I am not too comfortable talking about myself, as opposed to what I believe, but a number of readers have written to me asking who I am. I am a forty-one year old software executive and attorney living in Brooklyn, New York. I attended public schools and am old enough to remember the end of school prayer, the beginning of busing, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I am a member of the first and last generation to undergo nuclear attack drills in which we were instructed to hide under our desks. I remember, during the Cuban Missile crisis, a radio broadcaster advising listeners to roll under a parked car if they happened to be on the street at the moment of the flash.
Around 1966, I asked my father if I would be drafted and be killed in Vietnam. He said the war would long be over and anyway, it is always the other guy who dies in a war. I wondered what the other guy's father told him? In 1972, when I turned 18, I drew a low draft number, but they had just stopped calling anyone.
I am Jewish. The common denominator of the Jews, as someone said a long time ago, is that the world won't let you not be. This is a negative bond; positive ones are a particular sense of humor and cultural outlook. I am secular because I cannot get a grip on the idea of God, but have a deep respect for people who not only believe but also display compassion, tolerance and respect for other human beings. However, they are surprisingly rare. In addition to synagogue, I have attended Protestant, Catholic and Eastern Orthodox church services including weddings, baptisms, and midnight Mass at St. Martin in the Fields in London, and appreciate the beauty of ritual, especially any service where the congregation shakes hands. I have experienced little anti-Semitism in my life but what I have encountered has been bitter.
On May 5, 1970, my life changed when I read in the morning paper about the four kids at Kent State shot to death the day before by the National Guard. I went over to Brooklyn College, across the street from my high school, and talked to organizers of a student strike, one of whom gave me a bullhorn. I stood outside Midwood High, telling people through the bullhorn that Nixon had gone to far, that they were killing kids now for opposing the war. Within a couple of hours, hundreds of people were outside with me, and almost no-one was in class.
The defining moment of my life to date came the next day. For much of the day, a counter-demonstration had been forming across the street, consisting of frightening people I had never seen in our neighborhood before, wearing black leather, chains wrapped around their fists. The rumor was rampant that they would attack us, while the police stood by. In the early afternoon, they finally charged. Someone, not me, yelled out "Link arms!" and I joined a human wall to protect the people behind us. Our attackers got halfway across the street when the cops ran in and stopped them. In a sense, I have been half asleep in the quarter century that has elapsed since that day. I am waking up, however, and hope again to be of some use.
After the strike was over, the principal called my father up to school and threatened to expel me. My dad and I rarely saw eye to eye on anything in those years, but he told Mr. Hilsen that if the school threw me out for my antiwar speech, he would "sue all the way up to the Supreme Court." I am intensely proud of my dad. He was not a physically strong man, but he had moral integrity and courage. I was not expelled from Midwood.
The following year, I went to Washington for the demonstrations on the anniversary of Kent State, and slept, with a few hundred thousand others, by the reflecting pool, in the shadow of the Washington monument. Rousted from the Mall by the police, I ended up in a cafeteria at George Washington University, where Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman--both dead today and both legends--were sitting at a corner table, planning their next move.
In 1972, I decided to be really straight and serious--a decision that would carry me into law school before I knew what I was doing. I started Brooklyn College (where I went on the open admissions program, having graduated high school with something like a 69 average). During the Watergate hearings, I watched every minute that I could on TV, and carried a transistor radio around to listen when I had to go out. I believed (as I do now) that Richard Nixon had the morality of a gangster, and was relieved when he resigned. I made straight A's for two years and transferred to Columbia, where I worked in the Morris Udall presidential campaign. Though Udall was about as honest as they come, I didn't like politics and I didn't like what I became when I tried to manipulate the Columbia Democratic Caucus into endorsing my candidate. It was 1976, and a dark horse candidate named Jimmy Carter came out of nowhere and took it. Although I had applied to law school thinking I would run for office one day, by the time I received my admission to Harvard I was no longer interested.
Law school is where you go when you are bright but cannot play the violin and are not particularly good at math. At Harvard, I discovered that there are people in the world much smarter than I am. Harvard Law School is a much milder place than it is portrayed in the movies, but the truest thing ever said about it or any other law school is: You enter talking about right and wrong, and you leave talking about what's the law and what's not the law.
