Monkeys and Weekend Reads

Well, “Mission Accomplished” in North Korea, kids … L’il Kim handed China
a laundry list of nuclear bits and pieces so the Dubby has declared him, and his brutal dictatorship, no longer evil. Pffft! Tell it to the political prisoners. Oh, but wait — none of that trio has a red hot record in human rights, do they. OK … never mind. Just a little pissing contest among the three ‘evil’ monkeys [you know -- the hear no, see no, speak no dumb-ass monkeys.]

And — oh, yes — the Supremes like ‘em some guns; no brainer there. Scalia wrote the paper, and in yer minds eye you can see him and Uncle Dick huddled in their duck blind, throwing back a few, waiting for some poor hand-raised bird to be tossed into the air. Fingers on the trigger, monkey-business in their minds.

In other news, Afghanistan is going up in flames and the North Pole will likely be ice-free this summer; we’ll have to recreate Santa with an Hawaiian shirt and a snorkel [I think I've seen him dressed like that in some Coke ads.] Food is a big issue, with Killer Tomato’s and more bad news from the bee-keeper’s — indeed, Burt’s Bees has introduced Colony Collapse Disorder Lip Balm to its list of products.

Since oil has just hit $140 a barrel, you’ll probably be home this weekend to read — so here’s an interesting collection. You’ll find mention of George Carlin in some of them — he was a national treasure, like Molly was. I’ve included a nice read on the Onion; we think highly of the Onion at PWaves.

We’ll take a look at John Yoo and David Addington under subpoena; if you want to know what’s wrong with Dubby’s government, look no farther. Somebody needs to slap the disrespect out of these Amerofascists; these monkeys are refugees from Wizard of Oz.

There’s a fascinating bit on aphasic people and how they read body language (starring St. Ronnie the Reagan,) and another entitled Empathy Deficit Disorder, which explains a lot about some people we know; the GOP will want to read that one, since they’ve identified a certain failing in this area and are attempting to reconstruct the ‘negative perceptions about the party.’ That will have to be my second Pffft! of the day.

Joe Bageant, of Deer Hunting With Jesus fame, writes a poignant piece on sex offenders, which is timely since one of McCain’s possible VP picks, Louisiana Governor [and sometime exorcist] Bobby Jindal has just signed a bill to chemically castrate everyone in this category. Just one more reason not to plan a vacation in the Big Easy [or a vote for John McRib.]

Last, you’ll find the link to one hell of a speech from Chris Dodd on the FISA bill, delivered in Congress this week. He’s a good one. A few other links on that topic, as well.

Lots of stuff to think about in this post. And let’s start the weekend with a retrospective of where we’ve been — here’s a very fun Youtube … see how many people you recognize:

We Didn’t Start The Fire

Keep cool, dearhearts — it’s all grist for the mill.

Jude

When Anonymity Fails, Be Nasty, Brutish and Short
Dana Milbank, WaPo
Friday, June 27, 2008

Throughout the Bush presidency, he toiled in secrecy deep within the White House, a mysterious and feared presence who never stepped into the sunlight of public disclosure.

Until yesterday.

There he sat, hunched and scowling, at the witness table in front of the House Judiciary Committee: the bearded, burly form of the chief of staff and alter ego to the vice president — Cheney’s Cheney, if you will — and the man most responsible for building President Bush’s notion of an imperial presidency.

David Addington was there under subpoena. And he wasn’t happy about it.

Could the president ever be justified in breaking the law? “I’m not going to answer a legal opinion on every imaginable set of facts any human being could think of,” Addington growled. Did he consult Congress when interpreting torture laws? “That’s irrelevant,” he barked. Would it be legal to torture a detainee’s child? “I’m not here to render legal advice to your committee,” he snarled. “You do have attorneys of your own.”

He had the grace of Gollum as he quarreled with his questioners. In response to one of the chairman’s questions, he neither looked up nor spoke before finishing a note he was writing to himself. When Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) questioned his failure to remember conversations about interrogation techniques, he only looked at her and asked: “Is there a question pending, ma’am?” Finally, at the end of the hearing, Addington was asked whether he would meet privately to discuss classified matters. “You have my number,” he said. “If you issue a subpoena, we’ll go through this again.”

Think of Addington as the id of the Bush White House. Though his hidden hand is often merely suspected — in signing statements, torture policy and other brazen assertions of executive power — Addington’s unbridled hostility was live and unfiltered yesterday.

He sat slouched in his chair, scratching his mustache, as Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Constitution subcommittee, warned about “the unaccountable monarchy” before offering Addington five minutes to make an opening statement. Addington spoke for a minute and 12 seconds — most of which was devoted to correcting two errors in Nadler’s introduction.

“Is that the entirety of your statement?” the chairman asked.

“Yes, thank you,” Addington replied. “I’m ready to answer your questions.”

He sure was. When John Conyers (D-Mich.) inquired about Addington’s pet legal concept, a “unitary executive theory” that confers extreme powers on the president, Addington dished out disdain.

“I frankly don’t know what you mean by unitary theory,” Addington replied.

“Have you ever heard of that theory before?”

“I see it in the newspapers all the time,” Addington replied.

“Do you support it?”

“I don’t know what it is.”

The usually mild Conyers was angry. “You’re telling me you don’t know what the unitary theory means?”

“I don’t know what you mean by it,” Addington answered.

“Do you know what you mean by it?”

“I know exactly what I mean by it.”

Addington went on to explain how the enemy’s actions — “smoke was still rising. . . . 3,000 Americans were just killed” — justified his legal reasoning. And he showed abundant disdain for dissenters, such as Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala.), who asked whether Addington consulted lawmakers about anti-torture statutes. “There is no reason their opinion on that would be relevant,” he answered.

Addington’s insolence appeared to embolden another witness, his former administration colleague John Yoo. Yoo took Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) on a semantic spin when asked about whether a torture memo was implemented.

“What do you mean by ‘implemented’?” Yoo asked.

“Mr. Yoo,” Ellison pressed, “are you denying knowledge of what the word ‘implement’ means?”

“You’re asking me to define what you mean by the word?”

“No, I’m asking you to define what you mean by the word ‘implement,’ ” the exasperated lawmaker clarified.

“It can mean a wide number of things,” Yoo demurred.

After several such dances around the questions (whether, for example, the president could order somebody buried alive), Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) offered his grudging respect: “You guys are great on ‘Beat the Clock,’ ” he said.

“I don’t play basketball,” replied the 41-year-old Yoo.

“That was a game show,” Cohen explained.

