Tevin Eugene Crosby, Deonka Deidra Drayton, Simon Adrian Carrillo Fernandez, Leroy Valentin Fernandez, Mercedez Marisol Flores, Peter O. Gonzalez-Cruz, Juan Ramon Guerrero, Paul Terrell Henry, Miguel Angel Honorato, Javier Jorge-Reyes, Jason Benjamin Josaphat, Eddie Jamoldroy Justice, Anthony Luis Laureanodisla, Christopher Andrew Leinonen, Alejandro Barrios Martinez, Brenda Lee Marquez McCool, Gilberto Ramon Silva Menendez, Kimblerly Morris, Akyra Monet Murray, Luis Omar Ocasio-Capo, Geraldo A. Ortiz-Jimenez, Eric Ivan Ortiz-Rivera, Joel Rayon Paniagua, Jean Carlos Mendez Perez, Enrique L. Rios Jr., Jean C. Nives Rodriguez, Xavier Emmanual Serrano Rosado, Christopher Joseph Sanfeliz, Yilmary Rodriguez Solivan, Edward Sotomayor Jr., Shane Evan Tomlinson, Martin Benitez Torres, Jonathan Antonio Camuy Vega, Juan P. Rivera Velazquez, Luis S. Vielma, Franky Jimmy Dejesus Velazquez, Luis Daniel Wilson-Leon and Jerald Arthur Wright. And I am compelled not to reduce these people to statistics. The shooter used a Sig Sauer .223 caliber rifle and a Glock 17 pistol, and here are some statistics: In 2015, Sig Sauer reported net sales of $551.9 million, while Glock sold over 200,000 handguns averaging $449/per gun, which amounts to $92 million in handgun revenue.

One can be forgiven for considering these figures as proof that the blood of the victims is on the hands of the weapons manufacturers. But if we can reserve compassion for a moment, we might note that millions of gun purchasers are not murderers. And they might be more prone to express dismay over mass shootings if they weren’t lumped in with homicidal maniacs for exercising their rights and remaining within the bounds of legality. In other words, the action that is demanded after mass shootings alienates our most credible potential allies. 

To our collective misfortune, we know the cycle: A mass shooting occurs. An outcry ensues. Action is demanded. Perhaps, as with the last two days, action is taken. Action is defeated by the NRA. A common reaction from here seems to be, “Well, clearly we’re not reviling Wayne LaPierre enough!” But why are we running into this wall?

I posit two reasons:

1) In our rush to lament the children of Columbine or Sandyhook, or the LGBTQ community members of Orlando, we stint on the humanity of law-abiding gun owners, who are legion and, at present, more defensive than unreasonable. (please read that link)

2) We conflate background checks with “assault weapon” bans. One is a great idea (background checks) that the NRA actually supports. But “assault weapons” have been redefined as laws change. Fully automatic weapons were indeed outlawed in 1989. 

I don’t like guns. But I recognize that millions of Americans like them very much, and I am not quite arrogant enough to dismiss their reasons. It is a fact that the vast majority of firearms are not abused and never hurt anyone. 

When we use the term “common sense gun reform,” how common can it be if it excludes millions of law abiding citizens who know a lot more about guns than we do? For years now, we have operated under the presumption that gun advocates don’t care as much about preventing mass shootings as we do. We have impugned their value of life, treated them like they just don’t get it. And they’ve turned around and done the same to us. I am not talking about the eejits who think if everybody were armed, nobody’d get shot. And I am not saying that gun owners have all of the science on their side, or that there isn’t an overlap between gun ownership and classic forms of bigotry (though stereotyping gun owners is bigotry too, innit?). 

What I am saying is that if we really want to make a dent in this problem, we have to adjust the cycle of reaction, not just lean in more vociferously. We don’t show more love to victims by vituperating law abiding gun owners. Does that mean I don’t care enough?

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LAME. STREAM.

Pop quiz: how do you pronounce this word? 

