Fountain of Sorrow

“You ain’t no kind of man if you ain’t got work.”

-        Borrowed (and slightly adjusted) from “O Brother Where Art Thou”

I’m sitting here, as I usually do, at my home office as we’re told to hold our breath until June over a pandemic. While sitting at a home office would normally imply there’s work to be done, it’s really more about just having the desk and the space in the house. 

The fact is, I have no work, which produces the common side-effect of having no income.  The money part isn’t as big of an issue as I would have assumed before all this came about. Yet. It’s really more about the way the brain works and how it needs to be engaged and central to a common cause. But that’s not happening now unless trying to get the right amount of alcohol content into homemade hand sanitizer is a covered problem-solving exercise.

Not all of what I just wrote is actually true. In part, we’re all locked in our homes due to the Wu-Tang Clan Virus, so millions of people have gone from enjoying a few days away from the job to climbing the walls. It’s also true that there are things I could be doing that masquerade as work. For example, I could always work on my novel; a project that has now fallen into the fiction category of it being a total fiction that I will ever finish it in my lifetime. Also, and maybe crucially, N has desperately tried to get my help in forwarding the goals of her foundation, but I’ve been stuck in the mud due to brain atrophy from too many months of little-to-no work. In fact, this post I’m writing is actually a diversion to see if I can string together a few coherent lines that can slop over into the work that has been left in partial sentences and even less partial imagination.

How I got here is less a mystery to me than any of my former readers. It first came to me in slow motion and then, one day, it occurred to me I was fired by the owner of my own company, which happened to be me. It was a clever move to rid the company of the approximate reason for its demise, and I’m pretty sure I’m angry at my boss and he at me that it all came to this unfortunate parting of ways. The fact that we are one in the same person is merely shrewd obfuscation meant to throw the reader off track. What we know now is, the company stank and I’m its stinkee. 

But then the problem of firing oneself is that there is so much less to do; so many hours that used to be devoted to simple joys such as success and signing paychecks – most notedly mine! I don’t miss the business, but I miss being busy.  I also miss the social interaction that comes from running a company. There’s no question you need a shared brain and a hive mentality to make a business buzz.  You pick up the smallest and the largest ideas from everyone involved and it goes into a collective alter ego that is a company and everything just runs better. All that brain matter mixing together to oil the engines of a smooth-running business is what drove nearly 40 years of unparalleled success. 

Some of the core producers of those ideas took their thinking elsewhere (and good on them that they learned the basics with me and were welcomed elsewhere), some of the key people jumped off my company’s stepping stone into careers and opportunities that better suit their intellects, very important others, sadly, passed away with no ability to ever be replaced, and a few sat with me in the captain’s quarters singing Nearer My God To Thee and faithfully went down with the ship. To the last group, I feel the most derelict in my duty as owner and fiduciary. They trusted me; trusted I would avoid the iceberg yet again. I couldn’t do that forever and, for once, there were too many of those frosty islands to chart a path around and it happened so fast I can’t even remember if the band played on.

Jackson always sang “while the future's there for anyone to change,” he also added “still you know, it seems, it would be easier sometimes to change the past.” I want so much to change the past. Maybe I would have appreciated what I had a bit more if I can ever prove up the most elusive proof of knowing then what I know now. I like to think I’m smart enough to have done things differently. Why is it, then, that I don’t have the same faith in my own ability to create the next chapter of life with the wisdom learned from the earlier chapters? 

Learning something new. That should be the goal. As well, we should remember our past as more zeitgeist than something we take into the next phase. No era is the same and we have to adjust to what’s happening around us. What we’ve learned, we’ve already learned, and nothing can change that. Thinking forward leaves so much left to take in and maybe this time, we learn what we’re meant to learn and, significantly, why.

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Death of a Friend

I’m told I write about death too much; whether it’s been about Bill, my parents, my grandmother or Nick and Julie.  A quick perusal of this blog can offer ample proof of those claims.  

In writing about death, though, it helps me connect more directly with how I felt and continue to feel about whoever I’m writing about.  I don’t expect life to always tickle and so it is the same in writing about the people who’ve passed.  Conjuring memories that are often bittersweet or cruelly sad, in the end, can bring a smile to my face when I think about the joy they brought to the world.

Last week was the third anniversary of Nick’s death.  His passing was one of a soul-emptying experience, and not just because he was too young and too funny and too perfectly obnoxious.  He was life-changing to everyone he touched, and it’s difficult to get around the idea that there are hundreds of lives who will not be positively transformed because they will never meet him.  It’s not hyperbole to suggest he had that kind of affect on people. He could smell uncertainty or concern or anguish in anyone around him and it would set him on a mission to turn that person’s life around.

