X-RAY

 

Sometimes you don’t need X-ray vision to “see” right through things and know the truth. I once thought that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s candidacy was “intriguing,” but it was going nowhere for a reason. If he had just kept to being an environmental activist, maybe he’d still be “relevant,” but this article in Vanity Fair 2 demonstrated that his anti-vax and COVID-denying put him on the same level as the dangerous kooks enumerated in that story, who would have had the rest of us dying as they did if we shared their extremist conspiracy theories during the pandemic. 

Should we be surprised that RFK Jr., after suspending his pointless campaign, announced he was supporting Trump? The rest of the Kennedy clan has essentially disowned him over his support of far-right conspiracies, and this is his way of getting “even” with them. That’s the only way to see through his crackpot behavior.

He has also been passing himself off as a “working class populist,” which some say will “help” Trump because he has more “cred” being an offshoot of the liberal Kennedy clan. But that is ridiculous; like Trump he comes from privilege and just passes himself as a "populist" because he is taking advantage of “common” people who don’t like “government” getting in the way of whatever they hell they want to do. That’s the extent of his and Trump's “promises” to working people—we do what we want to do (that helps their own class), and if that hurts you while you are doing whatever you losers do, well don’t blame us because you voted for us:

 

Common sense can provide us with “X-ray vision" to see through the façade and into the truth. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp took advantage of one tragic murder in the state (which of course involved a white female) and signed an unnecessary law which merely parroted previous law in regard to local law enforcement reporting to the federal authorities about immigrants—both legal (thanks to the 1996 law) and illegal—in their custody, just more loudly as a PR stunt.

This is an example of how when making a political “statement,” it is always useful to portray "evidence" in isolation, rather than in context. Take for instance what is going on in the border city of Ciudad Juárez, where gender activists and media portray the killings and disappearances of females a "crisis" of “epidemic” proportions. Yes, the number as a rate of the population is certainly higher than in the U.S., but what about the “context”? 90 percent of all murder victims in the city (and in Mexico generally, thanks to the drug trade, no "thanks" to the US and its "habit") are male. 

What does this mean? It means that the percentage of  females of all murder victims in the U.S. is at least double that what it is in Ciudad Juárez, reportedly the “murder capital” of Mexico--and yet we are being led to believe the opposite is true because of the "quality," or lack thereof, of the "information" we are given, even by the "liberal" media.

The Georgia law also requires that a data base be established to count the number of crimes committed by immigrants (illegal especially), which probably will likely not have the effect desired to portray them as responsible for an alleged “crime epidemic” in the state, ignoring the fact that most of these immigrants are here to escape violence. Some people know what this is really about, to scapegoat them and deny them any rights as human beings as a political stunt:

 

 

But crime by “illegals” is just a way to draw people away from what Republican lawmakers are really up to, which is essentially make Georgia a police state and round up as many people as possible and into jail cells. In conjunction with the “new” anti-immigrant law, Kemp signed a bill that increases the number of crimes which require bail (18 out of 30 just misdemeanors), and makes it more difficult for lower-income people to pay it—thus, as critics point out, the law is simply an excuse to fill jail cells and enrich the bail bond industry.

Besides critics accusing “Republican lawmakers of unfairly demonizing Georgia’s Hispanic population that contributes to the state’s economy while raising families and paying taxes" according to the Georgia Recorder, the new laws have been accused by the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia as creating  “a two-tiered justice system based on wealth. ‘SB 63 is cruel, costly, and counterproductive. Research shows that sweeping people into incarceration only increases crime and taxpayer costs, and yet Georgia locks up a higher percentage of its people than any other state in the country. SB 63 doubles down on that position, forcing even more people to languish in jail because they are poor or mentally ill.’”.

But is that all--especially this close to the November election? I wouldn't put it past these assholes that they "hope" that they can get enough voters who they presume will vote Democrat sitting in jail cells instead.

Meanwhile, in the place running neck-and-neck with Florida as the top experimentation in fascist statehood, Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott continues to oversee the most vicious and corrupt state in the country. Besides being supported by the far-right and rogue courts with Trump-appointed judges to impose their own extremist and rights-hating culture war views, and undo separation of powers in the rogue state's favor,  Abbott continues to lie to people that he personally has “solved” the border with the usual false claims that most Americans wish to believe, that it is migrants escaping countries overrun with drug violence—and not U.S. citizens at legal border crossings—are bringing drugs, especially fentanyl, into the country.