But Yoo was not about to win a nastiness contest with Addington. As Wasserman Schultz questioned him, he put his chin in his hand, stroked his beard and cut off the congresswoman with an offer of advice “that may be helpful to you in asking your questions.”

Schultz, declining the offer, asked him to describe an interrogation he witnessed at Guantanamo Bay. “You could look and see mouths moving,” Addington answered. “I infer that there was communication going on.”

Cohen asked Addington to explain his curious theory that the vice president is not part of the executive branch. Addington explained that the vice president “belongs to neither” branch but is “attached by the Constitution” to Congress.

“So he’s kind of a barnacle?” Cohen inquired.

“I don’t consider the Constitution a barnacle,” Addington said reproachfully.

Cheney’s Cheney continued to dole out the scorn (”You asked that question earlier, today, and I’ll give you the same answer”) until Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.), the last questioner, inquired about waterboarding. “I can’t talk to you — al-Qaeda may watch these meetings,” Addington said.

“I’m glad they finally have a chance to see you, Mr. Addington,” Delahunt joked.

“I’m sure you’re pleased,” Addington growled. ++

Kelly Kennedy, George Carlin, and the Reason for Traumatized Iraq Veterans
Juan Cole, InformedComment
Wednesday, June 25, 2008

The late George Carlin did not like the phrase “post-traumatic stress disorder.” He famously said,

‘ I don’t like words that hide the truth. I don’t like words that conceal reality. I don’t like euphemisms, or euphemistic language. And American English is loaded with euphemisms. Cause Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality. Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation. For some reason, it just keeps getting worse. I’ll give you an example of that.

There’s a condition in combat. Most people know about it. It’s when a fighting person’s nervous system has been stressed to it’s absolute peak and maximum. Can’t take anymore input. The nervous system has either (click) snapped or is about to snap.

In the first world war, that condition was called shell shock. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables, shell shock. Almost sounds like the guns themselves.

That was seventy years ago. Then a whole generation went by and the second world war came along and very same combat condition was called battle fatigue. Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn’t seem to hurt as much. Fatigue is a nicer word than shock. Shell shock! Battle fatigue.

Then we had the war in Korea, 1950. Madison avenue was riding high by that time, and the very same combat condition was called operational exhaustion. Hey, we’re up to eight syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase. It’s totally sterile now. Operational exhaustion. Sounds like something that might happen to your car.

Then of course, came the war in Viet Nam, which has only been over for about sixteen or seventeen years, and thanks to the lies and deceits surrounding that war, I guess it’s no surprise that the very same condition was called post-traumatic stress disorder. Still eight syllables, but we’ve added a hyphen! And the pain is completely buried under jargon. Post-traumatic stress disorder.

I’ll bet you if we’d of still been calling it shell shock, some of those Viet Nam veterans might have gotten the attention they needed at the time. I’ll betcha. I’ll betcha.’

I have concluded that Carlin was right about that issue. Being traumatized by war is not a disorder. In fact, if you are not traumatized by the sight of body parts flying all around you as you are splattered with the blood of people you know, then you would have a disorder. Why not just say “war-traumatized”? Or better yet, “war-scarred”? The PTSD phrase has the unfortunate effect of making it seem abnormal for people to be negatively affected by wartime violence.

It is like the phrase “Vietnam syndrome,” in which the understandable reluctance of the Baby Boom generation to launch big, long-lasting land wars in Asia was medicalized, as though there was something wrong with them that they were not warmongers. Why not say that they had ‘learned the lessons of Vietnam,’ or were ‘Vietnam-scarred’? Why suggest that there is something wrong with them for it?

So below is a report from CBS on how the US networks have sanitized the Iraq War for viewers, and how we cannot understand the long-term trauma suffered by US troops who served in Iraq unless we understand what they’ve been through. Warning: her description of what she and others saw in Iraq is explicit and disturbing. Carlin would be proud of her:

“Army Times reporter Kelly Kennedy saw first hand the horrors of the war in Iraq. She spoke to CBS News about her experiences and about how post traumatic stress disorder is affecting the troops.”

[open link for Youtube] ++

Funny Man in an Unfunny World
Amy Goodman, TruthDig via CommonDreams
Thursday, June 26, 2008

The world lost one of its great comedians this week with the death at age 71 of George Carlin. Carlin had a career as a stand-up comic that spanned a half-century, in which he continually broke new ground, targeting those in power with his wit and genius. He impacted our culture, our media and our nation with a stream of material that skewered institutions of the left and right, from government to business and the church. He released 22 comedy albums, earning him five Emmy nominations and winning four Grammys. He was the first guest host of “Saturday Night Live,” in 1975, and appeared on “The Tonight Show” 130 times. He starred in 14 HBO specials and authored three best-selling books. He also left an indelible mark on the radio station where I got my start in broadcast journalism, Pacifica station WBAI 99.5 FM in New York City.

On Oct. 30, 1973, WBAI broadcast Carlin’s “Filthy Words” routine. Carlin wrote on his Web site, georgecarlin.com: “Lone professional moralist complains to FCC which issues a Declaratory Order against station. Station goes to court.” That court battle would last five years, end at the U.S. Supreme Court and set the standard for broadcast indecency laws that are hotly debated to this day. It was neither accident nor coincidence that this iconoclastic comic would have some of his most controversial material broadcast over Pacifica Radio’s WBAI. The Pacifica Network was founded in Berkeley, Calif., in 1949, with KPFA as the first truly listener-sponsored radio station.

Back then, radio was so overwhelmingly commercial that Pacifica founder Lew Hill and others found it worthless. As Hill wrote in his “Theory of Listener Sponsored Radio,” “If we want an improvement in radio, the basic situation of broadcasting must be such that artists and thinkers have a place to work — with freedom.”

On July 3, 1978, the Supreme Court ruled that the Federal Communications Commission could punish WBAI for its broadcast of Carlin’s routine, arguing that words relating to sex or excretion (i.e., piss) when children might be listening were prohibited. Supreme Court Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall dissented, noting the court’s “depressing inability to appreciate that in our land of cultural pluralism, there are many who think, act, and talk differently from the Members of this Court, and who do not share their fragile sensibilities.” Remarkably, 30 years later, the same issues are before a decidedly more conservative Supreme Court.

Recent episodes of “fleeting expletives” from the mouths of celebrities like Bono, Cher and Nicole Richie have prompted the FCC to seek enhanced power to punish broadcasters. George Carlin pointed out what in our society was truly indecent: the behavior of the powerful.

