It begins with the Guinea Pigs:
What are we talking about when we are talking? In therapy when you talk about one thing but you are really talking about something deeper we call it "doing it in the displacement." Today we dealt with life and death by talking about my patient's guinea pigs. 50 year old white woman, from a privileged background, with a history of eating disorders, body dysmorphia, borderline, suicidality, and bipolar with depressive features. When I meet someone like this their prescriber hands them off to me with a sigh--they take medication to smoothe out some of the rough patches but often they have a lifetime of multiple hospitalizations for delusional thinking or suicidality and the twenty minutes they get with their doctor or psychiatric nurse is the most therapy that they are getting--and often the most enduring relationship that they have in a lifetime of explosive or failed relationships, stressed family members, sad losses.
As a social worker, and an ex anthropologist, I tend to come at therapy from a strengths based perspective--what can this person do, not what can't they do. More integral to my approach is that I tend to focus on joy, creativity, expansion rather than contraction, on the idea that most of my patients are already taking care of themselves pretty well they just need more encouragement to recognize what they are doing as valuable and skillful. Also, because of my interest in Trauma work, I tend to draw on a model of the person which is multiplex--all of us have at least five nameable parts to our responses to stress: Fighter, Flier, Freezer, Fawner, Follower. Most of my patients rotate through these five responses to stress, or to me, or to therapy, or to family so fast that I can get fired several times in one session by a fighter, or someone who is experienced in freezing may collapse and seemingly go catatonic in session. Princess Sparkle Pony once mimicked freezing so successfully that she got hospitalized right out of my session room when none of us could rouse her although once she got to the ER she sat up and said "Aimai was wrong" quite normally and furiously.
We started session with [Brenda] telling me that she had nearly had a panic attack trying to take her guinea pig to the veterinarian (immediate problem) which I addressed practically. We ended it talking about death--about her fear of death and her experience, as a child, of her mother's near death and multi-month hospitalization, of her mother's depression, and of her own desire to shrink, starve, and vanish. To blow her brains out through a pillow. "I think I've always been afraid of death" she said dreamily, as she packed up pumpkin to go to the vets.
Thursday, May 21, 2020
Thursday, May 7, 2020
The Truth, and Nothing But the Truth, and Apparently The Whole Truth Too.
Anxious patient "What's going to happen?"
Anxious therapist "We are heading for a deep depression in which millions will be out of work, people will become homeless, and people will starve. After a while, if we don't apply Keynsian principles, the federal government will move to reinstitution slavery."
Anxious patient "Oh."
Anxious therapist "We are heading for a deep depression in which millions will be out of work, people will become homeless, and people will starve. After a while, if we don't apply Keynsian principles, the federal government will move to reinstitution slavery."
Anxious patient "Oh."
Tuesday, April 28, 2020
WORKING FROM HOME
I've been working from home since late March--I actually self furloughed the week before my managers realized they needed to move as many of us home as they could. The situation became untenable as I could not, in good conscience, ask my patients--many of whom have chronic physical health problems on top of their mental illness--to come to the office. For the last week before I came home I was madly engaging in sanitation theater by wiping down the chairs and the door between patients. But I was becoming increasingly anxious myself on public transportation and as I realized that even in a Medical Health Provider Organization my bosses were sleepwalking forward without thinking at all about our health and safety as workers.
A few days after I came home they figured it out--and to do them credit a lot had to be put in place in a short space of time. I work in a 500+ organization that provides health care and mental health services, runs group homes for the developmentally delayed, mentally ill, and addicted and which runs three clinics one of which (mine) is devoted primarily to persons living with psychotic disorders. Now the clinics are closed and the prescribers (psychiatric nurses and doctors) and the clinicians (clinical social workers) are all working from home. We are not yet licensed to give tele therapy by Zoom so no face to face work but we are permitted to access our medical records and call our patients.
I'm busier than ever and its terrible and wonderful at the same time. For me being able to work through this pandemic has been a saving grace, I can't imagine what I would be doing if I were just sheltering in place with no work demands. And the work itself is very rewarding still--ridiculous, touching, powerful. But there is no respite--not even five minutes to walk down the hall and chat with the secretaries, or as in the bad old days walk down the hall, out through the swinging doors, around to another corridor, unlock the door to our disgusting bathroom, and run back to the next patient. Instead I sit down at my desk at 8:30, review charts and make notes about who I'm going to call and the order that they are expecting the call, check email and respond to whatever crisis or hospitalization or plea for support from another provider, and then I start calling at 9:00 and finish at 5:00. Now I take an hour break for lunch, where before I ate at my desk for 20 minutes. That's because I'm working from home with four other people all of whom would like to be able to scamper around the first floor and eat lunch in more time than I had been giving them. I grab my lunch and retreat to my bedroom and eat in solitude while they emerge from their rooms/desks and eat lunch together.
I sometimes speak to eight or nine patients in a single day. One new intake a week. The work feels qualitatively different because when people come to your office in a sense they have self selected for functionality. They have chosen to come in to see me, they have gotten dressed and made it on public transportation or arranged The Ride (subsidized transportation for elderly/disabled), and they are quite triumphant and organized when they get to me. Calling people at home is like throwing a lifeline to a drowning person--they may fight, they may be confused, they may pull you in. I've had several sessions with people who are cowering under the blankets--I have even asked people to get into bed and pull the covers up if they sound like they are having a panic attack--It feels like a high wire act, like juggling bombs, choose your metaphor. Absurdly, its a bit like calling my daughters when they were in college--its quite a familiar experience to have to parent at a distance and hold someone's hand over the phone.
Its fine, its all good, but the tension involved in having to switch gears so rapidly is overwhelming. I have hard of hearing patients with trauma histories and delusional thinking (VPN communication), I have trans patients who are depressed/anxious and schizophrenic living in shelter, hiding their identity from the other shelter patients, I have Princess Sparkle Poney who is alternately suicidal and in a rage with me and hand making me gifts; I have patients who are depressed and delusional CEOs of failed companies, I have a guy I call Chance the Gardener who never launched but did rouse himself enough to stab a relative with a fork and throw himself in front of a train, I have Lady Job whose life history reads like outtakes from a Dennis Lehane novel, I have little Mouse woman schizophrenic woman who usually comes to my office and chooses a rock from a bowl and takes it away, I have a patient for whom I have cast out demons and prayed to Jesus. I have about 35 patients at the moment, and one more every week, and I speak to about 26 + of them every week or otherwise touch base about the rest of them via email or conversation with other prescribers/caregivers.
I have patients who don't know what day it is and others who sit waiting for my call. Such is the uncertainty of the situation that being four minutes late for a call caused one patient to spin out and begin worrying that I had died or that the clinic had closed without informing him. I have had patients tell me not to bother calling who then call a week later asking to be put back on the schedule. I've been fired twice by the same patient and then when I call the next week she resumes with me as though nothing happened. I have basically taciturn, non communicative patients ask for the teletherapy session and then be floored when I point out that we need to be talking or its not much use. One thing that I do now that is entirely new: I send cards to a lot of my patients. Just cheery notes so they have something to hang on to between sessions. The borderline patients often have both separation anxiety and lack object permanence so they love it. The paranoid ones love it too but they scold me, fondly, for "putting too much information into it" since they believe that their housemates are creeping into their rooms at night and reading things left out. "But its ok" one told me, "I keep it in my pocketbook so no one else can see it, but you should really know better." [The letter had said "I look forward to our next session on ___ date."
OK, got to run, the day begins!
A few days after I came home they figured it out--and to do them credit a lot had to be put in place in a short space of time. I work in a 500+ organization that provides health care and mental health services, runs group homes for the developmentally delayed, mentally ill, and addicted and which runs three clinics one of which (mine) is devoted primarily to persons living with psychotic disorders. Now the clinics are closed and the prescribers (psychiatric nurses and doctors) and the clinicians (clinical social workers) are all working from home. We are not yet licensed to give tele therapy by Zoom so no face to face work but we are permitted to access our medical records and call our patients.
I'm busier than ever and its terrible and wonderful at the same time. For me being able to work through this pandemic has been a saving grace, I can't imagine what I would be doing if I were just sheltering in place with no work demands. And the work itself is very rewarding still--ridiculous, touching, powerful. But there is no respite--not even five minutes to walk down the hall and chat with the secretaries, or as in the bad old days walk down the hall, out through the swinging doors, around to another corridor, unlock the door to our disgusting bathroom, and run back to the next patient. Instead I sit down at my desk at 8:30, review charts and make notes about who I'm going to call and the order that they are expecting the call, check email and respond to whatever crisis or hospitalization or plea for support from another provider, and then I start calling at 9:00 and finish at 5:00. Now I take an hour break for lunch, where before I ate at my desk for 20 minutes. That's because I'm working from home with four other people all of whom would like to be able to scamper around the first floor and eat lunch in more time than I had been giving them. I grab my lunch and retreat to my bedroom and eat in solitude while they emerge from their rooms/desks and eat lunch together.
I sometimes speak to eight or nine patients in a single day. One new intake a week. The work feels qualitatively different because when people come to your office in a sense they have self selected for functionality. They have chosen to come in to see me, they have gotten dressed and made it on public transportation or arranged The Ride (subsidized transportation for elderly/disabled), and they are quite triumphant and organized when they get to me. Calling people at home is like throwing a lifeline to a drowning person--they may fight, they may be confused, they may pull you in. I've had several sessions with people who are cowering under the blankets--I have even asked people to get into bed and pull the covers up if they sound like they are having a panic attack--It feels like a high wire act, like juggling bombs, choose your metaphor. Absurdly, its a bit like calling my daughters when they were in college--its quite a familiar experience to have to parent at a distance and hold someone's hand over the phone.
Its fine, its all good, but the tension involved in having to switch gears so rapidly is overwhelming. I have hard of hearing patients with trauma histories and delusional thinking (VPN communication), I have trans patients who are depressed/anxious and schizophrenic living in shelter, hiding their identity from the other shelter patients, I have Princess Sparkle Poney who is alternately suicidal and in a rage with me and hand making me gifts; I have patients who are depressed and delusional CEOs of failed companies, I have a guy I call Chance the Gardener who never launched but did rouse himself enough to stab a relative with a fork and throw himself in front of a train, I have Lady Job whose life history reads like outtakes from a Dennis Lehane novel, I have little Mouse woman schizophrenic woman who usually comes to my office and chooses a rock from a bowl and takes it away, I have a patient for whom I have cast out demons and prayed to Jesus. I have about 35 patients at the moment, and one more every week, and I speak to about 26 + of them every week or otherwise touch base about the rest of them via email or conversation with other prescribers/caregivers.
I have patients who don't know what day it is and others who sit waiting for my call. Such is the uncertainty of the situation that being four minutes late for a call caused one patient to spin out and begin worrying that I had died or that the clinic had closed without informing him. I have had patients tell me not to bother calling who then call a week later asking to be put back on the schedule. I've been fired twice by the same patient and then when I call the next week she resumes with me as though nothing happened. I have basically taciturn, non communicative patients ask for the teletherapy session and then be floored when I point out that we need to be talking or its not much use. One thing that I do now that is entirely new: I send cards to a lot of my patients. Just cheery notes so they have something to hang on to between sessions. The borderline patients often have both separation anxiety and lack object permanence so they love it. The paranoid ones love it too but they scold me, fondly, for "putting too much information into it" since they believe that their housemates are creeping into their rooms at night and reading things left out. "But its ok" one told me, "I keep it in my pocketbook so no one else can see it, but you should really know better." [The letter had said "I look forward to our next session on ___ date."