Abbott also grandiosely  announced that 1 million “illegal” voters had been “purged” from the voter rolls. Of course this was just another publicity stunt, since  the “purged” were likely all legal voters at some point, and probably didn’t vote at all or at least not in recent years, their "purging" the usual result of registrars updating the voter rolls to account for deaths and people moving out of state. 

However, half the people “purged” were put on the “suspense list,” which means that they were not necessarily "illegal" voters, but that their addresses could not be immediately verified, even if they are legally able to vote in the state. But we can use our “X-ray vision” to see what is really “upsetting” Republicans in Texas: it is the fact that non-Hispanic whites are the minority in Texas, and they just don’t like the possibility that non-whites have a “right” to decide if they are allowed to run a fascist state or not.

You know, Texas is the state that decided it didn’t want to join the rest of the country in insuring its citizens had enough power during emergencies by being a part of the national grid, the failure of which resulted in "officially" 246 people dying in the deep freeze of 2021 that shutdown the state grid; most experts believe that is a “serious undercount,” and thanks to the oil industry that essentially tells Republican lawmakers how they want the state  run, little has been done to prevent people dying from the next “freeze.” 

Abbott (who when he was Texas AG filed 31 lawsuits against the Obama administration) like all Republicans uses the “border crisis” and "voter fraud" to distract voters' attentions away from Republican failure to address issues that actually effect their lives:

 

Meanwhile, Texas' current corrupt AG, Ken Paxton, who has vowed to investigate, according to the AG's website, "every credible report we receive" pertaining to criminal activity tied to elections, argued that citizens have the ability to register to vote when renewing or registering for a driver's license with the DPS, "so there is no obvious need to assist citizens to register to vote outside DPS offices — calling into question the motives of the nonprofit groups." Of course, Paxton didn't mention that some people might not have been told they could register to vote at the DPS offices, per his unofficial "instruction."

Texas' "show us your papers" law on the subject reminds one of Nazi Germany. In the BBC documentary The Nazis: A Warning From History, a German historian pointed out that nearly all the information in Gestapo reports in a captured  repository were not from "investigations" by Gestapo agents but written statements by "ordinary citizens," and many of them were written anonymously and most presumably out of personal, vindictive motives.

Thus Texas law states that “a registered voter may challenge the registration of another voter of the same county”: The person challenging another voter’s registration must send a sworn statement to the county’s voter registrar stating they have “personal knowledge” of a specific reason that voter’s registration may not be valid. Typically, the stated reason for a voter registration challenge has to do with the voter’s address.  

Thus if some white person "suspects" for no other reason that a Hispanic neighbor is "illegal" save personal prejudice, he or she can report they are "illegal voters" this with no evidence at all. And if Paxton decided as a "registered voter" over the entire state decided on his own that he has "personal knowledge" that "voter fraud" has occurred, he can just take a stack of papers and declare everyone there to  be "invalid" just because he says so.

In a USA TODAY story on Paxton’s further corrupt abuse of power with the raid on Latino voter support groups, it is reported that "It is evident through his (Paxton's) patterns of lawsuits, raids, searches and seizures that he is trying to keep Latinos from voting," Roman Palomares, the national president of LULAC, said during the news conference. "LULAC will not stand idly by and allow our members to be to be targeted, harassed, bullied or intimidated." We can "speculate" that the reason for seizing all computers, cellphones and records during the raids was not to find "fraud," but to inhibit legitimate voting.

Paxton, who looks like a mob boss and has been voted back into office twice despite being a hypocrite who seems to believe he should not be held to the same “standards”  of adherence to lawful conduct that he falsely applies to others...

 

...accused Meta and wireless services in recent lawsuits (whatever he says, courts with Trump-appointed judges will support whatever he tells them to) of doing essentially what he did in his raids in the homes and offices of Hispanic voting rights activists. Paxton--who is so venal he was caught on video stealing another man's expensive pen at a courthouse metal detector station--himself has escaped being convicted after being impeached on bribery charges by Texas’s lower house, and “settled” a nearly decade-long felony case involving false statements and securities fraud with a fine and “community service”—where and when being under seal and he will no doubt never do. A criminal who should be sitting in the same jail cell with another person we know, commiserating about how "unfair" life is.