Yes, he spiced his delivery with expletives. He was angry. He, like Pacifica, gave voice to essential, dissident perspectives that have been almost entirely blocked from mainstream media. He said: “We were founded on a very basic double standard. This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free. Am I right? A group of slave owners who wanted to be free, so they killed a lot of white English people in order to continue owning their black African people, so they could wipe out the rest of the red Indian people and move west and steal the rest of the land from the brown Mexican people, giving them a place to take off and drop their nuclear weapons on the yellow Japanese people. You know what the motto of this country ought to be? You give us a color, we’ll wipe it out.”

His prolific output will continue to inspire for generations to come. ++

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 700 stations in North America.

Reading The Onion Seriously
Combining irreverent humor and acerbic critique, a handful of new media outlets — including The Onion — are transforming American politics and culture
Theodore Hamm, InTheseTimes
June 26, 2008

A news brief reported,”Dead Iraqi Would Have Loved Democracy,” which in just six words refuted most arguments for the war.

After 9/11, The Onion stopped its presses for one week. The hiatus allowed the paper to show its respect for the gravity of what had happened in lower Manhattan. But it also enabled its staff to come up with the paper’s quite poignant reaction to the terrorist strikes. It was announced by a large banner headline that read, “Holy Fucking Shit — Attack on America.” The statement perfectly captured the confusion and fear of the moment. The paper’s lead story, “U.S. Vows to Defeat Whoever It Is We’re at War With,” accurately recorded the Bush administration’s immediate and enduring response to 9/11. To “America’s enemy, be it Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, a multinational coalition of terrorist organizations, any of a rogue’s gallery of violent Islamic fringe groups, or an entirely different, non-Islamic aggressor we’ve never even heard of,” Bush vowed, “be warned.” A pair of news briefs in that same issue reported, “American Life Turns into Bad Jerry Bruckheimer Movie” and “Hijackers Find Themselves in Hell” instead of the “Paradise” they had expected.

As its new home city (the paper moved its headquarters from Madison to New York City months earlier) and the nation tried to make sense of the attacks, The Onion’s 9/11 issue uniquely encompassed a wide range of popular sentiments. “We really were just trying to capture the sadness and anger everyone was feeling, and somehow it came out as humor,” Robert Siegel, then The Onion’s editor-in-chief, recalled a year later.

The End of Satire?

Ironically, perhaps, the most powerful statement The Onion made in that landmark issue was not about terrorism or the likelihood of the Bush administration’s overreaction to it, but instead about the future of irony itself. That week in Time, Roger Rosenblatt’s column carried the ominous title “The Age of Irony Comes to an End,” with an equally foreboding subheading of “No Longer Will We Fail to Take Things Seriously.” As Ground Zero smoldered, Rosenblatt searched for both blame and a sign of hope. He wrote, “For some 30 years — roughly as long as the Twin Towers were upright — the good folks in charge of America’s intellectual life have insisted that nothing was to be believed in or taken seriously.” It was irony, Rosenblatt suggested, that somehow had blinded us to the rising threat of Islamic fundamentalism.

Such an overwrought notion was blown apart by a range of critics, comic and otherwise. For its part, an Onion news brief announced, “Report: Gen X Irony, Cynicism May Be Permanently Obsolete.” In the item, a Gen X-er states, “Remember the day after the attack, when all the senators were singing ‘God Bless America,’ arm-in-arm?’ asked Dave Holt, 29.’Normally, I’d make some sarcastic wisecrack about something like that. But this time, I was deeply moved.’ Added Holt: ‘This earnestness can’t last forever. Can it?’”

Both the news brief and the entire 9/11 issue vividly illustrated The Onion’s answer to Holt’s question, as did its lead story in the next issue, “Shattered Nation Longs to Care About Stupid Bullshit Again.” Looking back one year later, Siegel explained to Alternet’s Daniel Kurtzman that irony would survive well into the twenty-first century. “Many things about America changed, but you can’t kill humor….Obviously people are going to laugh and people will still be sarcastic and snide and ironic and winking and insincere. That’s a good thing. That’s a sign of the return to normalcy.”

‘Gulf War II: The Vengeance’

Unfortunately, for the Bush administration “normalcy” soon meant outright deception, scare tactics, and bullying in the service of its primary goal of invading Iraq. The Onion, as usual, saw right through the jingo. In March 2002, when talk of taking down Saddam was in the air but nearly six months away from becoming an official plan, one of the paper’s headlines read, “Military Promises ‘Huge Numbers’ for Gulf War II: The Vengeance.”

The lead photo for the article showed Donald Rumsfeld giving a typical chesty gesture at a press conference in front of a Photoshopped movie poster of Gulf War II: The Vengeance, starring W. and Saddam. The other photo in the piece was even more prophetic, as it featured W. in full military gear, carrying an automatic weapon and hunting down rebel forces. The image smacked more of Rambo than the Top Gun–style “Mission Accomplished” scene that W. eventually chose, but the prediction was accurate enough.

According to the article, the PR blitz for Gulf War II also included a pact with Topps for a series of trading cards; “a first-look deal with CNN, guaranteeing the network full access to the front lines, as well as first crack at interviewing the men and women behind the scenes”; and a “two-cry deal” with Dan Rather. Late that summer, then–White House chief of staff Andrew Card famously stated that the administration was waiting until after Labor Day to unveil its full plan for Iraq because “you don’t introduce a new product in August.” Six months prior, The Onion had already sketched out the marketing plan for that dangerous “new product.”

As the White House made its sales pitch for war, the lead article in The Onion’s issue in the second week after Labor Day — dated September 11, 2002 — declared, “Bush Won’t Stop Asking Cheney If We Can Invade Yet.” In this case, the story worked a father-versus-impatient-son storyline, and so focused less on details of the Iraq question than on Cheney’s control over W. At one point, however, the piece did report that “Cheney sat Bush down and explained at length the political ramifications of proceeding with a first strike without creating the appearance of approval from Congress and the American people.” It continued by quoting Cheney’s advice to Bush: “If we just wait a little longer, Saddam is bound to commit some act of aggression or we’ll find some juicy al Qaeda ties or something, and then we can make it look like the whole country’s behind it.”

Here again the satire was right on target. Over the next month, in order to help force Congress into granting the administration the authority to go to war — a vote that would haunt many leading Democrats through both 2004 and 2008 — both Cheney and Bush stressed Saddam’s alleged ties to al Qaeda. Such outright distortions helped propel the Republicans’ success in the upcoming midterms as well as in 2004, and their game plan almost seemed lifted directly from the pages of a satirical publication. While serious liberal news organizations such as the New York Times helped disseminate the White House’s specious rationale for war, The Onion’s lampoons turned out to be far more accurate. The Bush gang, the paper said, was hell-bent on invading Iraq, and it would deploy any means necessary in order to do so.

