The Books of My Life: The Lives of Erich Fromm

 

According to historian Lawrence Friedman, author of several biographies on figures in the history in the history of Psychology and Psychoanalysis, the subject of his 2013 biography The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013) lived many lives. He was, for example, a mostly secular Jew, a son. a husband, a student of the Bible, a student of the Talmud, an intellectual, a public intellectual, a sociologist, a social psychologist, a psychoanalytic analyst, an analysand, a student of human psychology, a student of religion, a social ethicist, a commentator on social issues, a member of the famous Frankfurt School, a specialist called to testify before the US Congress, a pundit, an anti-war activist, a celebrity, a critic of nineteenth and twentieth century political Zionism, a prophet of love and hope, a humanist, and an analyst of the human condition.  

Fromm, who was born in Frankfurt in 1900 and died in Locarno in 1980, lived all of his lives, as Friedman notes, in eventful times. He lived, for instance, through the rise of Hitler emigrating from Germany after seeing the writing on the wall. Many of his relatives weren’t as perspicacious. He lived through World War Two with its atrocities and its genocides in Europe and at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He lived through the Cold War with its latest iteration of great power politics and its potential for destruction on a mass scale thanks to the Bomb and the destructive power of mass murdering social engineers like Yosef Stalin. As Friedman notes these turbulent times helped make Fromm and made him into a critic of Freudian biologically grounded instinct psychology, something that made him a heretic in many Freudian circles including at the Frankfurt Institute which, thanks to the promptings of Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, turned Fromm into a heretic and ostracised him as a consequence because off his interest in grounding psychology and psychoanalysis in broader economic, political, cultural, and demographic currents than Freud.

I first encountered Fromm as a biblical scholar and a social ethicist when I read his book You Shall Be as Gods (1966) as a teenager. The book appealed to me for a variety or reasons but primarily for its exploration of social ethics. When I was in junior high school I became an opponent of the Vietnam War and eventually all wars and like Fromm was interested in the social ethics of war and, like Fromm, was drawn to Quakerism because of its anti-war stance. I never became a Quaker because, like Marx, Groucho Marx, in the end I could never bring myself to join an organisation that would have me as a member. Despite this, however,  I have continued to have an immense respect for Quakerism and for Quaker activism. Additionally, as was also the case with Fromm, I was drawn to the question of why humans were so aggressive and waged wars on one another in, particularly in the 20th century brutal fashion, and what to do about human aggression and its wars.

Fromm’s attempt to answer the question of why human aggression, why wars, and why human brutality, particularly male brutality, drew him, not surprisingly away from the biological reductionism of Freud and toward Karl Marx and other social science analysts who focused their analyses on the impact of environment, on the impact of economic, political, cultural, and geographical factors on humans. In this he was of a piece with, as Friedman notes, others trying to integrate the psychological, the social, and the cultural such as wholistic American Anthropology,  the interdisciplinary Culture and Personality school of Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Geoffrey Gorer, Gregor Bateson and others, which was connected to wartime US military research, and Edward Sapir, Clyde Kluckhohn, Alfred Kroeber, and Karen Horney among others of a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary bent who were trying to decipher the mysteries of the relation between personality and culture, what Fromm called human social character. And like many of the early social scientists there was a strong normative, social engineering, and ethical and moral aspect to his attempt to grasp the human condition and transform it in order to make more healthy humans and more healthy societies. The human utopian impulse.

Fromm’s excursion into why humans behaved in the ways they did, as Friedman notes, really began at the Frankfurt School where he and other researchers were engaged in a massive and ultimately problematic (for a variety of reasons) quantitative and qualitative analysis of German workers and particularly the authoritarian tendencies one found among German workers including those on the left in the late 1930s and early 1930s. This study provided the foundation for Fromm’s most famous early book Escape From Freedom/Fear of Freedom in 1941 and a later closely related book The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness which he wrote toward the end of his life in 1973. 

