Bill Gates Has a Sadz About His Divorce

Love the cartoon wisdom. We’re kind of the same around here and I’m not sure how intellechull my kids are lol. It’s mostly shrieking about Epstein island at the dinner table. One son started doing a great impression of the “Brawndo” girl from Idiocracy after I explained “internalized misogyny.” Or, when some other kid in his animation class wondered why rich dudes like Bezos always want more money, he proclaimed for all the class to hear, “To buy more yachts and hookers.”

He cracks up his teachers, God bless ’em. Meanwhile it’s got to be agony for FW to have to listen to the running commentary. But even if it excoriates all his failings, none of the wisecracks are directly aimed at him so he can’t cry “alienation” or say boo about it without admitting he’s a tad Trumpish, Tate-ish or Weinsteinish himself.

FW’s discomfort about socio-sexual-political stuff might amuse me now but there’s really no truth to the charge that I weaponized the kids just to get at him since he once pretended to be Mr. Woke Ally. How was I to know he was a fraud? I was genuinely confused at the start of the affair when this kind of banter from the kids and the fact I laughed and basically encouraged it seemed to be slowly driving him apeshit. Like when the kids would natter on about, say, Woody Allen or Epstein, the color would start rising from FW’s neck, the veins in his temples would bulge, he’d get all stiff and silent and his eyes would bug a bit.

If that memory didn’t come with combat flashbacks of how he’d suddenly rage and tear into me afterwards over something seemingly unrelated, that would be a completely entertaining recollection.

Our bookcases are FW kryptonite lol. As I always say, we’re the hands that rocked the cradles and made the reading lists while they were off doing… whatever.

It felt very urgent to me to introduce the kids to sociopolitical whatnot since the moment they could speak in sentences because I remember how, as a tween and adolescent, any place where my political understanding was a bit weak and rickety was exactly where confusion, anxiety, doubt and even danger could slip in. And I remember the explosive, joyful moments when I read or heard something that “disabused” me of the bullshit.

I remember exactly where I was at these moments too. Like on that student project in DC when I found a book about the importance of women’s anger on the elegant veranda coffee table of the mom of a guy I was working with. 98F, the moon on the swimming pool, the Grecian pillars, smell of magnolias, the vintage dress I was wearing and the big explosion in my head. From that moment on, I never “ate my feelings” again. I was much lighter and freer and a bit less prone to gaslighting– at least the charge of being an angry, uppity bitch. Hah, yes indeed I am!

I think that experience is a kind of non-religious “metanoia” though I suppose there’s a kind of “repentance” in realizing you’ve been misinformed or not properly prepared and sometimes by people you trusted. That’s a crossroads for a lot of people. If the original purveyors of the misinformation (parents, role models) are authoritarian types, people can end up feeling “disloyal” and risk being orphaned for correcting it and so may simply double down on the bullshit and let it guide their lives. But if families supply not only the basic framework for understanding the world but also the tools of critical thinking by which the next generation can question what elders have taught them, they may feel freer to “repent” their influences.

I was lucky in that sense since my parents made it clear I could disagree with them even if they didn’t always provide the tools to do it with. That’s why I knew how important it was to arm the kids with everything they’d need to eventually disagree with me– what Primo Levi called “political and philosophical scaffolding.” Because, as Levi noted during his time in Auschwitz, without it people have less chance of surviving. In the camps the political prisoners tended to fare better than the simpler folk, at least being less prone to die of despair because some had deeply studied political tactics and understood that the main point of the camps was to morally drag victims down to the level of their captors– get victims to betray each other.

But it’s obviously very important that that “scaffolding” be true, not bullshit. My parents did their level best but, to quote my dad, “Shakespeare didn’t have the bomb.” They were missing some key information and were fuzzy on a few things and so, even with the best of intentions, they misled me here and there and I was aware enough to observe how each bit of misinfo or fuzzy comprehension could lead to real disaster.