Throughout the fall campaign, The Onion continued to see right through Bush’s bluster. For example, the paper’s lead story in early October announced that “Bush Seeks U.N. Support for ‘U.S. Does Whatever It Wants Plan.’” “As a shining beacon of freedom and democracy, America has inspired the world,” Bush told the UN General Assembly. “In this spirit, I call upon the world’s nations to support my proposal to give America unrestricted carte blanche to remove whatever leaders, plunder whatever resources, and impose whatever policies it deems necessary or expedient.” Such aggressive unilateralism underpinned the rationale W. here gave the UN for overthrowing Saddam: “The time has come for this man to step down, because we want him to.” Meanwhile, the question “What should we do about Saddam’s WMD?” domi-nated mainstream media discussion. Based on a false premise, the question itself dictated the answer. It was a sophisticated level of deception, and given Saddam’s reputation, it was easy fodder for cable news chatter.

But for its part, The Onion generally steered clear of that question, and instead frequently pointed out how the war enabled Bush to shift the nation’s attention from other problems. In “Bush on Economy: ‘Saddam Must Be Overthrown,’” for example, the war solved problems ranging from a weak manufacturing sector to the ongoing corporate scandals, which at the time involved WorldCom and Enron. Similarly, W.’s answer to the problem of North Korea was, of course, to invade Iraq; later, he tried to help sell his tax cuts by offering another $300 on top of his initial tax rebate, provided that the United States went to war. Brushing aside the WMD issue, The Onion consistently put forth a satirical but convincing case that the United States was going to war simply because the Bush administration wanted it.

When the war finally began in March 2003, the paper continued to mock both the Bush administration’s theatrics and its claims to an easy victory. One memorable lead story again foretold Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” moment with remarkable accuracy. Beside a photo of W. leading an invading squad of soldiers through desert combat, the paper’s top story explained how “Bush Bravely Leads 3rd Infantry into Battle.” In that same issue, a news brief reported,”Dead Iraqi Would Have Loved Democracy,” which in just six words refuted most arguments for the war. With notable foresight, the lead in the following week’s top story then stated,”Following a 12th consecutive day of fighting, a puzzled and frustrated President Bush confided to military advisors Monday that he ‘really figured the war would be over by now.’”

In that story, and in many others, Bush came across as juvenile and incompetent, a front man for Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the other neo-cons. In the fall of 2002, Beltway media mainstay Bob Woodward had, in Bush at War, legitimized the notion that W. really was in charge of his administration’s war plans; four years and two books later,Woodward’s analysis mirrored that found in The Onion.

The Onion Stays the Course

As the overthrow of Saddam became the occupation of Iraq, the paper stayed on the attack. It fired back at Bush shortly after he gave his spurious speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln declaring victory; here was the Hollywood moment that the paper had sagely predicted, with Bush effectively combining two Tom Cruise films (Top Gun and Mission: Impossible).

But in The Onion’s account, instead of stating that the mission was over, the sign behind Bush read “screw you, vets,”and the story detailed a ribbon-cutting ceremony at which Bush cut veterans benefits. The piece also featured what was by The Onion standards an unusually earnest photo, of a homeless African American vet dejectedly panhandling. Such sentimentality was short-lived, however, as the next week’s lead story returned to form: “Gen. Tommy Franks Quits Army to Pursue Solo Bombing Projects.” “The years I’ve spent with the Army have been amazing, and we did some fantastic bombing,” Franks stated. “But at this point, I feel like I’ve taken it as far as I can. It’s time for me to move on and see what I can destroy on my own.”

Amid the chaotic aftermath of the invasion, many media observers, as well as Democratic Party officials, began to turn against the Bush administration, attacking its incompetent handling of the occupation. The Onion, however, continued its relentless assault on both the design and the execution of the war. ++

© 2008 by Theodore Hamm. This piece was adapted from Theodore Hamm’s The New Blue Media: How Michael Moore, MoveOn.org, Jon Stewart and Company Are Transforming Progressive Politics (The New Press). Published with the permission of The New Press and available now at good book stores everywhere.

“I’m a Goddamned Magnet for Bad Luck”
Old Dogs and Hard Time
JOE BAGEANT, CounterPunch
June 13-15, 2008

Late at night through my window by the computer I can see my neighbor Stokes bicycling at 10 pm to the local convenience store to buy groceries. Not only is that an expensive way to feed one’s self, but it is the only way for old Stokes to cop some grubs without getting thrown in jail. Seriously. As a convicted sex offender, he is not allowed to come in proximity with young women in a supermarket checkout line. Nor is he allowed to visit a park, or even his own grandchild, even though he is not a child molester by the court’s own admission. He is not allowed to drink a beer. In fact, he is not even allowed to read Playboy Magazine.

A dozen or so years ago Stokes, now 66 with a gray ponytail, an altogether gentle soul who labors under the illusion he looks like Willie Nelson, (and even has a framed photo of Willie on his wall to invite comparison). Got caught by police in a, shall we say, “a vehicular sexual incident” with a married woman. They were both drunk, big deal. That happens in beer joints. To make a long story short, by the time they got to court the lady’s testimony was that it was all against her will, which being a married woman, solved a lot of problems for her. That resulted in Stokes being convicted as a sex offender while his public defender all but slept through the trial.

To make matters worse, Stokes had an unregistered handgun stashed in his car. Stupid, I know, but rednecks are often like that, and I’d be willing to bet there are more unregistered handguns guns than registered ones around here. This may horrify urban liberals, but legal or not, it is the common practice of tens of thousands of people down here in the southern climes of our great nation. Not to mention common nationwide to many thousands more cab drivers, night clerks, hotel parking valets, bill collectors, repo men, single women and god only knows how many others. At any rate, thanks to the gun which he never touched, Stokes was prosecuted for armed abduction for sexual purposes, and did ten years.

He’s been out for years now. But he was released into an entirely different world than he left — one which seems scripted by Adam Smith and Hanging Judge Roy Bean. As a convicted felon, he has been released from prison to serve a new sentence … to serve time as a profit center for our economy. In truth, he has been one from the day he was charged.

First off, he was a profit center for the prison where he served his time. Now it is fairly common knowledge that America’s burgeoning system of privatized prisons, “super jails,” and related services has been a boon for corporations such as Corrections Corporation of America, Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections Corp.) and their investors. Prisoner leasing programs such as Florida’s which rents out prison labor for less than 50 cents an hour to private industry in the name of “job training,” make building more prisons an attractive option for state governments and investors. It also makes recidivism desirable, since it assures the prison labor pool. Somewhere between 1% and 2% of Americans are behind bars, locked up at any given time, and as many more on probation or under state monitoring, obviously capitalist style punishment is a solid financial investment.