These two books and virtually all of those in between were ultimately concerned with the human aggression and what to do about it. In his works Fromm traced human aggression not to the ego, the id, or the superego in isolation but to social factors that produced sadistic and masochistic authoritarian leaning humans who often, and paradoxically so, led many to surrender their freedoms to a charismatic authoritarian leader who gave them a sense of self-worth and hence an identity. Underlying this authoritarian personality, Fromm argued, was Fromm’s socialised version of Freud’s death instinct, necrophilia, a love of death, a social character trait that resulted, according to Fromm, in greed, egotism, acquisitiveness, violence, brutality, and war. Needless to say, Fromm’s take on necrophilia and its impact on humans and the worlds they have made might provide food for thought for those interested in understanding the rise of Donald Trump and others of his authoritarian and theocratic and fascist ilk including many university presidents at “research universities” like Columbia, NYU, and Indiana who, one assumes, are out to impress their boards of governance along with the right wing populist demagogues in the US Congress who are attacking them, with their hard and manly response to protests in their midst.

Fromm thought it was possible to overcome this culture of necrophilia, which he traced in part to modern capitalism, with its greed, its acquisitiveness, and limited sense of social solidarity with other humans through biophilia, the love of one's life and oneself, the consequent love of the lives of others, and the love of individual freedom and the enlightenment that came with it, all of which, he believed, would give rise to happier and healthier humans and happier and healthier societies and all of which he worked to promote during most of his life. The failure of the reforms of 1968, Friedman points out, would temper Fromm’s utopianism, a utopianism grounded in maternal love and, somewhat like that of Marx, in primitive “communism” its greater egalitarianism, somewhat.

One could, of course, explore other of Fromm’s lives as Friedman does in his fine intellectual biography of Erich Fromm. One could, for example, explore Fromm the author whose many books sold in the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, and the millions. One could focus one’s attention on Fromm the student of comparative political structures and his assessment that the two great powers of the post-World War II era, the USA and the USSR who, as he rightly notes, had a lot in common characterised as they both were by modern bureaucracies and somewhat different forms of modern capitalism. One could explore Fromm’s contention that societies like people can be characterised by greed, acquisitiveness, and necrophilia and so too can be insane something that has become clearer in the wake of the brave new digital media revolution and its social media. 

Anyone interested in any of Fromm's lives—Fromm as a twentieth century psychologist, Fromm as a twentieth century psychoanalyst, Fromm as influenced by anthropology, cultural anthropology, Fromm the twentieth century social ethicist and moralist—would likely profit from reading Friedman’s book, a book that, by the way, does not shy away from criticising Fromm for his sometimes too limited research when writing his books and his tendency to make giant leaps of analytical faith with limited reference to empirical realities. And while Friedman does explore what some might see as failures in Fromm’s personal life, he mercifully keeps this to a minimum, something that keeps The Lives of Erich Fromm from being a scholarly and academic version of a Rupert Murdoch gossip rag.

 

The Books of My Life: Identity’s Architect

 

As someone who has long studied the history, sociology, and anthropology of religion in core nation societies throughout much of his academic life it quickly became apparent to me that Western Christianity since the Reformation, despite its claims to be the world’s only true and universal religion was, empirically speaking,  characterised by sectarianism, characterised by division. Most Christian sects, in other words, be they Lutherans in their various and sundry forms, Calvinists in their various and sundry forms, Baptists in their various and sundry forms, or Evangelicals in their various and sundry forms, claimed and still oftentimes claim to be the one and only true form of Christianity. 

Another thing I quickly realised early in my academic career was that religion was not the only cultural meaning system that was characterised by sectarianism, by the belief that one's sect or group was the sole possessor of the truth writ large. Political culture in the West, for example, is also characterised by sectarianism as the many sects of Bolshevism each claiming to be the one true form of Bolshevik Communism point up. Interestingly, the Church of Anti-Communism in its various and sundry sectarian forms, which too claimed to have the truth on its side, accepted and fetishised the claim of Bolshevik Church of Lenin and his pope like successors that it was the one and only true variety of communism on the planet thereby ignoring, for a number of economic, political, cultural, and geographical reasons, the sectarian nature of the so-called political left and the fact that, empirically speaking, no variety of Bolshevism had a monopoly on the truth anymore than any particular variety of Christianity did.

