Moderates United

I had not realized until this moment what stunningly bad law Roe v. Wade is.  

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

In order to make all abortions legal because it is a “private matter”, you have to assume, or assert, that no crime can be committed in the commission of an abortion.  Otherwise, people selling drugs behind closed doors have a “right to privacy”, as do people running guns, operating illegal casinos, trafficking in humans, embezzling from their employers, etc.  The list is endless and can be made to compass substantially all the crimes on the books.

If a pregnant woman goes to a known abortionist, then there exists “probable cause” to assume a crime is about to be committed, if it is illegal to murder fetuses.  There is probable cause a crime HAS been committed, if there exist “medical remains”–fetal remains–indicating an abortion has taken place.

Thus, if we accept Roe v. Wade on its face, the same legal logic could be used to affirm ANY crime the SCOTUS wanted to support, if I am understanding this correctly.  The bookie taking illegal bets could claim that the law has no business interfering in his private business, and the Supreme Court could concur, thus making all forms of gambling impossible for local jurisdictions to criminalize.

In order for Roe v. Wade to make sense, it has to be ASSUMED that not only is killing a fetus not a crime, but that no legislature of any State has the right to claim it to be so, now or at any time in the future.  It has to make an enduring and categorical definition of human life without any possibility of rebuttal or change.  This is an assertion without any basis whatsoever in philosophical reasoning or legal precedent.  It is the sort of activity Jefferson specifically feared they would start to engage in, and thus ruin the Republic.

It is utterly corrupt intellectually, at the least, and certainly legally.  Laws are to be made by legislatures, and are to be mutable based on changing views about a variety of things.

This is a completely different topic, but I finally watched Deliverance, and wanted to share my conclusion that there were two different men, which is to say that Jon Voight killed the wrong guy.  Yes, it is apparently the same actor, but the same actor can play multiple roles in one film.  John Boorman had a pathetic budget which among other things required the actors to perform their own stunts, including Jon Voight actually scaling that cliff without a safety harness.

Here is my reasoning.  The two rapists were most likely wanted criminals.  They were going to kill Ned Beatty and Jon Voight and perhaps just leave them somewhere, knowing that it was likely someone would come looking for them sooner or later.  They just figured they would vanish in the woods.  They were not just standing there waiting for Beatty and Voight: how could they have known they would come ashore just there, or even that they were on the river (unless of course the hillbillies up the river told them)?

They must have been hunting, and if this is the case, then they must have only had one gun, or both would have been armed.  And that gun was a shotgun–double barreled as I recall.  That gun was buried with the dead man.

The man Jon Voight shot was armed with a standard rifle.  He also had teeth.  And the dead man in their party (was it Ed?  I forget as this was a couple weeks ago, and not important enough to post until now) had no gun wounds, and that he passed out from nervous exhaustion was the most logical explanation.

And even while watching the movie climbing that cliff made no sense to me.  If the guy had shot their guy, he was still pretty far up river.  If he was heading to that cliff, it was going to take time.  Burt Reynolds was hurt, and they were still, no matter what, going to need to get down river to get him help.  The time to go was then, not to wait until the guy, if he was there, caught up with them.  And even then, that was a long distance at which to hit a moving target, firing at that angle.

So my take is that the second criminal got away scot free, and the men managed to kill an innocent man, who was the hunter the sheriff was asking about.

This seems to be a minority opinion, although not absent on the internet.  Again, it is complicated–no doubt somewhat intentionally–by the use of the same actor.

As to the rape, I really have nothing intelligent to say.  Maybe I will tomorrow.  This is a violent, sometimes very unpleasant world, but there is nothing deep in making that obvious point.

I was contemplating last night my off-hand comment I think the night before that I had no idea what would happen that night.  And this was true.  I’ve seen everything from visions of heaven (some years ago) to many different demonic appearances (more recently) to mindfucks I can’t begin to describe where I am split into pieces.

Always, I awake and cohere, and go to work (if I have any that day), and it occurs to me that this is roughly the proper way to live.  I don’t have recurring nightmares: I invent new ones.

I am open to new experience.  I wait and listen and see what happens, then I try to learn from it.  Every day is a completely new day.  Nothing is the same, even if nearly everything is the same.

