I live too much in the past, nostalgic for a time I found pain when I
lived it, now far more innocent than time we pass through these days.
some joker on the intern posed an impossible choice between going back
to 45 with $10 million or going back to my youth knowing all I know now.
I'd skip the $10 million for the chance to see old friends and family
again.
perhaps to meet even family I didn't get to know enough when I met them
only in passing.
delving into their lives in retrospect I realize just how much I missed
or have forgotten or never knew and only by going back will I truly know them.
Everybody's youth seems more innocent than it actually is. My
grandparents, my great grandparents even my great great grandparents each saw
their worlds change and become more complex. Each saw the passing of family the
way I have to become as my grandmother became and I have become, a sole
survivor, burdened with my memories and the memories who came before me,
knowing but not well enough my ancestors. but I have only bits and pieces to
represent the whole, snapshots in time with which to preserve them.
if I could go back, knowing what I know now, I would know what to look
fir, how to fill in all these missing pieces of all those people I have come to
cherish through time.
The first feeling I feel when I get fired is not panic.
That comes later when I try and figure out how the hell I’m
going to pay my rent or mortgage.
The first feeling isn’t even negative, although that comes
later, too, the unworthiness that makes me unacceptable.
No, the first feeling is always elation, as if the chains
have been removed from me and I am able to move about unencumbered by responsibilities
that I been forced to endure just to get a paycheck.
After 32 years as a beat reporter – 27 at the Hudson
Reporter, the rest elsewhere, and the week in and week out ritual of a meeting
deadlines, the elation this time was even more significant than during other
terminations, feeling the links of chain drop one by one as I used by 30
minutes to pack up 27 years of accumulated stuff from my desk, putting
notebooks and file folders into recycling, things I thought I needed fore to
save for unrealized future stories.
I didn’t even hear the ticking clock in my head I had when
fired from other jobs, my whole 30 minutes done in deliberate slow-motion since
what I needed to take was significantly less than what I would leave behind –
and not all of that physical.
To be unbeholden to anyone, returning to that point in life
when I lived more or less carefree, assuming life would someone take care of me
– the hippie-hobo life Kerouac wrote about in “On the Road.” Someone on the
street of Hoboken even called me a “Darma Bum” as if my new-found freedom
emanated from me, a radiation glow I could not keep contained had I wanted to.
How long this glow lasts is up to me – perhaps even for the
rest of my life.
Monday morning rising to face one more week of deadlines.
I always have too much to do and make more promises than I
can keep – a story for this cause or that, each a brutal battle from notes to
finished copy that I always cringe over.
I keep looking for a formula that will make life easier,
knowing I’ll never find one.
All this, of course, comes in the middle of what I like to
think of as my “serious work,” those passages of purple prose which will put me
in a literature book someday, guarantee me a place among the greats (how many
other fools have thoughts like this, like the man at the poetry reading Saturday
who ranted on about those writers who influence him, name dropping so heavily
he could have served a biography for a text on western literature.
A large part of literary success is self-promotion, such as
what happened with Whitman when he wrote reviews of his own book and gave
himself high praise.
I am poor at self-promotion, and wish talented amounted for
me, and hard work, and some aspect of self-belief. All writers, artists, musicians
must believe they are destined for something, or they fail.
But some of us deceive ourselves, relying too much upon the
world somehow discovering us.
I did well enough at the open reading this weekend, and more
or less discovered a fact that I already knew, that people won’t tolerate long
pieces, regardless of the quality. They like beginnings and endings, and would
avoid the middles if possible, especial if those middles seem to go on and one.
Even poetry as been pockmarked by the punchy, sliced up
images of post-MTV, and in poetry as in my old adage (to whom I can not give credit):
keep it short stupid.
The problem is I don’t operate well in the realm of the ultra-short,
where every word need be a pearl, where every image as sharp as a diamond. My
work plods along in an emotional accumulation, where poetry demands lightning
strikes. But I do have a few short pieces, and I’ll see where that gets me. Perhaps
I can seduce some sucker into giving me a feature, where I can do what the hell
I want.