As Mother Jones noted in a 2022 piece, someone like Paxton would be a corrupt nobody who would likely be in prison but for one thing: he took advantage of the Trump “moment”:

Paxton’s persistence in the face of endless scandal makes him a model apparatchik for the current moment. He will never be president, but in a golden age of Republican corruption, in which anyone with ambition must bend the knee to an aspiring autocrat, a warm body with nothing to lose can do a lot of damage. By laundering the theories of conspiracists and hacks, he did as much as anyone short of Trump to make the Big Lie the new party orthodoxy. And in the process, he held a black light up to the rest of the conservative legal movement—the institutions and officials and donors who have turned jobs like his into some of the most powerful in state politics, and the compromises they’ve made to do it. There are a lot of Ken Paxtons out there, it turns out, and they were all just waiting to fall in line.

Are voters that stupid in Texas? Can't they see through this guy? Or do they just get their jollies watching cowardly bullies beating on helpless people? But wait--isn't he "working for the people" in the Meta lawsuit, or was this just a PR stunt to draw attention away from his own corruption? Are "the people" supposedly harmed by Meta getting any of that $1.4 billion “won” in the lawsuit, which was based on the usual Texas “Lone Star” posturing as “independent” of the rest of the country? According to the Texas Scorecard, “news” for “real Texans”—there is reason for doubt:

According to the Office of the Attorney General, money collected from the settlement will go, in small part, to pay outside counsel working on the case—lawyers specializing in these kinds of lawsuits. The vast majority, however, will go to the state general revenue fund. That means it will be up to the state legislature to decide how the money gets spent when they pass the next biennial budget, and if it will be given back to Texans. 

I wouldn’t doubt that Paxton will find a way of putting some of that money into his own pocket (probably as one of those "lawyers") before the people who he allegedly brought the lawsuit in the “name of” ever see a dime.

Of course there are things going on in Seattle that may not need X-ray vision to expose. Why did the city allow the building of that Convention Center extension? It isn’t close to downtown enough to “revitalize” it as “intended.” It looks more like a glorified parking garage inside...

 

 

...and its principle “function” was to be built on the only "available" land, the Convention Place transit station that serviced Metro bus traffic through the tunnel, which was built to get the buses off the streets in the first place, and is now being wasted on occasional light rail traffic.

Well, if we put on our X-ray vision goggles anyways, it is because the state paid the city $147 million for the land the transit station was built on, and the state was basically paying the cost of the $2 billion boondoggle. Where did that $147 million go? Probably to offset the budget deficit, instead of being used to build affordable housing, which critics at the time pointed out.

But not to worry if human intelligence fails: “Artificial Intelligence” is on the way, and of course it will be more “discerning” of the hard facts and come up with the “right answers” to all our problems, right? Uh-huh. Art Wittman of Brainyard tells us that what we call “AI” is not that all, but “machine learning,” which “has a hard time with context. If you’re trying to teach your ML system to write, you could show it lots of contemporary fiction and non-fiction books, newspapers and web articles, and it might start to do a pretty good job. Then throw it Chaucer and Shakespeare, and watch it fall apart. Give it some military manuals or scientific papers, and it’ll be hopelessly lost in the seas of jargon and arcane writing styles.”

He also notes that “Most of the bots you talk to on the phone or in web chats aren’t AI. They’re just taking your input, matching it to some known phrases and giving you canned replies. There’s no learning going on.” How many times have you said you wanted this and the bot either misinterpreted what you said or “admitted” it didn’t understand your “input”—especially when you used a curse word? For anything like AI to actually work, it needs lots and lots of unbiased and high-quality information—which tends not to be the kind of “information” that most social media chatbots receive and output.

Wittman notes that computers fed huge chunks of information merely have a large data base in which to process information by “example.” But is it “learning”?  A computer may develop its own algorithms without telling us what that is; it is just comparing and matching. There is no real “thought” that goes into it. “Most analytics today isn’t machine-learning-based. It’s just really complex programming that likely also uses probabilities and pattern matching of some sort, but the algorithm doesn’t self-improve, so again, there isn’t any learning going on. That doesn't mean it isn’t an incredibly powerful tool, but it’s not artificial intelligence.”

