The Frustrated CFO

On Columbia Campus or NYS Prison Camp, Antisemitism Is Inescapable: "I Built This Prison" Memoir Excerpt

© Marina Zosya, My Personal Nazi Brigade - Self-portrait in Mise-en-scene, ACF, 2019

Over and over again, I am consistently stunned by the political blindness of hate. It's incomprehensible to me. How can people loathe all Catholics because they still worship the papal Christianity or all arabs because of 9/11 and ISIS? Or how pro-Palestinian convictions automatically translate into hostile animosity  towards all Jews dispersed throughout the globe - many of whom are not religious whatsoever, have never been and don't plan to go to Israel, and some (especially here, in the States) don't even understand what the conflict over there is all about? Aren't the haters at all concerned that their blanket enmity completely obscures the essential meaning of their political standpoints? Shouldn't they be more focused and direct their efforts against the forces behind the territorial and largely economic conflicts? What can possibly be achieved by inciting violence against the students and the teaching staff of an educational institution 5700 miles away from the epicenter of the military actions? It's truly bizarre!

On the other hand, I'm quite accustomed to the pervasive, persistent, and profuse plain-ass antisemitism no matter how many political, nationalistic, self-righteous, and morally confused shrouds anyone throws over it. Look, I was born in the most antisemitic country in the world - Soviet Russia, with its pre- and post-revolutionary history of oppressing my relatives and ancestors going back centuries.  Thus, as the Soviet Jew I was raised to believe that antisemitism is simply written into the genetic code (my mother was among the first generation of Soviet physiology students to be taught genetics at universities in the 50s) of every non-Jew and there is nothing we can do about it: Whether openly or secretly, and with some even subconsciously, goyim will despise you. Live with that. Period.

And when I escaped Russia, the Soviet Union, though on its last legs, was still live and kicking, the communists were still in power (many of them still are - lightly disguised), and anti-Jewish state policies were still as prominent as the nationalistic hatred of the Russian populace. But, of course, decades of the subsequent NYC living... It lulls you with its ethnic diversity, and religious freedoms, and Jewish mayors, and Philip Roth, and Woody Allen, and Kubrick, and the overwhelming popularity of Seinfeld and Friends, and everybody eating lox on their bagels... And you (I mean me), a cultural non-observant Jew, start feeling... Well, I wouldn't go as far as to say "free of the ethnic bias", but you definitely push to the back of your Jewish kop the teachings of your grandparents - that if you ever forget that you are a Jew, there will be an antisemite nearby to remind you.

Of course, Ivy League schools, even those - like Columbia University - located in Manhattan, are nothing like NYC. Their student bodies, professorial staff, and administrations consist mostly of transient people from all over the world. Not just all fifty states of our own nation - most of them not nearly as diverse as our city, but from the foreign countries with their own socio-economic backgrounds as well. These people are here not because they belong, but because it's good for their resumes - if I had to generalize. So, it shouldn't be surprising at all that these educational institutions are prone to become fertile grounds for antisemitic protests.

And apparently the ones at Columbia earlier this week got so threatening, Jewish religious leaders urged students to STAY HOME (!!!) Here, IN NEW YORK CITY! And the university's administration (as well as the law enforcement - let's be honest) are so powerless in the face of these protests, the solution they offered is online classes! This is Columbia we're talking about!

I don't even know, though, why I'm so shocked. I mean, I've already got exposed in the fairly recent past to similar displays of open antisemitism and the passivity by "the powers that be". Because, guess what? The New York State prison system is even further removed from NYC than the hodgepodge of Columbia campus. It's staffed entirely with ethnically and culturally isolated upstate prison guards; and among the inmate population, there are plenty of multigenerational neo-Nazis - proud to display their various tattooed insignia and the compatible attitudes - as well as intellectually confused people.

From "I Built This Prison", Part III - Impressions of Imprisonment, •The Jewish Things•:

"...In Albion... I’ve got exposed to antisemitism of all stripes and colors - the white-bred upstate xenophobia, the ignorant multi-racial criminal-element loathing, the semi-religious misconfusion, and the pure Aryan “pride”.    

Funny, how some naïve individuals sometimes ask how Russians always knew that I was a Jew without even checking my official documents. Well, my Albion experience has proved all over again that Russian, German, American, or of any other origin - an anti-Semite always knows. By simply looking at you. Even though you are secular and wear no other ethnic attributes than your own face.      

***

I just couldn’t get used to this shit all over again. Even two years in, it was still hurting.