Another reminder of the loss of a gentle soul came from a social media calendar letting me know there’s an upcoming birthday for Sessie.  Why I hang on as “friends” to people who no longer need a social media account is probably a useful session for a therapist, but I have maybe a dozen of them.  Sessie was born to have a short flame.  She carried a rare neurological disorder from birth and she pretty much lived to the age that was predicted for her.  I don’t know all the intricate details of her case but, from my vantage point, she died from an aggressive sarcoma that resulted in the removal of her leg with the promise that would end the growth.  It didn’t.  She passed about two months later, and I can’t help but think Western medicine wasn’t at all helpful to her in the end, especially when she survived most of her life under the practices of Eastern medicine.  

Bill and Sessie were shocks and Nick and Julie allowed us to see them suffer and perhaps suffer far too much.  

These days I’ve been thinking about some words Paul Simon wrote 50 years ago, “I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why.”  I’m feeling that way, but I do know why as I suspect Simon knew back then as well.  He had just returned from England to find fame in America, leaving his love Kathy behind.  

For me, and this is the buried lede of all buried ledes, I’ve had another death in my family.  For 39 years, I was involved in a Stockholm-Syndrome relationship with my business.  Despite attempts to extricate myself from this relationship, I acted the part of the battered spouse and came up with credible reasons why I should stay in the relationship – for the kids, for the relatives, for financial security.

I never set out to make a career of the business, it was just a short-term way to make a little extra money.  It wasn’t built to last 39 years, not by a long shot.  But its rickety body survived past a marriage, some friends, numerous partners and other hangers on, dozens of name changes, and a huge, and often wonderful, cast of characters.  It was housed in so many offices that a tour around more than one city devolved into me pointing and saying, “I had an office in that building once.”  

Whether by choice, neglect or a sign from the Cosmos that the time had come, my business has passed away. It hasn’t been buried yet and, as one may expect, there is a bit of odor coming from being stuck without a beating heart in suspended animation.  But the grave has been dug, the casket purchased and we’re awaiting the mourners to dress in black and say something good and hopeful about the deceased. Like so many other deaths I watched it suffer for a long time, although it’s still a bit of a shock that the flame burned out nonetheless.  Some think the company is still alive and will live on forever and others thought it died long ago.  That probably says something about the company and its uneven leadership performed by none other than me.  

I remember one of my first campaigns.  I was up for the final 48 hours of the drive and was doing my best to pretend I knew what I was doing in our rented house.  I was delirious but pumped up that the campaign was ending, too.  I thought to myself that maybe it was a good idea to sleep for a half an hour so I could finish out the final night.  I found a secluded closet that turned out to be so secluded that nobody could find me for four hours.  It turned out to be a good nap and one that allowed me to rely on others to get the work done, something I always felt awkward doing.  

When the morning came around and we knew that we had succeeded, I remember driving to watch the Boy and the Girl at a swim lesson, which was the first normal life thing I had done in a while.  That particular day looked different to me.  Somehow the sun was warmer and the sky bluer and the idea that I was free of the burden of that campaign made me feel I was in the pocket of a slingshot waiting to be fired into unchartered waters.  And so it is today.  I’m in that pocket and pondering how far I’ll fly into the distance and into new beginnings and new adventures.  If I look with the right kind of eyes, I can see a bright professional future, one that I haven’t seen in a very, very long time.

Editor’s note:  This post was started several months ago, and I just got around to finishing it.  In case you wondered….

If A Leak Never Happens

There’s been a lot of news regarding supposed Russian involvement in our electoral process.  So far the press has covered it like a sporting event:  Trump leads by one, Clinton slashes back and picks up two runs by saying Trump’s in bed with the dreaded and re-set Russians.  The press and pundits seem to be taking bets on when the next release of emails will occur and how it will impact the presidential race.  Will it be an “October Surprise,” or will something juicy come out sooner? What the press hasn’t given much thought to is, what happens if there is no release of new and embarrassing information?  There’s a reason they may want to spend more time pondering about this.

By now, all reasonable people know Clinton’s bathroom server was hacked.  It’s almost comical to believe the Russians were interested in the correspondence between political hacks at the DNC, the DCCC or the Clinton campaign, but had no interest in learning our foreign policy secrets by hacking into the less-protected clintonmail.com server.  If you believe the Russians were involved in the DNC hack – and it’s amazing to me the Democrat spin doctors are trying to use this fact as a plus for them – then you have to assume the Russians got the goodies on Hillary’s server.  It would have seemed like a better move for her allies to say some random guy in his basement sitting in his underwear was the culprit than to push the story that the new Cold Warriors of Russia did the dirty deed since it reminds the world how vulnerable Hillary left our state secrets while acting as our chief diplomat.  But I’ll leave this up to the brighter minds of the Clinton campaign.

