"Welcome to the (food) desert of the real"

It’s official: my wife, Jen, and I don’t like to travel (although it goes without saying that we love seeing the ones we love so much that we travel to see them). Ours is not an aversion born of social conscious, like e.g. the folks I’ve heard tale of who will never again leave Oregon in the hopes of I’m not sure exactly what, but which almost certainly involves undoing the legacy of the Enlightenment while simultaneously forestalling climate change (whereas if I threatened to never again leave Baltimore I’d likely be deported to Canada, spiritual home of all threats related to one’s putative location). No, ours is a red blooded American antipathy grounded in the fact that everything we want and need is right here at home, i.e. this is where we’re comfortable. (Note the obvious irony in the fact that the initials for the old Soviet Union, U.S.S.R, when spelled in Russian letters, C.C.C.P., align precisely with what the initials U.S.A. stand for in 2014: Comfort, Convenience, Cat videos, and Pizza.)

So it was on a recent trip to North Carolina that, save for the fact that one can travel back and forth between Chapel Hill and Durham from La Quinta Inn on Rt. 15/501 without making a single left or right turn, I might as well have been in Rangoon. (GPS was invented for me, as my fear of getting lost is such that e.g. when travelling I typically like to give myself a four hour cushion when trying to find the airport, which makes my lack of any 21st century navigation devices either masochistic or evocative of Joseph Campbell’s observation that “the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”) And save for the Kroger grocery store, located just one straight shootin’ mile from La Quinta on 15/501. Dazed by the combined effects of spending 6 hours in the car with my three children, the younger two of whom spend the full 6 hours combining the hijinks of Moe poking Curly in the eyes with weeping and gnashing of teeth, and passing the night in La Quinta Inn with our dog Sy, which felt strangely like sneaking into the girls’ dorm at boarding school (or at least what I imagine that feels like, given that the closest I ever got to the girls’ dorm at St. Andrew’s came during my visits to Ms. Blenkensop’s dorm-abutting apartment for help with my pre-calculus), entering through the Kroger’s automatic doors felt as comforting as checking to see whether I turned the oven off before leaving out of my house.

There is something about grocery stores. I submit that that something is the pinnacle of western civilization. In many ways the secular west is just a grocery store chain with a slogan: “Man cannot live by bread alone, but it’s a damn good start.” The secular west is also in many ways just an army, and armies, as we all know, march on their stomachs. And one cannot walk into a grocery store without feeling, even if just a little bit, that the world is at your fingertips, which feeling is, of course, the whole point of the secular west. The world is your oyster, at $19.99 a pound. And though I was far from home, the Kroger warped space and time with the very same assortment of Little Debbie products available to me in Baltimore, especially the Oatmeal Creme Pies and Star Crunch (which tellingly, like money, is a noun that can’t be made plural). Like Foucault declaring “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” the Kroger assured me that, appearances notwithstanding, “Ceci n’est pas North Carolina.”

But if we are to assert that grocery stores are the pinnacle of western civilization, remapping its coordinates by the logic to be found in “home is where the food is,” then we must go one step further and confront the mystification rendered by that elusive adjective, western. Go west, young man. To which we may reply, like the legendary Bostonian blue blood asked where she would most like to go in all the world, “But darling, I’m already here.” Unless, after the fashion of Gertrude Stein’s “There is no there there,” there is no west here.

Case in point is Baltimore City, where you will find tens of thousands of civilized folks enduring sans (western) civilization, where “there’s no place like home” has given way to “there’s no place near home with any food,” a reality that has entered the popular imagination under the moniker of food deserts: “populated areas with little or no food retail provision… where people experience physical and economic barriers to accessing healthy foods.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert) This straightforward, intuitive definition can be found on Wikipedia, where, a few paragraphs later we learn that:

• “Remaining food retailers in inner-cities are gas stations, convenience stores, tobacco stores, drugstores, and liquor stores. A diet based on foods from these locations consists primarily of processed foods high in calories, sugars, salt, fat, and artificial ingredients.” (ibid)

• “Fringe food retailers in food deserts can have a 30-60% markup on prices, provide a limited selection of products and a dominant marketing of processed foods.” (ibid)

• “Areas with a majority of convenience stores have a higher prevalence of overweight and obese individuals, compared to areas with only supermarkets.” (ibid)