Political culture, of course, is not the only form of extra-religious—religion is only one institutionalised and bureaucratised meaning system--sectarianism in the West. As Lawrence Friedman, who has made a career of writing biographies of psychologists and psychoanalysts including on the Menninger family and their clinic (charismatic to traditional and bureaucratic leadership in action?), Erich Fromm, and Erik Erickson, shows, intellectual and academic psychology is also sectarian. Virtually every sect within the institutionalised meaning system that is psychology whether Behavioural, Freudian, Neo-Freudians, Jungian, or Gestalt, for example, claims to have a monopoly on the truth or at the very least a monopoly on some aspect of the truth. In his Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik Erikson (New York: Scribner, 1999) Friedman explores one of the many Neo-Freudians, those who followed in the footsteps of the charismatic father of the psychoanalysis cult or new meaning system, Sigmund Freud, but who also felt compelled to revise Freud because of his lack of attention, at least in his earlier years, to broader political, economic, cultural, and geographic contexts to the chagrin of “orthodox" Freudians, the Danish born Erik Erikson.

For Friedman, who practises what Erikson, Fromm, and the Culture and Personality school both belonged to, preached, namely, the need to pay attention to broader social and cultural contexts, broader contexts in which human lives are situated, must be explored if we are to understand humans in general and Erikson in particular. Friedman argues that Erikson, who never knew who his father was—something that troubled him throughout the course of his life apparently—and someone who was Danish, German, and American if in someone different ways, became someone who was adept at crossing borders—national, theoretical, professional, disciplinary, ideological—was drawn almost inevitably because of these broader contexts to the study of identity and how identity was impacted and influenced not only by biology—a central dogmatic tenant of early Freud and his followers--but by the dynamism of a historically situated human life cycle from birth to death where identity was situated within broader spatial formations and influenced and impacted by them. Biography as the micro of the meso and the macro. 

Friedman does a nice job of exploring Erikson’s many identities across time and space. He notes that Erikson was an artist and a qualitative if not always rigorous social scientist who moved across the disciplinary boundaries of psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology, and history during his long life in his many publications including what many regard as his most important book, Childhood and Society (1950), and his Young Man Luther (1958), and Gandhi’s Truth (1969). He does an excellent job of showing us Erikson the Dane, Erikson the German, Erikson the American, Erikson the romantic, Erikson the therapist, Erikson the clinician, Erikson the teacher, Erikson the academic, Erikson the sometime activist, Erikson the writer, Erikson the husband and father, Erikson the confidante, Erikson the confident, Erikson the self doubter, Erikson the mystic, and Erikson the prophet, all Erikson’s influenced by the broader social and cultural environments he moved through during the course of his life from Freud’s Vienna to FDR’s New Deal, World War II, the Holocaust, the Cold War, Vietnam, the backlash to colonialism, and Watergate, to mane a few. He does an excellent job of pointing out what he sees as the strengths and weaknesses of Erikson including his attention to historical and ethnographic contexts, his development of a modern and perhaps even postmodern understanding of identity and, along with William Shakespeare and Soren Kierkegaard, both of whom Erikson read, of the modern human life cycle, his less than rigorous approach to the stuff of society and culture, the limitations of his understanding of Gandhi’s India, his perhaps too great an emphasis on the universality and linearity of the human life cycle, and his contradictions, something all humans, of course, are, to name a few.

The problem I had with Friedman’s biography of Erikson is the same problem I have with most biographies I have read, there is a lot of what I regard as insignificant components amidst the significant details of a life making the book longer and more gossipy than it, in my opinion, needs to be. This was, for me, less a problem in Friedman’s more intellectually oriented biography of Fromm, another refugee from Germany. Those interested in the history of the social sciences and the history of psychology and psychoanalysis, the practise of psychology and psychoanalysis will find much of interest in Friedman’s well researched and documented biography of a key figure in 20th century intellectual culture, Erik Erikson.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Google, the Skanky Cookie Monster

When I decided to start blogging, writing essays on various subjects in various shapes and sizes on the World Wide Web in 2011, I chose to go with Blogger instead of WordPress. Blogger, which went online in 1999 and was purchased by Google in 2003, and WordPress, which was founded in 2003, were the only two blog sites I was familiar with at the time and sad to say I chose Blogger not for political or economic reasons but for cultural reasons. I preferred its look to that of WordPress. Yes, like all humans I too can sometimes be shallow.

