Category: Meta-discussions

The complexities of caring for a parent you don’t like.

October 1st, 2025

I just spent five days on a rescue mission. Immediately after returning home from a business trip, my wife and I loaded up and drove to distant upstate NY to retrieve my parents to bring them back with us for medical reasons. The primary one is that my dad’s vascular surgeon decided he would be better off coming to Maryland for treatment of his peripheral artery disease- a surgery he was supposed to have there this week. The decision came as a random phone call after my dad’s pre surgical exam, while I was in the third row of an Uber on the way back from a meeting with colleagues.

“Just take him to an emergency room down there, they’ll know what to do,” the surgeon who clearly doesn’t understand the medical system said.

For further disclosure, I do not have a particularly warm relationship with my father, a narcissistic rageaholic whose main skill has always been the use of apoplectic explosions of shouting to intimidate people into bending to his will. Now in his 80s with exceedingly poor health due to never listening to anyone about how to manage diabetes, failure to seek help for medical conditions because just ignoring them was easier, and generally otherwise not taking care of himself, he is embarrassed to have me assuming power of attorney to handle his shit.

Among his failures is also his failure to do anything to advocate for my mom, who started having memory issues last year and now is somewhat officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s related dementia. I knew there was something up last year when I found out my dad was in the hospital for 3 days from my mom’s Facebook post…because she didn’t remember how to call me , it seems.

My mom decided to stop driving late last year because she forgot how she got home one day. My dad became her only connection to the world. And my dad rarely got out of his La-z-boy.

So when my dad injured his foot and it didn’t heal, and it turned out the thing he kept calling “plantars fascia” was in fact a diabetic ulcer on his heel, he was forced to call me to get him to surgery and watch over my mom.

Things did not go according to his plans, and now he faces amputation of at least 4 toes—if not much of his foot or more. After his first vascular surgery, which removed a 90 % blockage of his femoral artery but did not restore blood flow to his foot, his surgeon told he that my father- a man with an Ed.D and two masters in Biology, who had done population genetic studies for NIH at one point in his life—did not know that he had diabetes. (He heard “pre-diabetes” years ago from a doctor and assumed that was what he had, even after being told he was type-2 diabetic, which he apparently assumed was the same thing and every time anybody tried to correct him he yelled at them.)

So now here I am, having put my parents in a long stay hotel nearby because the last time my dad visited he fell on top of me from the porch steps and broke his small toe. (There is a whole side story there that I could go into, but I’m already giving too much exposition.) Tomorrow I go to shower him, re-bandage his foot ( including his gangrenous toes that the surgeon’s PA told me might just fall off on their own), and shuttle him to an initial appointment with a vascular surgical clinic here.

During the whole trip down—two days and 9 hours of driving—he has said nothing longer than a declarative sentence to me. I tried repeatedly to engage him in conversation; either he’s in too much pain to converse, or doesn’t feel like it’s important to talk to the only person who is left to stand up and help him about anything. Most of what he said to me were curt requests/demands, while he left debris from his snacks all over the back seat of my car. He is officially in his second toddler-hood.

I love my dad, but it’s because he’s blood. I don’t necessarily like him, though. I mean, I actually don’t like him, and haven’t for years. He was the first bully in my life, and outlasted all the others. I strove to make myself the exact opposite of him.

And now I am responsible for seeing to medical care that will prolong his life. He very rarely lets gratitude show. But he usually does it when he has brief periods of self-awareness.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
It has happened here, and has been happening.

March 31st, 2025
Trump has managed to do one thing for a lot of people: dispel the illusion that America is somehow special and immune to autocracy. Now we get a chance to get people to look clearly at American history and realize that…this is the way it has always been, except more subtle.

Most of us grew up getting our brains filled with bullshit propaganda about how America was The Greatest Country Ever because WWII and apple pie and freedom and shit. But even the surface truths that hid the lie are now in tatters.

We have our own Nazi authoritarians now, so we don’t have to go to Europe to punch anyone and if we punched a Nazi we would probably end up in a concentration camp in Gitmo or El Salvador. We can’t make apple pies because no eggs to wash the pie crust.

So we have to now assess our country with clear eyes. Objectively. And welp, it isn’t exactly great. We have left too many people behind, we have not dealt with hatreds that have been born out of racism, evangelical cultism, regionalism, xenophobia or imaginary threats to someone’s piles of gold.

We don’t even have a free market (of ideas, labor, goods or anything else). We don’t have democracy (it’s a marginally representative republic with two institutional parties that would require billions of dollars and lawyers to displace). We don’t have the best healthcare or education or opportunity.