• “The availability of supermarkets in African American neighborhoods is 52% of their prevalence in white neighborhoods.” (ibid)

I.e. in food deserts you pay more for toxic foods that will make you obese and give you diabetes and heart disease, all because you happen to be Black. Or, as we say in western civilization, “Prevalence of food deserts in poorer neighborhoods is driven by lack of consumer demand, as the poor have less money to spend on healthful, nutritious food. From an economic standpoint, low demand does not justify supply.” (ibid) The logic in that statement, which is the logic of western civilization, boggles the mind: “Low demand does not justify supply” is just to say “You can’t be hungry unless you have money.”

Because you can’t be hungry unless you have money, Wikipedia goes on to suggest that “adding neighborhood supermarkets may have little benefit to diet quality across the income spectrum,” which is a fancy way of saying that food is not the solution to hunger, and that “the study of food deserts requires further research, including longitudinal studies of food environments, to support associations with obesity and to support neighborhood interventions,” which is a fancy way of saying “Let them eat (Hostess) cake.”

Note that “We now know that agriculture first evolved in the world’s harsh, hot, arid deserts, then spread to more temperate climes – not the other way around, as one might expect. All civilizations first took root in the deserts of the world.” (http://www.desertusa.com/ind1/du_peo_ancient.html) I take this to mean that as western civilization fast approaches its zero hour, (“zero hour- noun- the time at which a planned operation, typically a military one, is set to begin”; at this point is there any other possible ending?), we may find the roots of a new way of life in a most unexpected place, where we too might learn to endure in the desert of the real, where the demands of hunger are universal and, necessarily, graciously, so is the food.

Buckle Up, Indeed

Hilton Als’ remarkable genre blending and bending work, White Girls, in which memoir, essay, and fiction seem more like different musical instruments than different forms, includes a discussion of Richard Pryor, by way of a fictionalized first person account from Pryor’s sister, which asserts the following: “Everyone looks for someone to tell them what to do.”

Three pages later, looping back to the kernel of a thought much like Pryor returning to a joke from the first half of his set, Als’ (not Richard) Pryor expands:

“In actual fact, no one can handle vast quantities of power or fame. Richard couldn’t. It nearly burned him alive. He was always looking for something bigger than himself to tell him what to do. We all are. Being an actress is one of the few jobs on earth that tells the truth about this need that exists in humans- to be told what to do.”

If one followed the scientific polling practices of The Family Feud and surveyed 100 people as to what everyone is looking for, it is doubtful that you would get the two necessary responses out of the hundred in order for “Someone to tell them what to do” to appear on the Feud’s board. The number one answer, of course, would be love. Money might be the number two answer, but it would be a far distant second. Just turn on the radio. There is the occasional song about money, one thinks of classics such as Madonna’s “Material Girl”, Liza Manelli singing “Money Makes the World Go Around” in Cabaret, or Snoop Dogg’s refrain- “With my mind on my money and my money on my mind,” but at least ninety percent of popular music is devoted to love and its various leitmotifs: not having it, having it and then losing it, waiting for it, looking for it, looking for it in all the wrong places, etc. The Beatles go so far as to say that “Love is all you need,” which would limit the Feud’s board to two answers (not needing money in no way prevents one from looking for it; no one looks harder for more of it than those who already have an excess of it), leaving no space at all for “Someone to tell them what to do.”

Unless, that is, the need for love and the need for someone to tell you what to do are one and the same. Consider “God is love,” the definition of that final authority, God, which meets the following two criteria: 1) It is announced in scripture (see 1 John 4:8) and it would be the number one answer if the definition of God were queried on The Family Feud, i.e. it has both de jure (legal/scriptural) and de facto (popular) status. “God is love” would outdistance the second most popular definition of God by at least as much as love outdistanced money above. That second most popular definition, “God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent,” is simply, at the last, too fraught for a world with this much suffering. We just can’t bring ourselves to believe in an omnipotent, all powerful God who allows (dare we say, causes) this much suffering, but we just barely can believe in a God of infinite love who never stops loving us even as we suffer (and, we must add, even as we turn our back on that love). Our ability to believe in the latter begins to make sense if we flesh out the definition of love (and thereby God, and thereby authority) with an observation from Marie Luise Knott in her book Unlearning with Hannah Arendt that is equal parts accurate, tragic, and hopeful. To “God is love,” then, we add Knott’s “And although it (love) may fail, it is inexhaustible.” Inexhaustible. Those five syllables contain countless worlds in which to wander through and wonder at this fallible God, in which, to quote John D. Caputo, “religion is risky business, no guarantees.” (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/09/deconstructing-god/?emc=eta1)