According to a report from the Australian Data Science Education Institute:

A system that most of us would think of as real AI – something that can, more or less, think like us – is known in Computer Science as Generalised Artificial Intelligence, and it is nowhere on the horizon. The term Artificial Intelligence is used instead to apply to anything produced using techniques designed in the quest for real AI. It’s not intelligent. It just does some stuff that AI researchers came up with, and that might look a bit smart. In dim light. From the right angle. If you squint.

AI is usually misconstrued with “machine learning,” which is not the same kind of “learning” that humans do. ADSEI continues: 

They’re not really doing what we think of as learning, which should involve understanding. They’re just getting progressively better, with feedback, at one very specific task. The trouble with machine learning systems is that we don’t always know what they have learned. Sometimes they have not learned the things we intended them to…It’s a shame, really, that the term AI has morphed into referring to systems that are really quite horribly dumb. 

And even if we don’t have to worry about AI becoming sentient and taking over the world any time soon, there are plenty of dangers in the cavalier way we use AI and machine learning. We tend to trust them too easily, and fail to evaluate them critically.

Everything out there that calls itself “AI” isn’t really that at all; it is something that is no more “intelligent” than a simple Google search: you input search terms and given what is “out there," meaning it comes up with the “best” matches. Chatbots are not AI; all they do is regurgitate the most common “comments” found on the Internet on the topic at hand—even if most of what it “learns” from the input is some absurd conspiracy theory being bandied about by crackpots. It is also why Elon Musk’s own Grok AI (which at least does have a “disclaimer” warning people to use their own “judgment” about its outputs) is at the mercy of “woke” social attitudes, because “pro-woke” discussion predominates over the anti-woke, and that is what it bases its responses on. If you want to know what kind of asshole the Trump fundament-kissing Musk is, just "ask" his own Grok program.

Perhaps it may just come down to having “X-ray vision” into people’s motives, and if we are to trust people with "good" motives, or those who have "bad" motives. Is giving helpful information to people who have a right to vote a good motive, or a bad one to power-crazed politicians with authoritarian tendencies? Or is it really a "bad" motive to do what is “necessary” to stay in power, and with the help of extremist partisan judges with their own personal agendas, engage in blatantly racist suppression of voter rights? 

Shouldn't we see right through those who claim to have “good” motives when it seems obvious that their actions are clearly politically-motivated PR stunts based on deliberate misinformation  and conspiracies that have no basis in fact? “Learning”—human or machine—is unfortunately subject to its inputs, and unfortunately humans with bad motives are the source of bad inputs through either means.

WHITE

 

Donald Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, just can’t keep his stupid mouth shut. If the far-right accuses Kamala Harris of “flip-flopping,” that goes triple and quadruple for Vance. When he isn’t trying to “explain” Trump’s false or contradictory statements, he is confronted with his own statements of recent origin, which he tries to worm his way out of by twisting himself into a human pretzel with uncoordinated gymnastics of logic.

One recent example is when he was confronted with his statement about “waves of Italian, Irish and German immigration” leading to “higher crime and interethnic conflict.” When asked why he wouldn’t have supported mass deportations of these “criminals” back then, but does now for non-European migrants, he lamely asserted that there was “a lot of benefits to that wave of immigration”—implying that there was no “benefit” to the country, say, from Hispanic labor. You know, the people who the Vance-supported AppHarvest had to rush in because the “native” white people in eastern Kentucky the plant was meant to give jobs to quit in droves because the work was “too hard”?

Vance went on to suggest that certain types of immigrants (gosh, I wonder who) were insufficiently capable of “assimilation,” and deportation would “cure” that “problem”—you know, like how some Asian groups tend to gather in their own little “Chinatowns” to avoid “assimilation” on white terms? The truth of the matter is that the people who talk most about “assimilation” are those who don’t want the “others” to intrude on their “turf” and “assimilate.”