It would be fortunate for candidate Clinton if no more secrets came out.  However, it would be most unfortunate for the country if nothing else hits the wires and we end up with a President Clinton.  The reason is quite simply blackmail, and it wouldn’t be the first time a President Clinton faced this with the Russians.

I have a thread entitled “me in the middle of things” and I happened to be in the middle of Russian blackmail with the first candidate Clinton in 1992.  Some of this may be news to you, but I had a “friend” who looked after me while I was attempting to raise the GDP of Russia and bankrupt myself.  It was nothing Bond-like, but my friend was an FBI counter-intelligence agent that I’ll simply refer to as Raul.  Raul was interested in who was interested in me, and by me simply showing him business cards I collected, I was able to get a better idea about who I should stay away from.  Raul would sift through my business cards whenever I returned from Russia and if there was a name on the card that could be a threat, he would tell me they gave him “heartburn.”  While there were several people who gave him heartburn, there were two who constantly swirled around my brother and me that I will refer to as Boris and Vlad.  I should also point out I had heartburn whenever I was around them, too.

Boris and Vlad were very friendly to us and loved to ask a lot of questions about what we did in the U.S. and how our systems worked; particularly how our political and defense systems operated.  They had pulled up an article in the LA Times that was about my weird little niche in politics.  In the article, it noted I was working with the George Bush re-elect campaign by registering voters and doing GOTV activities.  This meant to Boris and Vlad that I was best friends with George Bush.  This made Boris and Vlad even more interested in me and made Raul suck down a box of Tums to cure his indigestion. 

In October of 1992, my brother was eating lunch at a hotel that was known for the kind of shady happenings that were in vogue in Russia in 1992.  Boris came up to my brother’s table with a large grin and said he had something for him and that I would love it.  Boris told him he was in possession of a 16 mm video of a bearded Bill Clinton on his visit to Leningrad in 1968.  The future president was seen on the video stomping on an American flag and cursing and spitting on it.  We never saw the film so I don’t know the context, but Boris assured my brother it was a doozie and that I would be happy to present it to President Bush to shift the election back his way.

My brother called me in the U.S. over a Russian landline and tried his best to tell me what had been offered without giving away all the facts.  He failed miserably and I – along with the phone listeners – knew exactly what he was talking about.  After hanging up with my brother, I made two phone calls: one to my friend in the Bush campaign and the other to ask Raul if I could meet with him.  Raul suggested we meet the next day.  My campaign friend called me back within 20 minutes and told me the information I had went straight to the president and they, reluctantly, decided to take a pass on obtaining the video (I’ll explain the reason why further down).  A few minutes after that, I got a call from Raul inviting me to come to his office and it would be really cool if I did it immediately.

When I got to Raul’s office, I went to a conference room and it seemed the meeting had drawn a crowd of other interested parties.  In addition to others in Raul’s organization, there were two more who were there representing another agency with three letters.  They asked me to describe everything over and over again but since I only had about a three-minute cryptic call with my brother, I had very little more to tell them. I was told that they knew this video existed and that the way it was described to us was very much in keeping with what they knew about it.  They also knew that Boris would have access to this video.  I was told to tell my brother to stay away from the video as it was a KGB document and he would be arrested if he tried to take it out of the country.

After the meeting ended, I asked Raul why there was a need for the larger crowd.  The president had passed on it and we already had second thoughts on ever talking to Boris again.  I said he didn’t need to worry about us.  Raul said he wasn’t worried about us (thank you very much), he was worried about the video NOT being released.  In October it was becoming very apparent Bill Clinton would be the next president and Raul was now very worried the video would be used to extract favors out of him in exchange for the video being buried.  He was worried the Russians would play to Clinton’s larger political fears and do whatever they wanted.

After my meeting with Raul and my new friends, I called my brother back on his Russian landline and told him that whatever he planned to do, he shouldn’t take the “gift” as it would end up being very bad for him.  He laughed and said, “Too late.  Two French Reuters reporters already took it from Boris.”  I called Raul back and said there was urgent information to tell him.