Now I am not about to screech here that our prison system is anywhere near that created by Uncle Joe Stalin. We do not have nine million people in it and we do not get sent there for being late for work at the factory, our factories having been outsourced. However, after 1929 Stalin’s prison camps were transformed to an economic machine. And in order to fulfill the camps’ economic goals, more and more prisoners were required, just as more prisoners are required to fulfill the investor goals of Corrections Corporation of America, Geo Group. In any case, convictions are profitable and the more of them there are the more money both private interests and the state take in.

That in itself is way the hell past just being strange. But throw in the term sex offender and get on the registered sex offender list (which seems to be mostly filled with Johns who solicited prostitutes, though you’d never know it by the way they name the offense) and it all gets really weird. Chilling even. This is partly because of the taboo and stigma associated, but mostly for the bizarre monitoring rules, and the money involved in enforcement. For example Stokes, must pay a couple hundred a month for counseling, group therapy and so on, until they tell him he can stop doing so. This therapy mainly amounts to listening to the stories of more serious offenders such as child molesters even though he is not one, but being treated by law as if he were. Such is the fate of being legally shackled to any of dozens of types of “certified sex offender treatment providers,” an ever expanding industry they tell me.

He also must pay for registration as an offender, blood, saliva, fingerprints, palm prints, police registration of his internet address (within 30 minutes of obtaining it) and so on with the Department of State Police and the Sex Offenders Registry, providing a new photo, address, etc., for 10 years, effectively the rest of Stokes’ life, not to mention registering with the local cops wherever he lives. After five years he may petition the court for relief from having to re-register monthly. He cannot leave the state. He is supposed to inform employers of his status as a sex offender.

So he cannot get a normal job and subsists on handyman work. In the end he generates about $400 a month for one post-incarceration entity or another, whether he has a job or not.

Stokes’s designated handlers tell him that the system would smile upon him if he would get more formal 8-5 employment, something that could be more easily tracked and taxed. Would that it were so easy for a 66-year-old man in this country. So he replies, “I’m retired dammit. I got the same right to live on my social security, if I can manage to, as anyone else.”

Yes, but it’s not much of a life for someone who once worked a skilled job setting up lights and stage gear in large arenas and performance venues. Now he lives in a basement workshop of an overcrowded apartment building/rooming house, in a space that is supposed to pass for an apartment but doesn’t even come close. For that privilege he pays $600 a month, and is allowed to work off part of it off by the landlord as a handyman.

Stokes tells me he could get out from under much of this by, and here’s the legal wording, “satisfying the court’s criteria for clear and convincing evidence that due to his physical condition the person no longer poses a menace to the health and safety of others.”

“You could cut your dick off,” I suggested.

“Sometimes I wish I had,” he sighs.

In any case, I am pretty dammed convinced parole is a racket, just like incarceration has become a racket, just as everything in this whole goddamned country is a racket in disguise, from home mortgages to health care. If it is vital to ordinary citizens, it’s a racket. But fear is the biggest racket of all. Even our rightful fear of sex offenders gets harnessed to the objectives of the corporate and political elites, woven into the weft and warp of the national delusion we call “the fabric of our society.” The freedom loving one that currently has 2.2 million of its own citizens locked up and another 2 million walking around under strict post-incarceration supervision and monitoring.

At this writing there are supposed to be 117 registered sex offenders in this burg of 24,000 from which I write, Winchester, Virginia, yet only 61 in the surrounding county which has a population of 73,000. Let me make a wild speculation here and say there may be a difference in the way justice is administered in the two localities.

As if Stokes’ needed to catch any more bad breaks, Stokes’ situation got worse. It seems he had the outrageous gall to get himself a dog. Stokes came upon a rather large black female mutt recently, who looked like she had a little retriever in her, according to Stokes, though I could never see it. She was bone skinny, partially blind and being neglected and abused by an old alcoholic woman down the street.

That dog, named Beulah, just loved Stokes. He lovingly fed he, and she stayed by his side constantly and obediently. But she kept getting skinnier and skinnier no matter how much he fed her. For a while we speculated it was worms, but I’ve seen enough dogs to know something worse was at work. Stokes spent money he didn’t have on expensive worm medicine. But he surely did not have $150 for a vet and tests and in a nation where uninsured folks are let to die slowly because they cannot pay cash, there was damned sure no more mercy for dogs.

Mercy too has been privatized and costs money. Meanwhile old Beulah is hanging out in the back yard in a friendly fashion, wreak and sick as he is, sniffing and getting petted by all who come her way. Dogs are like that. Uncomplaining and decent unto death. I’ve had several who passed that way. She was old and getting ready top die, sure as god made little green apples. Broke as Stokes is, this was certainly was not going to be a veterinarian administered death, with a canine Kevorkian attending. And being a paroled felon, for damned sure Stokes was not going to produce a gun and shoot her, which is the way old dogs such as we saw animals put out of misery back in our day.

A situation like that is bound to draw the animal control officer’s attention and rightfully so given the outward appearance of the situation. So Stokes was busted. An examination showed that Beulah had diabetes. Seems they’ll get a vet to examine a dog to get a conviction but not to save a dog’s life. Whereupon Stokes was charged with animal abuse by the animal control office of our city police department. “You should never have let that dog get in this condition; you should have taken her to a veterinarian!” Now Stokes has a court appearance on the docket for animal cruelty. And of course no money for a lawyer. That’s where the compassion of a lonely old man for another sentient being will get you. Smack dab in the jaws of our justice system.

I hold middle class America responsible for this deformed thing we now call justice. And I’ve wanted to write an article about the sex abuse crime industry scam in this country, and proposed it to several magazines. Every one of them said that sex abusers are too unsympathetic as characters for them to publish. I pointed out that these are real people, not characters in a fictional work. The editors added that they were afraid the public might mistake such a story as being supportive of real sex offenders.

Governments and states exist to control people, and for no other reason. If justice is achieved somewhere in the process, it’s an added bonus. But control above all else is necessary for modern civilization to exist. Population grows by the minute, increasing social pressure on humanity.