On the way from OMH meds, Sherri Ellis called me “old stinking Jew”, because she thought I looked at her funny. On previous occasions she called me a “nasty Jew” – she was definitely escalating. Oh, she kept her antisemitism in check when she asked for my help with her ASAT reinstatement after being kicked out for dirty urine. Now, this. Nobody had used that specific slur on me since the Soviet Union. And there was nothing I could do about it – not even talk back to her violent mug: if she lunged at me, both of us would’ve been sent to SHU.

            Heather Mims was walking next to me. She was shocked: “What are you doing being Jewish?” was her question. That was easy to brush off, actually. She knew me for two years and didn’t realize I was Jewish. Hers was the antisemitism of geographical isolation not of consciousness. She was from a tiny village on the Canadian border.

            I was more offended by Trish D: “I despise you because you are a Jew,” out of nowhere she spewed at me from across the messhall table. I was lost for words and I couldn’t just leave before a CO’s release… But several women at that table instantaneously joined forces in berating Trish for her unacceptable racism and un-Christian hatred. I felt as if a row of warriors was shielding me from the enemy. 

***

            Yet, most of the time you are unprotected, alone…

            Did you know that not all Nazis that fled Germany at the end of WWII and escaped the justice, ended up in Latin America? Thousands of them were accepted in the United States and many ended up in upstate New York.       

In prison, I’ve discovered that a chunk of their offspring constitutes a sizable part of our state’s neo-Nazism movement: children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Quite a few of them wore the guards’ uniforms, far more – the state’s greens. Some with no other signs of the fascist distinction but their openly hateful attitude. Others - walking around with the swastikas, SS bolts, 88 (numerical code for HH – heil Hitler), 4/20 (Hitler’s birthday), etc. tattooed on their necks, chests, and arms…

But twenty-something Amanda in the fourth of my Albion’s residences had a huge flower arrangement on the back of her neck. She was tiny, very blond, cutely pixyish, terribly flirty – especially with young white officers. A very sociable kid, friendly with everyone. A cleanliness freak and a cleaning ace. She bore a tongue-breaking last name that started with W, which, together with her partiality towards German rock bands, left no doubt of her descent. She chirped at me and offered to do my chores for cigarettes. She lived in a row of cubicles that shared back walls with my row, two cubicles down.

You were not really allowed to wonder around the dorm and cube-visiting was strictly prohibited. But if you needed to get something from somebody and you asked for permission to do so, depending on the CO, you might’ve been granted a 2-3 minutes trip to someone else’s cubicle. My cooking time-slot was coming up and I needed to retrieve my Mrs. Dash from somebody who lived next to little Amanda.  

As I was passing her entryway, my sideview caught something on her board that froze me on the spot. The picture was affixed right in the center - a cutout from some cheap-paper publication, an old black-and-white photographic portrait of SS Oberstumbannführer Adolf Eichmann – the architect of the Holocaust. The man who proposed that exterminating every Jewish child and adult would solve all German problems and then proceeded to manage the logistics of the mass slaughter.

She was in her cube, cleaning. I stepped in, “Why do you have this photo?”

“Do you know who he is?!” she exclaimed. Not in the way that she couldn’t believe that I recognized him, but in excited, starry-eyed, groupie way. “I’m obsessed with him… Do you want to see my books?” She started pulling hardcovers from her locker and shoving them at me one after another. Half of them were in German. I saw ‘Mein Kampf’ and something with the word “Aryan” on the cover… and then I stopped looking… She was chattering something about her dear great-grandfather, but I stopped listening… I walked out. I was nauseous…"

To continue: p. 428 

       

Disney Shareholders: Why Can't You Be More Like Netflix?

It's not an easy undertaking to make me laugh nowadays. Most of the time I'm just FINE (as in Frustrated [duh!], Insecure, Nervous, and Exhausted); the rest of the time I am severely distraught... And, of course, I meditate and do my best to cheer the fuck up... The vast music library helps; so does the good literature, quality entertainment... But, laughing - that's rare, very rare... Except for the news - some news snippets make me burst out laughing! And incidentally this particular hilarious bit also had to do with Entertainment... Or rather the business of it.

You see, Disney is in trouble... I don't need to regurgitate to you the whole stock-market mumbo-jumbo everyone else and their mothers write about, primarily focusing on the share prices, which are now below the level they were 10 years ago. Because the bottom line is fairly simple: The original Walt Disney Pictures isn't pumping out winners annually as they used to do. All those astronomical investments into hoarding the big-name franchises like Stars Wars (Lucasfilm) and Marvel  - in spite of the high profits per hit, don't really turn themselves into returns fast enough... And - most painfully in terms of the contemporary state of the entertainment marketing - the streaming arm Disney+ is not profitable at all.