And in my contemplation, I was pondering that the mission of the early Buddhists, who were sent off to beg and wander the rest of their lives, was to treat every new day of the rest of their lives as a new day.

What I find is that when you risk your current understanding of yourself, it refreshes, in a slightly new way.  The picture moves, perhaps, but is still recognizable.  It’s still you.  But you are learning flexibility, trust, to leap into the vortex with faith.

And everyone has their own refresh rate.   You are clearly NOT the same person you once were.  The river does not stop flowing.  But if you live in a tight social system, you are reaffirmed daily that you are who you are.  You see the same faces, hear the same names, do the same things, walk the same streets. Your image of you is presented back to you by others regularly.  This is a high refresh rate.

Those who live more solitary lives have much slower refresh rates.  They go longer between validations that they are who they are and not someone else.  And what I am finding is that with a very low refresh rate, you sort of free-flow.  Your identity does not seem as fixed and solid.  This feels, initially, like incipient madness.  But if I was going to go crazy, it would have happened long ago.  Long, long ago.

No: what this becomes, with time and practice and flexibility, is a new way of being, of being a person in this world.  You find a more stable foundation of trust and hope and joy.  I woke up very happy this morning, for no reason I could discern.  This is the point: it is something you allow, not something you create or force.  It is a gift which visits in the night.

Maybe we are all paying the price now for how they survived back then.

Context: I laid down to go to sleep, and it hit me that we have never had it so good.  100 years ago no one reported incest, but it must have happened.  Likewise most rapes.  Life was hard for most, disease and premature death common.  In much of the world hunger was and remains common, as does insufficient or bad quality water.  There were wars, economic crashes, forced marriages, loveless and inescapable marriages, dead kids.  There were bosses who were tyrants, companies which ground down your soul.

Is it true that Americans now are less tough, or that they are just more honest?  Can we not stipulate it is a bit of both, and that the new softness has also a new kindness that need not become decadent?

I am just musing aloud.  I should and will go back to bed, for my nightly adventures.  God only knows what will happen, but if it’s interesting and something I’m willing to share, I may report it tomorrow.

I will recur to my comment on my family a post or two ago.  I had an interaction, specifically, with my mother, the whole meaning of which I think I just figured out.

Where most people are concerned–and this will vary in truth depending on their level of personal integration and psychological health and maturity–there are three reasons for doing things: the one they offer others, the one they secretly believe themselves, and the real one.

Obviously, squared away people do not play games like this.  I don’t play games like this.  I may be a dick sometimes, but you know why.  There are no spider webs in my vicinity.

Where my mother is concerned, though, she first deceives herself–she is convinced, I think, that she is a meek and helpless, utterly mild person, when in fact she regularly pushes into the world large quantities of spite and venom–then she tries to deceive others, in that she attributes to others her secret motives that she won’t own.  Then she comes up with a cover story to tie it all together, seemingly.

Thirty years ago, some-odd, I was hearing phrases from therapists like “playing the martyr”, and “psychological blackmail”, and I really saw them in action for the first time in the reflective reenactments of the past two weeks I did in my mind today.

It is congenial and bland–even if perhaps most often correct–to assume that most things are what they appear to be.  That that nice old man is a nice old man; that that terrible criminal is a terrible criminal; that Democrats just want all of us to be happy and educated and prosperous; that to promise something means an attempt will be made to deliver it.

But people like me: I am like someone who grew up in medieval Italy–or as a modern Corleone in New York (I single out Italy by the way, but there is no reason to assume this was not ubiquitous the world over where large amounts of money and power were concerned)–where everyone was constantly scheming and planning and promising and backstabbing, and where you had to have a plan for all contingencies, and trust your gut when you assumed the worst.

It’s more work looking behind the curtain.   It’s more work being alert to people who are trying to fuck you over.  And most of the time–depending on who you are, what you do and where you live–that work is wasted.  Nobody is trying to get you.  You’re not on any lists.  The people you see around you would, most of them, pull you out of a burning car, and nearly all of them would stop by the side of the road to help you if you didn’t have a cell phone.

But the thing is, if you have this habit, and you allow it to run long enough, because you can’t help it, you DO start to see a lot of fucked up stuff the complacent people of the world take for granted they are protected from, that they assume will never affect them.

I won’t say we are on a precipice, but there are a lot of ways our system could break.  And what is CLEAR to me is that our national leaders are not even REMOTELY able to discuss these things with the sobriety, care, attention, and intelligence they require and deserve. 