OK, got to run, the day begins!
Friday, March 6, 2020
MENTAL HEALTH DAY
How time flies!** I've been at this for more than a year now and I don't come over to my own blog much. I'm taking a mental health day today and spending time in a cafe with Mr. Aimai and I suddenly really wanted to share some of the work with you all. (Victor, if you are reading, and Yaz, thank you so much for keeping an eye out for me! I think of you both all the time and look for you on the net).
Life at work continues to be enormously satisfying. There is something about passing that one year mark. I feel now like I've seen almost everything at least once. On one memorable day I had to handle the possible new patients--multiple people who show up and just ask to be seen and have to be evaluated--and also a walk in guy who just wanted to have his hand held. This meant rocketing from an elderly clubfooted gentleman who was sent to us by his priest for too much sinning (Aimai: Is it a Cardinal or Venal sin? Man: Its a MORTAL sin!" to a sad eyed elfin girl who insisted on speaking for the whole meeting through a large stuffed hippopotamus and who was working at a vegan cupcake store because of course she was. There was the elderly barfly from the wrong side of the white tracks who thinks Matt Damon stole his life story ("That was me working in MIT, I'm a genius, I've had my identity and my work stolen many times, I also wrote Fast and Furious--the God's Eye episode." ) There was the super paranoid schizophrenic who thinks he is "Just depressed" and thinks he has been treated for depression for 20 years instead of for schizophrenia. He is sure that an international conspiracy has robbed him of his life ("They are against me, that is why I'm not married." Aimai "An international conspiracy, if they are so powerful why aren't you dead yet?" Man: "Oh, well, maybe they are going easy on me." ) He is very snotty with me "No offense but I would rather work with a Psychiatrist or a Psychologist or someone with a Ph.D." Aimai "Well, I do have a Ph.D but not the kind you are looking for no, doubt. However you will just have to make do with me as the Psychiatrists and Psychologists are too expensive to give you therapy, and you seem to need therapy." Him "OK, well, can you tell me in the five minutes we have left how to reduce my paranoia?" Aimai: "No. Not in five minutes. Come back regularly and we'll see what we can do."(Reader: he didn't.)
I have been fired quite a few times by patients who don't like to work with me but I've also had the enormously satisfying experience of having patients come back a few months later and tell my manager "I want to come back to work with Aimai, it feels like a boxing match but I know that something is happening, I can feel the change. My new therapist was a guy and he never said anything. What was the point?" I found out that this guy--middle aged white ethnic guy--was coming back to me on the same day that I had another revelatory moment which I bundle into the observation that for some white ethnic guys, from an ethnicity which will not be named, shouting "shut the fuck up" turns out to be very soothing. They literally don't feel seen by women or therapists if you don't match the intensity of their emotional level. I had a very wonderful, miserable, collapsed, chaotic, patient--the kind of guy who has a permanent black cloud hanging over their head and who always makes the wrong choice every time increasing his misery and his poverty and stress, limp in on a cane, back against the wall, struggling to manage his status and housing, to discuss his depression. He had injured himself having unsafe sex with a drug addicted homeless woman ("Really embracing sex and death at the same time, eh?" I said unsympathetically "Come on, Doc, that's harsh!") Me: "Look, I've got to call it like I see it. I get it but this is risky for you and her, we need to get ahead of this because you are at risk of losing your housing and you are distracting yourself with primal shit." He: argues, pouts, complains. "With all due respect, Doc you gotta let me make my point." We were on a short time line and we had paperwork and other stuff to do to save his housing and I ended up cutting him off with the therapeutic adjuration "STFU for a minute" and he gave an enormous sigh and got up to go and said, with a look of complete bliss "I feel better, I really do. I was so depressed when I got here and now, somehow, I feel better." I was telling this story to my coworkers in team , arguing that you have to co-regulate with your clients by meeting them at the intensity that they are at and then bringing them down to functionality. If someone says "I'VE GOT A PROBLEM" you have to agree at that level YES YOU DO AND I'M LISTENING or they just don't know that you are listening. One of the others, who had handled this guy for a year before me, said suddenly "Oh my god, no wonder I never got along with him, I'm half Canadian."
**All patient information has been anonymized and changed so that no real patients are described. Descriptions are composites and not true to age, sex, gender, race, or diagnosis.
Life at work continues to be enormously satisfying. There is something about passing that one year mark. I feel now like I've seen almost everything at least once. On one memorable day I had to handle the possible new patients--multiple people who show up and just ask to be seen and have to be evaluated--and also a walk in guy who just wanted to have his hand held. This meant rocketing from an elderly clubfooted gentleman who was sent to us by his priest for too much sinning (Aimai: Is it a Cardinal or Venal sin? Man: Its a MORTAL sin!" to a sad eyed elfin girl who insisted on speaking for the whole meeting through a large stuffed hippopotamus and who was working at a vegan cupcake store because of course she was. There was the elderly barfly from the wrong side of the white tracks who thinks Matt Damon stole his life story ("That was me working in MIT, I'm a genius, I've had my identity and my work stolen many times, I also wrote Fast and Furious--the God's Eye episode." ) There was the super paranoid schizophrenic who thinks he is "Just depressed" and thinks he has been treated for depression for 20 years instead of for schizophrenia. He is sure that an international conspiracy has robbed him of his life ("They are against me, that is why I'm not married." Aimai "An international conspiracy, if they are so powerful why aren't you dead yet?" Man: "Oh, well, maybe they are going easy on me." ) He is very snotty with me "No offense but I would rather work with a Psychiatrist or a Psychologist or someone with a Ph.D." Aimai "Well, I do have a Ph.D but not the kind you are looking for no, doubt. However you will just have to make do with me as the Psychiatrists and Psychologists are too expensive to give you therapy, and you seem to need therapy." Him "OK, well, can you tell me in the five minutes we have left how to reduce my paranoia?" Aimai: "No. Not in five minutes. Come back regularly and we'll see what we can do."(Reader: he didn't.)
I have been fired quite a few times by patients who don't like to work with me but I've also had the enormously satisfying experience of having patients come back a few months later and tell my manager "I want to come back to work with Aimai, it feels like a boxing match but I know that something is happening, I can feel the change. My new therapist was a guy and he never said anything. What was the point?" I found out that this guy--middle aged white ethnic guy--was coming back to me on the same day that I had another revelatory moment which I bundle into the observation that for some white ethnic guys, from an ethnicity which will not be named, shouting "shut the fuck up" turns out to be very soothing. They literally don't feel seen by women or therapists if you don't match the intensity of their emotional level. I had a very wonderful, miserable, collapsed, chaotic, patient--the kind of guy who has a permanent black cloud hanging over their head and who always makes the wrong choice every time increasing his misery and his poverty and stress, limp in on a cane, back against the wall, struggling to manage his status and housing, to discuss his depression. He had injured himself having unsafe sex with a drug addicted homeless woman ("Really embracing sex and death at the same time, eh?" I said unsympathetically "Come on, Doc, that's harsh!") Me: "Look, I've got to call it like I see it. I get it but this is risky for you and her, we need to get ahead of this because you are at risk of losing your housing and you are distracting yourself with primal shit." He: argues, pouts, complains. "With all due respect, Doc you gotta let me make my point." We were on a short time line and we had paperwork and other stuff to do to save his housing and I ended up cutting him off with the therapeutic adjuration "STFU for a minute" and he gave an enormous sigh and got up to go and said, with a look of complete bliss "I feel better, I really do. I was so depressed when I got here and now, somehow, I feel better." I was telling this story to my coworkers in team , arguing that you have to co-regulate with your clients by meeting them at the intensity that they are at and then bringing them down to functionality. If someone says "I'VE GOT A PROBLEM" you have to agree at that level YES YOU DO AND I'M LISTENING or they just don't know that you are listening. One of the others, who had handled this guy for a year before me, said suddenly "Oh my god, no wonder I never got along with him, I'm half Canadian."
**All patient information has been anonymized and changed so that no real patients are described. Descriptions are composites and not true to age, sex, gender, race, or diagnosis.
Sunday, December 22, 2019
My New Life
All information about patients or staff has been anonymized and altered as to gender, age, race and history in order to provide anonymity to everyone.
I am entering my sixth month working with people with psychotic disorders--schizophrenia, schizoaffective, a mere bipolar with psychotic symtpoms seems like a walk in the park. I fell into this job--being offered it after being turned down for three others. It is in an awful building physically, he a homeless shelter in it as well as one for sex offenders. The population we serve are severely disabled by their psychosis, impoverished, frequently homeless or hospitalized. I have both male and female patients and some who are gender fluid or in transition. I have people who hear voices and have command hallucinations to hurt themselves, and I have people who are merely delusional and have fixed and unrealistic or bizarre beliefs about their own lives and that of the people they meet. I have paranoid schizophrenics, a whole other ball game. I have professionals (occasionally) who manage their symptoms and lead an ordinary life and people who are nearly catatonic and utterly lack insight.
This work is so new to me that I am frequently reminded of my early days as a new mother--my husband and I would turn to each other and say "can you believe it?" because we could remember the time before. Before needing a babysitter to leave home. Before needing to plan ahead for baby disasters. For me the time before includes being in control of my own time instead of working (like everyone else! how did I miss this!) nine to five, monday through friday. I get up at five thirty, shower, and get on the bus and take myself to a cafe for an hour to make notes to myself about the day ahead, or the day before, or to read for my trauma class (which meets most Monday nights at a nearby university for two and a half hours). Then I get on the subway and head into work aiming to be there by 8:15 and work without a break, or only stolen breaks, until five when they kick us out of the building because it is too dangerous to stay later. If I come in at 8:30 the homeless men and women are leaving the shelter for the day and walking into work through the ugly, basement, door that is assigned to us is like walking through a cloud of smokey zombies. The ones who are my patients greet me happily, the others who are in various stages of sleepy distress or confusion simply ignore me. If I leave early, at four thirty, they are coming back into the shelter and there is a lot of sadness and despair pooling in the hallway and the elevator. I found this daunting at first--and there are other people in the office who tell me that they never take the elevators at all because of anxiety about being attacked or because for an entire summer someone was peeing in the elevator and they never found out who it was.
The significance of the awfulness of the building is this: my "civilian" patients, those who come to us from the outside world that is not defined by poverty and mental illness, have a really hard time accepting that this is their new life. That their new life with their mental illness brings them into close contact with poverty, trauma, grief, homelessness. There is a safety net for our patients--and we are it!--we treat our patients with the utmost love and respect. But the environs are scary and the prognosis is not good. Mental illness such as our patients suffer is no respecter of class or race and even a wealthy, suburban, white family with everything (nominally) going for it can buckle under the weight of the demands that a family member with very resistant mental illness like schizophrenia or psychosis can place on it.