Or, as I prefer to define it: Netflix it ain't.

What to do? What to do? In a typical far-removed-from-reality only-in-corporate-boardrooms turn of events, the self-proclaimed "activist" investor billionaire Nelson Peltz (who started his "business-building" career - and this is very important - by inheriting his grandfather wholesale food company and then turning himself into a prominent private-equity mogul by buying and selling such fully-fledged companies as Snapple and Quaker Oats) challenged Disney's BOD to commence the corrective actions by dismissing the company's current CEO Bob (Why Bob, god dammit?! The man is 71! Time to grow up into your full name!) Iger (not a businessman at all - a career media executive, aka glorified mountain-top administrator with an outrageous compensation package of nearly $30 mil per year). In his haste for coup d'état, Peltz forgot to do his homework - he came into the fight empty-handed: no constructive plan, no corrective suggestions, no panoramic view of Disney's new and improved future... Just the hope that, without Iger in the picture and with him on the board, things will get better... How? By Disney Magic? (If you didn't hear: Peltz's coup failed and Iger is still up there - on Disney's very top, I mean).        

You get why this is so funny to me, don't you?

The very idea of two people with no entrepreneurial experience in their respective portfolios fighting over who's better fit to shake up the conglomerated mastodon (in case you forgot your primary-school lessons: mastodons were prehistoric, extinct cousins of the contemporary elephants - very large creatures) and expediently reshape it into an agile operational gazelle able to conquer the most difficult, most contemporary, most innovative trails - it seems inconceivable to me. Moreover, it's so desperately naive to believe (assuming, of course, that anyone actually believes it) that changing one (or ten! or all!) person sitting on the head of the mastodon - very far away from its vital organs and moving limbs - would trigger the company's rejuvenation. 

Do you think that the OG business-builders Walt and Roy Disney, if faced with a similar situation, would be concerning themselves with the BOD changes? I don't think so. They would dig deep into the causes of the business's slowdown, think outside of all boxes, and try to come up with absolutely new, never-explored-before solutions. Because they were the trailblazers and truly good fathers to their corporate child.  The current executive foster parents, on the other hand, are the worst: all they do is measure their child's failures against their peers' successes.        

You see, aspiring to someone else's model that happens to work for them for the time being is nothing but a short-term bandaid. The key is in the entrepreneurial intuition, the managerial flexibility and the structural mobility; the integral ability to adapt, to change fast - with every single shift of the market demand and technological leap. And can we expect that from a giant who cannot be anything but rigid and slow simply because its too large for its own good? Pure fantasy, of course (who's going to stop me, though? it's my blog!), but the best thing for Disney's Jenga-tower now would be to disassemble into individual blocks and let them operate as separate business units, without the burden of the astronomical executive packages. Let them compete within their own enterprising markets, against their specific peers - not against the fickle stock-market trends. I wonder what would happen then?   

And since commentators keep bringing it up as a benchmark, let me note this: Netflix Inc., God bless them - in spite of their global presence, publicly trading stock, and nineteen subsidiaries - is still a very much agile, 27-year-old (the most beautiful age) baby. With one of its shrewd co-founders still serving as an Executive Chairman of the board. 

I was a member of Blockbuster when my then pre-teen daughter first told me about Netflix DVD subscription. On my way to work I would drop the red envelopes into the mailbox and get the new ones shipped to us as soon as they were scanned into the USPS system at our local P.O. By the standards of those times: extraordinary expediency and incomparable efficiency of the entertainment-delivery operations. And that is still their main focus. Now, by means of what David Foster Wallace predicted (a few years before Netflix DVD was born, actually) would be the main form of delivering content into people's screens - the dissemination into "teleputers" as he defined it, which we now known as streaming. In between, all of their transitions, developments, enhancements, and additions have been seamless precisely because they keep to their core, pursuing their mission.

And I hope they continue being spry, fluid, and easy to adapt. To whatever the future brings. I don't know about the rest of you, but I owe them so much! No, for real, I have no clue how I would manage without them...   