It’s maddening.  But, then, I’m used to this situation.  I grew up with it.  

I went for a walk today–it is a splendid day, the sort that I like with mild winds, moving clouds, air ripe with moisture and the possibility of a storm–and it occurred to me that addicts–particularly opioid addicts–are really the Identified Patients of our national social system.

I mean particularly the people for whom the routine risk of sudden death is less to be feared than life without that drug, and all it provides.  People who feel so little a part of our common life that they are willing to play Russian Roulette across wide time spans, knowing that their time is likely to come.

Can we not call sick the culture which produces such people?  A culture where they feel unwanted, unclaimed, and purposeless?  This can happen to rich kids and street urchins.  I knew a woman in college–at Berkeley–who was the daughter of a psychiatrist who wound up living with her drug dealer in Oakland.  Perhaps he became her pimp too.  I lost track of her.  People fall off the grid like that all the time. I only heard about it long after the fact.  All I knew is she stopped attending classes.

But just as sick families produce people with obvious problems, can we not call The American Way of Life in some respects a dysfunctional, non-nourishing, bleak shadow of what is possible in terms of inclusion and the sense that life is meaningful (I just started Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan, by the way, and fell in love immediately with the first two pages)?

Are not the completely related phenomena of increasing opioid addiction, increasing suicide, and increasing depression (especially among the young) all dead canaries in our collective coal mine? 

Where are the people coming up with ideas?  I don’t see it.  I see a bunch of fucking douchebags on one side trying to double the speed at which our culture collapses, and a bunch of largely self interested but also, in principle, principled people failing to see the problem.  You have one set of saboteurs, and opposing them people largely asleep at the wheel.  They push Christianity, but that is not going to solve these problems.

My plea would be this: can we at least try to pause the fucking destruction?  I know it won’t happen: too many careers depend on it, and too many wicked, sick people are pushing it with far too much money.  But that would be my plea.  As I shared elsewhere today, I see Trump mainly as a stopgap, as someone who is delaying the pace of the retreat, someone who is buying time for good people to come up with good ideas that may actually work.

I have ideas, but I’m just one fucking small person with a shitload of my own issues.

I’ll keep pushing, and eventually things will start to crystalize for me in ways I can usefully share, but I won’t lie and say I feel any optimism at all.

I spend a lot of time alone.  I don’t have an office to go to, and where I am doing my work varies week to week, as do the people I am working with.  I go to bars just to hear someone say my name who (sort of) knows me.  They know my name, at least.  Some bars, it goes a bit deeper.

But I have really been dipping into this solitude.  It is a rich, rich place, especially compared to what I will (perhaps arrogantly, and accuse me in your mind to your hearts content) call the stupid bullshit that preoccupies most people.

We are here.  We know we die.  We know our bodies are fragile.  We know people lie and seek power, and that all religions most likely have been deformed somewhere in the past thousand years, if not much sooner.  We know too many scientists today lie and seek power.  They are our priests.  It is not a new story: it is a very, very old story.

Wrestling with and coming to terms with Verworfenheit is the game, is it not?  Nobody is going to do it for me, and nobody CAN or SHOULD do it for me.  This is the heart of this thing we reify as “Life”.

Several weeks ago I realized, with a bit of panic, that the core problem with extended solitude is that I lack a mirror: there is no one to tell me I exist, to acknowledge that I exist, to say my name, to react when I do or say something.

What I am realizing today–and by the way, after getting drunk Thursday night I have fasted 44 hours, about which I will write more as I really get to know it better–is that there is a mirror.  We are or can be present to ourselves, but ONLY IF WE ARE HONEST.

Solitude punishes liars.  It punishes people who thrive on and live in worlds of self deception.  Solitude makes them feel like they don’t exist, that they are dissolving.  It fills them with nervous anxiety.

But I am finding that even with profoundly negative experiences, when they show up honestly, as they really happened, they are like old friends.  They are pieces of me which I had lost.  They enrich me, help me feel more complete.

I don’t really want to be a hermit, but I will suggest that solitude is one of the most profound truth serums you can take, if you are willing to do the work of listening.  And it is work.  It is evoked–or at least, you need to be ready when it comes to you unbidden.  You have to sit listening, ready to pounce. 