Within an hour I was back in the same conference room with a smaller audience, but with a new person from their Washington, DC office who must have been lurking about during the first meeting.  When I explained the video was now in the hands of the French reporters, every person in the room slumped over in their chairs with devastated looks on their faces.  They asked me 10 or so times if I was sure this was the case and told them Boris had made this point clear.  My brother and I had known these reporters as they were frequent guests at a hotel restaurant we often visited.  We even got to know them a little bit.  It certainly wasn’t surprising these two would have had the stones to take the video out of the country (I learned later they took it to their embassy). 

Raul made me sit in the lobby for a bit and when his meeting ended, he walked me out again.  I suggested to him that it was better the French had it then the Russians.  Surely the French were friends of ours where the Russians weren’t.  Raul explained to me that the French were perhaps the most proficient users of information in the world.  What they didn’t need to spend on a large army like the U.S., they spent to create an enviable spy network.  He even said many Air France flight attendants were actually working for the DSG and looking and listening for information that could be used to help French intelligence or businesses.

A month later, Clinton was elected president.  A year or so had gone by and nothing had happened to suggest Clinton was blackmailed.  Then I read a story about the French Finance Minister being arrested for pushing huge government contracts to his girlfriend.  It was quite a sensational scandal in France (not that the married Finance Minister had a girlfriend, but that big money was changing hands).  As a footnote at the end of the news story, it mentioned the investigation included whether or not the two companies involved, Elf Oil and Alcatel, were guilty of violating U.N. sanctions for selling technology and buying oil from Iraq following the first Gulf War.  Later I read the sanctions violations were removed from the charges at the request of Russia and the U.S., two permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.  I guessed this was the quid for the pro quo to keep secret films forever secret.

So, keep an eye on what comes out of the hack.  If nothing or very little comes to light, you’ll have a pretty good idea that something bigger is kept quiet for greater use later on.  For those who think Hillary was wrongly persecuted for her lax security, this is the principal reason we have such laws on the books.  Here’s hoping the Russians would rather keep her out of the White House than prey on her moral flexibility if she was elected.

Footnote on George H. W. Bush:  I’m told the main reason Bush opted not to use the film is because he thought it would backfire.  I’m sure it’s easily slipped down the memory hole, but Bush got beat up pretty badly after it leaked that his State Department was looking at the travel destinations of key Clinton campaign leaders.  I was told it included Cuba, Nicaragua, Russia and other interesting places that should have been a negative reminder of who Bill Clinton was.  But a guy named Dennis Ross, who was Number Two at State, blew the whistle on the Bushies so he could stay Number Two in a Clinton Administration, which he did.  I thought Ross did a great job managing the end of the Soviet Union with his Russian counterpart, but I lost all respect for him when he did this.

With The Clintons, Always Follow The Money

It took the Clintons to get me back to blogging.  They are like a permanent virus and no amount of anti-fungal spray will get them to go away and be content counting their Euros, Dinars, Rupees, Rubles and Riyals.  For those under 40, you haven’t come close to seeing the perfect marriage of corruption and cover up like you’re about to see should Hillary and Bill turn the White House back into a hillbilly theme park with pay turnstiles at the doors and rides in the Lincoln Bedroom for those who can buy the complete package.

The world has done its best to keep the unindicted conspirators off the front pages.  A crazed lunatic in Nice, a faked coup in Turkey and a war on police instigated by our healer-in-chief president has meant less attention on the Clintons by the ADHD press.  Perhaps that’s unfair.  Old timers in the press certainly know it won’t take much time for the Clintons to draw attention back to themselves and they can revisit the most recent scandals again in the near future.

While the world was burning and leaders were fiddling, I was thinking about the way the Clintons work and something is not quite adding up.  We were all amazed at how brazen Bill appeared when he met with Attorney General Lynch at the zenith of her DOJ investigation of his wife’s rather elaborate efforts to evade transparency in the opaquest administration in history.

It doesn’t take much effort to acknowledge these two didn’t expect to have their private tarmac meetup made public.  It took only a little more effort to recognize this wasn’t a chance encounter between the two jetsetters.  Bill Clinton said he had been playing golf in 108-degree heat with a bad heart and that was his reason for being in the desert.  A local reporter (and only the local reporter) dispatched that lie quite quickly by calling around to all the major golf courses to see if Bill was taking his share of mulligans at their course since a former president doesn’t just show up and hope he can get a round of 18 in before the sun goes down.  Special precautions need to be made and this would leave a trail.  A trail that should have been quite easy for any reporter to track down.  So, first and foremost, Bill lied about the reason he was in Phoenix.  If the first statement is a lie, the rest of the story must be a doozie. 

As for the attorney general, the top law enforcement official in the land, the one person who sets the tone for our nation’s legal system and the person responsible for upholding the blindfolded Lady of Justice, well, she was also lying. 