Off the Cutting Room Floor of "I Built This Prison" Memoir: Clip #3: Methodical Corruption of the Soul

Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights, Fragment

"When Nietzsche wrote, 'God is dead', he wasn't really talking about God's existence per se. On the contrary, he was commenting on the state of human morality, or rather lack thereof, in the society greatly affected by the industrial revolution... And even that is not exactly right: it was more about the pervasive preoccupation with the accumulation of wealth... For many centuries before, whether correctly or not, philosophers and writers presumed the corruption by money to be the rich people's affliction. I mean, you will not find any peasants in Dante's Inferno. What Nietzsche alluded to was that by his time everyone, regardless of the status or the class, got onto the money-mining wagon and, as a result, removed themselves from God: even those attending services, kept doing it as a habitual ritual, not because of some true faith:

'They no longer even know what religions are good for and merely register their presence in the world with a kind of dumb amazement. They feel abundantly committed, these good people, whether to their business or to their pleasures, not speak of the “fatherland” and their newspapers and “family obligations”: it seems that they simply have no time left for religion, the more so because it remains unclear to he whether it involves another business or another pleasure...'

                        Fredrich Nietzsche

                        Beyond Good and Evil, Part Three: What Is Religious

Well, we can argue that instead of formulating that snappy motto about God's demise amidst all of the 'civilized' industriousness, he should've written: We, the humans, murdered God through the distraction of morality. But he said what he said. And it created a circular effect: his audience believed him - literally, and it liberated many into further relaxation of moral codes. Because we hear what we want to hear, disregarding the true meaning of the words.

And there lies the danger of catch phrases. They become popular beyond their intended audiences. Once out there, among the millions, all ideas described by memorable slogans get separated from their origins, adapted to the users’ whims and needs, reinterpreted, reshaped, modified to the point of becoming opposite of themselves. Sometimes it’s an act of the intentional distortion, but mostly it happens without any deliberation on the part of the unthinking revisionists.

I mean, I was born into a vile society that was built on blood, hate  and expropriation masked as 'liberation' causes by the slogans of supposed freedoms. It's the reason why I ran away, idealistically hoping to be delivered onto more virtuous planes..."

                        Deleted from Chapter 5: Omni-Present and Omni-Powerful

    

NPR Reports: Prisons Are Not Fit for the Elderly. What Else Is New?

MZ @ ACF 2019

On Monday, March 11th (I beg your pardon - it always takes time for me to summarize my reactions), NPR reported via Apple News (The U.S. prison population is graying fast... by Meg Anderson) that American federal and state prisons are not prepared to deal with their growing contingent of elderly inmates. Primarily because the correctional medical care cannot keep up with this demographic trend.

The provided statistical evidence illuminates the bleak reality: Apparently

"across the nation, between 1999 and 2016 the number of adults aged 55 and older increased 280%, compared to an increase of only 3% in those under 55."

But what else could we possibly expect? The multitude of our socio-economic problems affects all aspects of life, including the age mix of the prison population: the lifers with over thirty years of incarceration on their shoulders, the repeat offenders who cannot be absorbed into society and keep coming back even in the late stages of their lives, plus the older people who commit their first crimes out of hopeless desperation, yet become the subjects of our brutal sentencing customs nevertheless - it's only arithmetically natural for the proportion of older inmates to increase.

At the same time, it is absolutely unthinkable for any branch or twig of any governmental body directly or tangibly related to correctional codes to consider age-driven triggers for early releases. I mean, as it stands right now, only terminally ill inmates, with pretty much days to live, may qualify for this rare privilege. Anything short of that retains an inmate in prison until the sentencing conditions are fulfilled.   

It appears that the NPR reporter's main focus is to single out the truth of the aging prison population as the most crucial factor testing the limits of the correctional systems around the nations in keeping all of their charges healthy.  She further broadens the magnitude of the age effect in one of her leading arguments. Namely that prison is a difficult environment and "people behind the bars tend to age faster." To support this postulation the article quotes some studies by medical professionals specializing in Public Health, which claim that "incarcerated adults experience accelerated aging" (a term borrowed from engineering practice of specifically designed tests under aggravated conditions to speed up the aging of objects). One of the cited doctors suggests that "geriatric" in prison can mean someone as young as 50. 

Well, let's set the quality of prison medical care - for the entire imprisoned population, not just for elderly - aside for a moment. Because, first and foremost, I would like to contest the validity of the rapid-aging generalization itself. You see, I believe that it actually depends on the person and her attitude. For example, take me (who else would I take, really?): On the day I was sentenced I was 57 years 2 months and 3 weeks old. And yes, pretty quickly my hair gone completely gray. NYS Department of Corrections and Community Supervision (DOCCS) prohibits hair-dying within its walls. (Unlike the federal prison network, which allows it.) And since I've been going gray since I was very young and started my regular visits to a colorist when I turned 35, I had no choice but to turn peppery gray in prison. And yes, Natura Bissē products couldn't be obtained in the commissary or pass through the package-room regulations. So, it was impossible to hide the gloomy state of mind behind the brightness of my skin... But other than that... After decades of sitting on my fat ass behind my office desk, I managed to use my time in prison to get myself into a much better physical shape than I've experienced in my entire life: Walking the significant distances between various destinations of Albion prison's camp and performing daily tasks of physical labor were at first difficult, than bearable, and eventually easy. I progressed from crawling to power-walking at a speed uncatchable by the smoking 20-year-olds. My first yoga class happened in prison and eventually I geared myself up all the way to the power-yoga level. Moreover, I've discovered a rowing machine in the gym... Eventually, I've developed muscles in places where I only had fat before. And I felt much healthier than I did outside... I felt 40. No joke... Age is really a very-very relative thing.