Wednesday, July 31, 2019I’m unemployed again.This time I’m not completely to blame – although internal politics at
my office played a significant part in their choice to chop my head off rather
than someone else’s.Sometimes, the universe lines up in such a way that things become inevitable.I’ve carried a target on my back for the last several years, in
particular with the change of ownership last year – but even more so when the
person who despises me most became by boss and tried at least twice to convince
the new owners I was expendable, and even incompetent.Over the last 32 years as a journalist, I always knew I was better respected
by the people I covered than the people employed me.But in the most recent case, I’ve become a non-entity entirely because the
new owners do not see people as people, but as pieces in a corporate machine,
easily replaced, more importantly, easily pressed to do more than we are
actually getting paid to do.The recent downsizing was number crunching, nothing personal on the
higher levels. The corporation clearly saw my salary as an issue but left the
choice for who got chopped on local bosses, and since my boss didn’t like me, I
was an easy choice.This was true of some of the others that were giving notice when I was,
old adversaries to the local bosses, who found this as a good opportunity to get
rid of those they disliked anyway.This trust in local bosses is not new.Managers historically in our society trust other managers regardless of
how incompetent or corrupt these managers are.Nobody takes workers seriously enough to actually listen to them,
unless these workers make a lot of noise the way I do.Although I have held this job for the last 27 years, I have been fired
before, a number of times, only in those instances, I deserved it, mostly for
challenging authority.Ironically, each of these events seemed to occur around the same time
in the decade, so that the current dismissal is a kind of anniversary of each
of my previous events, in 1969, 1979, and 1989. Some jobs I resigned before
they got the chance to fire me.Almost in every case, I caused my own demise by pointing out just how incompetent
the people who oversaw me were or challenged the corporation mentality that
made workers into machine parts and ignored our humanity.I remember how the vice president of Fotomat came to my booth to talk
to me after I wrote a long letter to the corporation criticizing the way they
did business, or how I got fired from the Garfield Dunkin donuts two weeks
before my wedding because the owner was a complete ass and had abused one of
the female workers – a similar situation got me fired from the cosmetic company
in the late 1970s. I quit my summer job the Garfield Two Guys store before they
could find an excuse to fire me. I had challenged them and could afford to,
then realized that some of the other workers were looking up to me – and were
risking their jobs because I became a kind of spokesperson for a righteous
cause, working people. I understood then, that rebellion comes with responsibility,
and while I was willing to pay the price, I could not afford to let others
suffer.When I wrote a letter to Tony Pro in 1978 about how our union rep was selling
out to management, I knew I risked my job. Tony Pro was on his way to jail but
took time to fire the union rep (maybe more than that), but I lost my job
anyway.I was a constant thorn in management’s side during each of my jobs,
because people became invisible, and it was important for someone like me to
remind these powerful people than workers are not machine parts, easily
replaced, they have families, and their lives are shattered by corporate
decisions.That may well be part of the reason I’m unemployed this time, too, since
my current boss decided to use the corporate system to try to get me fired –
unable to get the previous owners to do it – and I struck back, refusing to
recognize my boss’ claims.But I knew in winning, I was losing, and that the whole confrontation
with a corrupt local boss was unwinnable ultimately, and that eventually, I was
doomed.So, when the corporate downsizing came, I did not resist – it was the
least painful of potential events, and let me walk away with the same dignity I
always have in such situations, knowing that the victory of the petty local boss
will be temporary, and hollow. In the end, letting me and other rebels go also
stole the heart and soul of the business, and left a pack of self-serving
power-hungry wannabe bosses in place – each aching to be captain of a ship that
has already sprung so many leaks that it can do nothing but sink. It's easy to be a captain of a sinking ship. You need no compass to choose
a direction. The only direction is down.Now I know how it feels to be one of the survivors in the life boats
watching the Titanic sinking in the distance, saddened by the loss of life, and
the tragic loss of a noble ship, but relieved that I have finally managed to
escape relatively unscathed, and aware that for the first time in a long time,
I do not need to look over my shoulder to see who is taking aim at the target
on my back – having left the target on the deck of the ship, and the pack of
wannabe captains shooting themselves in their feet as the water rises up around
their necks.And while I may feel as if the row to shore is a long one, at least I
know I will eventually reach shore, maybe even before my former bosses meet
Davy Jones.