Let me take a moment to praise the people I work with. I can not tell you how beautifully the other social workers and nurse practitioners and doctors that I work with treat our patients. Every patient has someone on staff who just loves them--its almost absurd, some times, the way everyone has their personal angel advocate who will say to you, spontaneously, "I just love X! Such a wonderful person!" Even about people who, at first glance, seem completely unconnected to reality and to their surroundings. I have a patient who I will call Gandalf who has been hearing voices since his teen years--he is now very, very, old. He comes in and sits in my office and we have intermittent conversations while he is dialoguing with his inner voices. When we do speak he is courteous and thoughtful, but what he says is often very bizarre. One of my proudest moments in treatment, in our first session, is when he commented on flowers I had in my office and after listening to what I had to say about the flowers he said, dismissively, that his voices thought "the flowers are not important." I said "I think the flowers are important because they help people recognize the passing of time, as the flower grows from bulb to flower to seed, and also because they beautify the surroundings." After a long, long, long pause he suddenly said "I think I disagree with the voices, I think the flowers are important." Imagine that! I brought this up with one of the other practitioners and they said to me "when I worked with Gandalf he wouldn't come into my office because he thought there were bears in there! He has really come a long way." Their voice as they said this was so full of love and respect for Gandalf, and for the work we are all doing trying to (as we say) "hold" and "contain" these patients--so often lost and disconnected from everyone else in their lives.
I am entering my sixth month working with people with psychotic disorders--schizophrenia, schizoaffective, a mere bipolar with psychotic symtpoms seems like a walk in the park. I fell into this job--being offered it after being turned down for three others. It is in an awful building physically, he a homeless shelter in it as well as one for sex offenders. The population we serve are severely disabled by their psychosis, impoverished, frequently homeless or hospitalized. I have both male and female patients and some who are gender fluid or in transition. I have people who hear voices and have command hallucinations to hurt themselves, and I have people who are merely delusional and have fixed and unrealistic or bizarre beliefs about their own lives and that of the people they meet. I have paranoid schizophrenics, a whole other ball game. I have professionals (occasionally) who manage their symptoms and lead an ordinary life and people who are nearly catatonic and utterly lack insight.
This work is so new to me that I am frequently reminded of my early days as a new mother--my husband and I would turn to each other and say "can you believe it?" because we could remember the time before. Before needing a babysitter to leave home. Before needing to plan ahead for baby disasters. For me the time before includes being in control of my own time instead of working (like everyone else! how did I miss this!) nine to five, monday through friday. I get up at five thirty, shower, and get on the bus and take myself to a cafe for an hour to make notes to myself about the day ahead, or the day before, or to read for my trauma class (which meets most Monday nights at a nearby university for two and a half hours). Then I get on the subway and head into work aiming to be there by 8:15 and work without a break, or only stolen breaks, until five when they kick us out of the building because it is too dangerous to stay later. If I come in at 8:30 the homeless men and women are leaving the shelter for the day and walking into work through the ugly, basement, door that is assigned to us is like walking through a cloud of smokey zombies. The ones who are my patients greet me happily, the others who are in various stages of sleepy distress or confusion simply ignore me. If I leave early, at four thirty, they are coming back into the shelter and there is a lot of sadness and despair pooling in the hallway and the elevator. I found this daunting at first--and there are other people in the office who tell me that they never take the elevators at all because of anxiety about being attacked or because for an entire summer someone was peeing in the elevator and they never found out who it was.
The significance of the awfulness of the building is this: my "civilian" patients, those who come to us from the outside world that is not defined by poverty and mental illness, have a really hard time accepting that this is their new life. That their new life with their mental illness brings them into close contact with poverty, trauma, grief, homelessness. There is a safety net for our patients--and we are it!--we treat our patients with the utmost love and respect. But the environs are scary and the prognosis is not good. Mental illness such as our patients suffer is no respecter of class or race and even a wealthy, suburban, white family with everything (nominally) going for it can buckle under the weight of the demands that a family member with very resistant mental illness like schizophrenia or psychosis can place on it.
Let me take a moment to praise the people I work with. I can not tell you how beautifully the other social workers and nurse practitioners and doctors that I work with treat our patients. Every patient has someone on staff who just loves them--its almost absurd, some times, the way everyone has their personal angel advocate who will say to you, spontaneously, "I just love X! Such a wonderful person!" Even about people who, at first glance, seem completely unconnected to reality and to their surroundings. I have a patient who I will call Gandalf who has been hearing voices since his teen years--he is now very, very, old. He comes in and sits in my office and we have intermittent conversations while he is dialoguing with his inner voices. When we do speak he is courteous and thoughtful, but what he says is often very bizarre. One of my proudest moments in treatment, in our first session, is when he commented on flowers I had in my office and after listening to what I had to say about the flowers he said, dismissively, that his voices thought "the flowers are not important." I said "I think the flowers are important because they help people recognize the passing of time, as the flower grows from bulb to flower to seed, and also because they beautify the surroundings." After a long, long, long pause he suddenly said "I think I disagree with the voices, I think the flowers are important." Imagine that! I brought this up with one of the other practitioners and they said to me "when I worked with Gandalf he wouldn't come into my office because he thought there were bears in there! He has really come a long way." Their voice as they said this was so full of love and respect for Gandalf, and for the work we are all doing trying to (as we say) "hold" and "contain" these patients--so often lost and disconnected from everyone else in their lives.
Sunday, November 18, 2018
I'm Back, Not Sure How To Handle The New Privacy Issues
I seem to have been gone from my own Blog for so long that just finding it and finding my own way in was quite the struggle. The reason is that for the last two years, since 2016, I have been back at school getting my MSW and interning at two places where I felt that the privacy issues for my clients and/or patients were too complex for me to handle with a quasi public blog. That's even more true now that I've graduated and begun my first full time job as a newly minted LCSW. However I also feel like I really want a place to explore some of the theoretical and intellectual issues in my new work--which is providing clinical care to people with psychotic disorders. So I think I will open up my blog again to at least post about the things I'm reading and the issues that arise for me theoretically while doing this work. So: stay tuned.
Monday, January 30, 2017
Combating the Sore Loser Meme
The Boston Globe published a story today about the mammoth pro-refugee/immigrant rally in Copley Square yesterday. I was still nursing a broken toe and didn't go and I'd be kicking myself for missing it but...broken toe. On the other hand I forsee plenty of chances to rally and protest in the near and far future so I'm not heartbroken. There were two quotes from Republicans in the Boston Globe story. Charlie Baker gave Mitch McConnell's response which was to pretend that this was all business as usual and that "the courts" would fix things, somehow. Not a constitutional crisis, not an unconstitutional act, not immoral, just...kind of not great but if we'd all calm down and let the grown ups handle it things would be better. The other was from Trump's MA campaign manager--interesting that they couldn't get one or two of our few Republican State Reps to comment--and he gave the other party line "you were warned, you can't complain now." Actually, what he said was even more interesting, deliberately drawing attention to the fact that President Obama had delivered this mild rebuke to the Republicans after his election he said "Elections have consequences and President Trump promised to do all this during the campaign." (Paraphrasing).
We are going to hear a lot of this in the future. But its not really an answer to the protests. We aren't protesting because we don't realize the election had a consequence that put Trump into power. We are protesting because his actions are illegal, immoral, and we don't like them. This has nothing to do with the legitimacy, or otherwise, of his election. And it has nothing to do with numbers for or against his policies. It has to do with legal, illegal, moral, immoral, justice, and injustice.
And this is a point we need to be making to the remaining Trump voters as well as to the voters and non voters who were essentially on the fence, or ignorant of the choice they were making, or voting out of spite. We need to emphasize (as people already do in their signs) the larger moral and safety issues. I also think we need to start banding together in affinity groups and showing up at rallies as groups--I suppose I'm thinking this because now that I am a Social Worker I finally have a ready made group to affiliate with. But no one will be surprised when Social Workers show up en masse. I am thinking of smaller but bigger groups--PTA, a whole street, churches, new mothers, grandmothers, bowling leagues. I'm also a Weight Watcher and I want to organize a "Weight Watchers Against Deportation" group. I think back to a sign my mother saw forty years ago at a big Anti-Nuke rally in NY "East Village Weight Watchers Against The Bomb!" When every subgroup in society comes out, loud and proud, and its not clearly "interested parties" or the phantom "paid advocates" we will start to see cracks in the complacent ice that is the majority of white people in this country. I hope.
We are going to hear a lot of this in the future. But its not really an answer to the protests. We aren't protesting because we don't realize the election had a consequence that put Trump into power. We are protesting because his actions are illegal, immoral, and we don't like them. This has nothing to do with the legitimacy, or otherwise, of his election. And it has nothing to do with numbers for or against his policies. It has to do with legal, illegal, moral, immoral, justice, and injustice.
And this is a point we need to be making to the remaining Trump voters as well as to the voters and non voters who were essentially on the fence, or ignorant of the choice they were making, or voting out of spite. We need to emphasize (as people already do in their signs) the larger moral and safety issues. I also think we need to start banding together in affinity groups and showing up at rallies as groups--I suppose I'm thinking this because now that I am a Social Worker I finally have a ready made group to affiliate with. But no one will be surprised when Social Workers show up en masse. I am thinking of smaller but bigger groups--PTA, a whole street, churches, new mothers, grandmothers, bowling leagues. I'm also a Weight Watcher and I want to organize a "Weight Watchers Against Deportation" group. I think back to a sign my mother saw forty years ago at a big Anti-Nuke rally in NY "East Village Weight Watchers Against The Bomb!" When every subgroup in society comes out, loud and proud, and its not clearly "interested parties" or the phantom "paid advocates" we will start to see cracks in the complacent ice that is the majority of white people in this country. I hope.
Friday, January 27, 2017
Long Time No See
I went back to school this fall--just slightly before the crack of doom that threw the entire country on this dystopian footing. Because I am getting my MSW (that's Master's in Social Work for those not in the know) I have mixed feelings about maintaining a blog. But I was reviewing my posts today so I could send my daughter some of my Proust posts and I decided that, come hell or high water or, in the case of our post Trump world, both, blogging my experiences as a Social Work student, intern, and practitioner is worth doing. So here goes!
Saturday, July 2, 2016
On The Occasion of Our Twenty First Wedding Anniversary
The Second Day of July... will be the most memorable Epocha in the History of America--John Adams to Abigail Adams
Mixed Media Anniversary Gift. Aimai to Mr. Aimai
Hand Made Pryographia Glove Box (1906), Ketubah Poem, Carved Shell Buttons, Gilded Vintage X, Found Iron, Antique Postcards, Found Images, Tin Hand, Hand Made Book, 19th Century Newspaper Clipping on the Duties of Husbands
Left Hand: 13th Century Hebrew Poem from Our Ketubah
Right Hand: Meditation on A Midsummer Night's Dream
I have had a most rare
vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to
say what dream it was... The eye
of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not
seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue
to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream
was.
Wednesday, June 29, 2016
My Grandfather!