That said, however, it is an undeniable truth that cost of medical care for incarcerated individuals, guaranteed by the Eighth Amendment to our Constitution, has been growing exponentially. If not because of the aging per se, but due to the complex combination of factors, including the alarming health and longevity decline in the United States. Note: A recent Harvard study has determined that

"for every two Americans who died age 65 and under, one [MZ: 50%] would have been alive if they lived in Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, or Portugal. An epidemic of chronic illness has also taken hold, with rates of heart disease, diabetes, liver disease, and obesity skyrocketing and impacting younger populations."

 

Thus, the percentage of sick people entering various jails and prisons, regardless of their age, is now much higher than anyone expects.  This, along with the persistently increasing price tags of pharmaceuticals and all health-related services, which we all experience whether we are "free" or incarcerated, multiplies the weight of the monetary burden on, already pretty fragile, shoulders of correctional systems. Naturally, the NPR article quotes a few prison officials complaining that it is impossible to care for the older inmates within the existing budget constraints. And I believe them: neither the states nor the federal government have enough money for comprehensive healthcare of incarcerated individuals to begin with; having funds for the permanent geriatric  needs - forget about it!

There is, however, one important factor entirely avoided in the article - maybe deliberately, maybe not: The inherent and persistent problem of the corrections - the utter mismanagement and inefficiency of whatever means they have on hand, sufficient or not. And I don't know, of course, maybe in the sampled states - Oklahoma, Texas, Michigan, Minnesota - everything is ran in the most methodical and productive ways; and if they had sufficient funds they would be able to medically accommodate prisoners of all ages (though my gut sours in doubt at that)... But I can testify that it would be an impossible dream (and when I say "impossible", I mean like a fan dreaming of dating her pop-idol) in the prison structure I had a misfortune to experience firsthand, i.e. New York State's women prisons - the most messed-up can of the administrative worms imaginable, if I have to say so myself.  

There are a couple of essays in "I Built This Prison" specifically related to this subject matter - the general mismanagement, the medical care, and the mix thereof. But here let me just mention a few facts. There are three female correctional facilities in the whole of NYS - one for each level of security: the maximum and the minimum are Downstate, in Westchester County, mere 35 miles from NYC and its multitude of high-quality medical care facilities; and medium located in God-forsaken Albion, practically a stone's throw away from the Canadian border, with the only hospital servicing the prisoners (Erie County Medical Center) 56 miles away. This latter prison camp is, of course, is larger - both in its capacity and the actual population - than the other two put together. And yet... The Albion Correctional Facility (ACF) has only a tiny medical office with no specialists, no OBGYN, no diagnostics, a few beds, and a handful (literally) of doctors that leave at 3 pm and don't work on weekends. On the other hand, the Regional Medical Unit (RMU), which can actually be qualified as a prison hospital because it is staffed with medical personnel, including doctors and RN’s on 24/7 duty, and, in addition to 20 infirmary beds, has 30 long-term care beds as well as the maternity and nursery divisions - that's, ladies and gentlemen, is, of course, in Westchester.

So, if an inmate happens to be pregnant or nursing, they have to be held in the maximum security prison regardless of their actual security gradation. The same goes for the legally blind as they cannot get walking assistance Upstate - and no one knows why. On the other hand, every one who is afflicted by ailments that bind them to wheelchairs, including murderers and other violent criminals, are invariably sent away to Albion - that's where the mobility assistance is provided, which is by no means a replacement for the proper medical care. Etc., etc., etc., etc. It's truly bizarre. And none of these three facilities can possibly deal with the needs of the aging population. In Albion, even 72-year-old women cannot obtain medical releases from their mess-hall job assignments, even if their feet double in size by the end of the day from edema - I've known them personally...

For further reading:

"I Built This Prison", Part III: In Case You Were Wondering About the State-Ran Healthcare 

"I Built This Prison", Part III: Through the Ass Backwards