Reflections on Narcissism, Politics, and President Trump

Posted by on January 25, 2017 Comments Off on Reflections on Narcissism, Politics, and President Trump

While describing Donald J Trump as a narcissist or having “narcissistic personality disorder” is not original, some of my ideas on the subject differ from the general consensus. If they resonate with you, then it might help understand some less transparent aspects of the new President.

Many people equate narcissism with selfishness. I do not. The selfish person says, “Here is what I want. Here is what you want. What I want comes first.” The narcissist says, “Here is what I want, and I have no idea what you want.” While the former describes a moral failing, the latter describes a disability.

narcissis

If you are not a narcissist, you may well be able to imagine the implications of the disability, including coping strategies.

  1. Being limited to perceiving only his own feelings and thoughts, he projects them on to others.
  2. Without being able to imagine the thoughts and feelings of another, he has to depend on external feedback loops to determine the reaction to what he does and says. He watches the reactions of others to his expressed thoughts as well as some random junk. He discards those that are received negatively or ignored, while repeating and amplifying those that are well-received. Think Darwinian natural selection of ideas by positive reinforcement.
  3. By contrast negative expressions, such as criticism, are rebuffed as unpleasant to the only person who matters by firing verbal barrages, including epithets and baseless charges, to tell the critic to back off. While no one likes being criticized, criticism of a narcissist attacks his central being, the ego, all he knows of himself, and is more threatening than that directed at someone in the rest of the population. He is also oblivious to the impact of his epithets.
  4. He is incapable of achieving intimacy, which means knowing another person as if they were naked with all their clothes still on, and letting that person know you to the same extent.

Let’s discuss each one, and see how it might apply to President Trump.

First, while duly noting my bias as a Democrat, I think most of the epithets that he directed at opponents reflect his own internal fears and weaknesses, as they are all he knows. That would include “low energy Jeb,” “little Marco,” “crooked Hillary,” and “lying Ted.” Some examples from his behavior might be taking off for the weekend after the Inauguration (low energy), the size of his hands and other body parts (little), his involvement in Trump University, stiffing suppliers, and the mysterious tax returns (crooked), and the endless deliberate misstatements or indifference to the truth (lying).

Second, consider chants of “lock her up” at his rallies, as well as his use of “drain the swamp.” When they resonate with his audience, he repeats them, or continually alludes to them so the audience will be cued to chant them. Indirectly he said as much right after the election. On “lock her up,” he said that “we don’t need that anymore.” On “drain the swamp,” he said that initially he didn’t like it, but as it became popular it grew on him. The process is completely amoral, without regard to other considerations such as ethics or human impact. In that category might be included “dog whistle” racism and white supremacy. His only criterion for success is if “it worked.”

Third, Trump’s apparent lack of ability to accept criticism is reflected in his tweets in response to critics, often on the most mundane and insignificant issues. His post-election press conference, when he denounced Buzzfeed and CNN as “fake news,” is another example. His most ill-advised and unattractive acts are in response to criticism.

Fourth, there is little evidence of love in his three marriages. The pattern seems to be trading money for a beautiful, younger wife. That includes the possibility of trading up, as wives one and two learned. Since only his feelings matter, being unaware of those around him, as much sex as he can get is part of the mix. Since he cannot imagine the feelings of someone being sexually assaulted, he feels free to engage in sexual assault. All described are transactions with commodities, trading money for power, or for sex, or for a younger wife.

You might well ask why there are narcissists at all. It is genetic. I have observed it passed down through 4 generations, skipping some members along the way. When only one of multiple siblings displays the narcissism of a parent, it is more likely genetic than environmental or taught behavior. My conclusions, based on some long-since forgotten article, which I cannot cite, are that it is a winning evolutionary strategy.

Consider two kinds of people. One says, “The world is a dangerous place. If we do not band together, we will not survive.” Another says, “The world is a dangerous place. If I do not look out for myself, no one will.” Over time natural selection favored both strategies so that they became hard-wired in us, some being more communitarian and altruistic, while others are narcissistic.