With respect to fasting I had read some time ago that the poet Hafez fell in love with some woman.  To get here, he fasted forty days inside a circle where he sat night and day.  At the end, he had fallen in love with God.  This is how I recall it, anyway.

40 days is a bit crazy, but I do wonder if in coming years I might not try something like that for 2-3 days.  Sufis in some cases call spiritual work “polishing the inner mirror”, which fits quite well with my own analogy.  Such works yields more of the real You, and makes competing possibilities pale in comparison.  This is why so many Tibetans, I suppose, die in caves.

Few of us in America have even begun to suspect what is possible.  Maybe some of the people who have used hallucinogens, but my personal view is that such things have to be placed in the context of a much larger, very sincere spiritual practice, and my own experience is that such a thing appears to be vanishingly rare.

I am no doubt still quite blind, though.  I must have missed things I might have seen.  I am trying to wind myself down and open myself up to this possibility, to go and do things I have viewed for some years with distaste, like visiting my local Buddhist temple.  Maybe they aren’t all assholes, even though I know for a fact at least one of the board members is.

My vision is spirituality with the F word, a firm grounding in reality with no bullshit, and a focus on basic sanity, which most of us lack.

Villains evolve out of the need all human beings have for hate.

Corollary: the hidden will always find a way to speak.

Context: I recently had some interactions with my family.  I try to avoid those, and since they live far away, it is not usually very hard. 

But without providing too much information, I realized something: I was forced, by the circumstances of my family situation, and my own seemingly congenital passion for truth, into playing the role of the villain in my own family.

Going back many years, I was what I guess some, perhaps all, psychologists call the “Identified Patient”.  This is the person, in a sick system, who manifest actual symptoms.  They are the ones unable to deal with Orwellian DoubleSpeak, silent emotional violence, profound coldness, and continual outright self serving delusion.  They become neurotic, not because they are inherently unhealthy, but because the system is unhealthy, and they lack the capacity for internalizing conflict–to make it outwardly hard to see–and to lie to themselves about their experiences.

It is no exaggeration, I don’t think, that I spent, even in my youth, more hours on the therapists couch than the rest of my family put together.  It ripped me apart, because at that time I had no advocates, no one in my corner.  Shrinks don’t count, because they are (highly) paid friends.  They’ll side with whoever is paying the bills.  That is my honest opinion, with regard to most of them.  It’s more than a little a whorish business.  You can’t make money if people don’t keep coming back.

And what I am feeling now is that people who feel emotional violence on the inside will regularly find ways to make enemies who justify their own violence.  As I have commented before, I don’t think it would be exaggerating to say the British Empire was made necessary by their inability to speak emotional truth, and to be open.

And, again, this speaks to Trump Derangement Syndrome.  They had to make enemies of us, in order to justify their own inchoate rage.  We all need boundaries.  We all need defensive barriers, places which are us, and outside of which the world operates separately. 

And the essence of Leftist practice and ritual is the denial of self, of family, of place, of country, of religion, of history.  Nothing is sacred.  Nothing is valuable.

Any animal, denied all this, will become mad with anxiety and defensive rage.  Where does it go?  At us, at “normals”, of course.

This anger is not even approximately proportionate to anything Trump has ever in his life said or done.  It does not come from him.  It has virtually nothing to do with him.  Its source is elsewhere.

The thing about being cut deeply is you learn a lot about your own emotional anatomy, and there is no reason in my view to fear generalizing much of my own experience to the world as a whole.  I am not put together differently than anyone else, in the end.  If I am different, it is only because my particular environment evolved me in a particular and unusual direction.  That, and I was blessed with a relatively high degree of native intelligence.

War and conflict are the truth of the human form.  To transcend them, one must transcend the human form.

True?  Not True?  How would one answer that question? 

Might it be the case that trying to answer that question would itself involve a struggle?  Can we gauge the quality of the human life by the caliber and level of the conflicts?

Without war, are we mindless sponges?  With war, are we perhaps also mindless sponges? 

Just talking out loud.

When someone is telling you a story about a decision they made in the past which they plainly continue to wrestle with, always assure them as strongly as your constitution and persuasive ability permit you to that they made the correct decision.

Last night, I heard some awful stories.  Today, more.