Schiavo

The end of life saga of one woman became such a big story that even if you never tuned into the news, you osmotically heard about Terri Schiavo. But meanwhile, if you got passionately involved in the theological battle royale that ensued when Mrs. Schiavo went into her coma and medically educated Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist could not stop himself from diagnosing her remotely, what seems to have escaped the public debate over whether to pull the plug, pray the woman well again, or bury her but keep the feeding tube connected, was how Mrs. Schiavo got so sick in the first place.

Bulimia.

Terry Schiavo had eating disorders so severe that in addition to making herself vomit several times a day, she took as much as four times the recommended dosage of laxatives, all of which lead to the heart failure that lead to the brain failure that lead to a tortured national conversation on the value of life.

How did that conversation manage to exclude the sickness that precipitated the moment when Theresa Marie Schiavo’s life suddenly got very precious to a segment of our society seemingly obsessed with personal responsibility? Why didn’t the numerous political and religious leaders who saw fit to sound off about a woman was languished in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years (1990-2005) talk at all about how she had a heart attack at the age of 25?

When the final legal hurdles were cleared to pull the plug in 2005, and the national debate over the fate of this woman reached peak frenzy, theliving-will-drafting business saw a boom. Girls with body issues? Really not the time to discuss this, honey.

If anybody in any major news outlet, regardless of slant, had been willing to disrupt the ratings-friendly tenor of the debate with the unpleasant fact that eating disorders can be fatal, a larger percentage of the people today who can pronounce “Schiavo” correctly might be talking to the young ladies in their lives. But the media, whose role is ostensibly to keep us informed, just wants to sell audiences to advertisers. And the less discerning those audiences are, the more malleable they are as consumers.

This is always a relevant problem, but among the myriad consequential media failures the one bothering me the most right now is the fact that when Donald Trump wants to ban Muslims from entering America, not one media outlet has pointed out that the most populous Muslim country in the world is Indonesia and number two is India. They would rather Americans presume we’re talking about Arabs. If this one simple fact was pointed out, that Trump doesn’t even know who he’s talking about banning, and that most Americans have no desire to cut off immigration from Indonesia and India and a host of other major Muslim nations that are not major sources of violent jihadis, it would go a long way to deflating the resonance of his ignorant and pernicious message. 

Do all of these debate moderators even know where most Muslims live? I’m not even sure these tv personalities who carry the patina of being agents of information have even done that simple bit of homework on the subject. But hey, they sure do wear those clothes well. And my, what sterling orthodonture! 

Before we even start the debate about morality and security, can we at least get a few facts in order? And hey, where did we get the idea that most Muslims are Middle Eastern anyway?

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The Hero’s Ego

The Torah is full of heroes, but the most epic, or at least the one who gets the most ink is Moses. While Adam is the first to get laid (alright fine, and exist), Noah carries all life through a watery apocalypse, Abraham experiences the revelation of non-corporeal omnipotence and raises his family accordingly, Joseph pisses off his brothers and then his master’s wife but still becomes Grand Vizier thanks to telling Pharoah that he might wanna stock up on grain in case not every future crop is a bumper one (I mean, it’s like he was psychic or something!), but Moses is sentenced to death before he was born, gets deposited by basket into the Nile where he is adopted by Pharoah’s daughter, attains an even higher position in Egyptian court than Joseph, renounces it when he realizes that the only people who have the same strange looking penis as him are the Hebrew slaves, meets God where there’s fire but no smoke, liberates hundreds of thousands of his kinsmen, leads them out of bondage, across an enormous body of water, through desert for more than a full generation, quashes an idolatrous rebellion along the way and even gets his buddy God to forgive the Hebrews for choosing a golden cow instead of the Lord who plagued their captors until they were free, oh, and he introduced one of the most enduring documents in the history of mankind, the Ten Commandments, all while helping hundreds of thousands of freed slaves and their offspring navigate inhospitable terrain to reclaim land divinely promised to their ancestor Abraham roughly 600 years prior. 