I still don’t know much about WordPress and how it works since I don’t use it. But I do know something about Blogger and knowledge as it sometimes does, has tarnished the aesthetic sheen and the reputation of this blog site for me.

 In the last couple of months the sheen has really began to wear off gilded Blogger for me. Google now requires, when I upload an image from my computer on to Blogger, that I allow them to use cookies, tracking cookies, in order to access and utilise information about me that they can presumably pass on (Google as Big Big Big Big Brother) and sell (Google as Big Big Big Big Corporation) to interested others. That is, after all, one of the ways that Google makes money and like many global postmodern megacorporations these days they will use every means, regardless of how small and seemingly petty, to make monies. 

And this is just one of the reasons why Google is one of the several skamky cookie monsters we sadly have to live with today. Beware of the skanky cookie monster whose ABC’s are actually dollar signs, pound signs, and Euro signs. The World According to Mammon.

 

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Dangerous CBC Reds Are Under our American Beds

 

Poor Canada. It is North America’s Poor Edith. Canada, particularly through its public broadcaster the CBC, has, over the years, produced some excellent and stimulating television shows. Hardly anybody within and outside of Canada, however, watches them. When people do watch them in significant numbers it is often a cause for at least some Canadian national celebration. 

There are several Canadian television shows that come to mind when I think about fine Canadian television. There is the excellent and very Canadian Due South, a cop show that explores, with humour, wit, and sometimes even sarcasm, Canadian and American ideologies of exceptionalism. There is Cold Squad, a show about usually cold murder cases from the files of the Vancouver constabulary which the US ripped off in the form of Cold Case. There is DaVinci’s Inquest, a show which superbly explores the dark realities at the heart of policing and politics in Vancouver. There is Slings and Arrows, the best show, in my opinion, ever produced on the theatre and theatre life in which each season centres around two Shakespeare plays and, in the third series, a musical comedy instead of another Shakespeare play, and a show which some regard as the finest TV show ever made. There is Heartland, a family saga set on an Alberta ranch that recalls excellent US family fare like The Waltons though with a Canadian twist and in which its American distributer, particularly in the early seasons, blurs out Alberta licence plates for presumably moral reasons—the dangers of Hot Ash licence plates?—or national reasons—it doesn’t want us to know that it is Canadian? There is the wonderful absurdist comedy Twitch City that precedes and foreshadows similar British comedies like The League of Gentlemen and the work of Julia Davis. And there is Murdoch Mysteries, a show about the Toronto constabulary in the Victorian and Edwardian era that reminds one of great British cop shows on ITV. All of these shows I have enjoyed immensely and been given much to think about as a result of watching them.

Well presumably some Canadians were intrigued to learn that someone, namely American diplomats stationed in Canada, were watching CBC commissioned shows. They were watching The Border (2008-2010), a show that reminds me less of 24 (2001-2010, 2014), a connection some commentators have claimed to see, than to the BBC’s spy, crime, and action-adventure show Spooks (2002-2011) with which The Border has a lot in common including an indebtedness to John le Carre. This last, by the way,  means that The Border, like Spooks, has a lot of reality in it. They were watching the excellent Intelligence (2005-2007), a show about the messy realities of the cross border drug and crime “trade" between British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest and the American and Canadian intelligence and surveillance agents involved in tracking and trying to stop them, brought to us by the same person who created the superb DaVinci’s Inquest, a show that preceded and parallels much in the very realistic US TV show The Wire. They were watching H2O (2004), a drama about an American plan to steal Canadian water co-written by Paul Gross. And they were watching Little Mosque on the Prairie (2007-2012), a situation comedy with an occasional bite centring on Canadian Muslims living in a fictional town in the prairie province of Saskatchewan. 