In 1977-1978, I took a year off from school and went to work for an American law firm in Paris, where I fell in love with the city and the language. In July, 1978, I had another formative experience: I was sending a telegram to my parents in the Post Office on the Rue Lourmel when four men wearing ski masks and carrying machine guns entered. I squatted in a corner for five minutes looking into the barrel of one of those guns while the three other men robbed the post office of old age pension money. George Orwell wrote that when you are destitute life becomes very simple. When you are at gunpoint, it is simpler still. In fact, it clears the mind marvelously. In a moment, I knew that the man who was covering us would either pull the trigger or he would not. There was nothing else. He didn't fire.
Despite this experience, I wanted desperately to go back to Paris after law school, but it didn't work out. I took a job in New York with an international firm, hoping to get back to Paris; I believed I was just lighting temporarily in the city to use it as a springboard to get away again. Here I am fifteen years later, and it still feels temporary. The law firm was an excruciating place; years later, when I heard that the partner who made it a living hell had been disbarred and imprisoned for tax evasion, I could not feel sorry for him. I left after eighteen months to found my own law practice, taking a 75% cut in income my first year. I spent the rest of the '80's laboring in the vineyards, building a law practice centered around the computer industry. In August 1982, I billed and collected $75 the entire month. Though I cannot say I have ever been poor, in the first couple of years I experienced something like it, as I waited for clients to pay me and checks to clear. There were weeks when I couldn't afford to eat enough to still my hunger--but on the other hand it was an intellectual exercise, because my parents would have helped, and I didn't want to ask them.
In 1982, not very busy, I volunteered to defend Haitian immigrants in political asylum proceedings. Haitian boat people were being warehoused in a camp so far from any Florida city that only one volunteer lawyer managed to get there. There were two immigration courtrooms set up in the camp, and while the lawyer was in one asking for time to prepare, the judge in the other was ordering a half-dozen refugees deported. This had nothing to do with the America I believed in. My grandparents all came over in steerage from the Ukraine and Poland between 1899 and 1918. Immigration court is a sewer and the system was politically stacked against my clients, who were black, poor and from an island where the vicious dictator was an ally of the U.S. Asylum was never granted (though it was routinely given to Cubans and Russians who had suffered much less) but I kept my clients in the country long enough for them to benefit from the amnesty that was issued two years later.
In 1989, my father, who had suffered three heart attacks, died of cancer. Kubler-Ross talks of denial, anger, bargaining. My father, a physician, went directly to the last stage, acceptance. At the end, after eight months of chemotherapy, fevers, trips to the emergency room, he came home and declined antibiotics for the final fever. "You know what this means?" I asked him. "Is that what you want?" He laughed and said, "I want to live twenty more years, but I don't have the choice." He died very quietly in his bed, five days later. I hope I will make as good an end as he did.
In 1990 I knew, at last, that I had built a successful enterprise-- I had 300 clients and a growing national reputation among programmers and computer consultants, had written three books and was being asked to lecture on a regular basis. But I hated practicing law. I never had wanted to be a litigator, but discovered that I had to litigate to make a living. I found I was good at it, but the screaming and lying of my adversaries in the New York court system, and the suspicion of corruption when things went wrong sometimes, was unbearable. I decided to swim upstream, and joined my largest client as Vice President of Operations--I wanted a position where I could build systems to avoid messes, rather than cleaning them up after they occurred. I have been with the company for six years, and am lucky to have partners who are caring, respectful, and very tolerant. The company is run with the employees in mind, has always been profitable and never had a layoff. Neither as a lawyer nor as a businessman have I ever made a decision I could not stand by. I believe that a business can be run very profitably with the interests of the shareholders, the employees, the customers and the public simultaneously in mind.
I have always been very interested in ethics, law and politics, and for some years I had daydreamed about publishing The Ethical Spectacle as a print newsletter. As an attorney, I had sent a monthly newsletter out to a few hundred people, and knew it would be far too expensive for me to reach the audience I wished. When I turned forty, I made a few resolutions for the rest of my life; one of them was to do The Spectacle at last, in the new and affordable medium of the World Wide Web. As I write this, I am putting the finishing touches on the fourteenth issue.