These things can be observed objectively. The only relative advantages we had over the world up to the last century was a vast supply of natural resources (that drove industrialization), an agricultural cornucopia (that drove industrial exploitation of agricultural goods) & a relatively open society with some marginal class mobility if you managed to pass for ruling class material.

That led to the industrial might that really won World War II, and if there hadn’t been a reactionary swerve away from the path being set post Great Depression through the war years, we might have had socialized medicine and other nice things everybody else has.

But we still had racism (born from colonialism), a legacy of rural poverty, unsolved issues from the abandonment of Reconstruction, and political structures designed for when we had an agrarian economy and were ruled by landed elites. And reactionaries. So we are where we are now—totally fucked.

At least most of the world is just as fucked in some ways as we are. Other places have nice things, but they are not necessarily responding to the challenges created by global migration due to displacement by economic and physical violence.

So maybe we should start thinking about MAGFA – Make America Great For All — instead of trying to go back to something that never really existed other than as some nostalgic vibe. </rant>

Reading list:
- A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn
- Working, Studs Terkel
- “Can the US resist fascism?”, The New Statesman
- More references to come.
The struggle against cynicism

March 4th, 2025

One of the things I have always struggled with in regard to my participation in politics is reconciling my strong feelings about what should be and what is just with my cynicism about what is possible.

I cannot remember a time in my life since I first became aware of politics when I felt elected officials were truly trying to do good. That’s probably because I was 7 years old when the Watergate scandal surfaced, spent my early childhood with Walter Cronkite giving the daily body count in Vietnam, and I followed Doonesbury instead of Peanuts on the comics page of Newsday.

As I got involved in local politics around issues that directly affected me (school budgets, for example) and then in campus politics at UW Madison, I recognized that to most people politics was like a sporting event. As with professional football, it seemed people picked a side based on where they lived or who their family supported (unless they were eager to be contrary for subversive reasons) and that was that. They would cheer for every play their team made and boo every success of the other team, regardless of how brilliant or elegant their performance was. And as a player, it seemed it didn’t matter what team you were on as long as you were in the game and scoring points.

Reagan knew this. It was in his DNA. He switched sides to get a better chance at going national.

In other words, American politics is like sports fandom in that it has always been about “vibes only” and rarely about substance. Little Bonespurs is the final form of that. The main difference is that in sports, at least we have referees who are theoretically impartial to enforce rules. And that is no longer the case in American politics.

The Supreme Court has been politically affected since before Dredd – Scott, but those umpires have been increasingly compromised beyond “tradition” since Reagan.

We’ve had the protection from purely vibe-driven insanity offered (sort of) by a mostly professional civil service and administrative court system enforcing regulations and executive compliance with law since the late 19th century (not terribly long ago historically), but vibeness was king for much of the first century of American government. The only thing that has protected us from government conspiracies is the utter inefficiency of the bureaucracy—it’s a feature, not a bug.

That protection is not absolute. Vibeness has resurfaced regularly, with building strength and frequency like a poorly designed suspension bridge over a windy chasm.

The fragility of US Democracy, as demonstrated by the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

We have now reached the point where a century and a half of laws, precedent and governing tradition that was never enshrined in law, along with the Constitution itself, are being pushed and twisted to the snapping point. Trumpism is all about cynicism, destroying faith in institutions and norms to create a new normal with oligarchs atop the heap.

It has been 160 years since the last real structural test of American government , which similarly was driven by one side gradually coming to the side of justice and the other defending the economic value of injustice for a relative few wealthy people who had convinced the rest of them based on vibes only. We can embrace what is just and right this time, or lose everything we tried as a nation to make the new baseline after 1864, and in every other great national struggle since then. Civil
rights, labor rights, human rights, all can be washed away by the current “vibes only” government.

I know what seems possible in this current climate runs hard up against what is just and right. But that is why we need to fight against realpolitik now, once and for all and overthrow centuries of racism, emergent fascism, and a long tradition of anti-fact, anti-science vibes that a very small number of people benefit from. That means we need to stop picking one of the two teams we’ve had to choose from for the past 160 years or so and building a new way that isn’t just a sporting event.

TL;DR: Fuck vibes, let’s get fucking real about saving the country and the world.
We have always been at war with Democracy

November 19th, 2024

Anybody who says anything about this mess we’re in being “unprecedented” just isn’t looking at history hard enough. Exhibit A: The Presidential Election of 1876.

Rutherford B. Hays. Another reason to be angry at Ohio.

1876 United States presidential election – Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

This was the election where the Republicans caved on Reconstruction as part of a compromise that was forced by a Democratic (read current MAGA base) majority that threatened to not certify the election results because they counted votes differently.