This is a link to a Vimeo which has just appeared. I'm not sure whether its a clip from Jerry Bruck's film about Izzy, or where it comes from. The person who posted it on Vimeo isn't sure either. There's only so much footage out there about Izzy and though I've seen bits of this before I haven't seen any film of him in a long time. I want to thank the person who put it up on Vimeo. I miss my grandfather very much, and wish he were here to comment, pungently, on the current state of US politics.
https://vimeo.com/172233617
https://vimeo.com/172233617
Thursday, June 23, 2016
These comments are in support of Betty Cracker's brilliant blog post today "Quibbling Over The Script."
"Christ! Between the bernie leftists for whom no democratic initiative is effective if it doesnt involve birds, giant puppets, or farting and the ACLU’s crack team of concern trolls worried that the democrats will lose the commanding heights of the moral hillock if they once stoop to noisy street theater, cruel manipulation, broad strokes, politics even (faints!)Or anything that smacks of stooping to conquer its no wonder we can’t have nice things. if the various flavors of left purity trolls could stop stabbing us and each other in the back perhaps hillary clinton and the kick ass dems could start to commit some god damned political winning up there. Oh, ok, I think I should take this one. I referred to the ACLU (and I’m a member, by the way) because djw, over at LGM, in a staggeringly stupid thread, referred to himself as an ACLU’er at heart. The ACLU are not concern trolling us here–but concerned citizens are behaving like concern trolls and using the ACLU’s issues and concepts as the method by which they do it."
"Christ! Between the bernie leftists for whom no democratic initiative is effective if it doesnt involve birds, giant puppets, or farting and the ACLU’s crack team of concern trolls worried that the democrats will lose the commanding heights of the moral hillock if they once stoop to noisy street theater, cruel manipulation, broad strokes, politics even (faints!)Or anything that smacks of stooping to conquer its no wonder we can’t have nice things. if the various flavors of left purity trolls could stop stabbing us and each other in the back perhaps hillary clinton and the kick ass dems could start to commit some god damned political winning up there. Oh, ok, I think I should take this one. I referred to the ACLU (and I’m a member, by the way) because djw, over at LGM, in a staggeringly stupid thread, referred to himself as an ACLU’er at heart. The ACLU are not concern trolling us here–but concerned citizens are behaving like concern trolls and using the ACLU’s issues and concepts as the method by which they do it."
"Here’s the thing–and stay with me for a moment–the ACLU does a very specific kind of legal work. Their opinion on a matter of politics, and especially electoral politics, is not dispositive. For one thing they tend to think in terms of end products (a law) with a specific set of possible precedential outcomes in a court battle. But a politician, even one who is engaged in potentially writing a law has a different set of priorities, a different understanding of the stages by which an idea becomes a law and then gets submitted for review when challenged in a court case. For one thing a legislator has to deal with time, committees, negotiations, trade offs, gestures, outside pressure, tv, as well as the bald language of the legislation. All of these things intervene between the proposal (we should do something about something) and the execution (this is the thing we are going to do). Short circuting that process for fear that the Democrats are going to turn into the Republicans on minority or muslim rights, or that their very proposal gives aid and comfort to the Republicans is absurd and, frankly, insulting.
And the proof of the pudding, by the way, is in the eating. The Republicans are so terrified of linking gun rights (constitutional right, fetishized idol) to the NFL and the Terrorist Watch List that they literally had to shut down congress to escape debating it. I always know when a thread is over–because that’s when I really get started posting! I want to say something else about the ACLU/naysayers group of commenters. There’s a whole lot of accusations floating around that people who applaud the Dem sit in are “acting like Republicans” and “using Cheneyite” language, or blurring a necessary distinction between our essential Democraticness (goodness, honesty, openness, purity of speech and deed) and their essential Republicanness (ugly, lying, mean, etc…). Politics–the art of the possible, always local, etc..etc..etc… is, in this model, irremiediably filthy and therefore not becoming to Democrats. Because politics always involves a lot of stuff that seems kind of wrong. Like accusing your opponent of pig fucking just to make him deny it. Or putting your oponent into the position of telling you when he stopped beating his wife. Or drawing his policies out to their absurd conclusion and making fun of him. All these things are certainly very messy, and involve passion (and faking passion) and involve arousing the passions of the voters. They are not the platonic ideal of rational debate of a subject on the merits.
Well–boo fucking hoo. If that is what it takes to get stringent gun laws passed I’m for it. I’m not for extra scrutiny for Muslims, the no fly list, or stripping my fellow citizens of their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but I am for damned sure pro getting guns out of the hands of ordinary citizens.
Time is what makes kittens into cats, and what keeps everything from happening all at once. The Democrats are fighting just to get the chance to talk about gun laws at all. After that we can argue about how new legislation gets drafted. And if you think anyone is listening to the details and will throw in the Democrats faces that they once, for a day, argued that “terrorists” should not be able to buy guns, well–you really don’t know the first thing about the American Public which would have to be hit in the face with a two by four, repeatedly, day after day before they woke up and said “huh? Whuh hoppen?”
And the proof of the pudding, by the way, is in the eating. The Republicans are so terrified of linking gun rights (constitutional right, fetishized idol) to the NFL and the Terrorist Watch List that they literally had to shut down congress to escape debating it. I always know when a thread is over–because that’s when I really get started posting! I want to say something else about the ACLU/naysayers group of commenters. There’s a whole lot of accusations floating around that people who applaud the Dem sit in are “acting like Republicans” and “using Cheneyite” language, or blurring a necessary distinction between our essential Democraticness (goodness, honesty, openness, purity of speech and deed) and their essential Republicanness (ugly, lying, mean, etc…). Politics–the art of the possible, always local, etc..etc..etc… is, in this model, irremiediably filthy and therefore not becoming to Democrats. Because politics always involves a lot of stuff that seems kind of wrong. Like accusing your opponent of pig fucking just to make him deny it. Or putting your oponent into the position of telling you when he stopped beating his wife. Or drawing his policies out to their absurd conclusion and making fun of him. All these things are certainly very messy, and involve passion (and faking passion) and involve arousing the passions of the voters. They are not the platonic ideal of rational debate of a subject on the merits.
Well–boo fucking hoo. If that is what it takes to get stringent gun laws passed I’m for it. I’m not for extra scrutiny for Muslims, the no fly list, or stripping my fellow citizens of their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but I am for damned sure pro getting guns out of the hands of ordinary citizens.
Time is what makes kittens into cats, and what keeps everything from happening all at once. The Democrats are fighting just to get the chance to talk about gun laws at all. After that we can argue about how new legislation gets drafted. And if you think anyone is listening to the details and will throw in the Democrats faces that they once, for a day, argued that “terrorists” should not be able to buy guns, well–you really don’t know the first thing about the American Public which would have to be hit in the face with a two by four, repeatedly, day after day before they woke up and said “huh? Whuh hoppen?”
These comments are in support of Betty Cracker's brilliant blog post today "Quibbling Over The Script."
">Christ! Between the bernie leftists for whom no democratic initiative is effective if it doesnt involve birds, giant puppets, or farting and the ACLU’s crack team of concern trolls worried that the democrats will lose the commanding heights of the moral hillock if they once stoop to noisy street theater, cruel manipulation, broad strokes, politics even (faints!)Or anything that smacks of stooping to conquer its no wonder we can’t have nice things. if the various flavors of left purity trolls could stop stabbing us and each other in the back perhaps hillary clinton and the kick ass dems could start to commit some god damned political winning up there.
Reply
@Halcyon:
Oh, ok, I think I should take this one. I referred to the ACLU (and I’m a member, by the way) because djw, over at LGM, in a staggeringly stupid thread, referred to himself as an ACLU’er at heart. The ACLU are not concern trolling us here–but concerned citizens are behaving like concern trolls and using the ACLU’s issues and concepts as the method by which they do it.
Here’s the thing–and stay with me for a moment–the ACLU does a very specific kind of legal work. Their opinion on a matter of politics, and especially electoral politics, is not dispositive. For one thing they tend to think in terms of end products (a law) with a specific set of possible precedential outcomes in a court battle. But a politician, even one who is engaged in potentially writing a law has a different set of priorities, a different understanding of the stages by which an idea becomes a law and then gets submitted for review when challenged in a court case. For one thing a legislator has to deal with time, committees, negotiations, trade offs, gestures, outside pressure, tv, as well as the bald language of the legislation. All of these things intervene between the proposal (we should do something about something) and the execution (this is the thing we are going to do). Short circuting that process for fear that the Democrats are going to turn into the Republicans on minority or muslim rights, or that their very proposal gives aid and comfort to the Republicans is absurd and, frankly, insulting.
And the proof of the pudding, by the way, is in the eating. The Republicans are so terrified of linking gun rights (constitutional right, fetishized idol) to the NFL and the Terrorist Watch List that they literally had to shut down congress to escape debating it.
And the proof of the pudding, by the way, is in the eating. The Republicans are so terrified of linking gun rights (constitutional right, fetishized idol) to the NFL and the Terrorist Watch List that they literally had to shut down congress to escape debating it.
Reply
287
I always know when a thread is over–because that’s when I really get started posting! I want to say something else about the ACLU/naysayers group of commenters. There’s a whole lot of accusations floating around that people who applaud the Dem sit in are “acting like Republicans” and “using Cheneyite” language, or blurring a necessary distinction between our essential Democraticness (goodness, honesty, openness, purity of speech and deed) and their essential Republicanness (ugly, lying, mean, etc…). Politics–the art of the possible, always local, etc..etc..etc… is, in this model, irremiediably filthy and therefore not becoming to Democrats. Because politics always involves a lot of stuff that seems kind of wrong. Like accusing your opponent of pig fucking just to make him deny it. Or putting your oponent into the position of telling you when he stopped beating his wife. Or drawing his policies out to their absurd conclusion and making fun of him. All these things are certainly very messy, and involve passion (and faking passion) and involve arousing the passions of the voters. They are not the platonic ideal of rational debate of a subject on the merits.
Well–boo fucking hoo. If that is what it takes to get stringent gun laws passed I’m for it. I’m not for extra scrutiny for Muslims, the no fly list, or stripping my fellow citizens of their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but I am for damned sure pro getting guns out of the hands of ordinary citizens.
Time is what makes kittens into cats, and what keeps everything from happening all at once. The Democrats are fighting just to get the chance to talk about gun laws at all. After that we can argue about how new legislation gets drafted. And if you think anyone is listening to the details and will throw in the Democrats faces that they once, for a day, argued that “terrorists” should not be able to buy guns, well–you really don’t know the first thing about the American Public which would have to be hit in the face with a two by four, repeatedly, day after day before they woke up and said “huh? Whuh hoppen?”
Well–boo fucking hoo. If that is what it takes to get stringent gun laws passed I’m for it. I’m not for extra scrutiny for Muslims, the no fly list, or stripping my fellow citizens of their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but I am for damned sure pro getting guns out of the hands of ordinary citizens.
Time is what makes kittens into cats, and what keeps everything from happening all at once. The Democrats are fighting just to get the chance to talk about gun laws at all. After that we can argue about how new legislation gets drafted. And if you think anyone is listening to the details and will throw in the Democrats faces that they once, for a day, argued that “terrorists” should not be able to buy guns, well–you really don’t know the first thing about the American Public which would have to be hit in the face with a two by four, repeatedly, day after day before they woke up and said “huh? Whuh hoppen?”