For instance, it was very nice of them to teach me about women’s rights and civil rights but they didn’t quite manage to break down and warn about all the twisted interpersonal and political tactics of repression and coercion and the real price of resistance. If you’re going to raise critical thinkers, you also have to arm them to survive as “rugged individualists.” They also didn’t quite understand “scientism” but instead just went on life experience and instinct and grumpily rejected bad theories in science and bad treatments in medicine because they “sounded like hogwash.” Which would be fine if they were micromanaging my life and making all decisions for me but, beyond pushing me to get As in chem and bio, didn’t really supply me with tools and principles by which to do my own analyzing and rejecting of “arguments by (corrupt) authority.”

The woman who founded the survivor network I worked for used to call this the “But it’s just a daisy!” type of stubborn folk “simplicity” which can verge on anti-intellectualism. My parents weren’t that backwards but a lot of people react with exasperation or even anger to technical classification (magnoliopsida!) even if this is important to conveying important facts (daisies survive in desserts and contain compounds that may slow bleeding). That “simple gifts” attitude can be risky in an era when, again, laws and policies are often based on scientific theory for better or worse. It meant every shitty, destructive propaganda campaign came wrapped in sciency drivel and the bullshit was coming at people like a fire hose through supposedly “liberal” media and pundits. Or it came packaged in progressive-y seeming “art.” And it always relies on dividing generations by individually targeting each with tailored crap.

At least my parents gave me a copies of Backlash (boom) and Demonic Males (boom) when they first came out but, by my teens I already had a brain-full of corrosive bullshit to detox from. All the same I think it’s completely understandable that my parents were playing catch-up since, for one, they were both still processing their own compounded trauma (dad– childhood poverty, combat experience; mom– sexism, misogyny) at a time when there weren’t many tools to do this with. Also in the period since WWII and then the civil rights era, there’s been a feverish renaissance of deconstructing social evil and analyzing propaganda by sociologists, forensic psychologists, historians, political analysts, linguists, even novelists and poets that has no precedent. Well, maybe Shakespeare already said it all in iambic pentameter but his day didn’t have data or Gloria Steinem, bell hooks, Primo Levi, Richard Wrangham, Susan Faludi, James Baldwin, Andrea Dworkin, Tzvetan Todorov, Noam Chomsky, Eric Fromm, Chump Lady, etc., etc., etc.

Thank you. I’m a proud Midvale grad haha (assuming you’re a Far Side fan).

Speaking of cleverness, you know what I think is more important? People’s impulse to guard their basic uncorrupted innocence. That part of everyone who, as a child, would bawl their eyes out over seeing a puppy get hurt or goes all agog when the Christmas lights are turned on who will run to offer another baby their mittens, etc.

Some people have these traits beaten out of them before ever leaving childhood. But one thing I’ve noticed about certain “lofty” intellectual humanitarians is that, when you observe the really ride-or-die types closely, you can almost see glimpses the inner three year old self they still carry around. Like the laugh will be real and a bit goofily childlike. Or gormless little traits or the way they light up over an idea. Chomsky, Goodall, Wrangham– I’ve seen it from time to time. My mother and uncle were like this.

I suppose it’s possible to fake such a thing but someone would have to understand it to fake some of these traits so I imagine that would be the mark of a truly diabolical sociopath.There are also sociopaths who “relate” to vulnerable creatures but only because they project onto them (Hitler loved doggies, Tony Soprano loved duckies). But mostly I’ve seen abusive types become angry or even triggered into bullying when seeing traits like this in others– like “How dare you go around flaunting the very fragile vulnerability that would get me thrashed growing up and the very thing I’ve lost!!”

Anyway, I’ve wondered if part of the reason some people deep dive into intellectual pursuits with an ethical bent is because it actually takes quite a bit of complex thinking to defend one’s own baseline simplicity (in the good sense). Being intellectual about it was just what was required, not the point. If it’s the actual point– just holding court and blah-ditty-blahing and being viewed as an authority– I’d hardly trust anything they came up with. To mean anything, they need to be saving puppies and sharing mittens.

Maybe that’s what authenticity really means– not being “true” to whatever fucked up, corrupt, basement-dwelling secret impulses one has picked up along the way but having preserved the better parts of sensitive and life-affirming infancy. It might have very little to do with IQ.

HAHAHA. I had to look that up. I can definitely see the benefits. 😉