But for all of his service to the people he forsook the throne of Egypt to lead, and to the God they worshipped, Moses was not allowed to carry the ball across the goal line. In most modern literature, a hero of such stature reaps the fruits of his triumph- Odysseus returns to Ithaca, Pierre marries Natasha, and Harry defeats Voldemort. So why does Moishe reach such an ignominious end? According to the Torah, the Israelites were clamouring for water, which is in short supply in the Sinai. Moses appealed to God, traveling with them on a pillar of smoke and fire. God told Moses to go over to a rock, tap on it with his staff, and speak to hit politely, whereupon God would make water gush forth. Instead, Moses gave the rock a mighty whack and commanded it to give up the juice. Despite the direct contradiction to God’s instructions, the water still flowed. Moses’s sin of taking credit for a miracle he alone was incapable of performing did not result in the collective punishment of his people.

But Moses himself was toast. To me, this is one of the most poignant moments in the entire Torah- the man who attained the greatest heights, who developed the most intimate working relationship with God, was excluded from the promise that God maintained for the people Moses had helped God free from 400 years of slavery. Because no matter how awesome Moses was, he couldn’t bring water from a stone. And yet, he tried to convince the people he was leading that he could. In retrospect, maybe Moses wishes he could have handled that episode better, with greater humility. But that’s the entire point- that even someone who had learned and experienced as much as Moses was still susceptible to lapses in judgement, driven by the ego. Moses was convinced that he had sacrificed enough, achieved enough that he had earned the right to take credit for that miracle. Wrong. 

Maybe at some point in our lives, we have caught an unwanted animal and let it free outside rather than killing it. But none of us have helped liberate hundreds of thousands of enslaved people. None of us has renounced a claim of royalty to do what is right. None of us has argued with unassailable authority to reclaim benefits for people who shamelessly squandered them. And yet, all of us are guilty of taking credit for moments we enjoy due to circumstance more than to our own efforts, however laudable.

Even taking this amateur stab at commentary, I am not innocent of pride of intellect, nor of hoping that people will think better of me for writing it. But in spite of that irony, I try to carry the lesson from this parshat- that we must be as vigilant as possible against our tendency bang on the rock instead of tapping. Gently.

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Hillary Clinton for President. NOW!

The first question I have for Sanders supporters is, “have you paid any attention to the last eight years?” Because here is what I’ve seen: As charismatic a president as we have ever had encountering the most vociferous resistance we have ever seen. What I have learned from this is that the more serious a challenge President Obama posed to the status quo, the more vicious entrench powers’ efforts to undermine him. And so while President Obama was elected twice, he got crushed in 2010 and 2014 midterms and for all of his personal eloquence and sophisticated online operation, he never achieved favorability commensurate with his personal likability.

Now.

I recognize that part of the thrilling buy-in of championing Bernie Sanders is the recognition that you can upset Hillary Clinton’s presumed coronation. That must feel very empowering. But guess what dearies- you’ve had the power to break up the banks all along. You’ve had the power to enact gun law reform all along. You’ve had the power to drop the hammer on predatory student loan operations all along. And you haven’t. Fucking. Exercised it.

Oh, but when we elect Bernie, he’s gonna Make America Fair Again!

Bullshit.

Let’s say you do get Bernie elected (which you fucking won’t).He gets inaugurated and introduces legislation to unrig the system. It hits Congress and their paymasters tell them they’d better block it and embarrass Bernie or they’ll get primaried by someone who will. And even though you never got off your ass before Bernie’s speeches and Bill Maher railings got you excited, now you will. And the only reason you didn’t for Obama is because, while he was the first president in 120 years to enact comprehensive healthcare reform, it wasn’t single payer so why bother?