To me that suggests that attempts to change Donald Trump’s mind on any given subject cannot be approached by appeals to reason, morality, or altruism. Even the most humane and generous policy has to be couched in terms of how it benefits Trump and his internal needs. That is the only thing he can understand and relate to.

So, Fidel Castro is dead

Posted by on November 26, 2016 Comments Off on So, Fidel Castro is dead

As one wag on twitter said, everyone’s opinion will differ with everyone else’s opinion. We see video of Cuban exiles celebrating in Miami, while Havana is somber. Some thoughts:
castro
As one wag on twitter said, everyone’s opinion will differ with everyone else’s opinion. We see video of Cuban exiles celebrating in Miami, while Havana is somber. Some thoughts:
1. While Cubans are very racially mixed, the people in the streets of Miami are generally descendants of the Spanish conquerors, while those who supported Castro were generally descendants of African slaves.
2. Before Castro’s revolution, the Spanish Cubans were on top of the economy and political system, and they created enormous wealth, but at the cost of racial division and economic inequality that exceeded what we have here. They were in power democratically and then by corrupt dictatorship, as Fulgencio Batista210px-fulgencio_batista_president_of_cuba_1952 took power in a military coup before the 1952 election.
3. After the revolution, the economic and political systems were overturned. A new group took control of the systems and created greater equality of access, but at the cost of a far more brutal autocracy. Literacy rose to the highest level in the Western hemisphere, so that people could read the government publications (propaganda). Healthcare was expanded to be universal.
4. Although ideological management of the economy and the impact of the US boycott both contributed to the impoverishment of the population, those who remained had little incentive to trade one for the other. And, before all those effects were felt, they had zero incentive to permit the return of the Batista regime so the population never rose up in response to the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.
5. In the fall of 1975 I was living in France, and a leftist friend came up to me all excited to announce that Franco (dictator of Spain)

franco-1had died. I looked at her. “What are you so excited about? While we don’t know if he was happy, he had wealth and power and died in his bed at 83? What is there to celebrate?” I feel about the same way regarding Castro.
6. Obama’s opening to Cuba was fortuitous, coming at the precise right moment, before Fidel Castro’s death and his brother Raul’s eventual death as well.raul-castro His opening is a counterpoint to hardliners on the island who will want to continue the relationship of the past half century. Whether Obama’s successor will move forward or revert to earlier failed US policies remains to be seen.

Living on Spec

Posted by on May 29, 2015 Comments Off on Living on Spec

One of my children is an auditory learner in a world that honors visual learners, a person with kinetic intelligence in a world that honors academic intelligence. He told me that he wanted to know that getting training, where academics are a challenge, would get him a job.

It would be really nice if the world worked that way. I think everyone would prefer a world that worked that way. Unfortunately, it doesn’t, not at all. Instead of assurances of favorable outcomes, most of life is lived “on spec.” I explained to him that it is a business term that means doing something before you have an agreement on compensation. You need some research, so I do a research paper for you hoping you will pay me adequately. If you don’t, either I accept less than it is worth and insist on payment up front next time, or I simply write off the time I spent on it.

Artists are accustomed to working on spec. Rarely do they get a commission for a creative work, and that only after years of building a reputation. One warm summer evening in Nashville, I was standing outside the Bluebird Café for the evening program. I was by myself since I wanted to be sure to get in. A man approached across the parking lot and stood there with me. He was short and African-American. We talked. I asked if he wrote songs and if he played an instrument and if he had done any work I might know. He was non-committal and vague, giving me one word answers without being unfriendly. Eventually the doors opened, and he went in the back. Later that evening I learned that he was the evening’s attraction, Bobby Hebb, best known for Sunny.

He told the audience that night how many pairs of shoes he had worn out on the streets of New York trying to get a cut for the song, trying to get it recorded. Before he left that night, we had a good laugh together, largely at my expense. He was about the age I am now, and he died five years later. He believed in his song, his art. He believed that it should and would get recorded. However, he did not know—he wrote it on spec and wore out shoes selling it.

Hebb

Almost everything we do in life is on spec, not contracted for. We get an education, never knowing if it will lead to employment or anything more than a degree. Sometimes we end up hating the subject and changing to another major or switching to another career in graduate school. Even then, we are a nation of reinvented careers. I know an attorney who does data analytics, medical doctors with PhD’s as if they need both. My graduate training is in economics, something I did for 8 years, mostly using MS Excel. When I moved to a new city, I used down time at a printing plant temp job to teach myself MS Access, noticing a button that said “SQL.” My new found SQL skills got me a job in healthcare. I learned data mining and took an online course in SAS, and eventually I found myself in San Francisco working with SAS until I was laid off a year later, moving across the country to a firm that did not use SAS. Two years later they were acquired by a firm that used SAS, so once again I can use those skills. I learned all those skills on spec.

Doing things on spec is not limited to professional life. We join clubs and organizations on spec, either for professional networking or to build our social circles. I met the mother of my children speaking French at the Alliance Française. I met my current wife online. In the absence of foresight, we have no idea how the skills we develop today will work to our advantage tomorrow, whether speaking with someone who knows the language we just learned or electronically meeting someone on the other side of the world who is looking for the same things in life that we are.

Reading all of this, there is something in common, and there is no good word for it, so I will use the next-best word: faith. Now, I don’t mean faith in the sense of religious faith, as in believing in God to have eternal life. But, it is close to the religious faith that things work out for the best (I don’t believe that either.) What it means to me is that we do things on spec, and then we have faith that there will be some unknown and unpredictable return on our investment of time and effort.

Because we don’t know how that return may occur, the best we can do is find things that we get satisfaction in doing. I can’t say I enjoyed learning SAS. What I have tried to do in my life is become the best Sam I could be, put myself out there where other people had a chance of meeting me, and trust (have faith) that someone, whether a lover or an employer, would appreciate my efforts—all on spec.

Holding Hands

Posted by on May 13, 2015 Comments Off on Holding Hands

We were crossing the parking lot, leaving a restaurant with friends who had been married for over 30 years. Looking at us, the wife said, “Oh, look, they are holding hands,” as if it were a remarkable oddity. I smiled, and thought, “When did they stop holding hands, or did they never hold hands?”

Many years ago, when I was in my twenties, I lived in France. A French buddy was expounding on seduction, as men in every country do, explaining, “When I touch a woman’s hand, it is as if I had touched her breast or between her legs.” Of course, I never had the opportunity to hear the woman’s side of that encounter, so I have to be wary of accepting it verbatim. Nonetheless, it is true that touch, particularly the least threatening form of touch, the two hands, makes a connection between individuals.

When men shake hands in business, it is firm, brief, and often perfunctory; however, when friends shake hands, they maintain the touch longer, and may engage the left hand on the handshake or with a pat on the back. When men shake hands with women, if they maintain the grasp a millisecond longer than expected, they are conveying the kind of message that my French friend was describing.

Holding hands can establish or validate or maintain a connection between people. Some situations call for more than holding hands. When a friend described to me the death of her young children in a car accident, I did not hold her hand: we embraced. When I met another mother from the PTO in the supermarket, I asked why she looked down. She told me that her sister was dying of cancer and was afraid that her young children would not remember her. As we talked, in the middle of the supermarket, she began to cry. I embraced her right there. Describing the scene to my mother, she asked, “What did you do?” I told her, “I cried, too.” However, those are rare instances. Usually, we can reach out for each other’s hands, to help and to comfort and to say “I love you.”

My wife and I are from two different and distant countries. As we became acquainted on the Internet (thank you, Skype), it was important to us to build and maintain connection, something we discussed. We made sure that we were available to one another for sufficient time to hear how the day had gone and become part of each other’s lives despite the physical distance.

Now, that distance is no longer an obstacle, as we have been married for three years and living together, but the challenge of maintaining connection is always there is a world filled with distraction, some pleasant, some less so. Part of that connection is physical; part of that connection is emotional; however, the boundaries between the two are not clear ones. Some couples consign love-making to the physical connection and leave it at that. We don’t.