To be clear, I am suggesting that “God is love” be read like a mathematical equation such that Authority=Love and Love=Authority, and that when looking for someone (or something) to love, one is always at the very same time looking for someone (or something) to tell you what to do. Many men meet these twin needs by getting married. Unfortunately for the women, after telling their husbands what to do their own needs for love and authority remain unmet, which helps to explain why 61% of American churchgoers are women. (http://www.christiancentury.org/article/2011-10/why-do-men-stay-away) But the decline of religious beliefs and practices in an increasingly secular age, paired with an American divorce rate that hovers around 50%, has rendered the social institutions of religion and marriage insufficient to meet a need that is as insistent as hunger.

All of which helps explain the road signs in Maryland which, in a sublime formulation of love and authority, say “Buckle Up: We care…and it’s our law.” Because in the absence of God and/or our wives, when we look for something to love us and tell us what to do we increasingly turn to the State. In particular, the secular left has in many ways simply substituted the State for God, e.g. only a left-leaning news outlet could sub-title an article thusly: “I hated government—even as it was the only thing trying to save me. Here’s how, one day, I finally saw the light.” (HTTP://WWW.SALON.COM/2014/07/16/I_WAS_POOR_BUT_A_GOP_DIE_HARD_HOW_I_FINALLY_LEFT_THE_POLITICS_OF_SHAME/)

As we move towards taking “Buckle Up: We care…and it’s our law” to its logical conclusion, we would be wise to recall that in recent history when a modern State has been absolutely identified with God, ironically evidenced by an explicit and official atheism, totalitarianism has never been far behind. This is not to give the religious right and its own logical conclusion of theocracy a free pass; recent history is every bit as emphatic about States that are absolutely identified with God by way of an explicit and official theism.

When we go looking for something to love us and tell us what to do and it seems like we have found a branch in the road between empty secularism and corrupt fundamentalism, we are really just walking in (the same) circles.

If we are ever to meet our need for love and authority in a way that isn’t pathological, i.e. in a way that insists on some degree of autonomy (as when my Dad used to always tell me I was not allowed to move back in after college in order, at least in part, to prevent himself from engineering precisely such a move back in), we must be at the same time radically secular and deeply religious. The failure of contemporary (left secular) multiculturalism originates in its insistence that no one choose a side, leading to what Slavoj Zizek describes in God is in Pain as “the paradox of the tolerant multiculturalist universe of the multitude of lifestyles and other identities: the more it is tolerant, the more it is oppressively homogeneous.”

The future will be radically secular when everyone chooses a side, i.e. when everyone is deeply religious. If, that is, there are enough different religions to make the world safe for religion. (The old line “Ask two Jews, get three opinions” hints at the notion that it is only within an unaccountable, miraculous excess of religions that we are ever safe and secure in the one that we choose, even when the excess and the choosing occurs within one religion.) An authentic multiculturalism, which is the only possible contemporary secularism, requires the deeply committed adherents of multiple faiths to act as checks and balances on one another. It requires these multiple faiths to have clear boundaries even as they are equally clear allies. Allies whose collective action, informed by each faith’s naked self interest, never allows any single group to make the otherwise inevitable thrust towards theocracy. In this future, all faiths will love their enemies, if only because the enemy of their enemy is their friend. Now, if you will excuse me, I’ve got to go ask my lovely wife what she needs me to do.

Pick a Side

On walks around the neighborhood I have recently taken to saving the lives of still-squirming worms stranded on the sidewalk. The proximity of worms to sidewalks and driveways is a great reminder that we live life “in the foothills of death,” a brilliant turn of phrase from philosopher Mark Johnston. Worms have been dealt a rotten hand; to put things in perspective just imagine if mice spent their entire lives adjacent to a gigantic glue trap that expanded towards them in the rain. So far I have rescued at least three worms.