July 27, 2019Power never lasts.And the tighter you grip it the more it slips like sand
through your fingers and leaves your hands empty.This may take days or weeks or even decades, and so on days
like this, when it seems like the bad guys won, I tell myself they haven't.And for those of us who seem to have been exiled from the
kingdom, outcasts from what we thought was Arthur's perfect realm, we need to realize, too, that inside those noble
halls, those who remain hate each other as much as they ever hated us, and must
live with each other, hating each other, more than they ever hated or feared
us, sharks living among sharks, always fearful of teeth that might dig deep
into them they way their teeth once dug deep into us.We all lived in one big fish bowl where they feed on guppies
like us, but now that they have fed on the last of us, we feed on each other.This is poor satisfaction for those of us who spent decades
building our power right, brick by brick, instead of body by body, making
alliances rather than petty schemes. In the short view, good guys always seem
like suckers, having done things the way were taught to do them, living by some
moral code that avoided using and abusing others in our climb to the top.On days like this we need to tell ourselves that these
mountain climbers really aren't getting to the top of a mountain, but to the
top of a dung heap, their own petty egos painting it as something more, and
that those same egos will eventually bring about their downfall from even that
un-lofty height. We need to convince ourselves that we won even when it seems
we didn't, by retaining a moral highground they for all their ambition lack, and that even in
exile, we remain the ones who won, though at moments like this, we do not feel
like we have.We need to remind ourselves that sharks will remain sharks
even when the fish tank is empty of everything but sharks, and we must learn
patience, learn to heal ourselves, wait and watch for that day when these
sharks turn onto each other – knowing that it must come, knowing that sharks
must continue to feed, and in the end, must consume each other.On days like this, we need to remember that all power hungry
people carry inside them the seeds of their own destruction, weaknesses they
cannot see in themselves, either because their egos won't allow them to, or
they simply do not know themselves well enough to avoid their inevitable
demise, and that on some future day, the final grains of sand will slip out
from between their fingers, and when they open their hands, they have nothing.
Pelosi took down the sign from the congressional wall saying, "In God
We Trust."
This is just one more example if the massive shift in American value
best reflected in the song by The Rolling Stones "Sympathy for the Devil"
in which all the sinners are saints.
Even “Rules for Radicals,” the handbook of the new left written by a mentally
ill Chicago social worker praises Satan as the true rebel.
Drug dealers, murderers, rapists (unless you're OJ or Bill Cosby) are
turned into victims of social injustice, completely gutting their victim's
right to more conventional justice.
These rules are a reinvention of radical 1930s Stalinist socialism,
unsuccessfully revived in the 1960s only to be resurrected by this unethical
Hitler-like Chicago community activists that decided that winning is everything,
and any means of obtaining it, is okay as long as you can get away with it.
This explains the current crop of pathetic and meanspirited people who
profess love and peace by committing the most atrocious acts, destroying innocent
people’s live if these innocent people happen to disagree with them
politically.
Under these rules, it’s okay to lie, cheat, deceive, even murder for
some imaginary higher cause, ignoring the fact that what you do is what you
are, regardless of how much you put lipstick on the pig.
This is the Democratic party that orchestrated a fraud to bring down Kavanaugh
and earlier Thomas, in order to keep them from overturning Roe vs. Wade.
It’s also okay to terrify the public with dishonest and exaggerated
climate change horror stories as long as it leads to distribution of wealth.
This new radicalism saw its pinnacle with the election of Obama as
president, since he was raised with its ruthlessness in Chicago, not merely a
student of the philosophy of hate, but a professor of it as well, disguising
his ruthless ambition behind pretty rhetoric, while he performed dishonest
deeds to achieve power.
Fortunately for America, Obama proved among the most incompetent of
presidents and much of the damage he did during his eight years in office may
be undone in the eight years of the current president.
This is largely what infuriates Democrats because they still subscribe
to the same Marxist philosophy as Obama did and are still engaged in the same
class warfare he waged while president.
The idea now is the same one espoused in the 1930s when Stalinism was
in vogue - to bring down capitalism.
The idea of equal opportunity is not enough. This new left wants to
live up to the mandate of yet another rock lyric by ten years after - to tax
the rich until they're rich no more.
The Chicago-based Marxism wants everybody to have the same even those
who haven’t earned it or are too incompetent to compete in a world where talent
and hard work account for something. This is the logic behind reparations for
slavery to steal, from the rich to give to the poor in some misguided belief
that the rich had advantages the poor lacked, despite six decades of massive
social reforms to provide poor people of color opportunity to succeed.
After decades of failed Democratic social reforms, Democratic radicals
have decided to take even more radical steps, spreading seeds of descent that
they will hope leads to revolution.
Marx mistakenly believed revolution against capitalism was inevitable
because poor people would become miserable and would rise up against the ruling
class.
Marx and Marxists miscalculated largely for reasons reflected in a
lyric by Springsteen- poor want to be rich and rich want to be king.
the Chicago based radicalism -- out of which the new left has emerged
-- takes Marxism to a new level through a process of agitation. Rather than wait
for a revolution against capitalism that will never come, radicals rub poor
people's noses in their own poverty. Instead
of showing the poor how to make the system work, the radicals cast blame,
stirring up hatred towards successful people by calling them racists or worse.
this is largely the logic behind antifa and others tearing down statues. But it
goes far beyond that. Since successful people largely generate the wealth that
ultimately pays for social programs that benefit the poor, these radicals
eventually hurt those they claim to help, not merely by destroying icons like God
or statues but by prompting the belief poor people can become rich without
having to earn it.