Monday, June 20, 2016
Cargo Cult Campaign
John Frum, He Come
Donald Trump, reports Maggie Haberman, has fired Corey Lewandowski in what could be seen as either the most recent campaign shake-up, or merely the latest iteration of an endless power struggle that has seen figures like Lewandowski, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort cycle in and out of the candidate’s earshot. When the operation in question is a garbage fire like the Trump-for-president operation, terms like “campaign manager,” which imply a cohesive entity that is managed in some hierarchical fashion, may not even apply.
Trump’s campaign, reports the Associated Press, has 30 paid staff on the ground across the United States of America. That is a smaller number than the Hillary Clinton campaign has in many states. Clinton’s massive ground advantage is supplemented by an even more massive television-advertising advantage. The current ratio of Clinton to Trump television-ad spending in battleground states is one to zero. (Data via NBC News, chart via the Washington Post.)
This sounds oddly familiar to me. I wonder...wonder...where we've seen behaviors like this?
Cargo cults often develop during a combination of crises. Under conditions of social stress, such a movement may form under the leadership of a charismatic figure. This leader may have a "vision" (or "myth-dream") of the future, often linked to an ancestral efficacy ("mana") thought to be recoverable by a return to traditional morality.[1][3] This leader may characterize the present state as a dismantling of the old social order, meaning that social hierarchy and ego boundaries have been broken down.[4]...
Cargo cults are marked by a number of common characteristics, including a "myth-dream" that is a synthesis of indigenous and foreign elements; the expectation of help from the ancestors; charismatic leaders; and lastly, belief in the appearance of an abundance of goods.[7]
The indigenous societies of Melanesia were typically characterized by a "big man" political system in which individuals gained prestige through gift exchanges. The more wealth a man could distribute, the more people in his debt, and the greater his renown. Those who were unable to reciprocate were identified as "rubbish men". Faced, through colonialism, with foreigners with a seemingly unending supply of goods for exchange, indigenous Melanesians experienced "value dominance". That is, they were dominated by others in terms of their own (not the foreign) value system; exchange with foreigners left them feeling like rubbish men.[8]
Since the modern manufacturing process is unknown to them, members, leaders, and prophets of the cults maintain that the manufactured goods of the non-native culture have been created by spiritual means, such as through their deities and ancestors. These goods are intended for the local indigenous people, but the foreigners have unfairly gained control of these objects through malice or mistake.[9] Thus, a characteristic feature of cargo cults is the belief that spiritual agents will, at some future time, give much valuable cargo and desirable manufactured products to the cult members.[9]
Symbols associated with Christianity and modern Western society tend to be incorporated into their rituals; for example the use of cross-shaped grave markers. Notable examples of cargo cult activity include the setting up of mock airstrips, airports, offices, and dining rooms, as well as the fetishization and attempted construction of Western goods, such as radios made of coconuts and straw. Believers may stage "drills" and "marches" with sticks for rifles and use military-style insignia and national insignia painted on their bodies to make them look like soldiers, thereby treating the activities of Western military personnel as rituals to be performed for the purpose of attracting the cargo.[10] (From the Wiki on Cargo Cults)
Saturday, June 18, 2016
The Dogs Bark But The Caravan Moves On
I really just felt like using this as a blog headline. I also considered
"There is a Tide..." and "Bernie Or Bluster." I was really hoping to be able to use "Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it..." but, alas, he won't go.
His dead enders are still squalling around in the dkos diaries explaining to everyone how Bernie's genius plan is receiving plaudits and accolades from President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer (they have put a ban on mentioning Raul Grijalva and Elizabeth Warren who have become unpersons. Much the same way Hillary Clinton's actual name and status were treated as if she were Voldemort by Bernie himself). The obvious fact that the Democratic Party is regarding Bernie like the crying tantruming toddler at someone else's birthday, who must be offered the first piece of cake and an extra present just for showing up, is apparently beyond them. But the entire discussion of political strategy and tactics in this election, if Bernie comes up, has devolved into the kind of analysis and fatuous teen snark that enables the same people to tell you Hillary Clinton is a corporate whore of a war monger and also that she is a skilled and gracious politician whose lead should be followed by her voters because she has recognized Bernie's superior power, worth, and historical importance. Some poor, innocent, soul put up Hillary Clinton's 2008 concession speech to Obama, with a few words changed so it could have been Bernie speaking, and his fervent fans swarmed it attacking the guy for having the temerity to suggest that Bernie would ever have any need to be gracious, that no person would ever have given such a speech, that Bernie's world historic run means he is above and outside the normal rules of good sportsmanship or campaigning. The teenage snark part comes in when several Bernie supporters swarm the comments to chant "if she's won why are you still talking about him???"
Really the best comment on what is going on was written by some Clinton supporter with a long history with environmental groups. Unfortunately I can't locate it but he or she pointed out that the politics of the environmental groups can be split into those who followed the philosophy of Rachel Carson (we all want basically the same good things for each other and the planet and we need to make coalitions to get what we want together) and the Edward Abbey-niks who organized around the principle that most people were lazy, apathetic, ill informed, or indifferent and that environmental protection would happen only when a committed, aggressive, revolutionary band made it happen. I'm paraphrasing, of course. I think its obvious that the Bernie people, at least the most noisy of them, fall into the Abbey style of politics. People from these two wings of political thought just can't really do politics together. For the Carson-ites/Hillary people, politics is about creating coalitions, discovering people's needs, working short term and long term to satisfy those needs while the Abbey/Bernie people are about big visions, large society wide changes, little attention to detail, no coalition building and no deviation from the original vision. Hillary people prize winning and governing, Bernie people prize being right and staying on message, whatever real world events interfere. What strikes me about the Bernie people and their attitude towards the electorate is that they are simultaneously elitist and pseudo populist--they represent themselves, to themselves as being by and for "the people" but when the people reject them as they have in this primary, the people are found wanting and need to be dissolved. **
In the short and long run I don't think Bernie matters very much. Sad to say because I am extremely progressive, myself, and I love the idea of an out and proud progressive Democratic Party, pursuing dominance in all fifty states. But Bernie didn't have a clue how to make that happen--he's a visionary curmudgeon not a hard worker, down in the weeds, paragon of organizing. Even his latest attempt at revolutionary relevance is nothing more than a rehash of Dean's 50 state strategy with added griftiness. Is he fundraising off this page and off this gesture?
Bernie is announcing that he managed the incredible feat of putting up a web page that enables his supporters to click "I will run for office" or "I will volunteer" and he got 6,700 people to click a button. This is all of a piece with earlier revolutionary acts by his supporters like "liking" Bernie's facebook page and keeping tabs on how many more likes they had than Hillary's facebook page. So who are these 6,700 people and what did they really "sign up" to do? Because if its 100 people in 67 college towns, all proposing to run for the same offices, they rather cancel each other out. Don't get me wrong--I think its critically important that progressives commit to running for office, support each other, and build a better Democratic Party from the inside out. But I don't think Bernie's "new" Congressional initiative is going to be the way it happens because I just don't think Bernie or his team can herd their own cats. (I give Bernie and his team props for running a very successful campaign, but history is littered with pretty good campaigners and their teams, just as the cemeteries are full of indispensable men).
Bernie doesn't matter--or won't by the time the convention rolls around, because he sold the most excitable and unreliable and least informed voters in the country--young people--a bill of goods. He taught them that passion mattered more than strategy, that long distance goals were more important than short term goals, that attacking your allies and co-workers was a viable way to build alliances, that intensity matters more than numbers, that people who don't agree with you on tactics are identical to enemies who don't agree with you at all, that everyone but Bernie is corrupt and deceitful, and that ideological rigidity and boorish behavior is the same as honorable authenticity. Its being reported that as we head into the convention Democratic voters are "coming home" to Hillary and that Bernie's own delegates are no-showing at the meetings where they would be helped to get housing and information about the convention. If the rest of Bernie's campaign is any indication Bernie himself probably doesn't have the slightest idea how many of his troops will follow him into battle at the convention. I wouldn't be surprised if Bernie ends up not showing up, for one specious reason or another, and if he doesn't his delegates won't either. The purity pouting will be epic, biblical, and if his online supporters are any indication of the generally spiteful attitude towards the Democratic Party if Bernie sulks at home so will his delegates. Its all of a piece with the "you'll miss me when I'm gone!" arguments the Bernie/Jill Stein wing has been making.
**The strong conviction that the Bernie voters (at least on Kos) have that they are both identical with "the people" and embattled against the people who actually voted, in a landslide, for Hillary Clinton, is what makes them simultaneously mawkish and aggressive. They are, as I've observed elsewhere, perfect examples of Fred Clark's "persecuted hegemon." They see themselves as a majority, or at least a majority of righteousness, and simultaneously as persecuted, misunderstood, and vulnerable. Once you recognize that this is how they understand their position in US society and the Democratic primary everything that they do and say as they follow Bernie down the garden path makes sense. Especially their viciousness against Hillary and her voters.
"There is a Tide..." and "Bernie Or Bluster." I was really hoping to be able to use "Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it..." but, alas, he won't go.
His dead enders are still squalling around in the dkos diaries explaining to everyone how Bernie's genius plan is receiving plaudits and accolades from President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer (they have put a ban on mentioning Raul Grijalva and Elizabeth Warren who have become unpersons. Much the same way Hillary Clinton's actual name and status were treated as if she were Voldemort by Bernie himself). The obvious fact that the Democratic Party is regarding Bernie like the crying tantruming toddler at someone else's birthday, who must be offered the first piece of cake and an extra present just for showing up, is apparently beyond them. But the entire discussion of political strategy and tactics in this election, if Bernie comes up, has devolved into the kind of analysis and fatuous teen snark that enables the same people to tell you Hillary Clinton is a corporate whore of a war monger and also that she is a skilled and gracious politician whose lead should be followed by her voters because she has recognized Bernie's superior power, worth, and historical importance. Some poor, innocent, soul put up Hillary Clinton's 2008 concession speech to Obama, with a few words changed so it could have been Bernie speaking, and his fervent fans swarmed it attacking the guy for having the temerity to suggest that Bernie would ever have any need to be gracious, that no person would ever have given such a speech, that Bernie's world historic run means he is above and outside the normal rules of good sportsmanship or campaigning. The teenage snark part comes in when several Bernie supporters swarm the comments to chant "if she's won why are you still talking about him???"