How do we know American diplomats and American agents stationed in Canada were watching these shows? Well in 2010, during the Barack Obama presidency and the prime ministership of ex Reform and new Tory pro-American Stephen Harper, it came to light, thanks to the Canadian national newspapers the National Post and Globe and Mail, and thanks particularly to Wikileaks, which had gotten hold of thousands of US secret diplomatic “cables”, that some bureaucrats in the US diplomatic corps who had watched these three shows reported in cables dated 2008 that they thought they were “anti-American”. These diplomatic and perhaps not so diplomatic missives accused these four CBC shows of stereotyping Americans via emotion laden “anti-American” melodrama. They claimed that that while these shows, produced with Canadian governmental aid, hardly constituted a diplomatic crisis between the two now close neighbours, they did reveal that the CBC, Canadian pubic television whose remit, in particularly, was to make Canadian television, twisted current events in order to feed Canadians negative images of the United States (ah there is that old saw of Canadian identity being a product of Canada and Canadians marking themselves off against Americans). They asserted that these shows reflected a Canadian nationalism that counterpointed Americans engaged in all sorts of “nefarious" actions while Canadians tried to stop them and even sometimes opposed them, shows that all too often counterpointed American black hats to Canadian white hats. 

The controversy that resulted over these cables, some of if gosh this is what American tax dollars are paying for variety, when they were released by the Canadian national press and Wikileaks was such that the American ambassador in Ottawa was forced to confess that while he had never seen any of these shows he doubted that any of them were “anti-American” while a spokesman for the US State Department in Washington emphasised the close friendship between the two countries and claimed that no one knows us, the US, better than Canada, a comment that opens up the Pandora’s box of double edged swords. What he also neglected to note is that these “anti-American” not “anti-American" television shows were also shown in the US on retro channels, if often late at night and in the wee hours of morning. Can US TV be "anti-American" too? 

Speaking of being an anti-, The Border one of whose creators was Lindalee Tracey of Not a Love Story fame, also sometimes skewers the Russians, the Chinese, two nations regularly skewered on US TV, the British and the Canadians, the last two often for good reason. MI6, the British not so secret spy and sureveillance agency and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, CSIS, in particular, come in for criticism, the latter quite regularly, making The Border, perhaps, at least for those Canadian politicians and nationalist Canadian historians—you know, the Canadian politicians and historians who think that only they are the only real Canadian patriots and who seek a more militant Canada with greater military, surveillance, and intelligence ties to the US—a prime candidate for the epithet “anti-Canadian”. Can Canadian TV be “anti-British” and “anti-Canadian” too?

Of course, what is never interrogated and never analysed empirically in this claim that something is “anti-American"is why and how something is “anti”  Now I will grant you that comments such as America sucks and Americans are dicks, that Israel sucks and Israelis (not Jews) are pricks, that Iceland sucks and Icelanders are sicks, and that evil Russkies suck and Russkies and dicks, pricks, and sicks (a common ideologically driven malady in the US which is used to great effect by the military, industrial, governmental, and university complex) are ill considered, if intellectually considered at all, lowest common denominator nonsense perhaps not even worthy of a seventh grade or first form mind. What I will not grant is that claims that the US is an imperial power, that it often throws its weight around, including in Canada way too often, that it regards itself as the chief policeman of the “civilised" world, that it has an increasing divide between the haves and have nots, and that it has had and continues to have racial problems, to name a few, is "anti-American". All of those critiques are valid empirical critiques of real America and, save in the minds of manipulating demagogues or polemicists and apologists and the socialised for conformity manipulated masses is not "anti-American". They are simply descriptions of reality. 

One can, of course, extend this point to other “antis". The differentiation between emotion grounded lowest common denominator schoolyard criticism versus empirical and analytical criticism can be applied to Israel as well given that Israel, empirically speaking, is a regional imperial power, thanks particularly to the US, with all that entails in terms of policing, surveillance, violence, and power, and where some Jews and many Muslims and Christians are second class citizens and experience segregation and violence. A lot of the same empirical criticism made of the US can also be made of Russia, including the observation that it is an imperial power, with the caveat that Russia is a second or third rate great power compared to the US (and certainly isn’t a threat to world domination and even if they were surely 007 or his American counterpart would be able to stop them single handedly as always) and so one’s empirical criticisms of that state’s power ambitions—all great powers including the US and Israel have power ambitions, of course—have to be adjusted accordingly in order to more accurately fit the Russian case. 

That so many of the socialised for conformity masses who are easily and readily manipulated by demagogues, by polemicists and apologists strategising for ideological and hence political advantage through the use of  emotional appeals, fall for the spurious rhetoric and discourse that even empirical and empirically verifiable criticisms of the US and Israel and Russia are the same as lowest common denominator “antiism" tells you a lot about the life of the mass mind in the modern and postmodern world and about how cultural and ideological power works in the modern and postmodern world. And who says that human life is not inherently absurd?