Someone with fulltime FBI protection knows exactly what’s on the ground in front of them.  They certainly know if there’s a former president lurking between the Gulfstreams.  It also means her security detail was notified in advance that Bill wanted to talk about grandkids and golf as she was on her way to nationalizing our local police forces.  It gave her plenty of time to make one of two decisions:  1.  Meet the husband of the key target in a DOJ investigation and a likely witness to a larger investigation or, 2. Avoid the perp as any sensible prosecutor would do and even as she admitted later she should have done.  Any belief she was cornered into the meeting not only doesn’t make sense from a security standpoint, but she shouldn’t have needed more than 30 seconds to tell Bill to go lurk somewhere else and he wasn’t welcome on her jet (and what’s up with her having a jet?  I was on a commercial plane with Janet Reno once and all 6’2” of her was sitting in a middle seat in coach.)

So there were two lies told of how the impromptu meeting came about.  From there it doesn’t take much to reason the rest of what they said were also lies. From both of them.  What was discussed during the 30 or so minutes on the plane is up for conjecture, but the official story is beyond laughable.  However, I like to think I have a pretty good idea of the subject.

For those of you who didn’t live through the first round of the Clintons (and God bless you), you’ll need to understand there is always a far worse story behind the bad story the press reports.  They don’t mind being accused of robbing a bank if it keeps the public and law enforcement off the fact they shot the bank tellers.  So all the assumptions that have been made that Bill was just standing up for his gal have to be looked at through this prism.

There were two obvious reasons Bill wasn’t seeking information about the investigation into his wife.  One is, he doesn’t like her much other than she’s his ticket back into the White House and, two, he already knew the outcome of the investigation.

So much attention was spent on FBI Director James Comey but few stopped to understand he was just investigating a referral by the inspector general for our intelligence agencies through the Department of Justice.  It certainly didn’t come about because some gumshoe in the FBI was acting on a hunch and thought to himself, “hmmmm, I wonder why Hillary destroyed all those emails that were under subpoena from several government agencies and federal lawsuits?”  Instead it came prepackaged with the investigation parameters already established by the Department of Justice. 

By Comey repeating himself ad nauseam with the word “intent,” he wasn’t ignoring the various laws Hillary was undeniably guilty of violating.  He was signaling that the referral was only about proving intent.   In the end, the investigators asked her – not under oath, mind you – “did you intend to violate several statutes?”  She says no and the case is closed.  So no need for Bill to get on his knee and beg Lynch for mercy or offer her jobs or money to convince the “career prosecutors” there is nothing wrong with housing highly classified documents on an Atari in her bathroom.  Even if that’s all Bill wanted to convey, there were other ways to get to Lynch that didn’t require private jets playing footsie.  Bill could have even noted the signal President Obama was sending by agreeing to campaign with Hillary before the investigation was over.

So what was so important that Bill had to speak to the AG about in private?  The easy answer comes from the two things he cares most about:  money and power (well, plus young women).  And here is as good as any place to offer my apologies that you had to read this far to get to the meat of the matter.  But if you want to get dialed in on the way the next four years will go should Hillary be elected, you need to get used to reading to the bottom of things because the answers about them is never at the top.

There was a simple thing the Department of Justice did two days after the tarmac meeting and it amazes me still that no pundits have put the pieces together or understood its meaning and gravity.  The DOJ, on behalf of the Department of State, filed a motion in a Freedom ofInformation lawsuit to ask a judge to approve a 27-month delay in disclosing 34,000 emails between key Hillary staffers and the Clinton Foundation.  The reason they gave the judge in seeking a delay was because they originally thought there were just 6,000 responsive emails only to learn there were 28,000 more that came to light because they were not in State’s possession.  Guess where they were?  Yup, on Hillary’s private server.

This was for four staff members, two of whom were doing double duty working for the silly taxpayers and either the Clinton Foundation or Teneo, a PR firm founded by a Clinton pal.  This works out to 700 emails per month between them, or 35 per day.  Makes a person wonder how they found time to do their work at State, cover up for Hillary’s misdeeds and still keep the Foundation supplied with top secret information.

We don’t know what’s in those 34,000 emails and it’s pretty certain we never will if Hillary becomes president.  In 27 months, she would be more than halfway through her second year as president and one needn’t be too creative to see how those 34,000 conversations get wrapped up in executive privilege. 

With the Clintons, as it was with Nixon, one must always follow the money.  The money gets Hoovered up in the Clinton Foundation by the truckload.  With that much money, it should be pretty easy for the press and law enforcement to follow.  I sit here and wonder why they don’t.