Last night someone was telling me about losing his son to suicide.  The whole thing was a mess.  He was a combat veteran himself.  He had–and I will differentiate these–at least Traumatic Grief, Traumatic Guilt, and probably PTSD.  He felt keenly the loss of friends, and felt keenly the murders he had committed in war.

His marriage fell apart.   He lost the ability to protect his son.  Bad things were done which, some 15-20 years later, caused his son to kill himself.  He was wondering if he should have footed the bill for intensive long term therapy after those things were discovered and he got sole custody, something he could ill afford, and at a time when he himself–for eminently justified reasons, in my view–thought little of therapy and its value.  He chose not to pay for the therapy.

I wish I had been more emphatic that he made the right decision, that it would almost certainly have made no difference.  That is actually my view, but in any event the past is past.  What is done is done.  What is present still is his self doubt, his worry, his grief, and his pain.  That is all anyone like me need worry about or attempt to assuage.

Tonight, someone was telling me about losing two babies, both roughly the same way: his wife dilated and started “leaking” about five months in.  The second baby he was thinking maybe he could have kept.  Even at five months, he thought, maybe a child could have emerged, even if one requiring lifelong daily care.  I told him I did not think that child would have lived, in any iteration of the story, which matched what his older brother had told him.  He has obviously long wondered if he should have trusted his older brother.  My honest opinion is his older brother steered him straight.

Now, he considers adopting.  But my God, the things most kids being put up for adoption must have been through, now.  You can’t heal Developmental Trauma without Neurofeedback, and that continues to be a backwater, forgotten relic of something non-professionals tried and which sometimes worked, but which lacked enough of BEING GOD to be of long term interest to “trained professional”.  (I have beer and gin in me, by the way, but all booze ever does is amplify me.  I go to 11, when I might have stopped at eight and a half.)

Those stories last night messed me up.  I bought a bottle of gin to drink, and chose not to.  I had something at work to finish today, and I finished it.  Good on me.  Tonight, I am giving myself this small blessing.

I will share some dreams.  Several nights ago, I was dreaming of living in the sea, and coaxing shy, very sensitive sea creatures to come out.  A crab came out from under a sofa.  Some sea eel or something similarly soft came out of a box.

And I remembered I was intensively soft at one time.  I was a very sensitive child.  I literally would not harm a fly.  When we moved where there were a lot of mosquitoes, it literally took me several years to get over my guilt for killing them, even when they were biting me.  I didn’t kill bugs or anything else for any reason.

There remains, apparently, still within me a nearly infinite tenderness, a reactive capacity, a seeing capacity, a feeling and empathetic capacity.

And I do not know how to reconcile this with the part of me that can FEEL a well made knife in my hand.  I think I posted this same line recently, but I’m not sure.

How do sane people reconcile, on the one end of the continuum, infinite sensitivity and reactivity and compassion and love, and on the other the sometimes need for physical, emotional, intellectual and social violence?  How do both live in one mind?

Magic.  That is my answer.  This is my mystical power.  Maybe.  Although I remain uncertain if it is an actual power, since it is unmanifest.

Last night I was dreaming about being homeless.  I felt how people, when they first lose their homes, are brave.  They put a brave face on.  They say “it won’t be so bad”.  But with time, they lose that bravado, and with enough time they lose the ability to care outright.  I felt all this.

Then I felt being sufficiently emotionally organized to actually deal with the Powers that Be, and the assholes behind them, to actually do useful work to ameliorate their condition.  Me, without losing my patience.  Me, without quitting when the going gets shitty.  That’s new.

My God what a fascinating thing this life is.  I feel it.  Life is in the feeling.  When you are doing, there is a shield in front of you.  Life is happening to the shield.  You can, of course, do with feeling, too, and that is the task most of us need to learn.

What really makes sense to me is that trying our best–which of course is almost never our best, but always feels like more than we thought we were capable of–is really what is asked of us.

I used to tell my kids–and I’ve likely shared this thought here–that God is not a fucking idiot.  God feels us, sees us, knows us.  There is no need for or point of pretense.  Be how you are.  Speak your truth.  Know that you have most likely fucked up seriously and often in ways you were too fucking stupid to see.  And know that what is infinite will be infinite with you, too.

There is a thousandfold the compassion any of us need in any inch of this universe.  If we can’t find it, it will eventually come to us.