Read the cables here…https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/28/world/20101128-cables-viewer.html#report/canada-08OTTAWA136

Thank God for Elderly Assistance

 

It is a pedestrian fact that we get older. I am now retired and I feel my age everyday. My muscles ache. My lower back aches. My neck aches. My knees are less mobile. My hands are looking a lot like those of Mr. Burns. It is increasingly hard to sleep and simultaneously increasingly hard not to sleep. It is increasingly difficult to get out of bed. My ears and eyes are increasingly fuzzy. I get dizzy spells and sometimes have to steady myself by putting my hands against the wall. My stomach constantly hurts. I have acid reflux issues. The muscles in my abdomen and chest area are tight and limit my ability to breath in. Getting older, as someone once reportedly said, is a massacre.

I am also getting sicker. For about three years now, ever since I had a negative reaction to a generic version of the asthma medication Advair, I have been seeing more and more medical specialists. I have been sent to a cardiologist, a pulmonologist, an allegist, an ear, nose, and throat specialist, a gastro-intestinal physician, and a urologist. And it doesn’t end there. In January I am off to see an immunologist. 

These increasing health problems have, to say the least, put a strain on my limited income and the budget such a limited income mandates. As a retiree, of course, I receive social security and Medicare. Thanks to working for the state of New York for almost twenty years I am one of the few and the proud who also gets something fewer and fewer Americans now receive, a pension, in my case a New York State Local and Retirement System pension. In addition I also get New York state retirement health insurance. Before my increasing health issues these combined allowed me to scrape by.

Health care costs, however, are eating ever more into this budget and have put a strain on my limited budget, a budget that also includes car payments until November since I bought a car before I retired assuming, wrongly it turns out, that I would be able to teach part-time for several more years. The pandemic put an end to that as SUNY essentially forced me to retire by only offering me one class and, as a consequence, no health insurance (they hid my other class making it impossible for students to register for it) which made driving from Albany to Oneonta three times a week irrational.

I have tried to supplement my income by working. Social Security and the state of New York retirement system do allow you to work in addition to collecting both pensions though there can be financial consequences and there are limits. I got jobs at the Albany School of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, Friar Tuck, and the Albany Public Library but had to quit each one for health reasons and, in the case of the former also for personal reasons. So, what I get from Social Security and the NYSLRS is it for me at this point in my elderly life.

Because of these increasing health care costs I had gone from a couple of thousand dollars in my savings account to a hundred. Concerned with how I was going to survive I applied for additional aid benefits to get me through the hard times and particularly until my car payments were complete. I applied for SNAP or food stamps, from the Albany County Department of Social Services. After a few hiccoughs I got limited but very helpful aid. I  also applied for assistance from Medicare to help with my pharmacy costs—which are increasing exponentially—but was denied. What helped more than anything else, it turned out, was when, at the request of my SNAP contact, I sent records of my health care charges since last October (charges for doctors, for three cat scans, for two MRIs, for numerous blood drawings, for three urgent clinic visits, and for four emergency room visits) to the Albany County Department of Social Services. Now the state of New York is paying my Medicare premium and my financial situation has improved dramatically. I am no longer, at least for the moment, treading water. I am actually above it for the first time in some time.

It is easy to whinge and whine about welfare and about government bureaucracy. Personally, I have found government bureaucracies to be far more efficient and effective than corporate bureaucracies like Tracfone and Amazon. Sometimes, however, we need a bit of help, from the government. At those times I am more than thankful that the government—local, state, and federal—is there to give  those of us who need it the much needed help we need just to survive. This help has allowed me, for example, to supplement my food, buy and allergen barrier for my mattress and to buy hypoallergenic pillows to replace the chemical laden memory foam pillows I should never have purchased and should have known more about when I did buy them. Hopefully it will also help to improve my health and it will make the never ending crisis management that is an essential part of being an elderly retiree less stressful and less consuming.