But I still swat mosquitoes with the lethal accuracy and superhuman speed of Stephen King’s gunslinger Roland Deschain, and I don’t think twice about drowning the scores of ants who, forming a division of the army invading my kitchen, have pushed the western front forward into my dishwasher. My approach to the pesty members of the lower animal kingdom who encroach upon my person or my real estate, perhaps best embodied by my practice of using the aforementioned glue traps to catch mice whom I immediately euthanize, is one of certain speedy death with a minimum of suffering. So, it seems, for the worms I wear the mask of Vishnu the maintainer, and for the ants et.al. I portray Shiva the destroyer, all of which reveals my basic philosophy to be “I bidthe old joke goes, Catholic Lite (as in Miller Lite), then I am also Diet Thich Nhat Hahn, i.e. Peace is (not quite) every step.

If a philosophy is to be considered truly basic, however, it should be universal. When gaps open up it means you still don’t know why you do what you do, which is ultimately to be in the same position as the worms, ants, mosquitoes, and mice. Which is why I found it so unsettling to encounter a bug squirming in a spider web on my porch the other day. “I bid you peace on two conditions…” was, in this case, about as useful as “When lost, never ask directions from strangers; get your wife to do it, or failing that, panic” which, while also basic to my approach to life, wouldn’t have filled in the gap left by the bug squirming in silk. If I bid peace to the bug, by freeing it, I starve the spider. And if I bid peace to the spider, I kill the bug. (And, to state the obvious, neither the bug nor the spider gave a rat’s ass about me or my house, meaning that “I bid you peace…” wasn’t nullified by its qualifiers, just merely meaningless.)

I once had an acquaintance whose basic life philosophy was “When in doubt, do nothing.” It was on the back of this philosophy that he gave his heart to a woman with whom he technically did nothing. “When in doubt, do nothing,” is both convenient (my married acquaintance had a “best friend,” not an emotional affair) and, as a means to choosing while pretending not to, bad faith par excellence. Just so, after I left the bug to die I rationalized that since I hadn’t known what to do I had simply chosen to let nature take its course. In pretending not to have chosen the spider over the bug I was simultaneously lying and suspending disbelief, which is known in the vernacular as believing your own bullshit. Believing your own bullshit will likely get you through the day, but it will just as reliably maintain your soul vibration at a low enough frequency such that you keep managing to piss off your wife.

Determined to stay married ‘til death do us part because a) my wife Jen is a badass sexy mensch who is the best thing that ever happened to me and whom I love with an OCD reckless abandon that involves a lot of checking (imagine the staccato rhythm of the Verizon guy’s “Can you hear me now?”, but substitute “Do you love me now?”) , and b) because I would never grant my enemies the schaudenfreude of my divorce, I have just recently, for the first time in my life, decided to begin aiming my bullshit detector at myself in a concerted effort to address what my shaman, who seems to have momentarily forgotten that flattery will get her everywhere, likes to call “my arrogance.” In fact, I used my bullshit detector in this novel fashion for perhaps the very first time when I caught myself pretending to let nature take its course with the spider and bug, leading, inevitably, to thoughts that I might just be a natural at this self-BS-detection thing (i.e. to more BS). But, as they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

The unvarnished truth is that I chose the spider. If its captive had been, say, a ladybug or a lightning bug, I would have chosen differently. But this was an average bug, in no way special or glamorous, completely lacking e.g. the erotic danger of the praying mantis, the mystical overtones of the butterfly, or even the grotesquerie of the cockroach. It was only too easy to imagine the generic bug in the web as the equivalent of a pale orange tomato pressed between cellophane and light green Styrofoam.

It is likely that my “I bid you peace on two conditions…” is as self-delusional as “When in doubt, do nothing.” Where the latter denies the inevitability of choosing, the former, as in the case of the bug and the spider, denies the inevitability of choosing sides. Note that Jesus said “Love your enemies,” not “Don’t have enemies.”

And re: my choice of the spider over the bug because the bug basically looked like someone who might be sitting next to you on the bus, there’s clearly still plenty of grist for my shaman’s mill in our next session.

Plus, my math was all wrong. Since when is missing lunch the equivalent of becoming lunch? That’s some bullshit.

Between You, Me, and the Lamppost

In 2004, just as he was launching a spectacularly lucrative NBA career, albeit one bereft of even a sniff of championship hardware, Baltimore native Carmelo Anthony got caught up in something of an imbroglio after appearing in the infamous Stop Snitchin’ “homemade DVD.” (One should note that “homemade DVD” is the terminology proffered by Wikipedia, presumably because the makers of the homemade DVD came off as poor and Black, which meant that they were categorically incapable of producing a documentary, documentaries being the purview of those who sympathize with being poor and Black; whatever one thinks of the message contained in Stop Snitchin’, which message we will get to in just a moment, stripping it of its medium is but one more example of how we allow Black males to talk without really granting them freedom of speech. Witness LeBron James, who entered the NBA the same year as Anthony, and who will never be forgiven for an appearance on a talk show, “The Decision,” that was, at worst, tacky.)

It would be easy to sit in judgment of Anthony and Rodney Thomas, Stop Snitchin’s creator, given the film’s ethos of violent vigilante justice, an ethos perhaps best captured by its corresponding slogan: “Snitches get stitches.” Except it is better captured by the actualization of the violence contained in those words:

“National examples of violence due to ‘snitching’ include Angela Dawson of Baltimore, who was killed along with her five children and husband on October 16, 2002, when their house was firebombed after she alerted police to illegal activities in her neighborhood. Another example is Terry Neely of Phoenix, Arizona, a 46-year-old man confined to a motorized wheelchair, who was tortured for days and then killed by Angela Simpson in August 2009. A third example is Michael Brewer of Deerfield Beach, Florida, a 15-year-old who, in October 2009, was doused in rubbing alcohol and set on fire after assailants yelled, ‘He's a snitch, he's a snitch.’” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_Snitchin')

Easy to sit in judgment, that is, until one gets a sense of exactly how Stop Snitchin’s Pandora’s Box was first pried open. The history is laid out, point by point, in Tom Farrey’s excellent article for ESPN.com, and it is a story that begins, coincidentally, with another local basketball player. Farrey pieces together a narrative beginning with the fatal cocaine overdose of Maryland basketball star Len Bias shortly after he was drafted by the Boston Celtics, a tragedy harnessed by Boston’s man in the US Congress, “Tip” O’Neill:

“As his constituents raged over the death of Bias, O'Neill sensed a political opportunity to make the Democrats look tough on drugs, according to Eric Sterling, a former counsel to the House judiciary committee, who explained the legislative machinations in a PBS Frontline report. Mandatory minimum sentences were introduced, stripping judges of the ability to consider mitigating circumstances. Getting caught with five grams of crack (25 doses), for instance, meant five years behind bars, and that was that.” (http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/columns/story?id=2296590)

Unless, as Farrey goes on to explain, you “become a confidential informant. A snitch.” (ibid) The upshot of all of this was a) numberless Black men either incarcerated or otherwise bound up in the justice system, and b) a sub-population of Black men turned against their neighbors and neighborhoods in a desperate attempt to avoid hard time. Farrey’s article draws on the work of former Baltimore public defender turned law professor Alexandra Napatoff to summarize the end results thusly:

“The policy has helped fill up penitentiaries, while inducing a state of paranoia in high-crime neighborhoods that she (Napatoff) likens to the former East Germany under the secret police. On street corners and at family barbecues, anyone's a potential rat.”

Stop snitchin’, indeed. Except, of course, snitches get stitches. One seems caught between the rock and the hard place of either condoning state terrorism (i.e. the “war on drugs”) or vigilante terrorism (see the firebombing of Angela Dawson and her family).

It is all troubling enough to make the rush to judgment even more urgent, judgment establishing distance. If the violence, which is first institutional and then reactionary and then both all at once on every side, is endemic to the poor and the state that police’s them, then it isn’t my violence. It is precisely this logic that enables one to know that there are two to three hundred annual murders in Baltimore without thinking they actually happen. I am reminded of the time my old next door neighbor explained to me that “We don’t turn around in other people’s driveways in this neighborhood,” which, of course, is not the kind of thing one says in a neighborhood where people actually don’t turn around in one another’s driveways. (I was mature enough to 1) only think, and not say, “But I just did,” and 2) never turn around in her driveway again, maintaining a relationship that would ultimately prove to be of great comfort when my other next door neighbor repeatedly leaf-blowered his leaves into a pile in front of my house.)

