Prepare for a tornado of bullshit

Photo by Nikolas Noonan on Unsplash

If you think bullshit has been raining upon us fast and furious, prepare for it to pick up the pace. It already started yesterday, immediately upon the release of the Barr memo, which is being propagandized by the illustrious party of cheats and liars as a complete exoneration of the president, even though the words on the paper specifically state there is no exoneration. The entire party seems challenged to recognize a “no” — just look at their Supreme Court members.

It’s as though now their full time job is to crank up the firehose of bullshit spewing in our direction. What, between the president unleashing his Twitter finger against the press while at the same time sending them his “enemies” list not to interview; the DoJ refusing to uphold the ACA, which, last I checked, was still the law of this land, and which every single member of the DoJ is getting paid by us to uphold; and openly lying about being the “Party of Healthcare” (yes, they did), we have entered Full Orwell (FO).

All this, while the Georgia legislature is not only stripping women of their right to a safe abortion, but imposing the restriction so early that even the woman herself may not yet know she is pregnant (Full Atwood, FA). And while the Supreme Court may or may not feel like eliminating the extreme sport of partisan gerrymandering in North Carolina, Maryland, and across this land.

And as all of these outrages are being dangled in front of our faces, behind the scenes oil and gas lobbyists in charge of our agencies are holding garage sales on our environment, education, and anything that will line the pockets of their plutocrat patrons.

If any of this implies good faith to any of you, I have a bridge to sell you. Real cheap. Yet the press and the dems keep treating these perjurers with earnest nodding and fact-checking. There is only one way to deal with bad faith, and that is to call it to its face. I know it’s hard, and that’s why I am not in politics. But AOC is doing it. We need more.

And if all this isn’t enough, the bullshit is about to accelerate. We have a president who under the best of circumstances has a problem with impulse control. He has a window of opportunity to convince his base that the “exonerate” was not preceded by a “not.” The Party of Lincoln, now the Party of Venal Mendacity (FOFA), has only so much of an opening to complete their pillage of our nation. The train is barreling ahead, and they’ll be damned if they stay behind on the platform, even if the final destination is a concrete wall.

Hold on to your hats. And your phones. Make sure your legislators’ phone numbers are in speed dial. And duck so the bullshit doesn’t sweep you away.

Absence of evidence is not an exoneration

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You know that drunk joke?

A drunk is rummaging in the dark street for something. A cop rides up in his cruiser, climbs out, saunters toward the drunk.

“Did you lose something, man?”

“My car keys.”

“Around here somewhere?”

“Nope.”

Cop scratches his head. “No? Then why are you looking for them here?”

“It’s where the street light is.”

That describes Washington to a T.

Remember the FBI “investigation” into the Kavanaugh allegations? Where did they look? Practically nowhere. Did they interview pertinent witnesses? Nope. Did they talk to Kavanaugh’s high school buddy Mark Judge whose memoir aptly named “Wasted” includes a character Bart O’Kavanaugh, who, in a boys-will-be-boys fashion, pukes drunkenly in his car? Not a chance. (Insert a drunk joke here.)

And now we have the illustrious AG William Barr, who made the Iran-Contra affair disappear thus saving the hides of many a highly-placed administration official, perform another legerdemain, dangling a “no collusion” in front of our faces, while tucking the entire Mueller report, wherein primary evidence lies for (or against) both the conspiracy and obstruction of justice, into the back of his pants.

If I conducted my research this way, you know how many papers I would have published? Exactly zero, none, nada. When I say I didn’t find something, I have to show how I went about looking for it. If I cannot show that I conducted a thorough search, then the study isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, or the pixels it takes up on the screen. Remember how your math teacher told you to show your work? Yup, that. And if this is the standard for middle school math and health services research, how can we accept anything less when our democracy is at stake?

Let me leave you with this thought. You have probably heard that absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence. In the case of Kavanaugh, there was no way for evidence to be present, since no one bothered to look. In the case of the Mueller report, the AG thinks we are the drunk, that we’ll be satisfied with what he’s illuminated in his 4-page summary.

Well, I think he has another thing coming. We need to be the judge of whether there is evidence of absence or simply absence of ethics to expose a crime.

Language of witness

Photo by Wenniel Lun on Unsplash

I’ve been off here for a while, writing in Word documents, cutting, adding, chiseling, until I am satisfied with the product. I had a few pieces published in the last several months:

 

 

 

 

America’s Covenant: http://www.poetsreadingthenews.com/2018/10/americas-covenant/
Recipes for Survival: https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/273965/recipes-for-survival
Magen David and Me: https://longreads.com/2019/02/15/magen-david-and-me/
All LIfe’s Matter: http://massreview.org/node/7377

Today I am opening my site again because, in this era of increasing insularity, I need to go outside my own head and share and be a part of something bigger, an effort that transcends the strictures of my singular words. I want to unravel the wooly language of witness.

I despair at the emerging illiberal autocratic world order. I despair at the senseless killing. I despair at the magnitude of the climate catastrophe which we are not only ignoring, but inviting with our petulant policies. I despair at the lack of empathy, indeed at the sadism our foreign and domestic policies are promoting toward a woman’s body, toward trans bodies, toward Black, Brown, Jewish, and other bodies that are not cis and straight and white and male and Christian.

But even cis straight white males are under siege. Information warfare is harnessing their deepest insecurities, weaponizing their fears. I am very familiar with these tactics; I have lived this before.

While the plutocrats are purchasing their yachts, palazzos in Tuscany, vineyards in NAPA, the unemployed are told it’s the immigrants who are taking their jobs, the “welfare queens” their money.

There are indeed welfare queens, but they are not who you think. They are those whose bank accounts are bursting like an overripe tomato, the ones whose minds are clouded by the money fever, the ones who elect their own representation in our government for the single purpose of funneling more wealth into their coffers by any means necessary. It’s what they steal from us that swells their mattresses and their off-shore accounts, while we pay for the roads they batter with their 18-wheeler fleets; for the cancers, asthma, heart disease caused by the excrement they dump into water and air and soil; for the crescendo extreme weather events from their orgiastic abuse of carbon; for addiction and suicides their social vandalism leaves in its path.

I despair at the peaceful slumber many of us are able to enjoy while the tectonics of geopolitics are shifting under our feet. As long as it doesn’t affect us, right?

The numbers are mind-boggling. Syria, Yemen, the genocides are breathtaking, “never again” a distant memory. And then there are the “lone wolves,” domestic and now Oceanic terrorists, racking up dead bodies with the paranoid brainwashing from the NRA, complicity from Congress, encouragement from the manufacturers; 26, 17, 11, 49, and that’s just a few instances, and not counting the wounded. Or the the holes blown through families and communities of the ones killed. Or the flesh they rip from our own humanity.

What kind of fear is slithering through the world, what kind of poison? It’s not new. There has always been struggle. Security or privacy? Liberty or equality? These are not new questions. But as I age and mature, the centripetal force of the middle pulls me harder and harder away from the margins. I am fool enough to think that these are false choices, that, in the best of all possible words, we can have both. It may be a compromise, but a workable compromise is less dizzying than flinging the see-saw between two extremes.

I once wrote an article about metacognition and how it can help us make better medical decisions. It is true for all of life: what we don’t normally see drives us off the cliff of extremism. We can train ourselves to see, or at least to dump the hubris of thinking we see everything all the time. If things were less clear to us, if we could just tolerate the ambiguity, the washed out, the unfocused, the uncomfortable, we might find much more satisfying answers and ways of being in this world. At the very least, we may feel less miserable and in need of launching our misery at others.

So, I ask you, what is your language for this mess we are in? How do you witness it? What’s to be done?