Point is, entrenched special interests are actually no match for a galvanized public. And you guys might feel galvanized right now. But are you going to keep doing what you’ve never done before every time a bill reaches the floor? If so, te’salud, Don Corleone! But I think you’ll go live your lives, like those of us/you who got Obama elected and re-elected did. And Bernie will never get jack shit done.

On the other hand, Hillary Clinton needs your vote and she’ll take care of the rest. Her legislative agenda doesn’t rise or fall based on the engagement of grass roots fundraising (doesn’t mean she won’t fundraise, God forbid!). She will get more done, whether you harass/support your representatives or not. She will withstand the onslaught of criminality and unfairness that afflicts our capitol. How do I know this?

Because when she was a senator, she got massive plaudits from both sides of the aisle. She developed a record of bipartisan accomplishment. Bernie? Yeah, he’s worked with Republicans to scuttle gun law reform.

Grow up. And vote for Hillary. She’ll do more good.

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Kim Davis and Naivete

When Kim Davis first garnered attention, the media seemed to make sure that all faithful readers knew that she had not conducted her own life in accordance with the biblical precepts she was imposing upon gay marriage petitioners. I recognize the hypocrisy implied here, but what I wish other consumers of mass media recognized was that, while yes, Kim Davis’ actions were hypocritical and illegal, her messy personal life might be clamoring for some order, or some peace. And where is she going to get the strength to bring more order to her life? Please understand, I am not excusing illegal or bigoted behavior. But I condemn it on those grounds and skip the charges of hypocrisy. I believe this makes a difference, because I would rather be as omnicompassionate as I can rather than gleefully embrace opportunities to heap scorn on a character the media portrays as loathsome. I do not like Kim Davis, nor do I agree with her distorted ideas of what her duties are as a Kentucky County Clerk. But I would not deny her the humanity she denies the gay petitioners for marriage. She sees them as biblical villains and this is where she goes wrong. We see her as a modern villain and this is where we go wrong. Kim Davis is a lady who wants love and kindness like the rest of us and she has gotten very little of it. And perhaps even more destructive than the snarky east coast media piling onto her are the backwoods politicians falling all over themselves to exploit her “heroic” stance. Shame on Mike Huckabee. Shame on Ted Cruz. These fellas act like champions of the common man and then they get on stage with the president of Citizens United (a man named David Bossie, who made his political bones investigating Bill Clinton’s campaign finances so zealously that Newt Gingrich demanded his resignation), the costumed patriarch of the Robertson Duck Dynasty and Sarah Palin, peddling lies and crypto-racist homilies, all the while urging the crowd not to be naive. Are we noticing what’s happening? Are we able to distinguish authenticity from propaganda? Messengers from shills? Am I? I cherish my critical facilities. I would rather not know than traffic in bullshit. We have strains in our culture that supports this, but we also have a milky way of lame-brained deception that rolls right through our discourse. Elections are decided by money- tons of it. Why? Why are we so hard to reach? Why can’t we just go to a website and see what the candidates think and base our decisions on that? Like a fucking dating app. Because thanks to the guy on the stage screaming at a crowd not to be naive, we aren’t vetting these candidates in our current electoral process, their funders are. So until a contribution cap is reinstated, we’re really just voting for whoever the rich people like the best. The fact that anybody can go onstage and peddle vicious falsehoods, using bigoted bureaucrats as poster children and still keep office points to something extremely wrong with our national dialogue. Less rock, more talk.

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Israeli Anxiety

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, informally known as the Iran Deal, is going to survive the opposition and be implemented. It is worth noting that neither proponents nor detractors of the deal trust Iran, and so in many respects, the deal’s opposition coincides with the segment of our society most vocally suspicious of President Obama. So right away, an emotional component is introduced into the debate. Just like those who chafe at the most dastardly accusations hurled at Israel (”Jews would never perpetrate something like that!”), President Obama has inspired supporters to take personal offense whenever his intentions are impugned. And yet, most of the vitriol casts the president or the Israeli Prime Minister in villainous shadow, with the mullahs always lurking in the background, suddenly diverting large piles of money to the vicious thugs of Hamas and Hezbollah.