Life as Crisis Management: The Case of the Missing Name on the Ohav Sholom and Beacon Rental Community Wait List Kiada

 

The flat that I currently reside in has seen its better days. The house, which apparently once belonged to a doctor, sits in Albany’s South End and can, or so I am told, be found on a census going back to the 1850s. It was remodelled, or so I am told, in the 1970s, though not expertly, and it looks it and feels it. The windows are, to say the least airy. It sits on a major avenue that carries workers and patients to the Veterans Administration Hospital, Albany Medical Center, and St. Peter’s Medical Center so dirt can readily enter the flat through the breezy windows. This makes the Sisyphean task of cleaning even more Sisyphean It is hot in summer and cold in winter. Radiators. Little in the way of insulation.

Given that I am in the autumn of my life and want a little bit more of the creature comforts in life and am in need or more affordable housing (the place I live in is very reasonable but, as I said, has seen its better days and the landlord may sell it which will raise the rent to a point I may not be able to pay) I applied for and was accepted into Ohav Sholom, a subsidised housing estate in the far south west end of Albany in 2022. I was put on its waiting list. In March and April of 2023 I was informed that a flat awaited me. 

I went over to Ohav Sholom taking over my necessary forms—income, bank statements, etc.—and was shown a flat. It looked great. Recently remodelled. Modern. Central air. Central heat. An elderly friendly wash room and shower. Laundry facilities, which I don’t have now. It even looked like i could hold all of my books, DVDs, blu rays, and CDs. I accepted the invitation to move in in April as I didn’t want to move in bad weather and I needed to see how much moving would cost (an estimated $2000 dollars which I did have at the time). Then I was shown my flat, the third one offered me by management. It looked much tinier than the model apartment I was shown. 

It quickly became clear that I could not move in until I ridded myself of most of my books and many of my DVDs, blu rays, and CDs. I pulled out of the move. A few days later I received a letter from the manager of Ohav telling me that I need to write to her saying that I wished to remain on the waiting list. I emailed her informing her (I don’t recall her name though it began with an L) that I wanted to remain on the waiting list. A few weeks later she wrote asking me to reconsider my decision not to move in. I told her I couldn’t as I had to many material possessions and it would take me awhile to get rid of them and give them loving homes.

A few months later I wrote L again via Ohav’s online contact page asking her to keep me on the list and informing her that I planned to move in in 2025. Cut to August of 2024. I wrote the management of Ohav, which is run by the private Boston firm Beacon Rental Community via their online contact page. I learned several things. First, there was a new manager. Second, L had removed me from the wait list despite my telling her not to. Why? I don’t know. Was she angry that I backed out of moving in? Was I supposed to do a letter by snail mail rather than email and webmail? If so I was not informed of this.

Long absurd story short, I have to reapply to Ohav. I will do this but I will also contact the New York State Housing Office, the federal Housing and Urban Development Office, which subsidises Ohav, and any Albany office I can to inform them of the injustice that was done to me and see what my options are.

An so it goes…

EPILOGUE

After complaining about my treatment by Ohav and its parent company Beacon Rental Community, I received a missive via email telling me that the reason I was taken off the waiting list was because I turned down several apartments and because I did not move in. In actually I only turned down one flat. The manager of Ohav offered me three over the course of our discussions about me moving in only to take away two of those previously offered. Note that Jessica Butler, the property manager of Ohav for Beacon, who wrote me is now changing the terrain. I was told initially byVernal Burrell, the administrative assistant at Ohav, that I did not ask to remain on the waiting list. I, as I said, did respond to a letter L, the manager, wrote me asking me if I wanted to remain on the waiting list AFTER I decided not to move in saying yes I did want to remain on the waiting list Now, according to Butler, the reason I am not on the list of the saved is because I did not move in. Apparently for Ms. Butler the letter L sent AFTER I decided not to move in asking me if I wanted to remain on the wait list never was written and never sent to me. Corporations do like to manipulate evidence and dissemble to cover their arses don’t they?

Life as Crisis Management: The Amazon Truly is Skankizon Kiada

 

Sad to say, it was really easy to take one’s fingers and squeeze one’s nose in order to avoid the stench Amazon gave off and so try to wish away the foul smell that was Amazon in its early years. After all, it had a lot of product, it had a great search engine, and it was quick and easy to use. Today, however, one can’t even avoid the stench that is Skankizon with its awful search engine, its monopolistic practises, and its monarchical like practises even if one tries to do the fingers closing nose holes thing.

I learned this lesson once again when trying to return something I bought from Amazon recently. On the 13th of August 2024 I purchased the Charpentier/Christie/ Harmonia Mundi (ASIN: BOBXBCHZ8C) eight disc box set from Amazon (Order 113-1948095-0370632). As is so often the case with CDs purchased from Amazon—two out of three cases of CDs I receive from Skankizon arrived cracked and I have to replace them by buying jewel cases often from Amazon (what a racket)—the set arrived damaged. The clamshell cardboard box was smashed thanks to the poor packaging.

I, of course, immediately contacted Amazon customer service chat and explained the situation to them. I asked for a damage discount but they declined to offer one. When I told them I would need to return the item they gave me three options: one, they would send me a QS return code and I could transfer it to my phone and take it to Whole Foods, two, I could print the code and do a drop off of the item at an assigned drop off point, or three, I could pay $7.99 to ship the item back to Amazon. The last is a fascinating and telling offer since that would mean I had to pay for their mistake. Amazon apparently does like gouging the victim of Amazon incompetence. And let’s not forget that Amazon making you use your car and your petrol to return damaged or incorrect items is a from of gouging the victim too. 

I informed the customer service operative who was just, I assume, following imperial orders, that the QS code option was a problem since I did not have a cell phone connected to the internet and thus could not send the QS return code to my phone and take the item to Whole Foods nor did I have a printer so I could not print out the code and take it to a drop off point. Amazon thus essentially told me tough luck kid. We have a one size fits all policy and we follow these bureaucratic demands regardless of the specifics of the situation. Of course, it is also possible that Amazon’s customer service operatives in India did not pay attention to what I wrote and their responses were coloured by the we always follow imperial orders mentality that I am sure Amazon cultivates in its customer service personnel.

I immediately contacted the Attorney General’s office of New York state and filed a customer fraud complaint. The Attorney General’s office contacted Amazon who sent a response to the office that elided the fact that I did not have the capability to transfer a QS code to my cell phone nor did I have a printer.

I posted all this on the Amazon Facebook page. The Amazon Facebook page monitor gave me a link to contact someone at the corporation about the issue. It took me awhile to realise that this was general customer service, that they had no ideal about my case, that when I responded with the requested information no one operative was looking at my specific case and so I was getting the same request for information again and again and again and again. So much for bureaucratic efficiency and effectiveness.

Finally this morning I received an email from the Amazon representative who responded to the office of the NY AG. Praveen finally seemed to grasp that I did not have a cell phone that allowed me to take a QS code to Whole Foods and that I  did not have a printer. He or she offered me a $7.99 gift card. 

The gift card would be great if I had any interest in purchasing from Amazon again after this Sisyphean experience. I don’t. I said I would take the gift card if I could use it for Amazon marketplace purchases. I suspect that is a non-starter as Amazon wants you to buy Amazon with their gift cards. Oh and let’s not forget I still don’t have a printer. I advised Praveen to send the QS code via text mail to my phone, something that I requested for an item I needed to return to Amazon earlier and was bizarrely told by Amazon that they could not, for some reason beyond my ken,  do though it makes so much sense to me. 

Epilogue

On 22 August the New York Attorney General’s Economic Justice division sent me a letter informing me that despite their best efforts there was nothing they could do to help me. What this says about the relationship between megabusinesses and the government of New York I will leave up to your interpretation. What I will note is that New York lets Amazon get away with charging New Yorkers for returning something Amazon damaged if they don’t have a cell phone to which one can send a QS code or a printer that can print one out with. Now that is quite a racket.

After pestering customer service I was finally able to get Amazon personnel to recognise that I don’t have a cell phone that can upload an Amazon QS return code nor a printer that can print one out and thus cannot utilise their “free” return options, I was finally given another if more roundabout option for returning the item I received damaged from the corporation. They required me for the first time in my Amazon life to arrange a UPS pickup. Previously Amazon customer service clerks had done this for me in the era in which they began charging for UPS pickups. Amazon then issued a gift card to my account to cover the shipping charge, a gift card I can also use, apparently, for third party purchases. Since I never want to go through this experience again—I really tire of a life weighed down by seemingly endless rounds of crisis management—I don’t think I will ever be buying something from Amazon that may require a return again.