Really the best comment on what is going on was written by some Clinton supporter with a long history with environmental groups. Unfortunately I can't locate it but he or she pointed out that the politics of the environmental groups can be split into those who followed the philosophy of Rachel Carson (we all want basically the same good things for each other and the planet and we need to make coalitions to get what we want together) and the Edward Abbey-niks who organized around the principle that most people were lazy, apathetic, ill informed, or indifferent and that environmental protection would happen only when a committed, aggressive, revolutionary band made it happen. I'm paraphrasing, of course. I think its obvious that the Bernie people, at least the most noisy of them, fall into the Abbey style of politics. People from these two wings of political thought just can't really do politics together. For the Carson-ites/Hillary people, politics is about creating coalitions, discovering people's needs, working short term and long term to satisfy those needs while the Abbey/Bernie people are about big visions, large society wide changes, little attention to detail, no coalition building and no deviation from the original vision. Hillary people prize winning and governing, Bernie people prize being right and staying on message, whatever real world events interfere. What strikes me about the Bernie people and their attitude towards the electorate is that they are simultaneously elitist and pseudo populist--they represent themselves, to themselves as being by and for "the people" but when the people reject them as they have in this primary, the people are found wanting and need to be dissolved. **
In the short and long run I don't think Bernie matters very much. Sad to say because I am extremely progressive, myself, and I love the idea of an out and proud progressive Democratic Party, pursuing dominance in all fifty states. But Bernie didn't have a clue how to make that happen--he's a visionary curmudgeon not a hard worker, down in the weeds, paragon of organizing. Even his latest attempt at revolutionary relevance is nothing more than a rehash of Dean's 50 state strategy with added griftiness. Is he fundraising off this page and off this gesture?
Bernie is announcing that he managed the incredible feat of putting up a web page that enables his supporters to click "I will run for office" or "I will volunteer" and he got 6,700 people to click a button. This is all of a piece with earlier revolutionary acts by his supporters like "liking" Bernie's facebook page and keeping tabs on how many more likes they had than Hillary's facebook page. So who are these 6,700 people and what did they really "sign up" to do? Because if its 100 people in 67 college towns, all proposing to run for the same offices, they rather cancel each other out. Don't get me wrong--I think its critically important that progressives commit to running for office, support each other, and build a better Democratic Party from the inside out. But I don't think Bernie's "new" Congressional initiative is going to be the way it happens because I just don't think Bernie or his team can herd their own cats. (I give Bernie and his team props for running a very successful campaign, but history is littered with pretty good campaigners and their teams, just as the cemeteries are full of indispensable men).
Bernie doesn't matter--or won't by the time the convention rolls around, because he sold the most excitable and unreliable and least informed voters in the country--young people--a bill of goods. He taught them that passion mattered more than strategy, that long distance goals were more important than short term goals, that attacking your allies and co-workers was a viable way to build alliances, that intensity matters more than numbers, that people who don't agree with you on tactics are identical to enemies who don't agree with you at all, that everyone but Bernie is corrupt and deceitful, and that ideological rigidity and boorish behavior is the same as honorable authenticity. Its being reported that as we head into the convention Democratic voters are "coming home" to Hillary and that Bernie's own delegates are no-showing at the meetings where they would be helped to get housing and information about the convention. If the rest of Bernie's campaign is any indication Bernie himself probably doesn't have the slightest idea how many of his troops will follow him into battle at the convention. I wouldn't be surprised if Bernie ends up not showing up, for one specious reason or another, and if he doesn't his delegates won't either. The purity pouting will be epic, biblical, and if his online supporters are any indication of the generally spiteful attitude towards the Democratic Party if Bernie sulks at home so will his delegates. Its all of a piece with the "you'll miss me when I'm gone!" arguments the Bernie/Jill Stein wing has been making.
**The strong conviction that the Bernie voters (at least on Kos) have that they are both identical with "the people" and embattled against the people who actually voted, in a landslide, for Hillary Clinton, is what makes them simultaneously mawkish and aggressive. They are, as I've observed elsewhere, perfect examples of Fred Clark's "persecuted hegemon." They see themselves as a majority, or at least a majority of righteousness, and simultaneously as persecuted, misunderstood, and vulnerable. Once you recognize that this is how they understand their position in US society and the Democratic primary everything that they do and say as they follow Bernie down the garden path makes sense. Especially their viciousness against Hillary and her voters.
Cross Posted at No More Mr. Nice Blog
Saturday, June 11, 2016
On Herd Immunity
I've been reading over at Kos for the last few months--I know, I know! Crazy. But I can't stop myself. I had to abandon other sites where I usually chew the cud with my internet friends because of all the Bernie Love and Hillary Hate. Now that we are at the end of the primary, although apparently we need to hush until Bernie accepts reality, women and AA voters, and especially women AA voters, are coming out of the woodwork to celebrate and to express how angry they are that their votes and their voters have been attacked, harassed, doxxed, insulted, and ignored throughout this primary. Its not going away. Just today I was listening to Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me and Peter Sagal was doing some shtick about how boring, old, tedious, and lacking in charisma Hillary Clinton was. He paused for a moment and then said, pro forma "Of course, it was a historic moment" and the lone woman on the panel shouted "Hell yeah!" and the audience roared its approval of her. They all then joined in to talk about marketing "clothespins" for people to wear on their noses when they "have" to vote for Clinton.
This is by way of observing that it is going to take a really long time--if ever--for liberal and progressive white men to grasp what is going on. If dKos is any example we are going to have to endure a whole lot of white male gnashing of teeth, sobbing, special pleading, and complaints about how dull she is, and how frumpy, and how stiff. And that's just from people who are going to support her! As for the Bernie dead enders they are even worse--I could pull up some of these comments but what would be the point? They go like this "I'm a white man who lives in a safe blue city in a safe blue state and I am personally offended by drones/climate change/rumor about Hillary/wall street and I must withold my <strikethrough>precious bodily fluid</strikethrough> from her and her minions. You people--you other people--do what you have to do but I never will. You can imagine this said either from behind the walls of a pillow fort or from atop a fainting couch.
I dislike both types--both the ones who are grudgingly giving her the vote, or acting like its just tacky to be uncool enough to vote for her wholeheartedly, and the Bernie or Buster single issue voters. These people are relying on a kind of political herd immunity. They are like people who don't get a vaccine that might save their life from an epidemic illness and who simply count on everyone else getting the vaccine to lower the danger to themselves. They know that Hillary and Bill and Obama and everyone else in the Democratic Party is going to raise the money, fight the fight, do the GOTV, and then fight to run the damned country regardless of their single vote. And they either believe that Trump getting in won't affect them, or that the rest of us will work our hearts out for Hillary and get her over the finish line and we will keep fighting for progressive causes and they can bitch from the sidelines.
Years ago, when I was considering moving my family to Canada to save my children from having to grow up complicit in Bush's war crimes, someone on a blog pointed out that doing so was abandoning everyone else in the country, who couldn't move, to their fate. That withdrawing might be possible, it might be convenient, it might be good for me and mine--but it was an abdication of my responsibility as a citizen and as a neighbor to all those who couldn't afford to move. I have never forgotten this post, and this insight has informed my political attitude ever since. I have to vote, and I have to vote in every election, not just on my own behalf, or on that of my children, but for people who are not able to vote here (non citizens in the US, the rest of the world, people in the US who are being denied their vote). And I have to vote, specifically, with their needs in mind. Because there are many of them, and they come in many kinds--my vote can never be all about any single issue. Certainly its not just going to be about the Oligarchs or the economy.
In this election season so far we have seen women and African American voters come out and vote solidly for Hillary Clinton. She is running an intersectional, progressive, campaign that puts women's issues, and LGBTQ issues, and AA issues, front and center. That is the fact of the matter. People are telling us the are experiencing existential dread--I know I am!--if Donald Trump gets in because he is going to be horrible for all the kinds of people who make up this coalition. And yet I see things like this all the time:
This guy may be a troll but there are plenty of others, including Matt Taibbi who he is riffing off of, who make essentially the same argument. I think it is because right wing has done a great job of causing people to forget 8 years of Bush. And the left wing has helped by concentrating fire on Obama and on Clinton rather than on Bush and the Republicans. Obama was castigated for not being able to fix all of Bush's mistakes, Hillary for being SOS to Obama (and thus part of the establishment cabal) and for participating in Bush's Iraq War. But everything else that happened under Bush--the economic dislocation, the racism, the war on women is ignored in this story as it is ignored as it is happening right now. We can't let the soi disant progressive left or last bastion of hipster white boy power do to Hillary Clinton what they have happily done to Barack Obama. That is: support them (whether weakly or strongly) during the campaign when it is expedient to do so and then sabotage them immediately upon election.
So I'm going to go back to this notion of herd immunity and beg people to think before they selfishly vote their ego. For herd immunity to work, for the most vulnerable parts of our body politic to be protected from disease, everyone who can get the vaccine must get the vaccine. Babies, children, old people, pregnant women, sick people--these are all people who have compromised or vulnerable immune systems. Often they can't get the vaccine. They rely on herd immunity to protect them from epidemic diseases sweeping through society. Anyone who is healthy enough to receive the vaccine owes it to everyone around them to take it. Anyone who has the freedom to vote, the ability to vote, the luxury to vote owes it to the rest of us to vote in this election, for the Democratic nominee. The health and safety of the entire country depends on it.
Cross posted at No More Mr Nice Blog
This is by way of observing that it is going to take a really long time--if ever--for liberal and progressive white men to grasp what is going on. If dKos is any example we are going to have to endure a whole lot of white male gnashing of teeth, sobbing, special pleading, and complaints about how dull she is, and how frumpy, and how stiff. And that's just from people who are going to support her! As for the Bernie dead enders they are even worse--I could pull up some of these comments but what would be the point? They go like this "I'm a white man who lives in a safe blue city in a safe blue state and I am personally offended by drones/climate change/rumor about Hillary/wall street and I must withold my <strikethrough>precious bodily fluid</strikethrough> from her and her minions. You people--you other people--do what you have to do but I never will. You can imagine this said either from behind the walls of a pillow fort or from atop a fainting couch.
I dislike both types--both the ones who are grudgingly giving her the vote, or acting like its just tacky to be uncool enough to vote for her wholeheartedly, and the Bernie or Buster single issue voters. These people are relying on a kind of political herd immunity. They are like people who don't get a vaccine that might save their life from an epidemic illness and who simply count on everyone else getting the vaccine to lower the danger to themselves. They know that Hillary and Bill and Obama and everyone else in the Democratic Party is going to raise the money, fight the fight, do the GOTV, and then fight to run the damned country regardless of their single vote. And they either believe that Trump getting in won't affect them, or that the rest of us will work our hearts out for Hillary and get her over the finish line and we will keep fighting for progressive causes and they can bitch from the sidelines.
Years ago, when I was considering moving my family to Canada to save my children from having to grow up complicit in Bush's war crimes, someone on a blog pointed out that doing so was abandoning everyone else in the country, who couldn't move, to their fate. That withdrawing might be possible, it might be convenient, it might be good for me and mine--but it was an abdication of my responsibility as a citizen and as a neighbor to all those who couldn't afford to move. I have never forgotten this post, and this insight has informed my political attitude ever since. I have to vote, and I have to vote in every election, not just on my own behalf, or on that of my children, but for people who are not able to vote here (non citizens in the US, the rest of the world, people in the US who are being denied their vote). And I have to vote, specifically, with their needs in mind. Because there are many of them, and they come in many kinds--my vote can never be all about any single issue. Certainly its not just going to be about the Oligarchs or the economy.