When we walk into a supermarket, we hold hands, or my wife slips her arm around mine. We don’t think about it—it is simply part of who we are. When I am driving, we are often holding hands in routine traffic. It was not very difficult for our friends to spy us holding hands. I hope it keeps us as young as school children holding hands for fire drills or to cross the road, but I have no doubt it will keep us connected and focused on how fortunate we are to be together.

It has been written that the eyes are the windows to the soul. I wonder if the hands are not the doorknob to the soul. If you have not held hands with someone close to you for a long time, try it—and then let me know what happens. I recommend it.

Good guys and bad guys

Posted by on January 1, 2015 Comments Off on Good guys and bad guys

Nearly 30 years ago Robert Fulghum wrote a best-selling book entitled “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” While I did not read the book, much of the wit and wisdom became part of popular culture at the time. In a similar vein, when I was in elementary school, we learned about good guys and bad guys. In our recreation periods, we played games, taking the roles of one or the other, in Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians, and Yankees and Rebels. Neither role was uniformly bad or good—it was a matter of perception—everyone took turns at both roles in the game. However, we did learn that there were good guys and bad guys in the world, and we learned that it was not always easy to tell which was which.

There is much in the last year to which that lesson applies. One example is the ongoing Syrian Civil War, which has victimized hundreds of thousands of civilians, who have been wounded, raped, and driven from their homes by the combatants. At the outset Syria was a majority Sunni Muslim country ruled by a brutal Shia Muslim (Alawite) dictator. The armed opposition was largely Sunni. Among them were some relatively secular Sunni elements as well as the Al-Nusra brigades (aligned with Al-Qaeda) and ISIS (broken off from Al Qaeda). All of these groups use captured weapons, many captured from recipients of US suppliers.

Here is an example where there are so many bad guys, it is hard to know where to help the good guys, if there are any. We tend to favor secular groups. It is unclear whether those groups are adequately trained and motivated against a minority regime fighting to stave off ethnic and political disaster as well as two religiously ideological groups opposing it. It is unclear if they would be as attractive to us in power. For a time we wisely stayed out of the conflict until ISIS began beheading people on YouTube. That got our attention, although it did not change the relative morality of any of the actors in the region. Indeed, our ally, the Saudi monarchy, routinely beheads dissidents, but prudently, not on YouTube. At the same time, the ISIS group is taking territory not only in Syria but in the Sunni regions of Shia Iraq, largely because the central government has not reached out to include the residents of those regions. As a result, we are once more wading into the morass created by our invasion nearly 12 years ago.

The US domestic headlines have been dominated by violent encounters between police and civilians, often with unarmed civilians being killed, many of them African-American. A large part of the population has chosen up sides, pro or anti-police, pro or anti-African-American. Unlike children, they rarely get to play for both sides. Because we did play for both sides as children, we learned the world was not as Manichean as we thought. Adults should be wiser, seeing even more shades of gray than children.

In the Middle East, none of the multiple sides is as good or as bad as we might like to think. In the US neither police nor civilians are as good or as bad as would like to think. To me the bad guys are the ones using guns to shoot at people, whether civilians shooting at police or police shooting at unarmed civilians. It is not the presence or absence of a uniform in an American city or on a foreign battlefield that tells who the good guys are.

So, my wish for 2015 is that overseas we pull back a bit, realizing our limits even to discern the good guys from the bad guys, much less do much about it. Indeed, sometimes we are the only good guys so we should put our efforts elsewhere. And, in the US I hope we will start holding the bad guys accountable, civilian or police. The rest of us, the good guys, police and civilians, deserve that.

Why I hope to live until I die

Posted by on September 28, 2014 Comments Off on Why I hope to live until I die

Seventy-five years is all I want to live. I want to celebrate my life while I am still in my prime. My daughters and dear friends will continue to try to convince me that I am wrong and can live a valuable life much longer. And I retain the right to change my mind and offer a vigorous and reasoned defense of living as long as possible. That, after all, would mean still being creative after 75.