And while the rest of the world embraces the opportunity to slow Iran’s progress toward a bomb, only in America and Israel do leaders devote millions of dollars to propping up the notion that Joe the Plumber is smarter than Angela Merkel. And if you want proof that Adelson money is playing a role in the debate, and that it is more about politics than actual security, consider this: Iran added more centrifuges and enriched more uranium when big, tough W. was president than they have under Obama. And yet, to people who feel dutibound to walk around worrying that Israel could be destroyed at any moment (and it’ll be their fault for not being vigilant enough), Obama is the guy kowtowing to the mullahs while Bush stood strong. This narrative gets bought because it gets packaged well. But it’s false and it’s dangerous.

The truth on which everyone agrees is that sanctions brought Iran to the table. But then, the opposition suggests that stronger sanctions are needed for a better deal. What this ignores is that Bush imposed sanctions too, but they didn’t work because his administration was so diplomatically inept that they could not get Russia and China on board. Cue Obama, who, despite polyps like Bret Stephens and Charles Krauthammer screaming otherwise, has advanced America’s diplomatic interests well beyond anything Bush ever achieved. Our trade agreements are more favorable, our alliances are in better shape, and perhaps most importantly, we are responding more deftly to real intelligence rather than fabricating it and forcing the world to swallow whatever we lob. So this advocacy for more vigorous sanctions is coming from people who failed to impose strong ones in the first place. The guy who did get Iran to the table is the guy who is ready to lift them in exchange for strenuous inspections, destruction of centrifuges and relinquishment of HEU (highly enriched uranium).

Some more facts: Iran supports Hamas and Hezbollah. But here’s a fact that gets drowned out by AIPAC, Hezbollah is fighting against ISIS. Does it mean they’re the good guys? No, it means that the Syrian rebels are Sunni wahabists and the forces propping up the Assad regime are Shiite radicals. And America’s supposed to pick sides here? Again you have people who are so eager to blow shit up that they want to side with ISIS. And by people I mean Lindsey Graham and John McCain. Complicated neighborhood.

Meanwhile most people start out having the vague sense that the Iran Deal is bad for Israel. Then they read an AIPAC press release and feel like their sense is less vague. So now they’re informed citizens whose views are bolstered by Dick Cheney’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. The thing to remember, though, is that these folks are decent people who are just trying to do what they feel is right. So ridiculing them because Dick Cheney seems so obviously evil (and he truly is evil) is counterproductive if your goal is to win as much support as possible for the JCPoA.

But this leads me to what is going on inside of us during this debate. “Israel,” “Iran,” “Nukes,” “Sanctions,” these are terms that carry meanings. “Obama,” “Netanyahu,” these are people we see on the tv and feel we know. But all of this is only relevant to our relatively safe and secure daily lives in the abstract. We think about them, argue about them, feel about them. But all very far away from where we actually toil every day. Our children don’t know anything about any of this. And when our parents followed raging debates in their day, we had no idea what was going on. AWACS? Loan Guarantees? Osirak? Huh?

We need something to do. Especially now. We get online and are surfeited with so much cheap gratification that we don’t know what to do with ourselves if 10 minutes go by without seeing any red dots on our Facebook feed. The more connected we become, the lonelier we get. We are experiencing deep anxieties without realizing it. And we alleviate them by adopting views based on highly filtered content and then trying to smash our views into opposing ones and seeing what remains in tact. But then we wind up frustrated because the people who disagree with us either sidestep or get personal. And so do we. The liberals good/conservatives bad, or vice versa, dichotomy is as false as it gets. Both sides are rotten with disingenuous arguments and doctored statistics. Because again, it’s not about truth or righteousness, it’s about feeling smart. And the smarter we feel, the dumber we get.

Anyway, I’m for the Iran Deal.

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