Compromise of 1877 – Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org

We’re essentially back in Unreconstruction now. Everything today is the result of failed Reconstruction after the Civil War.

Since the Civil War, we have had two institutional political parties with legal and financial advantages against all comers. Don’t call it a Democracy.

Sherman ‘28 – Let Him Finish The Job.
To the mooooooon

November 12th, 2024

lol. Roflmao.
This (is/is not) America

November 11th, 2024

It should come as no surprise that a nation of cast-offs and rejects from Europe of the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries — 400 years worth of religious extremists, prisoners turned indentured servants, disowned second and third sons, treasure hunters, pirates, brigands, thieves, sons of impoverished pastors, corporate murderers–and the kidnapped and dispossessed of various continents plus the survivors of the genocide of its original inhabitants has elected a charlatan, showman, rake and felon as their President for a second, non-consecutive time. The problem is that many have an illusion of this political subdivision of the North American continent being fundamentally Exceptional, and they are now shocked to find that the script has deviated from their vision, while others are absolutely certain it is their way that is Exceptional and that Exceptionality also requires exclusion of everyone that doesn’t look, think, worship, or fuck like they do.

The axis of American political direction has always been wobbly, the result of idealism built on a foundation made from the opression and enslavement of others whom the founders could not be bothered to admit were also people worthy of rights. “We the White Male Landowners” would have made for a very uninspiring Constitutional preamble opening, but it would have certainly been more accurate–and as it turns out, that’s how certain “originalists” on the Supreme Court interpret it anyway. Fear of a lessening of American Whiteness has long been a driving force behind national policy, from the three fifths compromise, to Irish, Eastern European, and Italian restrictions in 19th century immigration acts, to the Chinese Exclusion Act, to children in cages on the southern border. Only those who can assimilate into what remains of Protestant White culture are truly welcome everywhere in America, and even then those of a slightly darker shade will be eyed suspiciously.

So shock! An appeal to the basest of those long-held prejudices along with a promise of doing a different (but not necessarily better) job with the economy and shutting the doors for the corruptive forces of global trade in goods and ideas has won the majority of a vote by a minority of Americans who are eligible to participate in this system we call Democracy, with all its handicapping for underpopulated and exceedingly White provinces that in many cases are still fighting the war they lost in 1864 in another form. We are stunned that our hopes for a somewhat slightly better direction embodied in a daughter of immigrants was thwarted by the grandson of a bordello owner who emigrated illegally and was stripped of citizenship in his old country for not paying his taxes. (The apple does not fall far from the tree, even over two generations.)

Which story is more American? The child of immigrants who rose to be a top cop and instrumental in maintaining a status quo that put innocents in jail and slapped the wrists of corporations abusing the less wealthy, and generally making California slightly less fascist? Or the convicted felon escaping sentencing whose life story has been about the power of both real and fictional wealth, the power of coarseness and lies, and reaching out and grabbing whoever he wanted by the p*ssy?

Both are on script, but cop shows are tired and everybody loves a circus.

Footnote: My accompanying rant from Bluesky

A little food for thought having nothing to do with Veterans Day, but everything to do with it, if you get my drift.

We were taught certain things that made us want to serve. That Democracy was to be defended. That America was the land of the free and the home of the brave and fair to everyone, right? And that we were making the world safe and supporting a Western World of truth, fairness and Big Macs for everyone

Or we were inspired to defend our country by the evil acts of evil people from lands far away where they wanted women to be covered up and flagellated themselves and were cruel to animals and shit. Plus 9/11.

But what we keep finding is places where you’re putting a boot on the neck of people who are more like us than the people who are cheering for us, victims of every fucking circumstance who if they had been born in the US would probably drive pickup trucks with Trump flags to NFL tailgate parties.

And we lost friends. We lost shipmates and fellow grunts and squadmates and battle buddies and often the people from those places we went who helped us the most. Sometimes in combat, often in stupid, stupid circumstances created by a flag officer trying to get another star’s wet dream of an idea.

But if we opened our mouths about how stupid those ideas were we’d get busted or worse, get sent off to some rubber-room assignment waiting for our obligated service to run out or some brig or disciplinary barracks. So we either stealth resisted or just said yessir and waited for the worst to come.

47 shipmates in one take, and I was elsewhere because I pissed off the wrong person and was in Panama making sure classified data wasn’t in fucking plain sight through the window to Russian binoculars on the other side of the canal and the names were rolling up the screen and I was screaming.

And that’s just how it fucking was. And how it is. And how it evermore shall probably fucking be. Because a handful of people end up taking the brunt of the mistakes of someone a handful of people voted for in the right states, and afterward they get a “thank you for your service.”

Happy Veterans Day.