So wrote Ezekiel J. Emanuel, director of the Clinical Bioethics Department at the U.S. National Institutes of Health and head of the Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, in the Atlantic magazine of September 17, 2014.

He argues that:

  1. He will have lived a complete life by then.
  2. Increased life expectancy has been accompanied by increased disease, accompanied by physical and mental disability.
  3. If we change our goals to match our ages, we still burden our children and alter their memories of us as decrepit rather than vibrant.
  4. “But 75 defines a clear point in time: for me, 2032. It removes the fuzziness of trying to live as long as possible.”

He concludes that certain medical tests and interventions that the larger population would consider quite normal should be ruled out after age 65, after age 70, after age 75.

It is a thoughtful and provocative essay that has attracted a lot of attention, presumably to the satisfaction of publisher and author. It could be that he wished to attract an audience, or it could be that as a bioethicist, he wished to begin a national conversation about end-of-life issues, rather than to be taken at face value. I would not question the sincerity of Dr. Emmanuel, nor would I question his education, which surpasses my own. I question his wisdom.

First, his choice of 75 is by his own admission arbitrary. Why not 74 or 76? Why not 79 or 81? Choosing an arbitrary age, or arbitrary criterion for anything, is a logical one-size-fits all or Procrustean standard. Such standards assume a homogeneity of population that does not exist, and Dr. Emmanuel presents counter-examples and outliers himself.

He further claims that a country that achieves life expectancy of 75 for both men and women need no longer concern itself with further life-lengthening efforts. This is a statistical fallacy. He does not state which life expectancy.

Our life expectancies change as we age. Much of the life expectancy quoted is at birth, including the risks of infant mortality. Life expectancy at age 18 is much different. Furthermore, life expectancy at age 70 is considerably higher, as there is a heightened risk of mortality in the fifties and sixties, with those reaching their seventies enjoying a much longer expectancy. On top of that, those are averages that say nothing about the experience of any one individual, and we live life as individuals not as averages, except for those rare individuals with precisely 2.4 children.

Second, when he points to the increase in disability and disease in extended old age, those figures apply to the general population, including the obese we see among us. They may not apply to those who climb Mt. Kilimanjaro in their fifties, as has Dr. Ezekiel.

Third, he is concerned about burdening his children, but he may prove to be a greater burden on his children by refusing available medical interventions than had he accepted them. A person with atrial fibrillation who has a pacemaker is less likely to experience a debilitating stroke than someone who refuses medical treatment. The only difference is that the stroke disability occurs in the person’s seventies rather than their eighties. That doesn’t sound the ethical high road to me.

Fourth, it is ironic that Dr. Ezekiel in pointing out the “spiritual and existential” reasons for his position to be rejected overlooks the religious drive behind his position: the desire for certainty in the face of life’s ambiguity. That drive motivates most religious belief in the same way that desiring to die at a fixed age “removes the fuzziness of trying to live as long as possible.”

Fifth, it could be that as a physician on record as opposing active euthanasia and recognizing that people do have disabilities that radically degrade their quality of life at an increasing rate with age; he is left with the only alternative being a form of very passive self-euthanasia, which he describes in other terms in the essay.

Now, the essay is replete with disclaimers that Dr. Ezekiel is not trying to convince us nor does he think it unethical to conclude otherwise and so forth. In short, he is restricting his conclusion to a population of one that we cannot know as well as he does. If that were truly so, the essay need not be published anywhere but a diary. So, I find the disclaimers to be disingenuous.

At the outset, I challenged Dr. Ezekiel’s wisdom but not his sincerity. I did so on two grounds.

First, in academic research, with which any physician is familiar, it is a cardinal rule to state what you know, what you don’t know, and what should be the next steps. My impression is that Dr. Ezekiel confuses what he knows with what he doesn’t know. Among the things he doesn’t know, not because he is not intelligent and knowledgeable, but because he is not omniscient are:

  1. What the outcomes of two personal time lines would be, one being the refusal of interventions and the other being the acceptance of interventions.
  2. What medical advances will occur in the next fifteen years to address some of his concerns about disability accompanying expanded life expectancy.