I have this film in my collection that was one of the last true film noirs of the “classic” period, and one of the better ones: the Robert Wise-directed Odds Against Tomorrow, recently released on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber. Although this film came out in 1959, it still has a "contemporary" message, that the more things “change,” the more they stay the same. The racial views of Robert Ryan’s Slater may not be expressed as overtly today as it was then (although perhaps in private); but what does still ring all too true is the complaints of the kind of white people who support Trump in reality have only themselves and the politicians they vote for to blame, and not the designated scapegoats, for their problems

Slater's hatred of blacks is so intense that he doesn’t recognize that the accusations he makes about them (being incompetent and untrustworthy) are actually better descriptors of himself, and a tendency to violence (he served time for assault and manslaughter) is the only way he knows how to “settle” differences of opinion in the direction of his life. But in one moment of self-awareness, he tells his needy girlfriend—who the perpetually jobless Slater has been living off of—that whenever he’d start a job, if it didn’t work out right away, he’d just leave. She asks him “Aren’t things ever easy for you?” His response speaks for many Trump supporters today:

Only when I get mad. Then they get too easy. I think that’s why I get mad, to make it easy.

It’s easy to blame “the illegals” and the “liberals” who they are told supposedly allow them to have an “equal share” of the national pie instead of examining one’s own personal fault. They are fed the addicting drug that they are fitted for something “better” because they are white, and some “undeserving” and “inferior” species has their job--or if not, they are living off their tax dollars (if they are paying taxes at all) on public welfare.  Whatever the reason, they just want to be “mad” at someone or anything—because that is easier than self-examination and thinking things through. I mean, if people like this were capable of logical thought, they'd realize that when Trump says "I" he really means just "I":

 

That is why Trump is flipping the bird at his critics, since when people lie about themselves, it doesn’t matter if anything Trump says is a lie, because all they know is lies. It doesn’t matter that Trump lies when he says he is “for” working people, when his tax cuts for the rich and corporations which is still on the books has done absolutely nothing to help them (being yet another failed example of "trickle-down economics"), and if anyone is to blame for their “problems” externally is for that reason and Trump’s handling of the pandemic, which more than anything else was responsible for the rise in inflation after it was over and consumer spending rose again while production tried to “catch up,” and certainly would have occurred anyways if Trump had been re-elected in 2020; and yes, he would be trying lay the blame for it on the Democrats or Anthony Fauci.

What happens when people don’t trust one another because they are “different”? A seemingly easy “job”—in this case a late night payroll heist—goes terribly awry simply because Slater cannot overcome his racial hatred toward “partner” Ingram (Harry Belafonte) to “trust” him with the getaway car keys. The two of them run from the scene of the crime, less to escape the police but so they have a chance to kill each other; after they start shooting on top of a petroleum storage unit that explodes and burns both of them to a crisp, the police and medical personnel at the scene note that their “color” doesn’t matter anymore; they both look the same now:

 

There was a story by CNN recently about a Virginia woman in the no doubt inaptly named town of Christiansburg who runs a gift shop full of pro-Trump paraphernalia. We learn that

Jo Anne Price wears a button that says, “You find it offensive. I find it funny. That’s why I’m happier than you…She’s 72, wears black-rimmed glasses and her gray hair swept back, and has been lifting weights for 20 years. She says, “racism is a made-up word,” and “I don’t know what it is, because it doesn’t exist,” and “if I don’t accept it, it doesn’t apply to me.” By the register, she sells credit card-like objects, one of which says, “WHITE PRIVILEGE CARD.”

Now, you’d think to yourself that this person is the worst kind of racist in this country, and in a way she is. What I left out there was that this individual is identified not as white, but black—or maybe she wishes people would think she should be something else:

 

This is what it means to “assimilate” on white terms. The story goes on to note that there was a black customer (much darker than Price) who thinks Trump is “right”  that migrants are responsible for all the crime (although he admits an “affinity” with Trump for being a fellow felony convict) and are stealing “black jobs”—you know, the kind of “jobs” that drew heckles at Trump when he said that at the black journalists forum. Naturally there is the usual dose of hypocrisy here...

 

...and although blacks account for "just" 20 percent of the population of Virginia, they account for 57 percent of all crimes, and 74 percent of the homicides. The post this information was provided in tells us that "The biggest lesson is that both Black families and society simply have to do a better job of raising, education, and mentoring Black youth."  OK, but what about all those crimes that illegals are supposed to be committing?

But mainly the store attracted white customers who no doubt welcomed an Aunt Tamsin in their midst who made it “easy” to be “mad” at people who didn’t think like themselves.