In this election season so far we have seen women and African American voters come out and vote solidly for Hillary Clinton. She is running an intersectional, progressive, campaign that puts women's issues, and LGBTQ issues, and AA issues, front and center. That is the fact of the matter. People are telling us the are experiencing existential dread--I know I am!--if Donald Trump gets in because he is going to be horrible for all the kinds of people who make up this coalition. And yet I see things like this all the time:
Democrats and progressives would be wise to listen to Tiabbi’s warning, but they won’t. The nomination of Hillary Clinton and her Wall Street coterie will only be another 4 years of paying lip service to progressive reform. Worse, it will stunt the youthful idealism that Bernie tapped into, which is the future of the party.
Rather than treating Trump’s destruction of the GOP as an opportunity to continue the status quo, the Democrats should learn a lesson from it. The old, toothless GOP is gone, and in its place is something far more formidable — a re-awakening American nationalism and an awareness that the American worker has gotten a raw deal from corporate globalism. Rather than dismissing Donald Trump with tired accusations of bigotry , why not address some of the real issues he has raised affecting national security and the economy? Bernie was trying to do this, and Clinton, for many reasons, is incapable of it. Ironically, with Bernie gone, the best outcome for progressives may be a Trump victory in November.
This guy may be a troll but there are plenty of others, including Matt Taibbi who he is riffing off of, who make essentially the same argument. I think it is because right wing has done a great job of causing people to forget 8 years of Bush. And the left wing has helped by concentrating fire on Obama and on Clinton rather than on Bush and the Republicans. Obama was castigated for not being able to fix all of Bush's mistakes, Hillary for being SOS to Obama (and thus part of the establishment cabal) and for participating in Bush's Iraq War. But everything else that happened under Bush--the economic dislocation, the racism, the war on women is ignored in this story as it is ignored as it is happening right now. We can't let the soi disant progressive left or last bastion of hipster white boy power do to Hillary Clinton what they have happily done to Barack Obama. That is: support them (whether weakly or strongly) during the campaign when it is expedient to do so and then sabotage them immediately upon election.
So I'm going to go back to this notion of herd immunity and beg people to think before they selfishly vote their ego. For herd immunity to work, for the most vulnerable parts of our body politic to be protected from disease, everyone who can get the vaccine must get the vaccine. Babies, children, old people, pregnant women, sick people--these are all people who have compromised or vulnerable immune systems. Often they can't get the vaccine. They rely on herd immunity to protect them from epidemic diseases sweeping through society. Anyone who is healthy enough to receive the vaccine owes it to everyone around them to take it. Anyone who has the freedom to vote, the ability to vote, the luxury to vote owes it to the rest of us to vote in this election, for the Democratic nominee. The health and safety of the entire country depends on it.
Cross posted at No More Mr Nice Blog
Friday, April 1, 2016
Many Great Changes At the Last Possible Minute
SO: I'm going to Social Work School for my Masters. It seems like I'm going backwards since I already have a Ph.D. But I could not be more excited. Yesterday I walked six miles in to town to my new future school, and by dint of wandering walked the rest of the way home for a grand total of 11.5. I've been drivin in and out taking my daughters to events at Aimai's New Future Alma Mater (ANFAM) for years but as I walked the extremely windy streets yesterday I saw everything with new eyes. Imagine! Soon I'll be one of these scurrying hordes! I'm very, very, excited. I feel like I'm coming out of a period of hibernation. At the same time today I had baby group and I realized that I might have to give it up. It will probably conflict with my internship next year. I've been doing this group for four years and, increasingly, the work has gotten more intense and more meaningful as the women in the group (especially those on their second child) have really come to rely on the group and on my co-facilitator and myself for advice and comfort. I am having a hard time figuring out how to write about the issues that come up in group, since they are quite private. I think I'll have to take all that offline. But today a parent came in who had disclosed to the group a few weeks ago just how hard a time she'd been having with her child, just how frustrated she was. We--well, I because I was soloing--gave her the best counsel I could. Everyone pitched in and really kicked the issues around with her. This week she came back alone, since her mother-in-law was looking after her children--just to embrace me, sit next to me, and give back to the group some of her experiences since she had broken so many barriers and taboos and confessed her problems to them. She told us that she had been afraid that she had crossed a line and told us too much. But that our response to her had enabled her to really talk to her husband and start to advocate for herself to get the help she needed. And though she'd been afraid even to come back to group after being so exposed she knew she could trust us to welcome her back. I was really surprised and touched because she walked into the room as group had already started and I waved to her and she came all the way around and just threw her arms around me, passionately, and told me how much it meant to her to be in group with us.
Wednesday, March 2, 2016
Where Hillary is Really Going With All This Loving Kindness Stuff
So, its going to be Trump (angry white people spoiling for a fight and desperate for security) and Hillary (a mixed group of Obama voters and depressed/angry/selfish self proclaimed leftist purity trolls and Sander's voters).* Trump is going to be wildly successful. His patented combination of fascist seduction and prosperity gospel makes him very, very, hard to beat. He's not only promising to "make America Great Again" but to bring back jobs galore. I've heard him exhorting his fans to "get greedy!" because he's "going to make them all rich."
This, needless to say, is not so much a political argument so much as it is a double helping of cake and ice-cream, laced with quaaludes and coke, and the promise that there will be no headache or vomiting tomorrow. Because its all promise and no policy it can't really be rebutted by another political figure. It doesn't resolve itself into an argument such as I will/will not build a wall at Mexico's expense. Or I will/will not raise taxes to pay for my policies.
Trump doesn't have to say anything specific, or at any rate his voters don't want him to and will instantly forget anything he does promise. The thing is that Trump, like Disney, is a <i>destination event</i>. Being a Trump voter <i>is</i> the achievement. What Trump himself does or promises to do isn't relevant. Its how he makes his voters feel about their future and the future of the country.
Steve M. made this argument with reference to anti Trump advertising and I think he is absolutely correct. You can't undermine Trump by referring to him or discussing him. His voters adore him, and they feel good just looking at things that remind them of him. His name, his hats, his ridiculous hair. You have to expect that, like any addict, his voters are very well defended against anything that undercuts their addiction. That even the shabby opium dens and crack filled streets where they get their fix is, in its own way, a triggering and pleasurable memory for them. They will wallow in their own vomit while congratulating themselves on having the time of their lives. I have no doubt that in the long run people will remember the way they felt at Trump rallies very happily, whether he wins or not. Its a peak experience for his voters--finally a feeling of being spoken of, being spoken for, after what feels like a lifetime of being ignored and silenced. Trump's voters are like the miserable kids who got beat up every day at school when the jock finally adopts them as a pet. They will put up with any amount of bad treatment from Trump or whoever Trump appoints as a surrogate, and they will protect Trump with everything they have.
I think that HRC can beat Trump with the Obama coalition, and she seems to me to be on track to hold it together. After all, as I have to keep explaining to people who are not keeping up, Clinton and Obama both lost the white male vote (or the white vote entirely I keep forgetting). HRC can win just with the Obama coalition even if she loses most of the white vote again. But she can't lose it all. And she probably still has to play for some portion of the Republican vote--those mythical people who are supposedly repulsed by Donald's racism, jingoism, intemperate behavior, boorishness, and recklessness. Of course for the most part they don't actually have a problem with the racism, jingoism, militarism or even the anti elitism. But Trump is going to ratchet tension up until there is literal blood in the streets between his supporters and any minority person out there. And then he is going to gin up a race war to be the retroactive excuse for his racist pandering. Its going to be all “see what you made us do” all the time. He's got nothing to lose with this strategy. Trumps voters will never abandon him--they will rationalize away whatever they have to in order to keep getting their fix from Trump. Accusations that his campaign or his voters attacked some Black Students? It will all be seen as a lie or just Hillary's brand of bare knuckles partisanship. These people are skilled at ignoring any reality they don't like. And they don't want to be unsold from the Donald experience.
But there are probably a few Republicans who are not going to be able to stomach that. Some of them are old line Republicans, actual conservatives, or people with a stake in the system. Still others might be those recently flipped Democrats in MA who might end up coming back to the fold after the fever passes. The thing about Trump is he's an acquired taste. He's like a virus you catch if your immune system is already weak. If you've been powerless so long that this looks like success to you, you are a gonner. But if you come from slightly higher up the social scale, or you are not so scared, you never fall for this stuff at all. So for those on the fence, or possibly in recovery from the Trump fever, what do we need to do? They need a reason and a socially acceptable method to refuse to vote for him.
Our only hope is if HRC can hold on to the Obama coalition, and ride a wave of specifically anti trump fervor, while also assuaging the fears of the sliver of Republican voters who will sit out the election even if they don’t cross over. In other words regardless of the provocation or the cries from the most left fringe that she become abusive to Trump or his voters she has to take the position (which, btw,she is already taking) of welcoming defectors and promising good treatment to everyone.
Trumpers are in the throes of a self justifying fury–every single thing that rebuts their love affair or attacks their love object is going to just harden their determination to crawl over broken glass to defend him and vote for him. Trump is like some mythic monster who only grows stronger the more you throw at him. Only by lowering the tension and fear for (some) of them can we overcome them. And this, of course, is exactly what Hillary is doing with her "make America whole" and a return to purpose and kindness. This is not an argument from weakness--its extending an olive branch to Trump voters in the same way that promising not to torture and kill captured soldiers encourages them to surrender.
*Which, to the extent they post furiously over at dkos about how Kissinger or the TPP or her imminent arrest by the FBI will doom Hillary, probably will still be typing furiously on election day and not bother to get out to vote anyway.
Hillary is going to have to go after the disaffected Republican voters, those for whom the open racism and jingoism of Trump is kind of too much, even though they probably agree with a lot of what he is saying (the racism and the jingoism and the anti elite stuff).
Friday, February 26, 2016
The Clockwise Solution
When my groundbreaking, best selling, future masterpiece "The One Secret of Extremely Successful Aimais" hits the stand I want you all to know I've shared it with you here, first. I am experimenting with what you might call a Clockwise solution to a linear life. Here's the method. When you get up from whatever you are doing (writing, lunching, doing laundry, answering email) simply proceed in a clockwise direction. After lunch I pick up my bowl and go to the kitchen, rinse the bowl and pick up something that needs to go upstairs, take it upstairs and throw in a load of laundry, pick up the thing upstairs that needs to do downstairs, bring it downstairs and move something from the front room to the dining room where I'm working, sit down and do twenty minutes of work before getting back up and wandering on to the next thing, repeat until I've circumnavigated the house and completed all my tasks.
Thursday, February 25, 2016
Better To Reign In Hell
Recently someone sent me one of those articles that circulates on each side of the divide Sanders/Clinton meant to show that one candidate is full on evil, or has no chance of winning the general election. These, of course, are two different arguments although they can begin to blend together. Will Hillary lose the general election because she is so evil and stupid that she took money for speeches from Goldman Sachs?* Will she be a terrible President because she, like Obama, was in the position of trying to clean up the uncleanable mess that the Bush regime left us in the Middle East? The person who sent me the article is really on the fence about the two candidates, seeking insight into both who they are, in an existential sense, and how other respected people view them. The article in question was Sachs' attack on Hillary for failing to do the obviously right thing in Syria. Apparently there was no one else involved in our decisions about Syria, no Obama, no France, no Turkey or everyone else who was involved was already lined up along an obvious cline from evil to good and we should have known better than to work with X country because they were more malevolent than Y country.