More rules and more control are required to keep order. Order is defined as the way we think others should behave – or imagine them to misbehave. We support the state’s police machinery and massive incarceration of our fellow citizens, so long as they are being imprisoned for the right reasons. They should pay. Every action in a capitalist world must produce money. So they should pay in cash.
Last week I was in Minneapolis, and spent a couple of nights getting drunk with a friend, an apartment building owner, who in his younger years

did hard time for burglary. Things were somewhat different then, he avowed. In the fifties and sixties a prisoner may or may not have worked off his “debt to society.” But in these times, he says, “The system demands that you just deliver payment in cash. It’s more efficient. But not fundamentally different. Back then, the rich still profited for our crimes more than we did. We stole $10,000 worth of stuff. Next day in the paper we found that the guy we burglarized claimed it $30,000 worth for insurance purposes. Getting robbed was a winning situation for him. He made 20-K on us.”

It’s also is a wining situation for the 20 percent of Americans in what we call the middle class – those actually living the middle class life as advertised by the commercial and financial state’s marketing department. It works well for Stokes’ psychologist, his piss tester, his lie detector service contractor, the people with the sex offender website contract, and all good citizens with investments on Wall Street. The psychologist needs money to send his kid on the private school trip to Italy this summer. The contractor providing the sex abuser services just built a summer down on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. The state police officer running the sex abuser monitoring program will retire in six years – his investments need to earn another $50,000 in that time…

But hold on!

Honest to God, as I conclude writing this — and I swear on a stack of friggin Bibles — a police prowl car and two of the department’s animal control officers in a police truck just parked in front of Stokes’ place across my driveway. They get out and after rifling through some papers on a clipboard and talking on cell phones.

Now they have walked over to Stokes’ back door. He comes out and they sit him down in a lawn chair while they stand over him, hands on hips, lips moving under dark sunglasses. And the neighbors are all peeking out their blinds, watching the cops accost the registered sex offender (once he was on the internet registry, word got around here fast). They are probably looking at the animal control officers’ truck and thinking: “Oh my gawd! Bestiality too?)

Anyway you look at it, this cannot be good. Not for Stokes, not for you or me or anyone else less than enamored with the idea of a police state.
And Stokes? As he told me only yesterday, “I’m a goddamned magnet for bad luck.”

No he’s not. He’s just one more anonymous human profit center to be squeezed, one more grape to be crushed in a grotesque blood and money press that has no mercy. ++

Joe Bageant is author of the book, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. (Random House Crown), about working class America. He is also a contributor to Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance from the Heartland (AK Press). A complete archive of his on-line work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class may be found on ColdType and Joe Bageant’s website, http://www.joebageant.com.

Food For Thought
A Collection of Heretical Notions and Wretched Adages
Jack Tourette, JunkFoodForThought

“The President’s Speech” from The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks, 1985:

What was going on? A roar of laughter from the aphasia ward, just as the President’s speech was coming on, and they had all been so eager to hear the President speaking…

There he was, the old Charmer, the Actor, with his practised rhetoric, his histrionisms, his emotional appeal - and all the patients were convulsed with laughter. Well, not all: some looked bewildered, some looked outraged, one or two looked apprehensive, but most looked amused. The President was, as always, moving - but he was moving them, apparently, mainly to laughter. What could they be thinking? Were they failing to understand him? Or did they, perhaps, understand him all too well?

It was often said of these patients, who though intelligent had the severest receptive or global aphasia, rendering them incapable of understanding words as such, that they none the less understood most of what was said to them. Their friends, their relatives, the nurses who knew them well, could hardly believe, sometimes, that they were aphasic.

This was because, when addressed naturally, they grasped some or most of the meaning. And one does speak ‘naturally’, naturally.

Thus, to demonstrate their aphasia, one had to go to extraordinary lengths, as a neurologist, to speak and behave un-naturally, to remove all the extraverbal cues - tone of voice, intonation, suggestive emphasis or inflection, as well as all visual cues (one’s expressions, one’s gestures, one’s entire, largely unconscious, personal repertoire and posture): one had to remove all of this (which might involve total concealment of one’s person, and total depersonalisation of one’s voice, even to using a computerised voice synthesiser) in order to reduce speech to pure words, speech totally devoid of what Frege called ‘tone-colour’ (Klangenfarben) or ‘evocation’. With the most sensitive patients, it was only with such a grossly artificial, mechanical speech - somewhat like that of the computers in Star Trek - that one could be wholly sure of their aphasia.

Why all this? Because speech - natural speech - does not consist of words alone, nor (as Hughlings Jackson thought) ‘propositions’ alone. It consists of utterance - an uttering-forth of one’s whole meaning with one’s whole being - the understanding of which involves infinitely more than mere word-recognition. And this was the clue to aphasiacs’ understanding, even when they might be wholly uncomprehending of words as such. For though the words, the verbal constructions, per se, might convey nothing, spoken language is normally suffused with ‘tone’, embedded in an expressiveness which transcends the verbal - and it is precisely this expressiveness, so deep, so various, so complex, so subtle, which is perfectly preserved in aphasia, though understanding of words be destroyed. Preserved - and often more: preternaturally enhanced…

This too becomes clear - often in the most striking, or comic, or dramatic way - to all those who work or live closely with aphasiacs: their families or friends or nurses or doctors. At first, perhaps, we see nothing much the matter; and then we see that there has been a great change, almost an inversion, in their understanding of speech. Something has gone, has been devastated, it is true - but something has come, in its stead, has been immensely enhanced, so that - at least with emotionally-laden utterance - the meaning may be fully grasped even when every word is missed. This, in our species Homo loquens, seems almost an inversion of the usual order of things: an inversion, and perhaps a reversion too, to something more primitive and elemental. And this perhaps is why Hughlings Jackson compared aphasiacs to dogs (a comparison that might outrage both!) though when he did this he was chiefly thinking of their linguistic incompetences, rather than their remarkable, and almost infallible, sensitivity to ‘tone’ and feeling. Henry Head, more sensitive in this regard, speaks of ‘feeling-tone’ in his (1926) treatise on aphasia, and stresses how it is preserved, and often enhanced, in aphasiacs.*

* ‘Feeling-tone’ is a favourite term of Head’s, which he uses in regard not only to aphasia but to the affective quality of sensation, as it may be altered by thalmic or peripheral disorders. Our impression, indeed, is that Head is continually half-unconsciously drawn towards the exploration of ‘feeling-tone’ - towards, so to speak, a neurology of feeling-tone, in contrast or complementarity to a classical neurology of proposition and process. It is, incidentally, a common term in the U.S.A., at least among blacks in the South: a common, earthy and indispensable term. ‘You see, there’s such a thing as a feeling tone…And if you don’t have this, baby, you’ve had it’ (cited by Studs Terkel as epigraph to his 1967 oral history Division Street: America).