Have we not all wondered at some time, what if we had married person A instead of person B, what if we had taken job A rather than job B, visited country A rather than country B, and an almost infinite number of similar questions that are summarized in Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken? And the power of the poem lies in our understanding that we simply cannot see the path that disappears in the underbrush, nor can Dr. Ezekiel.

In the field of economics, everyone becomes familiar with work of Thomas Malthus, who predicted widespread war and famine accompanying population growth. It may still happen, but it has not happened yet because Malthus was unable to take into account the impact of technological advance. The same technological advance that has helped us lengthen our lives by declining infant mortality and more hopeful outcomes to heart disease and cancer may yet address the disabilities accompanying aging. What I know is that at my age (67) I can walk 5 miles easily and 10 miles less easily whereas my parents’ generation could not at my age. I carry two stents in my heart, which have no lengthened my life but improved its quality such that I can climb a hill without feeling faint. Such qualitative improvements from technology should not be overlooked.

Second, the ancient Greeks had a word that survives in our studies of their literature and ours, hubris, an excessive pride or self-confidence. And, to me that is the lack of wisdom in an otherwise well-written, thoughtful essay. We have come a long way as a species. With luck and wisdom that we do not always demonstrate, we will have a long way to go. Part of that wisdom is a certain humility that I found lacking in the essay. Even about ourselves we know less than we pretend to know. A person contemplating his death at 75 does not know he will not be hit by a car at 60 or suffer a heart attack or learn he has pancreatic cancer. By the same token, there are imponderables on the other side of 75 as well, good and bad, desired and feared. A person cannot plan that way, but the humility of admitting those possibilities should come through in this essay.

Many years ago I lived in the backyard converted garage of an older couple in Miami, Florida. They had an old dog. One day, the man about 70 years old was musing about how the dog was arthritic, had trouble walking and could not climb up on his lap, and how perhaps it was time to put him down. It gives me pause and a needed dose of humility in thinking about such things to recall that the dog outlived the man.

Resolving Differences

Posted by on July 27, 2014 Comments Off on Resolving Differences

We come with strongly held but divergent points of view. Although we both have right on our sides, we often fail to see the merits of the opposing view. Nonetheless, we remain focused on a favorable outcome, recruiting allies, using available means of communication to push our agenda. We are strong and tough, and winning is not the most important thing—it is the only thing.
Now, tell me: am I describing a social media thread, an American election campaign, the latest hostilities in the Mideast, or your last business meeting?
As I have watched the latest round of violence unfold in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it occurred to me how symbolic it is of human failure to communicate and cooperate in a wide range of settings. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians have strong emotional and historical ties to the land they are disputing. That these ties are in part based upon different religions makes their claims both more emotional and more central to their identities as individuals and as peoples.
It is also clear that if they found a way to cooperate and live in peace, the political boundaries they are fighting about would become less and less important over time, as economic ties and networks, social networks and business relationships supplanted political and religious stands in the importance of individuals and groups.
What is lacking in their relations, what is so important to our own, in business and personal relationships are these:
1. Even when we disagree we need to find ways to move the process towards the ultimate goal of agreement. By continuing to build Jewish settlements in the West Bank, by continuing to lob rockets and build tunnels under the Israeli border, both the Netanyahu government and Hamas are failing to move in the right direction.
2. We need to recognize that the other’s point of view has merit. If the Israelis and Palestinians really recognized that fact, it would be much harder for either to inflict violence, violence that they currently seem quite eager to inflict.
3. We need to recognize the humanity of the person facing us—dreams, disappointments, joys, sorrows, challenges, all of it. It might be an individual or a nation, but our opponent brings human needs to the encounter, and those needs have to be recognized for a negotiation to move forward.
4. We need to carefully listen if we are to accomplish these goals, to determine the way forward, to hear the part of the opponent’s view that has merit, and ultimately to hear the humanity of our opponent.
5. Only then can we reach out with a win-win solution, which is the only kind of solution that works in business.
We cannot solve the problem of war in the Middle East, but we can all do a better job in our personal and business relationships—especially if we wish to avoid the poor example set for us by Netanyahu and Hamas.

What do we do when we run out of options?

Posted by on June 25, 2014 Comments Off on What do we do when we run out of options?

Perhaps no other people on earth are more optimistic than Americans.

We walk the streets of this world as if we own them, and if we do not own them today, we will own them tomorrow.

Two of our most beloved Presidents of the 20th Century were elected and reelected not so much for their programs but for their optimism and soaring rhetoric: FDR and Ronald Reagan.

When faced with a problem, we have a Plan B, and if Plan B doesn’t work, well, their are 24 more letters and lots of numbers to follow.

However, sometimes optimism runs into brick wall reality.

My step father is 96 years old. He is in a hospital bed this evening, for the third time in a month.

When he was younger, he was a swimmer and later a swimming coach. In his 60s and 70s he played golf regularly and still turned heads at the community swimming pool. In his 80s he could no longer play golf so he turned to crossword puzzles, books, and television.

A few days ago he fell at home. Sometimes older people fall and break something, and sometimes something breaks so they fall.

He has a compressed fracture of the spine. He could have gone to rehab, but Medicare requires 2.5 hours of daily exercise to qualify. He has aged beyond that. So, he went home with some non-narcotic painkiller.

The next day he returned to the hospital in excruciating pain.

Here are the choices I see for him:

1. Endure excruciating pain

2. Take painkillers that will render him drugged unconscious or nearly unconscious.

Since he is metabolically in pretty good shape despite a pacemaker, he can choose 1 or 2 for up to five years.

So, what do we do, optimists that we are, when there are no more good options?

Looking Backward

Posted by on May 25, 2014 Comments Off on Looking Backward

If you mention to a friend or colleague that you have an upcoming reunion, their first reaction is likely to be “You should go.” For many people that would be sound advice, even if the adviser cannot articulate precisely why.

Most of us did not escape high school or college free of demons. As the cult classic The Breakfast Club makes clear, no matter what role one played in high school, there were demons accompanying it.

My 50th high school reunion was 10 days ago. I did not attend.

The decision not to attend was made in part 30 years ago. I attended both my 10th and 20th reunions.

At my 10th reunion I was struck by two observations. First, some people looked like they were attending their 20th reunion. Second, some people, including my friends from high school, were having almost the exact same conversations they were having ten years earlier.

At my 20th reunion my now ex-wife and I were the first ones to get up and dance. I had not attended any high school dances. I had scrambled to find a date for the prom. It was good to put down that particular demon.Looking Back

Having a convinced a childhood friend to attend these reunions, I found that he became a born-again reunion attendee. He wanted me to join him for the 25th and 30th. I no longer saw the point.

Finally, I assured him that if we were both in good health, we would attend the 50th together. I figured that one of us would be dead by then, releasing me from the promise, one way or another.

That did not happen, so as the years and months approached the reunion date, I resigned myself to attending. However, as luck would have it, my friend’s daughter graduated college the same weekend, releasing me from my promise. The moral seems to be that promises should be made as far in advance as possible, increasing the possibility that something unforeseen will intervene to release you from your vow.

My 50th was to be in another city from the one where I grew up and went to school, for reasons that escaped me. The cost of admission was $119 per person, leaving me the alternatives of a considerable investment to have my wife accompany me or to attend alone for more money than it was likely to be worth to me.

But that is not the reason I did not attend.

In past times reunions served a purpose of reconnecting individuals with their pasts. In addition, it was possible to reconnect with people who had fallen away as life progressed, sometimes simply because a letter did not catch up or a phone number had changed.

That is no longer the case. Most people can be reached by Google or Facebook searches. If not, it is unlikely that a reunion committee will have contact information.

The obvious conclusion is that when people do not stay in touch, there is a reason they have chosen not to do so. They may not even be aware of the reason, but it is there nonetheless.

We grow. We change–sometimes at highly different speeds.

We continue on our journeys, and the people we once knew at a very particular time of life, the people whom we saw every day, the people who were central to our lives outside our homes, are simply no longer relevant.