In my case, “assimilation” has been mostly an abject failure, but not because of lack of a proper "environment" in which to do so; it was thrust down my throat, and I just choked it out once I realized there was no point in living in a world of illusion. I ask myself, is being “white” more a way of being, or does it really just mean looking “white”? I recall being in a college classroom when out of the blue a very pale, very blonde female blurted out that she wasn’t a “racist,” but she would never marry a black man. She then repeated that she wasn’t a “racist.” 

The other students look at each other and silently asked WTF was that about? I’m sure that most of the white females in that Southern culture merely assumed the same about themselves, but why embarrass yourself and sound like what you claim you are not? Well, alright; at least she was "honest," and it is always nice to know what people are "really" thinking.

And me, I had a ringside seat on the mendacity of it all, although it took me a long time realize exactly how far that went. I read a book called A Death in White Bear Lake by Barry Siegal on the Dennis Jurgens case, which I talk about in a post here 1 and thought to myself while reading one passage. “This sure sounds ‘familiar’”:

Once, after Lois had whipped him with a belt buckle, a school counselor and coach noticed big purple welts on Grant, but he explained he had gotten them falling down the driveway. ‘If I tell, they’d just send me back to Lois…Over time, the children became scared even to come home from school. When the bus dropped them off each afternoon, they would go up the steep driveway to see if Lois’ Buick Skylark was parked by the house, relaxing if it was gone, cringing if it was there’” because they knew that she “‘would walk through the house and down into the basement until she found something wrong or out of place’ and they would 'hear' about it.”

My mother told me I was born a “blue baby,” apparently a mild case since I didn’t die from it. Being “first born” didn’t give me any special privileges, in fact less so. The three siblings who came after me had all the “privileges”—they got the allowances while my mother became angry if I asked her on a hot summer day for a quarter for a soda  when she made me ride my younger brother’s bike because he was in an absurd “competition” with another kid to see how many miles they could get on their bikes, and they got the braces on their teeth while my teeth were allowed to grow out as crooked as they pleased.  I was “imperfect” from the start, and only got worse, no thanks to mother.

When we were living out in the country, I did most of the “chores,” and even had to wake up early on school mornings to feed my sister’s “pet” horse and clean out its stall.  I learned at a young age what was meant by “social hierarchy” and that my “good” traits (like an addiction to reading books) were discouraged, and that my “bad” traits (the results of being afraid of my mother) were encouraged by default. Most of the “bad” things I did to deserve punishment were motivated by this fear; even when there was a brief period of niceness, there was always some dumb thing sure to soon end it, like me having the audacity to ask for something, because mother interpreted this as just taking “advantage” of her niceness. 

Admittedly this fear could lead to some embarrassing memories that could have been avoided; for example, if I wasn’t afraid to tell someone I wasn’t feeling well when I was 4 or 5, I would have lost my breakfast somewhere other than in the middle of a church service.

I wasn’t a very good student in grade or high school, but for me that wasn’t the point of being in school, it was just a safe haven, and I always dreaded returning home from fear of what mother had found that necessitated more punishment. I remember I went to school one day and a teacher was horrified at the welts she saw around my neck; I couldn’t tell her how I really got them, and it was very “convenient” that the school bus that morning had a little “accident” that I could use as an “explanation.” My mother was called by the school nurse and she accompanied me to the hospital for an examination. Lies and deception was such a part of daily existence for me that the irony of it not surprisingly didn’t seem to register with her.

I was always quiet and timid around people when I was a kid, but not so "timid" when no one was looking. Fear had made me "untrustworthy," and there was no accounting what I would do on the "sly." There was "obviously" something very“wrong” with me, and I had to be punished in order to act “normal” or “smart” like my siblings, who unlike me had no trace of “ethnicity” in them (especially my blonde, blue-eyed youngest sister). 

Then there were the psychiatrists, who told my mother to just try to be “nice” to me; she didn’t want to admit any fault, and said they were the ones who were “crazy” like me. One of them just invited me to draw a picture with him; from what mother had told him, he probably expected me to draw some knife-wielding maniac, when all I could think of drawing was a Navy ship or birds. By her reaction when she got off the phone with him, I wonder if he told her he thought she was the one who needed "help."

Sure, I did “bad” things—mainly doing things on the “sly” like taking food when no one was looking or hiding the books I was not allowed to have; in fact, as time went on I had fewer and fewer objects I could actually “keep” as my own, and if I was in possession of anything, it was assumed it was “stolen.” I have to admit that today I am surprised I felt a need to do things a certain way in order to “survive.”