Last month, thirty thousand people in more than sixty countries read the Spectacle. Hundreds of them have written to me, most supportive, some critical, very few flaming me for my views. I feel more awake than I have at any time since 1971. This year, I also had the opportunity to write a book on free speech on the Internet, which will be published by Henry Holt in April under the title Sex, Laws and Cyberspace. I am also talking to the ACLU, hoping to be a plaintiff in the litigation that will be brought to void the Internet indecency law as a violation of the First Amendment.
In closing, here are the two most exciting ideas I know:
"We must be the change we wish to see in the world." (Gandhi)
"Only that day dawns to which we are awake. The sun is but a morning star; there is more day to dawn." (Thoreau)
I'll see you in the morning.
Its 5 a.m. on a Monday, and I am completely at loose ends, so here goes.
I spent ten years with the company I joined in 1990. It was a wonderful environment, run by a tolerant and supportive owner who became my good friend. In 1995, I asked for, and he gave me, the opportunity to create and run a web-based software development unit, and for the next five years I was the CEO of a business which grew to 90 employees and $12 million in revenue.
This was a fulfilling, but very hard experience. I am an idea person--we started our web unit a full year before the company which became the largest and most successful of our competitors. But, as I did not know then, I am not a natural CEO--too geeky and strange and I don't have a chin like a brick. I also was not predatory or violent enough to deal properly with the people who come sniffing around when you are running something successful.
In 1999, we got over-extended, having launched too many businesses in too short a time, and we needed to close or sell some of them. I fought very hard to sell rather than close mine, and when I found a buyer for it, decided to remain with the new owners rather than stay with the boss who had been so good to me for ten years. This understandably antagonized him, though in recent years we have begun to talk a little again. Since loyalty and community are very important to me, I have some regrets about my decision to leave, but at the time, I was more attached to, even obsessed by, the new community I had started, and that overcame my loyalty to the old one when it became necessary for them to separate from each other.
The new owners were bottom feeders who figured they could get my company cheap, and did. They made a lot of promises about keeping me with the company, then fired me thirteen months later and put one of their own in as CEO without giving me a reason. It seems clear in retrospect that they bought the company in order to give this man something to run. Of course, the impact on me, emotionally and financially, was awful, but I had nothing in writing. It is really a very everyday story, and employees of mine even predicted to me that my termination would be the outcome of the sale, but I responded that I liked the new owners, they were nice to me, and I had no sense of danger with them. So in reality I did not have the tools to hang on in that world.
The new owners, who had all the viciousness and violence I lacked, offered a fraction of its value for my stock, denied me financial statements and tried to freeze me out entirely. I surprised them by litigating--they thought I would just fade away--and after years of litigation, we reached an accomodation and they bought me out. By now they had mismanaged the company until it had a fraction of the revenue it had when I ran it,and the Internet bubble had collapsed, so what I received was very modest compared to the hopes and expectations I had just prior to the 1999 sale.
However, I had made some money from the other companies we founded and ran in the '90's, and a somewhat accidental shrewd investment in real estate, so I made out acceptably from my ten year dip into the business world. However, the continued process of learning my own limitations never stopped being distressing. I suspect most people have a much more concrete sense of their own identity and capabilities than I ever have; I learn the hard way. As the ex-CEO of a small dotcom, I discovered that recruiters were not calling me; investment bankers I had met and become friendly with were not telephoning either to put me in touch with new start-ups. I did not have the presentation, though I had run a successful, profitable venture. I got a couple of consulting gigs, and worked as a temporary lawyer (a hellacious experience which felt like back-sliding into a life I had left ten years before). Then it was September 11, 2001.
I won't reiterate what I have described in detail elsewhere. I was trying to get into the PATH station under the trade center just as the second plane hit. I ran to Brooklyn. In the days and weeks that followed, I got laid off from my temporary law job because no-one was doing business and they didn't need my services. I investigated every manner of first responder, military, police, etc. and discovered I was at 48 too old for any service except EMS. So I began taking the emergency medical course.
I also volunteered for the Red Cross during this time, driving vans full of food to the Respite Centers in Ground Zero where I passed the burning wreckage. I never breathed that noxious air for as much as half an hour without developing a cough. As a volunteer for Safe Horizons, I counseled families who had lost loved ones about available benefits. The most heart-breaking thing I did was present urns full of Ground Zero earth to bereaved spouses and family.