As we continue on our journeys, there is nothing wrong with the indulgence of a brief glance in the rear-view mirror, but the road is ahead of us not behind us.

My journey continues. My eyes are on the road ahead. And what is behind me is simply a bit of dust stirred up on the road in the wake of my forward movement.

Congratulations, America!!

Posted by on April 30, 2014 Comments Off on Congratulations, America!!

Is there a more self-congratulatory nation than the United States? When it comes to self-congratulations, we’re number one.

If there is true American exceptionalism, it is, among other things, that we are exceptionally congratulatory of ourselves.

Perhaps the most well-known example was the large “Mission Accomplished” banner behind President George W. Bush on the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln on May 1, 2003 as he said, “In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”mission accomplishedLarry Downing/Reuters

More recently we have the twin cases of Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling to make us feel good about ourselves.

The past two weeks have been Bundy’s 15 minutes of fame. Here is someone who thinks refusing to pay grazing fees for his cattle herd to the government is taking the high moral ground, as opposed to those on welfare who fail to report some outside income they earned.

And, when the government comes calling, he gets a few of his friends with weapons together, forcing the federal employees to either risk a blood bath a la Waco or retreat, to the applause of Fox News and others on the Right.

Among the gems from Mr. Bundy was denouncing the legitimacy of the US Government while standing in front of an American flag. No single mother on welfare could have shown more ignorance than Mr. Bundy and his supporters, and almost none of them would have shown his arrogance.Cliven Bundy

Then, to universal surprise, we learned that he was as ignorant about the history of this country, particularly with regard to race, as he was about the government and his obligations as a citizen. So the political Right and Left were shocked, shocked to learn of his racism. They joined hands to universally condemn him while patting each other on the back at having taken the moral high ground. Mission accomplished!

For someone with an entirely different background and lifestyle, Donald Sterling’s saga played out in a parallel manner. Sterling is a billionaire owner of multiple real estate holdings and assets including the Los Angeles Clippers NBA franchise. He was born in 1934 and came of age long before the Civil Rights struggle. His attitudes on race seem to have been unchanged by the 1960’s.

He seems to believe that people should stay with their own kind for the most part, so he wanted only Koreans renting from his properties in LA’s Koreatown, and wanted Latinos and African-Americans in their own areas. The fact that he had a multi-racial girlfriend did not seem to alter those views. Nonetheless he received an NAACP lifetime achievement award.

As a result of a convoluted controversy and lawsuit involving his wife and his mistress, a tape of him making remarks that he probably made fairly often was released, and people from the President of the United States down seemed to be in line to condemn them. The NBA decided to ban him from life from NBA games and move to take the franchise away. UCLA refused a $3 million dollar gift. Mission Accomplished!!

Despite different backgrounds and occupations, Bundy and Sterling share a fundamental ignorance about the values of this country in general and about race relations in particular. However, does anyone seriously think that none of the other NBA owners are racists? Does anyone seriously think that banning all racists from NBA games wouldn’t leave a few empty seats–they may be quieter, but do we doubt they are there? And, does anyone really think that if he had been more successful with the Clippers, bringing in money for the NBA, that they would be so quick to ostracize him?

We really like congratulating ourselves about Bundy and Sterling because it distracts us from the Supreme Court gutting the Voter Rights Act and Affirmative Action plans, on the grounds that times have changed racially, Bundy and Sterling notwithstanding. It is certainly cheaper than raising taxes to pay for opportunities for the poor of all races to eat (SNAP program cuts) or to go to school (Pell Grants) or to provide health care to the working poor by expanding Medicaid. Instead, we let billionaires put the thumb on the scales of our elections and give them tax subsidies to do so, eliminate estate taxes that might require their progeny to work for a living, decertify the unions that might give working people some leverage against the wealthy, and then congratulate ourselves about our support of liberty.

Well, pardon me if I don’t get too excited about the shoot-in-the-barrel, easy target, bullying of two ignorant old racists as I’m afraid of getting slapped upside the head by all the back patting. USA! USA!