I was so far gone by the time I got to my teenage years, that even with people who "sympathized," if they made me feel at all threatened I simply reverted to my shell behavior. Where did this “fear” come from? I remember visiting an aunt in Pennsylvania and she hugged me like she really meant to be affectionate, maybe because she knew I wasn’t getting much of that home; the next day we went back to her house, and when I saw her outside I hid behind a car. 

Why did I act that way? It was seemingly an instinctual reaction from being touched.  I have an early memory of spilling milk from a cereal bowl and then things kind of blacked-out after that. What I do remember next was being in a clinic to get stitches on the bridge of my nose, the scar from which still can be seen 60 years later.

But as I grew older I became more emboldened; I remember once I was left behind locked outside the house while the rest went on some family outing; unfortunately they came home earlier than expected,  to find that I had somehow found a way to get inside and bake some cookies; while my sister admitted that she was impressed by my baking skills, mom and dad  (who usually just stayed out of her way) were not so much.

There was no account for my feelings at all; I’ve mentioned a visit to a barber shop which my mother pulled up a chair in front of the barber’s chair to instruct the barber in how short he was supposed to cut my hair; I don’t know if it was either to save money until the next visit—or simply that she enjoyed seeing me miserable to the point of tears. The barber wasn’t enjoying it either; he’d cut a little bit, and she would demand he cut more, and this continued for some time until she was “satisfied.”

That was my life inside the family home (that is, when I was allowed inside of it), but what happened outside the family was less threatening but for what I would grow to understand was based on the same “principles.” I was “different” but not so much from what people “saw” in the inside, but from what people saw on the “outside.” That was when I discovered that there was something else going on that I hadn’t realize before, because I thought I was just like the rest of my family, you know, “white” and I liked the same things they liked.

But I didn’t always understand the things my parents didn’t like—especially of people who looked “different” to me. Since we didn’t interact with those “other” people, I didn’t know what to think of them, and did not form an opinion of them; they at least didn't get a chance to do me any harm, like that gang of white boys who held me down on the ground and stuffed grass in my mouth like I was some animal. I suspect that maybe it was believed that there was some DNA that I "shared" with "those people" that accounted for my “behavior."  But in light of what happened after I left home for the Army, this was more a self-fulfilling prophecy than anything ingrained in my cells.

It took me a long time to figure out something was “amiss” that I had no control over. As a kid in school, classmates might be “friendly,” but not friends. Some teachers seemed to be more “sympathetic” with my “plight,” which in hindsight was an opportunity for someone with liberal pretensions to do something for the socially “disadvantaged.” It’s odd, but when I look back on it now, they probably thought I was “adopted," not aware of the fact that my white “mom” was in fact my real mother. Maybe some people who didn’t know the “family” thought my caregivers must be “liberals” to have what they saw was a member of a minority group being afforded the “privilege” of being raised in a proper “white” environment. Of course they were not "liberal" at all, and that helped "shape" my own political views, and helped discontinue the last thread of communication I had with the "family."

Of course I wouldn’t have known what they could possibly be talking about because where I came from wasn't mentioned save in occasional asides of regret. Sure, all I ever saw were white people (we never lived in “mixed” neighborhoods), and  although once in a fit of anger my mother called me a “nigger," it still didn’t register in my mind the real reason why a teacher felt “sorry” for me, and wanted to “help.”   

But I was beyond “help,” I just wanted to “get out,” which included running away from home when I was the ripe old age of 14. I just didn’t like to be around people anymore. I was more comfortable being by myself, never much of a talker and never seeing any point in it. I preferred going out into the woods and communing with nature, which was my “plan” for life when I ran away.

But all "good" things have to end, and the best thing my mother ever did for me (if allowing me to be born counts) was having "enough" and sending me to the U.S. Army recruitment office. I was probably like a lot of “white” people who were for the first time in close proximity to those “other” people, and at first I just saw those “other” people as just looking "different," although later I discovered they had some of the same faults as any other people I had spent my life with as a kid, except that this time I wasn’t their “dependent” and what they did was only of concern if I let it be so. 