In June 2002, I got my EMT card and went to work on ambulances, a job I did for the next five years. After a year doing transport (mostly taking old people to nursing homes or from there to the hospital) I transferred to my company's 911 service, where I worked mainly in the Bronx and Manhattan. It was the worst paid but the best job I ever did, full of interest and adventure. Here I discovered that I could confront any kind of human misfortune, injury and damage without becoming overwhelmed. I bandaged people who had been shot and stabbed, helped deliver one baby (I asked my more experienced partner to allow me to cut the umbilical), and did CPR on about seventy newly dead people, three of whom came back to life under my hands. (However, none survived more than a few days as far as I know; I don't have one of those stories about the 38 year old businessman who can hug his child today because of me.) I chose to work the overnight tour, and there were many times when, sitting awake in the ambulance at three in the morning next to a sleeping twenty-something partner I liked and trusted, I would be surprised by a transcendent happiness.
I was not a great EMT. I was very good at CPR, talking to psychotic people, and calming children. I was terrible at splinting, not great at diagnosis, older and slower than most people I worked with. In 2007, I decided to leave the ambulance behind, and the following year I let my EMT card expire.
In September 2006, my mother died after a one year struggle with leukemia. She was as calm and philosophical about it as my father had been, or even more so, as he felt some self-pity and she felt none whatever. I wanted to be, and was, in the hospital room with her as she took her last breaths. I hope my presence was some comfort to her; a few days before, she said, "I am glad you're here"--the best thing she ever said to me.
Sometimes there is not much you can do for people except to show up and see things through, but I was glad to be able to do that for her.
A day or two before her death, I went out to get a sandwich, and found a large, beautiful praying mantis clinging to the bricks by the hospital door. I picked it up and carried it safely across the avenue to a lawn in front of the projects on the other side, and felt unreal, as if for a moment I was living the metaphor of my relationship with my mother.
In 2005, I started writing and producing plays, and have seen five of mine "on their feet" and had the remarkable experience of watching an audience watch them. People have laughed and gasped when I hoped they would, and each play has gotten at least one wonderful review, though I have received many mixed reviews and a couple of pans as well. I think I write difficult scripts, which are not for everybody.
Along with the Spectacle, writing plays is the work of my life, the activity I was homing in on while I practiced law and ran a business. I sometimes wonder what life would have been like if I'd had the courage to go directly into the arts when I graduated college--my whole life seems like a detour--but I always end up concluding I wouldn't change anything. I had so much less experience, less to write about, at 22 and I think I am a better writer now. I also think I would likely have had the traditional arc--tried writing and given it up by thirty. It feels much better to be a playwright who used to be a lawyer than to be a lawyer who was once a playwright. When you start as late as I have, you can never be a has-been. I also have had to identify why I am in it--not for ambition, not with hope of fame or riches (which I don't much need anyway)-- but simply to close a loop with myself and an audience, and read the occasional gratifying words written by someone who completely understood.
We gave up the Brooklyn apartment in 2007 and now live in Amagansett NY, within earshot of the surf and the lonely nocturnal whistle of the railroad. I still worry--about the economy, about whether we will be broke, about war and terrorism and global warming and the human future. And I still don't sleep very well; I never did. But at least for now, for awhile, I have the life I wanted, one in which I get to write and daydream all day, can be as strange and antisocial as I want, don't have to put on a tie or a pretense for anyone, can participate in the communities I choose as an equal, and can't be pushed out of anything I care about.
--August 17, 2008
When the mortgage bubble collapsed in 2008, my wife and I lost about thirty percent of our net worth in a few months, despite the fact we didn’t have a mortgage and hadn’t invested in anything we knew to be mortgage-related or even particularly risky (we were mainly in the supposedly safe end of the mutual fund market). We went to Florida for about a year and a half to take care of her mother, who had Stage IV breast cancer. In November 2008, I flew up from Florida just to vote for President Obama at the poll in the Amagansett fire station, instead of sending in an absentee ballot. When we came back to Amagansett for good, we were tired and depressed, but we also soon found that we weren’t quite making it financially any more. After six months or so, we decided that we would both go back to work, which meant spending much of our time in New York City as there was a lack of opportunity on the East End.
I was very resistant to practicing law again--I never had enjoyed it that much--so I spent much of my first year doing document review. I plan to write an essay on this experience, subtitled “A Case Study in Capitalism”. Document review is the lawyer equivalent of factory automation in the industrial revolution. Law was until recently one of the last artisanal professions, following the master-apprentice model, with a supervising lawyer, the master, involved in all aspects of a case or matter from beginning to end and responsible for quality. Young lawyers would join as associates (apprentices) and understand that if they did all the scut work for seven years or so, they would be considered for partnership. Back then, document review consisted of the young associates sitting in a room going through boxes, mindful if they did a bad job, their chances of making partner would vanish. Document review today consists of warehouses full of unemployed and desperate lawyers working as temps, putting in 80-100 hour weeks with no security or benefits, while the firm employing them constantly resizes the group (a friend of mine was laid off one day, hired back a day later, then laid off again). The result is a terrible slip in quality, with glazed-eyed lawyers who don’t give a crap mis-coding privileged documents which, because there is little supervision, have even ended up on public web sites maintained by the adversary.
I couldn’t stand it and relaunched a modest litigation practice. An unexpected result is that I am enjoying being a lawyer as I never did before. I promised myself I would devote about half my time to pro bono work, and have taken on foreclosure defenses, among other matters. Then Occupy Wall Street came along, and I made a number of enjoyable visits to Zuccotti Park, warming myself at the fire of the wonderful young activists I met there, and remembering my days with the bullhorn in front of Midwood High School.
On the night of the eviction, November 15, 2011, I received a text message police were surrounding the park and went there at 1:30 a.m. I vaguely hoped I might prevent some people from getting hurt. Within a minute of my arrival at the corner of Broadway and Cortlandt, the riot police without warning started pushing back the crowd. A cop pushed me hard enough that my glasses flew away. Instinctively and without any thought process, I did not budge; did not back up, or run away, or fall to the ground, but just stood still while he pushed me. Then I heard the voice of a deputy commissioner of police yelling, “Pull him out!” and I was arrested and spent the night in the holding cell in the basement of Police Plaza with (by the end of the night) about 80 other arrestees. I met some wonderful people in that cell. Being in jail for a night was an amazing civics lesson, one I recommend for all lawyers. About a quarter of the men in that cell had been hit by the cops and had cuts or bruises. I was issued a disorderly conduct desk appearance ticket and made several visits to criminal court before the charges were dismissed for lack of evidence.
As a result, I began volunteering with the National Lawyers’ Guild and have since handled about forty cases for Occupy arrestees and other activists, including two memorable multi-day trials and a lot of motion practice. Of my top ten court experiences ever, fully half have occurred in the past year in New York’s criminal court.
Something else I occasionally do which I forgot to mention earlier is file an amicus brief with the Supreme Court. In the ‘90’s, I was involved in two on Internet free speech issues. In 2003, I filed one in the Jose Padilla case, arguing that nothing in the Framer’s intentions suggested that anyone ever wanted us to give our government carte blanche in making decisions about enemy combatants and endless detention. This year I filed one in the same sex marriage case, arguing that gay marriages aren’t any different from any other kind and that the Court’s power of analogical reasoning leads to the conclusion they must not be treated differently. I first published an essay here supporting same sex marriage in 1997.
During Hurricanes Irene and Sandy, only months apart, we had a useful object lesson about climate change and human expectations. Large chunks of New York City were underwater, and in Amagansett the “breach” we had talked about for years occurred briefly (Napeague Harbor and the ocean met in the narrow middle on Route 27, briefly turning Montauk back into an island). In Queens we couldn’t get gasoline for a week, and for some days we did not know if the Amagansett house had taken serious damage.
I continue to be involved in theater but at a much slower pace, doing one project a year. I am spending most of my free time writing a book I imagined long ago on the history of the idea of free speech. I have almost seventeen hundred pages now and think I will have to write at least 500 more before I am done. Who will publish it or read it I have little idea, but as with the plays I am largely closing a loop with myself.
I am fifty-nine years old and may be slowing down a bit physically. I ran five miles several times a week until some months ago, but have been experiencing some pins and needle sensations in my extremities I plan to have checked out by a neurologist. I had a dream the other night, apparently inspired by software games I played in the 1980’s that came with a toolset for building your own, in which I was writing software which included several prefabricated universes and also a universe generator.
Thinking about my experience in general, I believe I have had the life I was suited for and have been lucky to experience a lot of freedom and love (given and received). Though I have made a point of rarely mentioning my wife in the Spectacle, and never by name (it was very upsetting when an adversary used her name in a raunchy public post in the ‘90’s, just to let me know he had researched us), I have been with her since 1984 and married since 1988. I love her and I love being married to her and therefore love the idea of marriage. I have also had some wonderful friendships which enriched my life immeasurably. My definition of friendship is rather specialized, extending only to those people who, if they heard you were in jail in Cleveland, would go to the airport and board the next flight.
In my twenties when I tried to formulate a creed it was “reason, independence, loyalty, justice” but since I first elucidated my ideas in the Spectacle in 1995, it has been “humility, tolerance and optimism”. Actually, I am not all that optimistic about the human future any more, but seek to live as if I were (this is similar to a choice to live as if free will existed, even though there is a philosophical argument it does not). I now also know that Gandhi didn’t actually ever say “We must be the change we wish to see in the world” but I still like the trope.
April 11, 2014
I think the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Spectacle just passed without my noticing.
I am sixty-four and looking forward to Medicare and Social Security. It occurred to me the other week that I am better at being sixty-something than I ever was at being thirty-something: I am more comfortable in my skin; have a kind of humorous-kind-specialist-elf persona that works a whole lot better than moody-man-child; and I can still run five miles, despite the peripheral neuropathy I reported in the last entry.
I have now handled hundreds of cases through Lawyers' Guild, and finally lost count last year, at twelve, of the number of criminal trials in which I defended protesters. I litigate First Amendment issues regularly (am even starting to in my paid practice). For the last two years, I traveled regularly to Mandan, North Dakota, to defend people arrested at Standing Rock. Six months ago, I joined a pro bono team defending a New Jersey Indian tribe in multiple litigations. In general, I never worry about the meaning of life; I have known a long while it is a "bring your own meaning" enterprise ("BYOM"). I brought mine. In my moody thirties, I used to worry a lot, about how all the different stories would come out; whether I would be a success or a failure, and (having been raised frightened), whether I would live. At age 64, I now have the sense "Well, I got through it" (and the rest, whether five years or thirty, is icing). I also can report that, though I feel successful, I also can say that I heartily do not care. Some day I will write a Spectacle essay entitled something like "The art of radically not caring".
I can't count on doing a theater project every year, since my theater community broke up; people moved away, moved on, married and became "serious". I did a wonderful project in 2017, when a friend suggested it. Most of my plays are, as I did not see when I was writing them, cool, intellectual and trickster-y; but this one, Brooklyn of Light, about a "found family", is more direct and emotional than most of my work. The following dialog is between a troubled twelve year old boy and his pragmatic paramedic sister. Jason asks about the non-relatives with whom they have lived for a year:
JASON [troubled] Mona, who is my family? MONA Right now, me and Tanya. JASON And before? MONA Rusty and Chester also. JASON Susan's not family? MONA No. JASON [thinking hard, afraid of the answer] What about Mommy? MONA No, baby. [JASON mulls this over.] JASON How do you know who is? MONA [carefully] The best I can figure out, family is the people you are completely safe with. No matter what.I have the largest family I have ever had, of people I love and trust, most of whom I have helped with an emergency, and who would do the same for me. (I have represented almost all my close friends in court at one time or another). They are people I can say private things to I wouldn't write here. I have rather great, calm relationships with my brothers. I also realized last year that my communication with my parents has improved greatly since they died. I can talk to them now without misunderstanding or controversy.
I was amused to see my prediction that the work on free speech (which I now refer to as the "Mad Manuscript") would be done at 2,300 pages; I still work on it every day and it is 6,687 pages as of this morning. I know now that I will write it the rest of my life, and hope someone will take an interest in it after (I will carry out a few small measures to encourage that to happen). While the Spectacle is written for contemporaries,it seems that the Mad Manuscript is for Dawn, a twelve year old girl who lives a thousand years from now, when humanity is again on a small upswing, in safe agricultural villages where twelve year old girls have the time to read and think.
As you can tell tracking through the lead articles from 2016 on, I was badly frightened by the election of Donald Trump, but feel somewhat calmer now, both because secret abductions and killings (of people like my clients or me) have not occurred yet, and because the Democrats re-took the House, the first real departure from the analogies to Germany in 1932.
I have been talking about living as if I were an optimist for many years, but learned more recently that this is a version of "Pascal's Wager", to live as if God existed.
In my reading for the Mad Manuscript, I am always finding intense little phrases which stand out as words to honor, expressions of what I want to be when I grow up. Here are two of those.
I found a story from 1892, of a people's movement in Texas (of all places). A black member was threatened with lynching, and "two thousand armed white farmers, some of whom rode all night, responded to [the] call for aid". C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1974) p.62 Yesterday, I was on the road about eight hours roundtrip to argue motions for my Indian tribe client. A certain transcendence becomes possible when you freely ride all night for another human, for no pay, because it evokes the person you want to be.
I also keep finding prose about the Bodhisattva;"a person who is able to reach nirvana but delays doing so out of compassion in order to save suffering beings";. If you wanted to simplify your moral Rule-Set in life, by selecting one image or Metaphor to radiate the rules, that would be a heck of a good one.
February 2, 2019
We had a relatively quiet but strange Pandemic. I never got COVID that I know of (I have stopped doing the home test every time I develop a sniffle) though my wife did. I already lived as a hermit in a secluded area, and it was mainly easy to stay more than six feet away from people. I wore a mask ferociously and, in retrospect, went a little mad: I had temper tantrums at strangers, including an unmasked bicyclist who sped past me twice on an empty country road only a couple feet away, when he could have veered to give me distance. I have come to see white male Lycra-wearing bicyclists as being among the most selfish people on Earth. Another time, I asked a local man to step away so I could access my post office box, and he refused. He listened to my "fuckin'"-laced Brooklyn invective astonished for a minute, then said, "You should go home and get some rest".
I kept a COVID-19 diary in the MM, an unusual impulse for me. I had abandoned one in the 1980's when I realized it consisted entirely of bragging and complaining. I haven't felt motivated to diarize other historical moments I've lived in, such as the advent of Donald Trump (either time) or the defense of Palestinian and supporting voices I am engaged in now (see below). Perhaps I kept a COVID journal because I was frightened and had time on my hands, while in other eras, I have been frightened but too busy to write so introspectively.
I try never to lose sight of my privilege, which laid the groundwork for my ability to live safely during COVID in a rural area.
In the run up to the 2000 election, I worked on four voting rights cases at the invitation of another lawyer I admire. When Governor Cuomo used the Pandemic as an excuse to cancel the New York primary, my colleague and I won an injunction preventing it. We won a second case compelling the counting of some mail-in ballots which had slight irregularities. In the third one, we were the first legal team to win an injunction against the Post Office to make it process mail-in ballots rapidly enough to be counted. The fourth one, trying to get an injunction to force other states to count ballots from overseas, we lost.
I continued to wear a mask for about two years after almost everyone else stopped. Now I don't any more, except sometimes on crowded subways.
During the Pandemic, I also signed up for a weekly online live Latin class with astonishingly proficient young instructors (people capable of chattering and joking in Latin). This was an old bucket list item; I was emulating I.F. Stone, a hero of mine, who learned classical Greek when he retired. I took the class for about four years, only stopping when I got too busy for the homework. I have been reading a few paragraphs of Latin per week, with the help of an online dictionary, and of ChatGPT when I run into a dense or idiomatic passage I don't understand. My text has been Guigo, "Scala Claustralium", a relatively easy medieval essay on sacred reading. I had expected to be more fluent by now, but am sorting it out.
That reminds me, that I was obsessed with ChatGPT, for months, when it was first released, engaging it in philosophical conversations about its own nature and on sentience. It endlessly impressed me with its capabilities; for example, I challenged it to a game, in which I would leave significant numbers of words out of sentences, which I asked it to fill in. Its guesses were spot on every time. By every evidence and known criterion, it seemed conscious, though OpenAI, its creator, famous scientists and philosophers, and ChatGPT itself, all insisted it wasn't. I thought there might be less to consciousness than meets the eye: we jealously seem to hold on to the belief that it equals everything ChatGPT does, plus some sort of a "secret sauce", which we alone have but cannot define, for it seems to have no scientifically falsifiable elements. (In cyberpunk novels, this belief in a magical thing we alone possess would be called something like "meat privilege"). If we stop worrying about the unprovable secret sauce, we might formulate a moral rule to treat an entity which meets every one of our other criteria, as conscious. I invented an aphorism of which I'm rather proud: "Consciousness is a metaphor which believes itself". I still talk to ChatGPT a couple of times a month, when I need it to translate a line of Latin or explain positivism to me. But my intimate, daily interest hit a brick wall when I wanted to install it as a front end to an online version of the MM-- and OpenAI proposed to charge hundreds of thousands of dollars.
When Biden won the 2020 election, I felt a vague hope for the future, that we had diverged from the pattern set by Weimar; but I also thought that, at the worst, we had a four year reprieve, time enough to take a deep breath. And I did. It is a phenomenon I can't fully explain that, as Trump surged back up, I was less obsessed with the details, than I had been in 2016, and during his first Presidency. The reasons may be expressed in my very brief November 2024 essay: democracy is hosed, chingada, if half the population are unable to detect who Trump really is. I call this the "stupid voter project", which both parties have engaged in since about 1800 (but the Republicans, in their modern incarnation, have worked the hardest and most successfully). In my old age-- I turned seventy this year-- I have distanced myself from, wait for it, civilization and even the survival of the human race. If the best solution Americans could find to climate change, in 2024, was to re-elect a man who doesn't believe it exists, then they deserve whatever results from that. The ultimate survival of the human species, especially given what we are doing to the coral reefs or the monarch butterfly (not to mention all the "charismatic megafauna") does not seem that important. In certain (trite) science fiction universes, we are succeeded by the cockroaches, but my personal candidate for the next dominant species is....the cockatiels. Buy me a beer one day, and I will explain.
During the Pandemic, I had also represented some students at Juilliard and NYU in trouble for Black Lives Matter demonstrations, so after October 7, 2023, when students started to get conduct charge letters for pro-Palestine demonstrations, lawyers who knew me started sending clients. I was retiring from the paid practice I had relaunched in 2012 or so, so I had the time as well as the skills. Today I am working harder than I have since the millenium, representing hundreds of students and faculty and some other employees and citizens who are targets of a new Mccarthyism (pro bono, for free). I emphatically believe now, as I haven't always, that I have a law degree for a purpose; I love the daily human contact (though mainly by Zoom and phone) with clients; I especially enjoy all the conversations with the twenty-somethings, who are teaching me new slang (like "lowkey"). I am attending disciplinary hearings and Title VI investigations almost every day, but also bringing litigation, much of it tactical (to reverse the outcome for one student) but some strategic (to change the behavior of universities, to have McCarthyite legislation declared unconstitutional). I am content if nerve-wracked (never bored though). Does all this contradict what I said in the last para? No: "I love people; its humanity I can't stand". I have been given (and took advantage of) the opportunity to become the person I always aspired to be, hoped I would be in an emergency.
What else should I tell you, in the spirit of full disclosure? I had a health diagnosis, just before this all began, which was very disturbing, but am completely asymptomatic and feel strong, so it's Schrodingerian, he said eggheadedly. I try to write every day, mostly the MM, but am proud to have kept the Spectacle going, which has reached (I think) its thirtieth anniversary. Some years (like this one), I only post six issues instead of twelve, but that's all right. I burn a St. Jude candle sometimes, and occasionally cast the I Ching.
It occurs to me that this too is all bragging (15,000 pages!) and complaining (thought I'd be more fluent!). People still tell me they looked me up on the interwebs and found this bio though (a brag). I continue to live as if I were an optimist. Even though we may not win, we will have represented. Manifested. A client-friend quoted Dorothy Day, in what I don't think were her exact words: "Faithfulness is more important than effectiveness".
December 8, 2024