Syria is not my beat and I'm not interested in refighting this fight or even discussing the ins and outs. I want to talk about what is behind the forwarding of these emails and this kind of information. The person who forwarded this email to my friend is virulently opposed to HRC. Reading this kind of article is meant to tell us that HRC is irremediably evil, that she made the wrong decision in Syria because she is malevolently disposed to be pro Israel, pro Saudi, and anti Iran. Therefore, she can't run the US. Because: evil.
I must be the most evil person in the world--and I quite possibly am--because I don't think that anyone who gets elected to be President of this country isn't, on some level, going to be evil to someone. The whole fucking country is evil. We are an empire and every decision we make--whether opening our borders or closing them, shipping jobs overseas or keeping them here, zoning laws no zoning laws, amnesty or no amnesty, will end up harming some non negligible number of people. Every decision has its downside. I'm not making a reactionary argument against progress a la A. O. Hirschman-that is that every progressive action brings about the potential for a perverse, futile, or dangerous backlash. I'm simply observing that even an apparently benign decision or choice, when it affects 300 million people, has enormous costs and knock on effects that can, because of sheer quantity, have some deleterious results. The overproduction of Greek Yogurt, for fuck's sake, has resulted in metric tons of whey being thrown into a sewer system that can't handle it. There are basically no innocent actions in an overpopulated world.
Every election cycle, for some number of people (however tiny) there is some savior figure who offers us the chance, supposedly, to set the world aright, to fix what is broken, to move forward in a way that fundamentally changes things for the better. On the Republican side, right now, that's Trump. On our side right now that is popularly supposed to be Sanders. I think Trump has a better shot at it than Sanders because Trump's America is pretty much the one we've got: a dangerous, imperialistic, globe spanning, Gargantua of a state with limited empathy for it own citizens, and almost none for people who are non citizens. A state riven with racism, sexism, ageism, contempt for the weak and for the ill. A state run by oligarchs for the benefit of the wealthiest while the lower class struggle for scraps and crumbs from the table and fight each other using race, religion, sexual orientation, and personal history. Trump has an excellent shot at giving his voters something of what he promises them--bread, circuses, and lots of people thrown to the lions. I less certain about Sanders' chances.
I suppose I sound like Sanders speaks for me, don't I? Absolutely. I agree with Sander's assumptions about the US. But I don't agree that the presidency is the place where decisions that can change that get made. I don't think that Sanders is the guy to make any kind of successful change in the composition of the State. At best he can stand athwart it and shout "stop" but its not designed for the President to be able to do much more than let his own moral impulses speak on things under his executive control. And, perhaps, if he's very skillful and very persuasive and plays well with others he can influence enough down ticket races to have a chance to make some bigger, more long term, changes.
We've actually had one of the most moral people in our history as a people as President for the last seven years. In year eight how is that working out for him and for us? He's done enormously important things--things for which I regard him as a second FDR. He's been enormously patient with his attackers, and he has fought them strategically to get whatever he can get done, done. He has brought thousands of good people into government through his appointments (when they weren't blocked), and he has inspired millions to vote and to engage with government at every level. Is Sanders going to do that? Is he going to do it more effectively than Obama? I doubt it. Because neither Sanders nor his supporters grasps that in between all that inspiring and executive actioning falls the shadow of just keeping this enormous, craptacular, imperium, running.
OK, sez my emailing friend of a friend, by why take dirty, worn out old Hillary who has had a finger in the evil empire pie all these years? Will she do any better? Well, yes, I think she will. Syria won't stop blowing up because Sanders gets into power and I don't think he has any better ideas of what to do next than she does. In fact I think he has less. I don't share my friend's Manichean thinking on foreign policy--there are many wrong things to do that seem right, or seem necessary, at the moment. And decisions have to be made in the moment. Will she do better for our citizens (and non citizens) here at home? I am pretty sure she will. She has already advanced concrete plans on both health care and crises like Flint that are achievable, measurable, doable. Call me a small bore person but I'll take small steps to a better world over large pratfalls.
When I look at the choice between HRC and Sanders I'm actually agnostic. I'd be happy with either. But I'm not unhappy with HRC because she's been to this rodeo before and she isn't promising to wave a magic wand and make America something it has never been: just, fair, and running on renewable energy. I see the person who takes the presidency as someone who is agreeing to run Hell for a term that shall not exceed 8 years. Perhaps I should leave it at that.
*Campos, Booman and John Cole all seem to believe this was some kind of screaming fatal flaw because "she should have known" that working with the power elite in this country for the period between being Secretary of State and running again for President would be used against her. I think this is the dumbest argument I've ever seen advanced against a major political actor--one who has famously used the money raised at these things to back the Clinton Foundation and to support down ticket races.
Syria is not my beat and I'm not interested in refighting this fight or even discussing the ins and outs. I want to talk about what is behind the forwarding of these emails and this kind of information. The person who forwarded this email to my friend is virulently opposed to HRC. Reading this kind of article is meant to tell us that HRC is irremediably evil, that she made the wrong decision in Syria because she is malevolently disposed to be pro Israel, pro Saudi, and anti Iran. Therefore, she can't run the US. Because: evil.
I must be the most evil person in the world--and I quite possibly am--because I don't think that anyone who gets elected to be President of this country isn't, on some level, going to be evil to someone. The whole fucking country is evil. We are an empire and every decision we make--whether opening our borders or closing them, shipping jobs overseas or keeping them here, zoning laws no zoning laws, amnesty or no amnesty, will end up harming some non negligible number of people. Every decision has its downside. I'm not making a reactionary argument against progress a la A. O. Hirschman-that is that every progressive action brings about the potential for a perverse, futile, or dangerous backlash. I'm simply observing that even an apparently benign decision or choice, when it affects 300 million people, has enormous costs and knock on effects that can, because of sheer quantity, have some deleterious results. The overproduction of Greek Yogurt, for fuck's sake, has resulted in metric tons of whey being thrown into a sewer system that can't handle it. There are basically no innocent actions in an overpopulated world.
Every election cycle, for some number of people (however tiny) there is some savior figure who offers us the chance, supposedly, to set the world aright, to fix what is broken, to move forward in a way that fundamentally changes things for the better. On the Republican side, right now, that's Trump. On our side right now that is popularly supposed to be Sanders. I think Trump has a better shot at it than Sanders because Trump's America is pretty much the one we've got: a dangerous, imperialistic, globe spanning, Gargantua of a state with limited empathy for it own citizens, and almost none for people who are non citizens. A state riven with racism, sexism, ageism, contempt for the weak and for the ill. A state run by oligarchs for the benefit of the wealthiest while the lower class struggle for scraps and crumbs from the table and fight each other using race, religion, sexual orientation, and personal history. Trump has an excellent shot at giving his voters something of what he promises them--bread, circuses, and lots of people thrown to the lions. I less certain about Sanders' chances.
I suppose I sound like Sanders speaks for me, don't I? Absolutely. I agree with Sander's assumptions about the US. But I don't agree that the presidency is the place where decisions that can change that get made. I don't think that Sanders is the guy to make any kind of successful change in the composition of the State. At best he can stand athwart it and shout "stop" but its not designed for the President to be able to do much more than let his own moral impulses speak on things under his executive control. And, perhaps, if he's very skillful and very persuasive and plays well with others he can influence enough down ticket races to have a chance to make some bigger, more long term, changes.
We've actually had one of the most moral people in our history as a people as President for the last seven years. In year eight how is that working out for him and for us? He's done enormously important things--things for which I regard him as a second FDR. He's been enormously patient with his attackers, and he has fought them strategically to get whatever he can get done, done. He has brought thousands of good people into government through his appointments (when they weren't blocked), and he has inspired millions to vote and to engage with government at every level. Is Sanders going to do that? Is he going to do it more effectively than Obama? I doubt it. Because neither Sanders nor his supporters grasps that in between all that inspiring and executive actioning falls the shadow of just keeping this enormous, craptacular, imperium, running.
OK, sez my emailing friend of a friend, by why take dirty, worn out old Hillary who has had a finger in the evil empire pie all these years? Will she do any better? Well, yes, I think she will. Syria won't stop blowing up because Sanders gets into power and I don't think he has any better ideas of what to do next than she does. In fact I think he has less. I don't share my friend's Manichean thinking on foreign policy--there are many wrong things to do that seem right, or seem necessary, at the moment. And decisions have to be made in the moment. Will she do better for our citizens (and non citizens) here at home? I am pretty sure she will. She has already advanced concrete plans on both health care and crises like Flint that are achievable, measurable, doable. Call me a small bore person but I'll take small steps to a better world over large pratfalls.
When I look at the choice between HRC and Sanders I'm actually agnostic. I'd be happy with either. But I'm not unhappy with HRC because she's been to this rodeo before and she isn't promising to wave a magic wand and make America something it has never been: just, fair, and running on renewable energy. I see the person who takes the presidency as someone who is agreeing to run Hell for a term that shall not exceed 8 years. Perhaps I should leave it at that.
*Campos, Booman and John Cole all seem to believe this was some kind of screaming fatal flaw because "she should have known" that working with the power elite in this country for the period between being Secretary of State and running again for President would be used against her. I think this is the dumbest argument I've ever seen advanced against a major political actor--one who has famously used the money raised at these things to back the Clinton Foundation and to support down ticket races.
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
8 Years Ago Tomorrow. It Still Seems Relevant.
Your Mumia sweatshirt won’t get you into heaven anymore
A comment left over at digg regarding Ralph Nader:The Democrats really hate Nader because he points out the fact that they are asking those of us on the left to vote for them but they aren’t doing anything for us. Did they end funding for the Republican’s crime spree in Iraq? No. Have they moved for UHC? No. Have they tried to stop corporate crimes? No. Have they tried to reform the tax code to be progressive? No. Have they tried to protect homeowners from predatory lenders? No. Have they defended our constitutional rights? No. Take back the FDA from the corporations? No. The FCC? No.
The Democrats don’t deserve my vote. They aren’t helping the left, why should the left help them?Let me see if I can explain it this way:
Every year in Happy Gumdrop Fairy-Tale Land all of the sprites and elves and woodland creatures gather together to pick the Rainbow Sunshine Queen. Everyone is there: the Lollipop Guild, the Star-Twinkle Toddlers, the Sparkly Unicorns, the Cookie Baking Apple-cheeked Grandmothers, the Fluffy Bunny Bund, the Rumbly-Tumbly Pupperoos, the Snowflake Princesses, the Baby Duckies All-In-A-Row, the Laughing Babies, and the Dykes on Bikes. They have a big picnic with cupcakes and gumdrops and pudding pops, stopping only to cast their votes by throwing Magic Wishing Rocks into the Well of Laughter, Comity, and Good Intentions. Afterward they spend the rest of the night dancing and singing and waving glow sticks until dawn when they tumble sleepy-eyed into beds made of the purest and whitest goose down where they dream of angels and clouds of spun sugar.
You don’t live there.
Grow the fuck up.
--Tbogg!
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