The distance established by believing “Snitches don’t get stitches in this neighborhood” also reminds me of the stickers you used to see in driver side mirrors: “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” The comforting distance is pure illusion, and not just because the violence can erupt at any time and any place. (In my twenty years in Baltimore, most of which have been spent indoors, I have been robbed at gun point in a fast food drive thru lane in addition to walking from my car to my then-apartment only to see someone pull out a gun and start shooting, thankfully not at me, a block away.) The illusion is that Stop Snitchin’ is an ethos circumscribed by class and race, when, in fact, it is a national mythos that informs every station of society, from the very top to the very bottom, and everywhere in between.

To understand how “Snitches get stitches” operates outside of the environs with which it is explicitly associated, one must both recall that a) the pen is mightier than the sword, and b) there is more than one way to skin a cat. Combining them reminds us that there is more than one way to make a snitch bleed, most of them having to do with words. To wit, Edward Snowden. Whatever one makes of Snowden’s epoch making decision, it has resulted in at least two indelible outcomes. Before Snowden, everyone knew we lived in a surveillance state, we all just figured they were watching e.g. the vaguely ethnic guy who lives on the corner who smokes and never cuts his grass; now we all know they are watching each of us. Secondly, Snowden has left this plane, emerging as the Platonic form of 21st century American snitch the moment Secretary of State John Kerry branded him a “coward” and a “traitor,” (who knew the Platonic realm was in Russia?), making each of us Snowden’s flawed copy. “Each of us” because they are reading everyone’s email, i.e. we are all potential snitches, and “flawed” because, based on our collective non-reaction, we consider the NSA’s clinical filtering of our personal data on par with a “friend’s” perusal of our Facebook page.

Although it should be said that our collective non-reaction also functions to establish distance. If I say out loud to my kith and kin that I have nothing to hide and that if the NSA wants to waste its time reading my boring emails they are welcome to have at it, then I’ve used magical thinking to once again establish the illusion of comforting distance. It is the belief that by simply saying “Snitches don’t get snitches in this neighborhood,” one can prevent the NSA from ever showing up on one’s doorstep. All of which functions to repress the intolerable thought that they wouldn’t be reading one’s email if one weren’t already a suspect and, prima facie, a snitch.

But even if we grant that it is possible to keep one’s thoughts, words, and deeds pure enough not to raise any of the NSA’s red flags, perhaps by keeping every last online transaction linked in some way, shape, or form to one’s fantasy football team, one still has to make a living. Which, per a report last week in The Washington Post, increasingly involves “tak(ing) an unusual oath.” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/workplace-secrecy-agreements-appear-to-violate-federal-whistleblower-laws/2014/06/29/d22c8f02-f7ba-11e3-8aa9-dad2ec039789_story.html) These oaths are “nondisclosure agreements” which, e.g., prevent “contract employees at the Hanford plutonium processing plant in Washington state… from reporting wrongdoing at the nation’s most contaminated nuclear facility without getting approval from an agency supervisor.” (ibid)

And, it goes without saying, workplace snitches get stitches, too:

“Donna Busche reluctantly signed the agreement. ‘It was a gag order,’ said Busche, 51, who served as the manager of environmental and nuclear safety at the Hanford waste treatment facility for a federal contractor until she was fired in February after raising safety concerns. ‘The message was pretty clear: “Don’t say anything to anyone, or else.”’ ” (ibid)

In a strange echo of Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook,” it is as if every employee is being required to declare “I am not a snitch,” precisely because, like Nixon, it is already an established fact that you actually are.

In the Salem Witch Trials, suspected witches had their hands and ankles tied together before being lowered into a lake. If they survived and floated to the surface it proved that they were witches, which meant that they were then put to death. If they sunk to the bottom and drowned, it proved that they weren’t witches after all. Just so, if there is one thing we can say about the Stop Snitchin’ world we find ourselves thrown into, it is this: All of us are gagged, and we all get stitches anyway.

The violence will end when there is nothing left to hide or when there is no one left to hide it. Which means the only path forward is truth and reconciliation, even, and especially, when the truth is irreconcilable; the only available future is an impossible one, which is a marginally better deal than the Salem witches got. I suggest we accept the offer, and, taking our cue from the old Master Card slogan, master the impossibilities.