Thus the feeling I sometimes have - which all of us who work closely with aphasiacs have - that one cannot lie to an aphasiac. He cannot grasp your words, and so cannot be deceived by them; but what he grasps he grasps with infallible precision, namely the expression that goes with the words, that total, spontaneous, involuntary expressiveness which can never be simulated or faked, as words alone can, all too easily…

We recognise this with dogs, and often use them for this purpose - to pick up falsehood, or malice, or equivocal intentions, to tell us who can be trusted, who is integral, who makes sense, when we - so susceptible to words - cannot trust our own instincts.

And what dogs can do here, aphasiacs do too, and at a human and immeasurably superior level. ‘One can lie with the mouth,’ Nietzsche writes, ‘but with the accompanying grimace one nevertheless tells the truth.’ To such a grimace, to any falsity or impropriety in bodily appearance or posture, aphasiacs are preternaturally sensitive. And if they cannot see one - this is especially true of our blind aphasiacs - they have an infallible ear for every vocal nuance, the tone, the rhythm, the cadences, the music, the subtlest modulations, inflections, intonations, which can give - or remove - verisimilitude to or from a man’s voice.

In this, then, lies their power of understanding - understanding, without words, what is authentic or inauthentic. Thus it was the grimaces, the histrionisms, the false gestures and, above all, the false tones and cadences of the voice, which rang false for these wordless but immensely sensitive patients. It was to these (for them) most glaring, even grotesque, incongruities and improprieties that my aphasic patients responded, undeceived and undeceivable by words.

This is why they laughed at the President’s speech.

If one cannot lie to an aphasiac, in view of his special sensitivity to expression and ‘tone’, how is it, we might ask, with patients - if there are such - who lack any sense of expression and ‘tone’, while preserving, unchanged, their comprehension for words: patients of an exactly opposite kind? We have a number of such patients, also on the aphasia ward, although, technically, they do not have aphasia, but, instead, a form of agnosia, in particular a so-called ‘tonal’ agnosia. For such patients, typically, the expressive qualities of voices disappear - their tone, their timbre, their feeling, their entire character - while words (and grammatical constructions) are perfectly understood. Such tonal agnosias (or ‘atonias’) are associated with disorders of the right temporal lobe of the brain, whereas the aphasias go with disorders of the left temporal lobe.

Among the patients with tonal agnosia on our aphasia ward who also listened to the President’s speech was Emily D. , with a glioma in her right temporal lobe. A former English teacher, and poetess of some repute, with an exceptional feeling for language, and strong powers of analysis and expression, Emily D. was able to articulate the opposite situation - how the President’s speech sounded to someone with tonal agnosia. Emily D. could no longer tell if a voice was angry, cheerful, sad - whatever. Since voices now lacked expression, she had to look at people’s faces, their postures and movements when they talked, and found herself doing so with a care, an intensity , she had never shown before. But this, it so happened, was also limited, because she had a malignant glaucoma, and was rapidly losing her sight too.

What she then found she had to do was to pay extreme attention to exactness of words and word use, and to insist that those around her did just the same. She could less and less follow loose speech or slang - speech of an allusive or emotional kind - and more and more required of her interlocutors that they speak prose - ‘proper words in proper places’. Prose, she found, might compensate, in some degree; for lack of perceived tone or feeling.

In this way she was able to preserve, even enhance, the use of ‘expressive’ speech - in which the meaning was wholly given by the apt choice and reference of words - despite being more and more lost with ‘evocative’ speech (where meaning is wholly given in the use and sense of tone).

Emily D. also listened, stony-faced, to the President’s speech, bringing to it a strange mixture of enhanced and defective perceptions - precisely the opposite mixture to those of our aphasiacs. It did not move her - no speech now moved her - and all that was evocative, genuine or false completely passed her by. Deprived of emotional reaction, was she then (like the rest of us) transported or taken in? By no means. ‘He is not cogent,’ she said. ‘He does not speak good prose. His word-use is improper. Either he is brain- damaged, or he has something to conceal.’ Thus the President’s speech did not work for Emily D. either, due to her enhanced sense of formal language use, propriety as prose, any more than it worked for our aphasiacs, with their word-deafness but enhanced sense of tone.

Here then was the paradox of the President’s speech. We normals - aided, doubtless, by our wish to be fooled, were indeed well and truly fooled (’Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur’). And so cunningly was deceptive word-use combined with deceptive tone, that only the brain-damaged remained intact, undeceived. ++

Empathy deficit disorder — do you suffer from it?
Amanda Robb from “O, The Oprah Magazine,” via CNN
April 2008

Story Highlights

People learn basics of empathy in childhood from parents
Expert: Lack of empathy, values behind war and divorce
A first step to becoming empathetic is faking it to comfort other person

I swear on the “Thelma & Louise” video we watched into a scratchy oblivion: I didn’t mean to be the worst friend ever. When Lisa — my roommate and boon companion of three years –stepped into our apartment, sank to the floor, and clutched our cocker spaniel, I asked, “What’s wrong?” with sympathy.

“I got fired,” Lisa told me.

“Wow.” I pulled her to her feet. “You’ll have an amazing story for Jim’s party tonight!”

Lisa’s eyes went round and wet as the dog’s when we left her at the vet. She said, “Come on, Maya” (who gave me a reproachful glance before obeying), disappeared into her bedroom (for three days), and never discussed career matters with me again.

Boy, was I annoyed. At age 26, I was a sublime friend. Lisa, also 26, was blessed to have an ally so honest about dates and hairstyles, so fiercely supportive of her dreams, and willing to defend her choices (the dates, hairstyles, and dreams) to her habitually nettling mom and dad. Never once in our relationship, I was proud to think, had I ever even been tempted to commit a single mortal friendship sin: being competitive, gossiping, or backstabbing.

To me, Lisa’s job loss was no big deal. She had complained about the position. Her parents were rich and gave her money. She had nothing to worry about. I thought that reminding her we had something fun to do that night was an appropriate and kind response.

Psychologist Douglas LaBier, Ph.D., director and founder of the Center for Adult Development in Washington, D.C., disagrees. He explained to me that my dearest friend was humiliated by receiving a pink slip, feared she might be incompetent at everything she tried, and, because of me, felt utterly alone. I was, LaBier tells me, “catastrophically unempathetic” to Lisa.

At the heart of many problems

Today, 15 years later, I know why my attempt at consoling my friend was so ham-fisted. As LaBier explains, virtually everyone learns the basics of empathy in childhood (from our parents comforting us when we’re in distress), but my father died when I was 4, and afterward my mother had to be very can-do, juggling three jobs, graduate school, and two kids. When I was upset, she never said, “Oh, I’m sorry. It must be hard to have me away so much after losing your dad.”

Instead, on good days, she’d say, “Why are you crying? Nothing is wrong.” And on bad days: “You’d better toughen up because life can get a lot worse.” Looking back at my 20-something self, I realize that if, as LaBier says, empathy is “the ability or the willingness to experience the world from someone else’s point of view,” I wasn’t brought up to be able to do that.

At least my lack of empathy was not unusual. Having practiced as a psychotherapist for 35 years, LaBier believes that what he calls empathy deficit disorder (EDD) is rampant among Americans.

LaBier says we unlearn whatever empathy skills we’ve picked up while coming of age in a culture that focuses on acquisition and status more than cooperation and values “moving on” over thoughtful reflection. LaBier is convinced that EDD is at the heart of modernity’s most common problems, macro (war) and micro (divorce).

When Lisa crept into her bedroom, I couldn’t have articulated any of this. She might have felt abandoned, but all I knew was that I felt alone. My roommate had her dog, and they were both shunning me, and my boyfriend of four years wouldn’t rescue me from the loneliness I increasingly felt by agreeing to get married. I went into psychotherapy.

Faking it a step to becoming empathetic

I thought my therapist would help me break up with my commitment-phobic lover, figure out how to choose less sensitive friends, and, of course, let me rant about my mother’s shortcomings. I did get to rant — about my mom, Lisa, and my boyfriend.

What surprised me was my therapist’s response to these tirades. She never said, “Leave that rotten bastard.” Or “Your roommate is a big baby.” Instead she said, “Gosh, that sounds really hard.” And, “That must have felt terrible.” And, “How did you feel after that happened?” My reaction to those spectacularly bland comments was even more astonishing. I loved them.

“These very simple responses make you feel understood,” says New York psychologist Frank M. Lachmann, Ph.D., author of “Transforming Narcissism: Reflections on Empathy, Humor, and Expectations.”

He points out that many of the common responses — “It could be worse”; “You should do X”; “Let’s talk about something else” — appear to be kind and aimed at soothing. But no matter how well intentioned, Lachmann says, these remarks are a rejection, a denial, of what the other person is going through. “They are code for ‘Don’t confront me with things that are unpleasant,’” he says. “Or ‘Don’t bother me with your pain.’”

About six months into psychotherapy, I started using what I thought of as my therapist’s “lines.”

When Lisa was offered a job at an organization she did not want to work at, I said, “Oh, that’s a tough spot to be in.” When my boyfriend was invited to study abroad, I said, “How do you feel about that?” What I really felt was: “Lisa, that job pays a ton of money, but I guess you can turn it down because your parents are loaded.” And, “You selfish bastard, I’ll kill you if you go to Europe without me.”

Still, Lachmann says, I had taken the first step to becoming empathetic — which is faking it. If you want to act more empathetic, you follow certain steps: Instead of telling people what they ought to do or becoming tyrannically optimistic, you offer sympathy, inquire about feelings, and validate those feelings. You’ll be giving comfort to the other person, even if you yourself can’t feel what they’re going through.

It’s true that for a long time, while I could say the appropriate thing, I could not relate to their struggles. Still, I took satisfaction in the fact that my relationships were improving. Then a year after starting therapy, I began feeling something intensely when comforting friends: terror.

This turned out to be a signal, Lachmann says, that I was actually feeling empathy.

Final insult

I didn’t recognize it because I’d always run from emotional discomfort — and, at least in the beginning, I found trying to be empathetic profoundly uncomfortable. Most of the time, I managed to avoid the impulse to blurt out unhelpful suggestions to my friends — “Happy hour, anyone?” Or, “Here’s the number for a credit consolidator!” — and instead say the appropriate thing. But for years and years, I could stand genuine empathy only five minutes at a time.

For those five minutes, though, I was not alone. And once I had experienced the wonder of that, I was willing to stumble out of my comfort zone to try to be not alone again.

Virtually everything I have ever tried to improve about myself — my weight, my sleep habits, my housecleaning — has resulted in an endless seesaw of improvement. But empathy, I’ve learned, is not like dieting. (Or, at least, how I diet, which involves ending up back at square one.)

Cultivating empathy has its own rewards: The more you do it, the better your relationships are and the more you want to continue.

Feeling understood in that therapist’s office taught me that human beings are not doomed to be alone — and empathy is life’s connective tissue. If you have a romantic partner, he or she will someday believe that you are entirely wrong about something, and if you can see the problem from your partner’s point of view, you’ll be able to get through that conflict without smoldering in the corner or splitting up.

If you work with someone you despise (and who despises you back), and you try to understand why that person dislikes you, then you stand a chance of not hating every minute with her at the office. If you live in a world that you would like to see less divided by ethnic, economic, and religious strife, you’ll find that attempting to comprehend the needs of your sworn enemies is a prerequisite to any meaningful action you can take.

Empathy will also require you to get past rationalizations and admit wrongdoing.

For about a decade after I started working to be more empathetic, I told myself that I hadn’t hurt Lisa too badly because she never told me I had. But Lachmann points out that the final insult of being treated with a lack of empathy is that the hurt person usually can’t complain. “If you say, ‘That was such an unempathetic thing to say,’ it can easily be heard as, ‘Feel sorry for me.’ And no one wants to be pathetic.” So most people don’t say anything, Lachmann says, and relationships “are often ruptured and ruined.”

Lisa and I are no longer close. We live on opposite coasts. We have very different lives. But still, I couldn’t bear the idea of us being “ruptured and ruined.” I recently called her and said I was sorry for being selfish when she lost her job. I said I had eventually learned that it must have been a terrible time for her and that I had made it worse by leaving her so alone with all her confusion. Lisa was gracious (”You did your best”), forgiving (”Really, you were a wonderful friend to me overall”), and honest (”It was 15 years ago, and I’m over it now”). She changed the subject, and we caught up on our summer plans.

Her family — along with the cocker spaniel, Maya, who was still alive and giving reproachful looks — was planning a camping trip. Packing up, Lisa realized none of her jeans fit. Her pregnancies had stripped every curve from her body. She was skinny as a post. I began to wail, “Oh my God, you lucky rat! I gained 10 pounds … ”

But then I stopped myself. “Um. So how does it feel to have to buy new jeans?” I asked.

There was a silence on the line. Then Lisa started laughing. “Wonderful,” she said. “Absolutely wonderful.” ++

Senator Dodd’s speech on the Senate floor

Chris Dodd’s Speech And A Glimmer Of Hope For Stopping The FISA Bill
Glenn Greenwald, Salon
6/26/08

Housing bill, FISA delayed until after July recess
The Hill
6/26/08

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

1 comment June 28th, 2008