But I still retained the “cultural values” as the people who “raised” me and I grew up around—in particular taste in music, which curiously “defines” someone’s “culture” more than any other variable, even more than religion. Musically, I was “white” with an open mind that allowed for outside inputs if they had sufficient doses of “sugar”—meaning string arrangements—to “sweeten” it enough to consume it. 

And of course I like films dating from the silent era, but like in music I have a limited tolerance for the self-serving “politics” of today’s films that don’t speak to my experience. Films like Odds Against Tomorrow just wouldn’t be made today; all of the characters have faults, some more than others, just as life itself is. People are responsible for their own decisions. Why some people think they will be “protected” by a partner with a disposition toward violence is something that they have to answer to, not for society to find excuses for.

The Army helped me understand who I was, for good or bad. Any illusions about what other people “saw” and what my “place” in society is was “shattered” once and for all when I had this conversation with a drill sergeant during a locker inspection:

“Is that how you fold your socks, you Mexican?”

“I’m not a Mexican.”

“You…Cuban?”

“I’m not Cuban.”

“You…Puerto Rican?”

“I’m not Puerto Rican.”

“You…whatever you are?”

Anything but "white." I recall once I was working at a temp job when a Hispanic female trying to get my attention started speaking Spanish to me; I could tell by her tone she was trying to get a rise out of me. A fellow worker had to intervene and tell her that I didn’t speak Spanish, just the typical English spoken by someone in a white Midwest environment.

So what was the deal with me? My mother once told me she wished she had never let me be born; if it was because I was so “unhappy” with my life or if she was, that was probably immaterial. I gathered that my mother was a nursing student, and that Dad had been drafted and sent to France (back when it was still part of NATO's military). I don't know if they were actually married at the time, but I heard her once say she wasn't a "passionate" woman anymore, implying that maybe she still was before I showed up.

There was so many stories about who my real “father” was she couldn’t decide “what” he was. I couldn’t tell what was a lie or not, and when I wrote to the Ohio Department of Department of Health to send me my original birth certificate when I was in the Army, it wasn’t much help because the information my mother provided probably wasn’t completely true; being a good Catholic back then still required some fudging if you wanted to avoid the “shame” of not following the “normal” procedures.

It could be said in hindsight that I was a terrible “disappointment” to my mother that I didn’t do more to “justify” my existence, at least in comparison to my (relatively) perfect half-siblings. Although I probably had more of my natural father in me than my mother, it probably didn’t help that I was born a “blue baby” which probably stunted some part of my development, and there certainly was some “concern” there because I was a “quiet” baby and might have some intellectual developmental issues—which later morphed into questions about why I didn’t act “normal.” 

The “problem” was that the wrong questions were being asked, and when the right ones were asked my mother didn’t like the answers--i.e. being more "nurturing." It was rather determined that I was “destined” for jail or an early grave; instead, once the Army of all places gave me a sense of what “normal” was supposed to be like, I “shocked” and disturbed my parents (who had moved from Wisconsin to Knoxville) by having lost all my fear (hell, I had been promoted to sergeant after all), and just did whatever the hell I wanted to do without asking,  and then earned a college degree (much good it did me) and after that managing to stay out of jail, living a typical working class life long enough to see retirement age, and maybe have the time to put that film collection to better use.

Still, the more things "change," the more they stay the same. Using force to turn me into an “assimilated” white person could only be limited to the “culture” I was exposed to from an early age, but what couldn’t be changed was what people saw on the outside and what the stereotypical and prejudicial views they had about it. I can’t even act “normal” in today’s political environment without some people seeing it as “suspicious.” 

Just look at what’s going on at the Democratic National Convention; in regard to Hispanic immigration, what you hear there is almost as despicable as what you heard at the Republican convention: deport “economic” immigrants and curtail asylum, which is in line with “public sentiment” and both completely hypocritical; as I have discussed before, U.S.-deported violence made more “efficient” by the Bill Clinton-signed 1996 immigration “reform” law, and support for the “business” of drug cartels is the cause for feeling it unsafe to work—let alone live—in migrants' own countries.

And who are the Latinos who have been allowed to speak at the DNC? “Moderates” who are parroting the “official” line that they represent an unwanted group, and a voting rights activist who is essentially telling Latino voters that the Democrats are the lesser of two evils. I mean, I don't see any "percentage" in "assimilating" with animated objects who try to pass themselves off as human beings, like whatever this was at a typical Trump rally: