A specter is haunting America: the specter of narcissism. It shows up in the flood of recent books with titles like “Narcissists Exposed” and “The Narcissist Next Door,” in hand-wringing over Instagram-addicted millennials, in studies showing that American writers are using “I” and “me” more frequently than they used to, in the casual application of the term to everyone from Donald J. Trump and Barack Obama to Edward J. Snowden, Oprah Winfrey and Kanye West.
Kristin Dombek, in “The Selfishness of Others,” also warns of another, more subtle menace: the fear of narcissism.
It’s a fear, she argues, that can distort our relationships with others, freezing us in self-righteous victimhood. But Ms. Dombek isn’t just a Cassandra. She’s also here to help, with nearly 140 pages of sharply argued, knottily intelligent, darkly funny cultural criticism and, if that doesn’t work, the blunter instrument of a nine-point diagnostic test.
Do you worry you are surrounded by fake, empty people who are trying to manipulate you? Do you believe you should associate only with others with “high empathy scores”? Do you require “excessive reassurance” that other people, especially when encountered online, are real?
If so, you may have narciphobia.
Ms. Dombek, who describes herself as “born in the uncanny valley between the millennial generation and Generation X,” is the former advice columnist for the hip Brooklyn-based literary journal n+1, where she gamely responded to semi-ironic reader questions like “Is it cool to try hard now?”
In “The Selfishness of Others,” her first book, she stretches out, showing how a specialized clinical term metastasized into a sweeping description of our entire culture, and a weapon of intergenerational and romantic warfare.
Ms. Dombek doesn’t deny that pathological narcissism is real, and can be dangerous. But expanding the diagnosis from mass killers who “post on Facebook before they walk into schools and movie theaters with guns” to run-of-the-mill “bad boyfriends” and young people in general, she argues, blinds us to how our own craving for esteem and attention works.
“This story about how some people are,” she writes, “under the surface is also a story about the way that we all want.”
Any book, for its writer, “is its own asylum,” Ms. Dombek laments, “but a book about narcissism is like the padded cell inside the asylum.” Here, she bangs her head against psychoanalytic theory, reality television, Greek mythology, online self-help culture and social psychology survey methodology, among other subjects, until the reader sees often-illuminating stars.
One of the book’s most entertaining sections riffs on the dark continent of online self-help that Ms. Dombek calls “the narcisphere,” where victims of relationships with narcissists help one another parse “narc” behaviors like “love bombing,” “mirroring” and “doing a discard,” which sometimes come disguised as perfectly normal actions. (“My narc in-law removed the family pictures from the hallway, and replaced a living room chair with a piano,” one poster says. “I just can’t figure out why she would do this.”)
Ms. Dombek wanders virtual structures like the Web of Narcissism castle, complete with warnings from Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” — narcs, like vampires, “cannot die, but must go on age after age adding new victims and multiplying the evils of the world” — over the door.
She also checks in on the “manosphere,” as she calls the parallel universe of sites where “seduction strategies meet paleo diets,” and men trade advice on how to outmaneuver the kind of needy, manipulative women who are likely to label them narcissists. But it doesn’t, by her lights, stand a chance.
“If there’s one thing a girl with a bad boyfriend has,” she writes, “it’s the moral upper hand in the religion of mental health.”
Calling out narcissism, she notes, wasn’t always primarily a female sport. For Sigmund Freud, the archetypal narcissist was a woman, particularly a beautiful woman, locked in immature “self-contentment and inaccessibility.” Other psychologists extended his theories, giving rise to the common notion of the narcissist as wearing “a charming mask covering a cold calculator, a self empty of empathy and the capacity to love.”
The term went wide in the 1970s, when best-sellers like Tom Wolfe’s “The Me Generation” and, especially, Christopher Lasch’s “The Culture of Narcissism” transformed narcissism from an individual therapeutic problem into a cultural norm. For Lasch, the rising popularity of therapy and self-help — along with radical feminism, confessional writing, permissive parenting and the designated hitter rule — was itself implicated in the problem.
Today, pop psychology has given us a wealth of subtypes, including the Phallic Narcissist, the Corporate Narcissist, the Organizational Narcissist, the Medical Narcissist, and the Spiritual Narcissist. (Do you try to act generously, publicly align yourself with noble causes and “talk a lot about care and empathy”? You may be a Communal Narcissist.)
But amid the epidemic of narcissism talk, Ms. Dombek argues, we remain confused about just what narcissism is. Is it cover for an empty, insecure self? Or is it “exactly what it looks like”: excessive self-esteem, as the psychologist Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell — authors of “The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in an Age of Entitlement” (2007) — have argued?
Ms. Dombek’s own view echoes that of the philosopher René Girard, who argued that our tendency to see narcissism in parents and partners is an effort to reassure ourselves that if those we desire are less than ideally responsive to us it’s because they are sick, not because we are uninteresting.
“Only one person can be the center of another person’s world at any given time, and ideally, this would always be you,” Ms. Dombek writes, before slipping in the shiv: “This is where all the narcissistic romance websites invite you to be: in the center of the world, stuck in time, assessing the moral status of others, until love is gone.”
That may sound awfully judgmental. But Ms. Dombek, despite her efforts to keep the first-person pronoun at bay (“I don’t want you to find me self-absorbed,” she writes early on), is also offering an earnest recovery narrative of sorts.
Before the book ends, her bad-ish boyfriend — or “romantic affiliate,” as he prefers it — has morphed into a good boyfriend, or at least a partner no more self-preoccupied, she realizes, than she is. She breaks free not from him, but from the compulsion to obsess over whether he is a narcissist, clearing space to consider bigger questions, like the relationship between the cigarette butt she unthinkingly — a passing stranger might say narcissistically — flicks onto the sidewalk and impending climate catastrophe.
A stretch? Perhaps. But it’s worth pausing over one slyly double-edged item on Ms. Dombek’s narciphobia checklist. Are you “preoccupied with fantasies that the world is ending because of the selfishness of others”? Maybe we all are. And maybe sometimes the fantasy is real.
The strategy and tone that lay behind this week’s Republican convention in Cleveland, and that have lain behind Donald Trump’s campaign from its outset, reflect a strain that has existed in the Republican Party for nearly fifty years, and that will likely dominate the fall contest. That is, to play on the politics of fear, hatred, and race. In identifying himself as the candidate of angry white middle-class men, Trump took on both their economic and social grievances. It was thus logical that he’d declare, as he did on July 11, echoing Richard Nixon, “I am the candidate of law and order,” and that that theme would be continued in Cleveland. As the convention was opening on Monday, Paul Manafort, who is now more or less in charge of the campaign, said that Trump was modeling his campaign on Nixon’s.
Trump’s disturbing acceptance speech Thursday echoed the menacing cast of the whole convention: Americans have much to fear. If those discomfited by the violence of the addresses on Monday thought that, well, that was just convention-opening rhetoric leading up to a statesmanlike final night, they were in for a rude surprise. The speech was reminiscent of the one Trump made when he announced his candidacy a little over a year ago: illegal immigrants are “roaming free” on America’s streets and killing its citizens. (No mention was made of Obama’s controversial—among Democrats—stepped-up deportations.) Not for Trump the lofty address. Not for him “the lift of the driving dream” or “the shining city on a hill.” His red-faced, shouted speech—longer than any acceptance speech in modern history—packed with red meat, went down well enough in the large convention hall (though one could spot some stony faces), but how it was received by those not present is another matter.
The strategy behind the speech was puzzling: it seemed mostly aimed at the people already with him. Trump was the riverboat gambler who bet that this raging performance would convince enough Americans that he should be president. It was either extremely shrewd or a profound miscalculation. Caution isn’t one of Trump’s long suits—a trait that the public may find appealing or appalling. He isn’t inclined to do what the political professionals say he should, and he made no sign of having acquiesced in the widespread assumption that once he had the nomination in hand he would have to “pivot” and be “presidential.” Or perhaps, Trump, a revolutionary of sorts, thinks he can revolutionize the presidency itself.
Those who’ve been uneasy about Trump’s apparent authoritarian instincts were given no comfort from this speech. In Trump’s mind, it seems, there’s no Congress and no governing process. (L’etat c’est moi.) He presented himself as the vessel of the angry people—“I AM YOUR VOICE” (the only phrase in capital letters in the entire speech transcript). Of course he wasn’t suggesting he was the voice of minorities and the left-out. Providing few specific prescriptions for fixing the problems he defined—crime, immigration, unfair trade deals, etc.—he said he would solve all of them. “Of ISIS,” Trump said, “We’re going to defeat them fast.” As far as Syrian refugees are concerned, Trump shouted to the cheering audience, “We don’t want them in our country.”
As promised, “law and order” made several appearances; the phrase has carried a racial connotation since Nixon started using it in his 1968 presidential campaign. It signals black men causing trouble. Trump counted on events of the past six or so weeks to define the nation of today, though he focused much more on policemen murdered by black men than on black men murdered by police. Race was also implied in the phrase, used by Trump and earlier speakers, “school choice”: this meant white kids shouldn’t have to go to school in black neighborhoods. In talking about bringing back jobs, Trump dropped the names of important swing states: Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan. He also mentioned New York which, if it truly becomes a swing state (as Trump people keep indicating it will, perhaps to fake the Clinton campaign out), it would be a remarkable development.
Revealingly, Trump made a big thing of stating that he’d be truthful: “I will present the facts plainly and honestly…Here, at our convention, there will be no lies. We will honor the American people with the truth, and nothing else.” He then rattled off a series of misleading statements and statistics. He suggested that homicides and violence had increased dramatically, though violent crime is at a forty-year low. Though he hammered away at illegal immigration, there’s been no great influx in the last decade. He made an absurd assertion about the size of the increase of Syrian refugees and claimed that this country has no screening process for vetting them, though there is a rigorous one in place. He repeated his claim that “America is one of the highest-taxed nations in the world,” though Americans are taxed at among the lowest levels of any major country. In Trump’s account, there had been no recession and no Iraq war. Like the rest of the convention he aimed an unusual amount of attacks against Hillary Clinton, giving the flavor of what’s likely to come.
Well before the convention rolled around, Trump had lifted many of the traditional political restraints on expressions of intolerance. He’d conveniently rejected “political correctness.” He and congressional Republicans had already gone to town denouncing the FBI director’s decision in early July not to recommend prosecution of Clinton for her use of a private email server as secretary of state; at the time, Trump said, “Hillary Clinton has got to go to jail.” (No former government official has been imprisoned merely for misuse of classified information.)
The convention’s dark first night culminated in the berserk-looking Rudolph Giuliani, who in recent weeks had been stirring up already heightened racial tensions over the murders of black men and mostly white policemen, bellowing to the large hall that people should be very afraid. Giuliani cried, “The vast majority of Americans today do not feel safe.” He went on, “They fear for their children. They fear for themselves. They fear for our police officers, who are being targeted with a target on their back.” In the setting of the Monday night speeches, and given Trump’s previous comments, the crowd’s extraordinary cry of “Lock her up!” seemed almost natural.
It wouldn’t have been impossible for Trump’s representatives to try to tamp down what the Republican strategist Steve Schmidt called behavior symptomatic of a “banana republic.” Convention managers send messages from a control room to whips on the floor directing the chants. If they didn’t encourage “Lock her up,” they did nothing to stop it. As the week wore on, the theme that the opposition candidate should be imprisoned—the radicalization of partisanship—became ingrained, with speaker after speaker encouraging mob anger. (Could the guillotine be far behind? It was no surprise that the co-chair of Trump’s veterans outreach and a New Hampshire delegate said that Hillary Clinton should be “put in the firing line and shot for treason,” which led to a Secret Service investigation.) Throughout his campaign, Trump hasn’t shown concern about the negative if not dangerous emotions he has set loose with his talk, his tweets, or his use of symbols (such as the Star of David).
Paul Manafort’s thuggishness defined much of what happened in Cleveland. His unprovoked attack on Ohio Governor John Kasich, whom he described on the morning of the opening day of the convention as “embarrassing his party,” and then the unnecessarily protracted mess over Melania Trump’s speech, were further indications of the thinness and ineptitude of the Trump campaign. Manafort had been a partner of the Republican flame thrower Lee Atwater (George H.W. Bush’s political consigliere), and the deliberately flamboyant Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser who, though he and Trump had a falling out in 2015, still had Trump’s ear. Characteristically, instead of owning up to the plagiarism in Melania’s speech, Manafort first denied its existence and then went on the offensive, preposterously blaming the controversy on the Democratic nominee. On no basis at all, he called it “an example of when a woman threatens Hillary Clinton, how she seeks out to demean her and take her down.”
It was no surprise that the thug-in-chief of convention speakers was New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. The Trump campaign of course knew that Christie would “prosecute” Clinton, and Christie was eager to please them. His litany of “charges,” with which he spurred the audience into shouts of “Guilty!”—interspersed with “Lock her up!”—was riddled with lies that were echoed by other speakers. Contrary to what Christie implied, Clinton didn’t negotiate the Iran nuclear deal—a good agreement that’s become the Republicans’ next Obamacare. (In his acceptance speech, Trump said that the deal had yielded the US “absolutely nothing.” That would be true if one overlooks that it will stave off Iran’s development of nuclear weapons for at least ten years. Trump even said in the speech, “Iran is on the path to nuclear weapons.”) But it didn’t matter what Christie said, or whether it made sense—for example he accused Clinton of “putting big government spending financed by the Chinese [again] ahead of good paying jobs for middle class Americans.” The fact is that stimulus spending could have created jobs (had Republicans not fought it). Though Obama didn’t recognize Cuba until well into his second term, years after Clinton had left the State Department, Christie described her as “a coddler of the brutal Castro brothers.”
Christie has allowed himself to become a somewhat comic figure, slavish in attaching his ambitions to Trump. Christie’s running out of options in New Jersey, where he’s in political (and perhaps legal) trouble. After he learned that he’d be passed over for joining the Republican ticket he called and begged to be reconsidered. Christie’s now widely thought likely to be named Attorney General should Trump win. Consider that.
The testimonies given by Trump’s children about their father came across as real, and the family is obviously close. But Trump can be a great father and also a cut-throat and exploitative businessman with a history of questionable deals and four bankruptcies. The direct involvement in the campaign of his three eldest children, Don Jr., Ivanka, and Eric, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is most unusual. If their advice has on occasion been wise—such as telling Trump to get rid of the coruscating Corey Lewandowski—it hasn’t made life easier for Manafort, though at least until now they’ve largely been his allies. The lines of authority—well, there seem to be no lines of authority.
Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Paul Manafort, New York, April 19, 2016
The Trump children’s influence on his choice of a running mate was extraordinary—and while Mike Pence may well have been the best option under the circumstances, Melania Trump was known to be angry at the pressure on her husband to pick someone he wasn’t comfortable with. Pence, is the conventional, traditional Republican who Trump defiantly isn’t. Trump’s last-minute bout of indecision was mixed with his fury that his choice of Pence, supposedly settled, had been leaked. Does this tell us anything about how Trump would make decisions in the Oval Office? When I say “under the circumstances” I’m referring to the alternatives.
Only in the Trump campaign’s parallel universe would Newt Gingrich be considered vice-presidential material. To describe Gingrich as erratic is to be euphemistic to a fault. I spent a lot of time around Gingrich when he became House Speaker after waging an intra-party rebellion and taking over in 1994, and while I found him fascinating and canny, his stratospheric ideas took him to his own Neverland. His manic chase of Bill Clinton into an impeachment over his sexual misbehavior in the White House ultimately hurt his own party and got him ejected from the speakership. (At the time he was having an affair of his own, though he’s now a settled married man.) Gingrich’s pattern of thinking was displayed when, after the murderous truck tragedy in Nice, he called for the deportation of believers in Sharia law and for making an Internet search for Sharia law a felony, punishable by jail time.
Though Mike Pence is a man of no great distinction or brilliance, he’s equipped with the likable qualities that make one popular among House colleagues. Born into an Irish-Catholic Democratic, Kennedy-worshipping family, over time he became an evangelical Christian and Tea Party adherent. But his lack of rough edges has softened the meanness of his message. He worked his way into the House Republican leadership, ending up in the number three position, chairman of the Republican conference; along the way, he challenged John Boehner to be Republican leader but lost badly. After serving six terms in the House he ran for governor of Indiana in 2012 and won.
As governor Pence has backed an anti-abortion bill so strict that it’s now being challenged in court. Having trapped himself in the anti-gay marriage movement that would legalize denial of services to same-sex couples, under pressure from businesses in Indiana he backed down to some extent, incurring the enmity of die-hards on the matter. In interviews at the time, Pence looked confused. At one point he had considered running for the presidency himself. Now he, too, was in danger of failing to get reelected. As an agent of party unity, a link to the traditional Republican Party (which put his previous views much at odds with Trump’s, but Pence was quickly adjusting), Pence was a good choice, and that was reportedly one of the reasons Manafort and Trump’s children urged his selection.
The “rollout” of the announcement of Pence was awkward throughout, in part because of the incompetence of Trump’s staff, in part because Trump clearly lacked enthusiasm for his choice. The two men’s joint interview on 60 Minutesthe weekend the choice was announced was painfully awkward, given the differences in their positions. That Pence had voted for the Iraq war, which Trump falsely claims he opposed from the outset, was forgiven by Trump, though he said Clinton’s vote wouldn’t be. Trump, who in most of their joint appearances kept scurrying off the stage after joining Pence there, doesn’t seem to welcome co-stars; among the finalists for his running mate, he seems to have chosen the one least likely to compete with him for attention. (After his acceptance speech Thursday, Trump dispensed with the tradition of the two nominees raising clasped hands.)
Pence’s acceptance speech on Wednesday night was so normal, such a typical Republican convention address, that it came as a relief after all the talk about threats and violence. But even Pence’s competent performance was overshadowed by Ted Cruz’s refusal to endorse Trump—the latest display of the fact that he can’t resist doing something that makes more people dislike him. The Trump campaign, such as it is, knew that Cruz wasn’t going to endorse him and didn’t have to give him such a prime spot in the program. But Trump decided to let Cruz hang himself in his pursuit of the presidency in 2020—though Trump made a point of appearing in the hall just at the moment Cruz urged people to “vote your conscience”—the motto of the Never Trump movement. And so Cruz secured his own place in convention history.
While attention should have been kept on the convention, Trump gave another interview on foreign policy to The New York Times, this time saying that he wouldn’t necessarily come to the aid of a NATO nation attacked by Russia, and upending other longstanding bipartisan foreign policies. Either Trump is playing a game of chess to get other NATO members to up their contributions to the alliance or this was another example of his cluelessness about international affairs. Trump has a strange affinity for Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where he has business interests. His people even got a platform proposal dropped that would have advocated sending arms to Ukraine.
A number of Republican leaders, deliberately or not, colluded in the nomination of a man who appeals to everything dark in our society, a man of demagogic talents, ignorant of so much that matters in governing in this country, and of questionable soundness. A lot of people in Cleveland managed to contort themselves into supporting Trump—several said they supported “the party’s nominee,” and the Republicans’ visceral hatred of Hillary Clinton was a unifying principle. Many observers maintain that Cruz had inadvertently helped Trump unite the party. But this was as unenthusiastic a convention as I’ve observed, despite all the cheering for Trump on Thursday night. (A convention crowd wants to be roused by the candidate’s acceptance speech.)
After four nights of opportunities, the Trump campaign and the Republican Party had done almost nothing to expand its following beyond the base: token Hispanics and blacks were given minor roles in the program—fewer blacks were at this Republican convention than there’ve been in a long time—but in his acceptance speech Trump didn’t bother with outreach to groups he’s assumed to particularly need. He didn’t talk about Hispanics or women (though in her introduction of her father, Ivanka Trump said he gave the women who worked for him equal pay, and pledged that he would do the same as president). He did express support for gays, which was at odds with the convention platform’s offering assistance to parents for “conversion therapy.”
The outsider, the populist plutocrat, has captured the party, at least for now. If he loses in November, some amount of Trumpism will likely survive, but as the delegates dispersed, the party remains deeply divided on such crucial issues as trade, immigration, and foreign policy. While some Democrats are becoming nervous about the tight polls in certain battleground states, the Republicans left Cleveland with an unusual number assuming—or hoping—that their nominee will lose.
Perdona si te hago llorar perdona si te hago sufrir pero es que no esta en mis manos pero es que no esta en mis manos me he enamorado, me he enamorado me enamore Perdona si te causo dolor perdona si te digo adiós como decirle que te amo como decirle que te amo si me ha preguntado yo le dije que no yo le dije que no
Soy honesto con ella y contigo a ella la quiero y a ti te he olvidado si tu quieres seremos amigos yo te ayudo a olvidar el pasado no te aferres, ya no te aferres a un imposible, ya no te hagas ni me hagas más daño, ya no
Tu bien sabes que no fue mi culpa tu te fuiste sin decirme nada y a pesar que llore como nunca ya no seguías de mi enamorada luego te fuiste y que regresabas no me dijiste y sin más nada Por qué no sé pero fue Así Así fue
Te brinde la mejor de las suertes yo me propuse no hablarte y no verte y hoy que has vuelto ya ves solo hay nada ya no debo, no puedo quererte ya no te amo me he enamorado de un ser divino de un buen amor que me enseño a olvidar y a perdonar
El perfume de su almohada tu lo conoces bien Y la humedad de sus sábanas blancas también Que suerte la tuya que puedes tenerlo a tus pies Sintiendo en tu boca sus besos que saben a miel Mirando como le hablas de amor el tiempo no se detiene Y nada tengo yo que esperar aunque me quede en el aire
Quien como tú Que día a día puedes tenerle Quien como tú Que solo entre tus brazos se duerme Quien como tú
Quien como tú Que tarde, tarde esperas que llegue Quien como tú Que con ternura curas sus fiebres Quien como tú
Esas noches de locura tú las disfrutas bien Y entre sus brazos las horas no pasan lo se Mirando como le hablas de amor el tiempo no se detiene Y nada tengo yo que esperar aunque me quede en el aire
Quien como tú Que día a día puedes tenerle Quien como tú Que solo entre tus brazos se duerme Quien como tú
Quien como tú Que día a día puedes tenerle Quien como tú Que solo entre tus brazos se duerme Quien como tú
Quien como tú Que tarde, tarde esperas que llegue Quien como tú Que con ternura curas sus fiebres Quien como tú
CLEVELAND — It was Donald J. Trump’s best chance to escape his own caricature.
He did not.
After 40 years in the public eye, Mr. Trump decided on Thursday night that he was not interested in revealing himself to America with disarming tales of his upbringing, hard-earned lessons from his tumultuous career or the inner struggles masked by his outward pomposity.
In the most consequential speech of his life, delivered 401 days into his improbable run for the White House, Mr. Trump sounded much like the man who had started it with an escalator ride in the lobby of Trump Tower: He conjured up chaos and promised overnight solutions.
To an electorate that remains anxious about his demeanor, his honesty and his character, Mr. Trump offered no acknowledgment, no rebuttal, no explanation.
It was a speech that might be remembered, ultimately, as much for what it lacked as for what it contained — and for the message those absences seemed to convey: He is content with the angry voters he has won, who thunderously cheered him on here, and indifferent about wooing those he has not.
For those grasping for new signs of humility, generosity and depth, Mr. Trump offered the thinnest of reeds.
Inside the Quicken Loans Arena, a thicket of American flags behind him, he portrayed himself, over and over, as an almost messianic figure prepared to rescue the country from the ills of urban crime, illegal immigration and global terrorism.
“I alone,” he said, “can fix it.”
But Mr. Trump made no real case for his qualifications to lead the world’s largest economy and strongest military. He is, he said, a very successful man who knows how to make it all better.
Campaign speechwriters from both parties were stupefied.
“It’s a lost opportunity,” said Matt Latimer, who wrote speeches for President George W. Bush. He said he had expected Mr. Trump to plumb his personal life and career for the kind of anecdotes that would turn him, in the eyes of his doubters, from a cartoon into a flesh-and-blood human being.
“A little humanity and self-reflection,” Mr. Latimer said, “is usually very powerful in a speech.”
After reading the speech, Paul Begala, a longtime Democratic strategist and speechwriter, called the missing personal details “an enormous mistake.”
“The American people,” he said, “need to know their president’s mythic arc.”
But Mr. Trump, even at 70, seems constitutionally incapable of, or stubbornly averse to, capturing and conveying the complexities of his existence.
At every turn on Thursday night, he avoided turning a colorful and remarkable biography — populated by a volcanic father, a self-destructive brother, his own dizzying career highs and mortifying lows — into vivid, poignant storytelling.
His childhood? He learned “to respect the dignity of work,” he said.
His parents? His father liked the company of the carpenters and electricians he employed. His mother was a “great judge of character.”
His storied career? “I have had a truly great life in business,” he said. And that was that.
His wife, Melania? “Lucky to have at my side,” he said.
The most powerful convention speeches have long relied on verbal Polaroids from the past, intimate glimpses into an unseen and unknowable personal journey.
In 2012, Mitt Romney defied his reputation for stultifying oratory by extolling the romantic bond between his parents, recalling the rose his father, George, left on the pillow every morning for his wife, Lenore.
“That’s how she found out what happened on the day my father died,” Mr. Romney recalled. “She went looking for him, because that morning, there was no rose.”
The elder George Bush undertook an earnest examination of his best-known vulnerabilities, confronting his reputation for out-of-touch elitism and a lack of charisma and casting them as strengths.
“I am a quiet man,” he said in 1988, “but I hear the quiet people others don’t.”
Richard M. Nixon pleaded with voters who knew him as a bitter political outcast in 1968 to think of him instead as the boy who had grown up poor on a lemon ranch and dreamed “of faraway places where he’d like to go.”
Mr. Trump, aides said, took inspiration from that famous Nixon speech. But he left out Nixon’s uplifting message and sentimental tone, said David Gergen, an adviser to four presidents, including three Republicans.
“Trump puts forward the same iron fist as Nixon,” Mr. Gergen said after the speech, “but Nixon clothed his in a velvet glove.”
“Trump,” he said, “threw away the glove.”
Instead, Mr. Trump projected unbending self-confidence, authority and strength. He lacerated his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, as thoroughly untrustworthy and unethical.
He did not present an entirely unfeeling figure: He promised to give a voice to laid-off factory workers, “the forgotten men and women of our country.”
And he offered compassion for the parents of people killed by undocumented immigrants — and outrage on their behalf.
“These families have no special interests to represent them,” he said. “There are no demonstrators to protest on their behalf. My opponent will never meet with them, or share in their pain.”
“These wounded American families have been alone,” he added. “But they are alone no longer.”
He had enlisted his children to make him three-dimensional, a task they carried out with just a handful of personal memories: of the encouraging notes he scribbled across their report cards, and of playing at the foot of his desk with Legos or Erector Sets while their father worked in concrete and steel.
Of course, turning a polarizing candidate into a likable leader is not Mrs. Clinton’s talent, either. For much of the past two years, she has emerged as an awkward and reluctant storyteller of her life, more comfortable with 10-point plans than with providing fresh glimpses into her formative years or candid accounts of her professional struggles.
But Mrs. Clinton, whose convention next week will extensively mine her biography, has started to undertake the humbling repair work that many Republicans had hoped Mr. Trump would begin on Thursday.
She has admitted some mistakes, conceded that many Americans do not trust her, and acknowledged her role in the partisan warfare that has alienated many voters.
On Thursday night, Mr. Trump reveled in that warfare, made no concessions and admitted no mistakes.
His America, he said, would be “bigger, and better and stronger than ever before.”
Re “Professors, Stop Opining About Trump” (Sunday Review, July 17):
Historians Against Trump appreciates the attention to our open letter, but wishes that it came from a less predictable critic. Stanley Fish repeats all the usual barbs aimed at the politically involved academic.
At a moment when thinkers across the political spectrum invoke the specter of fascism in describing Donald Trump’s candidacy, Mr. Fish’s bad-faith reading of our letter comes across as astonishingly out of touch.
Contrary to what Mr. Fish writes, we do not believe that as historians we possess a special political wisdom. But no less than other workers, we have a pretty good sense of when our profession is under attack. Anti-intellectual demagogues have not historically been kind to the academy or the free exchange of ideas.
It is odd that Mr. Fish should take issue with professionals speaking out in defense of their fields. This election season has mobilized not just academics but also groups of therapists, writers, clergy, tech leaders and others to speak out against the threats posed by Mr. Trump’s candidacy to civil society institutions.
It is too bad that Mr. Fish’s fixation on small-bore campus politics keeps him from appreciating what is at stake outside the ivory tower.
DAVID SCHLITT
Pittsburgh
The writer is a member of the Historians Against Trump Organizing Committee. The letter was also signed by the three other members of the committee.
To the Editor:
Stanley Fish’s harangue against Historians Against Trump’s open letter, which I signed, charges us with hubris and denies our qualifications for warning against potential dangers we see in the coming election.
As a historian of Germany, I found our letter much too mild. Historians are responsible for the collective memory of peoples, and just like individuals with memories of past trauma, we are obliged to shout “stop!” when we see familiar signs of coming disaster.
RENATE BRIDENTHAL
New York
The writer is emerita professor of history at Brooklyn College, CUNY.
Like most economists, I don’t usually have much to say about stocks. Stocks are even more susceptible than other markets to popular delusions and the madness of crowds, and stock prices generally have a lot less to do with the state of the economy or its future prospects than many people believe. As the economist Paul Samuelson put it, “Wall Street indexes predicted nine out of the last five recessions.”
Still, we shouldn’t completely ignore stock prices. The fact that the major averages have lately been hitting new highs — the Dow has risen 177 percent from its low point in March 2009 — is newsworthy and noteworthy. What are those Wall Street indexes telling us?
The answer, I’d suggest, isn’t entirely positive. In fact, in some ways the stock market’s gains reflect economic weaknesses, not strengths. And understanding how that works may help us make sense of the troubling state our economy is in.
O.K., let’s start with the myth Samuelson was debunking, the claim that stock prices are the measure of the economy as a whole. That myth used to be popular on the political right, with prominent conservative economists publishing articles with titles like “Obama’s Radicalism Is Killing the Dow.”
Strange to say, however, we began hearing that line a lot less once stock prices turned around and began their huge surge — which started just six weeks after President Obama was inaugurated. (But polling suggests that a majority of self-identified Republicans still haven’t noticed that surge, and believe that stocks have gone down in the Obama era.)
The truth, in any case, is that there are three big points of slippage between stock prices and the success of the economy in general. First, stock prices reflect profits, not overall incomes. Second, they also reflect the availability of other investment opportunities — or the lack thereof. Finally, the relationship between stock prices and real investment that expands the economy’s capacity has gotten very tenuous.
On the first point: We measure the economy’s success by the extent to which it generates rising incomes for the population. But stocks don’t reflect incomes in general; they only reflect the part of income that shows up as profits.
This wouldn’t matter if the share of profits in overall income were stable; but it isn’t. The share of profits in national income fluctuates, but it has been a lot higher in recent years than it was during the great stock surge of the late 1990s — that is, we’ve had a profits boom without a comparably large economic boom, making the relationship between profits and prosperity weak at best. We are not, in fact, partying like it’s 1999.
On the second point: When investors buy stocks, they’re buying a share of future profits. What that’s worth to them depends on what other options they have for converting money today into income tomorrow. And these days those options are pretty poor, with interest rates on long-term government bonds not only very low by historical standards but zero or negative once you adjust for inflation. So investors are willing to pay a lot for future income, hence high stock prices for any given level of profits.
But why are long-term interest rates so low? As I argued in my last column, the answer is basically weakness in investment spending, despite low short-term interest rates, which suggests that those rates will have to stay low for a long time.
This may seem, however, to present a paradox. If the private sector doesn’t see itself as having a lot of good investment opportunities, how can profits be so high? The answer, I’d suggest, is that these days profits often seem to bear little relationship to investment in new capacity. Instead, profits come from some kind of market power — brand position, the advantages of an established network, or good old-fashioned monopoly. And companies making profits from such power can simultaneously have high stock prices and little reason to spend.
Consider the fact that the three most valuable companies in America are Apple, Google and Microsoft. None of the three spends large sums on bricks and mortar. In fact, all three are sitting on huge reserves of cash. When interest rates go down, they don’t have much incentive to spend more on expanding their businesses; they just keep raking in earnings, and the public becomes willing to pay more for a piece of those earnings.
In other words, while record stock prices do put the lie to claims that the Obama administration has been anti-business, they’re not evidence of a healthy economy. If anything, they’re a sign of an economy with too few opportunities for productive investment and too much monopoly power.
So when you read headlines about stock prices, remember: What’s good for the Dow isn’t necessarily good for America, or vice versa.
Read my blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, and follow me on Twitter, @PaulKrugman.
This column has argued for a while now that there is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy. At least a one-party autocracy can order things to get done.
A one-party democracy — that is, a two-party system where only one party is interested in governing and the other is in constant blocking mode, which has characterized America in recent years — is much worse. It can’t do anything big, hard or important.
We can survive a few years of such deadlock in Washington, but we sure can’t take another four or eight years without real decay setting in, and that explains what I’m rooting for in this fall’s elections: I hope Hillary Clinton wins all 50 states and the Democrats take the presidency, the House, the Senate and, effectively, the Supreme Court.
That is the best thing that could happen to America, at least for the next two years — that Donald Trump is not just defeated, but is crushed at the polls. That would have multiple advantages for our country.
First, if Clinton wins a sweeping victory, we will have a chance (depending on the size of a Democratic majority in the Senate) to pass common-sense gun laws. That would mean restoring the Assault Weapons Ban, which was enacted as part of the 1994 federal crime bill but expired after 10 years, and making it illegal for anyone on the terrorist watch list to buy a gun.
I don’t want to touch any citizen’s Second Amendment rights, but the notion that we can’t restrict military weapons that are increasingly being used in mass murders defies common sense — yet it can’t be fixed as long as today’s G.O.P. controls any branch of government.
If Clinton wins a sweeping victory, we can borrow $100 billion at close to zero interest for a national infrastructure rebuild to deal with some of the nation’s shameful deferred maintenance of roads, bridges, airports and rails and its inadequate bandwidth, and create more blue-collar jobs that would stimulate growth.
If Clinton wins a sweeping victory, we will have a chance to put in place a revenue-neutral carbon tax that would stimulate more clean energy production and allow us to reduce both corporate taxes and personal income taxes, which would also help spur growth.
If Clinton wins a sweeping victory, we can fix whatever needs fixing with Obamacare, without having to junk the whole thing. Right now we have the worst of all worlds: The G.O.P. will not participate in any improvements to Obamacare nor has it offered a credible alternative.
At the same time, if Clinton crushes Trump in November, the message will be sent by the American people that the game he played to become the Republican nominee — through mainstreaming bigotry; name-calling; insulting women, the handicapped, Latinos and Muslims; retweeting posts by hate groups; ignorance of the Constitution; and a willingness to lie and make stuff up with an ease and regularity never seen before at the presidential campaign level — should never be tried by anyone again. The voters’ message, “Go away,” would be deafening.
Finally, if Trump presides over a devastating Republican defeat across all branches of government, the G.O.P. will be forced to do what it has needed to do for a long time: take a time out in the corner. In that corner Republicans could pull out a blank sheet of paper and on one side define the biggest forces shaping the world today — and the challenges and opportunities they pose to America — and on the other side define conservative, market-based policies to address them.
Our country needs a healthy center-right party that can compete with a healthy center-left party. Right now, the G.O.P. is not a healthy center-right party. It is a mishmash of religious conservatives; angry white males who fear they are becoming a minority in their own country and hate trade; gun-control opponents; pro-lifers; anti-regulation and free-market small-business owners; and pro- and anti-free trade entrepreneurs.
The party was once held together by the Cold War. But as that faded away it has been held together only by renting itself out to whoever could energize its base and keep it in power — Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, the Tea Party, the National Rifle Association. But at its core there was no real common denominator, no take on the world, no real conservative framework.
The party grew into a messy, untended garden, and Donald Trump was like an invasive species that finally just took over the whole thing.
Party leaders can all still call themselves Republicans. They can even hold a convention with a lot of G.O.P. elephant balloons. But the truth is, the party’s over. Thoughtful Republicans have started to admit that. John Boehner gave up being speaker of the House because he knew that his caucus had become a madhouse, incapable of governing.
A Clinton sweep in November would force more Republicans to start rebuilding a center-right party ready to govern and compromise. And a Clinton sweep would also mean Hillary could govern from the place where her true political soul resides — the center-left, not the far left.
I make no predictions about who will win in November. But I sure know what I’m praying for — and why.
I invite you to follow me on Twitter (@tomfriedman).
For a nation heartsick over the killings of black men by police officers in Louisiana and Minnesota, and the ambush murders of officers by a gunman in Dallas, here comes Rudolph Giuliani, bringing his trademark brew of poisonous disinformation to the discussion.
In his view, the problem is black gangs, murderous black children, the refusal of black protesters to look in the mirror at their “racist” selves, and black parents’ failure to teach their children to respect the police.
“What we’ve got to hear from the black community,” said Mr. Giuliani, in a Sunday morning talk-show appearance that seemed to double as a lecture to black America, “is how and what they are doing among themselves about the crime problem in the black community.” He added, “We wonder, do black lives matter, or only the very few black lives that are killed by white policemen?”
Here’s a better question: How, we wonder, will the country ever get beyond its stunted discourse about racialized violence when people like Mr. Giuliani continue to try to change the subject? Those who remember Mr. Giuliani as the hectoring mayor of New York know what he has to offer any conversation on race and violence — not a lot. In case you’re unconvinced, here is what Mr. Giuliani on Sunday said he would tell a young son, if he were black: “Be very careful of those kids in the neighborhood and don’t get involved with them because, son, there’s a 99 percent chance they’re going to kill you, not the police.”
Mr. Giuliani’s garbled, fictional statistic echoes a common right-wing talking point about the prevalence of “black on black” violence in America. Homicide data do show that black victims are most often killed by black assailants. (They also reveal that whites tend to be killed by whites.) This observation does not speak to the matter of racist policing and police brutality. Killings of the police have, mercifully, been on the decline during the Obama presidency. But unwarranted shootings by police officers remain a persistent problem, ignored for generations, exploding only now into the wider public consciousness because of bystander videos that reveal the blood-red truth.
Unnerved by black anger, Americans like Mr. Giuliani cling to false equivalencies. They have, for example, defamed the Black Lives Matter movement as a “war on cops.” (Tell that to the protesters in Dallas who smiled for photos with officers who were protecting their march.)
The debate is full of such untruths and misdirections. There is the colossal Texas lie, the one that says a “good guy with a gun” can always stop a bad guy with a gun (in Dallas, where some marchers and bystanders were armed, it took a bomb). There is Mr. Giuliani’s ludicrous suggestion that black people don’t know they need to be careful around cops, or somehow are complicit in their brutalizing. Alton Sterling, in Baton Rouge, and Philando Castile, in a St. Paul suburb, were posing no threat when they were shot. (Far from being ignorant of the ways of the police, fearful black parents long ago learned to impart the advice that Mr. Castile’s mother, Valerie Castile, said she gave her son: “If you get stopped by the police, comply. Comply, comply, comply.”) Eric Garner, on Staten Island, was unarmed and outnumbered by the officers who swarmed and smothered him.
In 1999, when Mr. Giuliani was New York’s tough-on-crime mayor, Amadou Diallo reached for his wallet and was cut down in a hail of police bullets. Patrick Dorismond was minding his own business on a Manhattan street in 2000 when Mr. Giuliani’s undercover officers confronted him and shot him dead. In one of the disgraceful acts of his or any mayoralty, Mr. Giuliani smeared the victim’s reputation and released part of his juvenile police record, as if to suggest that he deserved to be murdered.
We can only hope that in the heat and anger of this wretched summer, Americans’ impulse to pull together is stronger than the divisiveness of race-baiting moralists. We hope, too, that the violence calls further attention to the tragedy of hypersegregated Chicago, whose South and West Sides are beset by gangs and drugs and generations of isolation and joblessness, and where the police have long had the power to harass and humiliate. But the victims of Chicago’s agonies have certainly done their part to try to end them. For years, black Chicagoans have denounced the violence, marched in the streets, pleaded with the authorities for help. Their struggle, like the one that raised the national alarm about unjust policing, deserves to be heard and truthfully confronted.
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DALLAS — President Obama said on Tuesday that the nation mourned with Dallas for five police officers gunned down by a black Army veteran, but he implored Americans not to give in to despair or the fear that “the center might not hold.”
“I’m here to insist that we are not as divided as we seem,” Mr. Obama said at a memorial service for the officers in Dallas, where he quoted Scripture, alluded to Yeats and at times expressed a sense of powerlessness to stop the racial violence that has marked his presidency. But Mr. Obama also spoke hard truths to both sides.
Addressing a crowd of 2,000 at a concert hall, the president chided the police for not understanding what he called the legitimate grievances of African-Americans, who he said were victims of systemic racial bias.
“We cannot simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as troublemakers or paranoid,” Mr. Obama said to applause. “We can’t simply dismiss it as a symptom of political correctness or reverse racism. To have your experience denied like that, dismissed by those in authority, dismissed perhaps even by your white friends and co-workers and fellow church members again and again and again — it hurts.”
But the president also turned to the protesters of the Black Lives Matter movement and said they were too quick to condemn the police. “Protesters, you know it,” Mr. Obama said. “You know how dangerous some of the communities where these police officers serve are, and you pretend as if there’s no context. These things we know to be true.”
It was the poignant speech of a man near the end of his patience about a scourge of violence that he said his own words had not been enough to stop. Mr. Obama spoke after a week in which the police killed two black men, in Minnesota and Louisiana, and Micah Johnson, the Army veteran, killed the five officers in Dallas.
“I’ve spoken at too many memorials during the course of this presidency,” Mr. Obama said. “I’ve hugged too many families. I’ve seen how inadequate words can be in bringing about lasting change. I’ve seen how inadequate my own words have been.”
He acknowledged that the Dallas killings — “an act not just of demented violence but of racial hatred” — had exposed a “fault line” in American democracy. He said he understood if Americans questioned whether the racial divide would ever be bridged.
“It’s as if the deepest fault lines of our democracy have suddenly been exposed, perhaps even widened,” Mr. Obama said. “And although we know that such divisions are not new, though they have surely been worse in even the recent past, that offers us little comfort.”
Americans, he said, “can turn on the TV or surf the internet, and we can watch positions harden and lines drawn, and people retreat to their respective corners, and politicians calculate how to grab attention or avoid the fallout. We see all this, and it’s hard not to think sometimes that the center won’t hold and that things might get worse.”
But Mr. Obama insisted on holding out hope.
“Dallas, I’m here to say we must reject such despair,” Mr. Obama said, adding that he knew that because of “what I’ve experienced in my own life, what I’ve seen of this country and its people — their goodness and decency — as president of the United States.”
He cited both the Dallas police and protesters as part of that decency. “When the bullets started flying, the men and women of the Dallas police, they did not flinch and they did not react recklessly,” Mr. Obama said. “They showed incredible restraint. Helped in some cases by protesters, they evacuated the injured, isolated the shooter and saved more lives than we will ever know. We mourn fewer people today because of your brave actions. ‘Everyone was helping each other,’ one witness said. ‘It wasn’t about black or white. Everyone was picking each other up and moving them away.’”
Mr. Obama concluded: “See, that’s the America I know.”
A row of police officers behind Mr. Obama in the concert hall did not clap when Mr. Obama spoke of racial bias in the criminal justice system, saying that “when all this takes place more than 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we cannot simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as troublemakers or paranoid.”
But when Mr. Obama added, “We ask the police to do too much, and we ask too little of ourselves,” the officers behind him applauded.
Law enforcement officials who attended the service broadly welcomed Mr. Obama’s remarks.
“To me, this is one of his best speeches I’ve ever heard,” said Chief Warren Asmus of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, who saw the speech as a milestone in the acrimonious national debate about policing and race.
“He started to build that bridge that I think hasn’t been built for a long time,” Mr. Asmus said. “From what I heard today, I see it as a turning point.”
But Chief Terrence M. Cunningham of the Wellesley, Mass., police said that while he liked much of Mr. Obama’s speech, he was concerned about the president’s discussion of the shootings by the police in Louisiana and Minnesota, which remain under investigation.
“It’s almost like he’s put his thumb on the scale a little bit,” he said. “Let’s let the facts come in.”
Some protesters responded positively to Mr. Obama’s remarks.
“I liked his speech,” said Dominique Alexander, the founder of Next Generation Action Network, an activist group in Dallas that organized the protest the night of the shooting. The president, he said, “did a good job” in a situation where “both sides are mourning, both sides are hurting.”
Many conservatives were angry about a reference Mr. Obama made in his remarks to gun control, when he said that “we flood communities with so many guns that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book.”
Three others spoke at the memorial, including former President George W. Bush, a Dallas resident who said his city was not prepared for the evil visited upon it on Thursday, nor could it have been. “Today the nation grieves, but those of us who love Dallas and call it home have had five deaths in the family,” Mr. Bush said. He said the forces pulling the country apart sometimes seemed greater than the ones bringing it together.
“Too often we judge other groups by their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions,” Mr. Bush said to applause. “And this has strained our bonds of understanding and common purpose.”
The memorial was held in the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, a cavernous concert hall with a massive 4,535-pipe organ dominating the back of the stage. Nearly all of the auditorium’s seats were filled, many with men and women wearing blue police uniforms from places like Massachusetts and South Carolina, and from towns throughout Texas, like League City, Huntsville, Robinson and La Marque. They walked into the hall under a giant American flag strung from fire trucks.
On one side of the stage, five seats sat empty except for uniform hats and folded American flags to memorialize the five dead.
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Gardiner Harris reported from Dallas, and Mark Landler from Washington. Alan Blinder and John Eligon contributed reporting from Dallas.
Bernie Sanders went off for a month to contemplate life after the revolution, and this was the best he could come up with? “Secretary Clinton has won the Democratic nominating process, and I congratulate her for that.”
So said Sanders at a rally in New Hampshire on Tuesday, where he appeared on stage with Hillary Clinton as an ally for the first time. As big events go, it felt pretty small, with Sanders waving his arms around and offering up his usual list of shouted slogans.
Sanders avoided subjects like war and foreign affairs, since he and Clinton disagree violently on those things. He harped on his successes, which was understandable, but it was passing strange when he claimed that he and his backers “showed the world that we could run a successful national campaign based on small individual contributions.”
Yes, if you define successful as losing.
Clinton — who actually wrapped up the nomination more than a month ago — stood next to him looking uncomfortable, nodding endlessly like a bobblehead doll and smiling at odd, seemingly random moments.
The event was bound to be stiff, since Sanders has spent most of the year attacking Clinton as corrupt, excessively hawkish and beholden to Wall Street.
So it would have been naive to expect Sanders to give Clinton a roaring tribute. But did it have to be as awkward as it was? Who thought of leaving the winner up there with the loser the entire time? The same public-relations genius who put Michael Dukakis in a tank in 1988?
There were times when Clinton sounded almost excited about joining forces with Sanders, or at least pretending to. Perhaps more accurately, there were times when she sounded like Sanders, or at least pretended to.
She trashed the Trans-Pacific trade pact that she once supported but that Sanders and his followers hate. Clinton grinned and nodded vigorously when Sanders talked about raising the federal minimum wage, even though she has disagreed with him in the past about how high it should go.
“These aren’t just my fights,” she said. “These are Bernie’s fights. These are America’s fights.”
But Clinton sounded distinctly more sincere about the state of play in the campaign at the very beginning of her speech, when she said of Sanders: “Being here with him in New Hampshire, I can’t help but reflect how much more enjoyable this election is going to be now that we are on the same side.”
Will Sanders’s fights continue to be Clinton’s fights? Certainly, Sanders has steadily pushed Clinton to the left. She will probably keep pressing issues like trade and the minimum wage during the rest of the campaign, and she promised on Tuesday to pursue them as president. But we all know what happens to campaign promises.
The Clinton campaign gave in to Sanders on some of these issues in the drafting of the Democratic Party platform over the weekend, and her concessions will keep the peace at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia at the end of this month.
There will be the ritual first-round votes in which the Great State of Whatever proudly casts its votes for Sanders. But in the end, the platform will be adopted, Sanders will get his prime-time speaking slot, Clinton will be nominated and that will be that.
The question for Clinton is how many of the 13 million people who voted for Sanders will vote for her — indeed how many of them will vote at all. Motivating that crowd is going to be the big challenge for Sanders if he was sincere on Tuesday when he promised to help Clinton get elected.
He may need a different formula from the one he used on Tuesday — talking about the things on which he and Clinton now agree, and ignoring the ones on which they disagree.
“I have known Hillary Clinton for 25 years,” he said. “I remember her as a great first lady who broke precedent in terms of the role that a first lady was supposed to play as she helped lead the fight for universal health care. I served with her in the United States Senate and know her as a fierce advocate for the rights of children.”
What about her time as secretary of state? Sanders called his former opponent “Secretary Clinton” a couple of times, but never mentioned the State Department, probably because he has relentlessly attacked her over her record in that job.
If his primary aim is to keep alive his cult of personality, perhaps all Sanders can do is accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. I’m not sure that will get his supporters to vote in Novembe
Miller’s close friend, author Lawrence Durrell, was severely disappointed in Sexus. In a letter dated September 5, 1949, he wrote that Miller was lost "in this shower of lavatory filth which no longer seems tonic and bracing, but just excrementitious and sad."
"I am trying to reproduce in words a block of my life which to me has the utmost significance – every bit of it," Miller responded. "Since 1927 I have carried inside me the material of this book. Do you suppose it's possible that I could have a miscarriage after such a period of gestation? ... But Larry, I can never go back on what I've written. If it was not good, it was true; if it was not artistic, it was sincere; if it was in bad taste, it was on the side of life."
Yes, the above exchange of the two writers has had an effect on you, an aspiring writer. You celebrate the magic of words properly employed. You are on the side of life, this side of paradise.
You recall the words of Nietzsche in his Ecce Homo (How One Becomes What One Is). Itis an autobiography, the likes of which didn't appear before or have not appeared since then. Deliberately antagonistic and provocative, Nietzsche supersedes the conventions of the genre. He is in your face, shouting and screaming and stretching his views to combative and poetic extremes. His life is that of an artistic and philosophical anti-hero whose life is a self-conscious, painful, and lonely journey of self-transcending . If you have to brag, brag like Nietzsche, boldly and with no reservation. You must be convinced of your own greatness. And fuck false social conventions of modesty and moderation while you're bragging. With Nietzsche, Excess is good. Nothing exceeds and succeeds like Excess. You scream until you can scream no more and the remainder of your life is confined and condemned to silence, a fitting conclusion to a solitary man.
A mad man is not necessarily a stupid man. He could be just different and ahead of his times. He looks around him and he laughs. The world is indeed peopled more by monkeys than real men. Only monkeys would believe in a God and an Afterlife. Only monkeys would be vain and stupid and fearful of truths and guilty of self-projections.
When you interact with folks on the Net, you realize that most of them are so fucking dumb and ignorant that the situation is pathetic and laughable when these motherfuckers don't know how to keep their stupid mouths shut. As monkeys and dogs, they must holler and bark. Yet some of them in stupid fits of anger and rationalization, dismiss others as "stupid failures". Now you understand why Hitter was into genocide and eugenics. Man is a stupid but vain animal, deserving both contempt and wariness. The moment you view humans strictly in animal terms, you know your alienation from them is total and complete. You are no longer in flight from them. To you, they don't even exist as real humans. They are sub-humans to you. If you could, you would expedite their departure from this world, you would put an end to their useless, subhuman, despicable existence.
On the way to work this afternoon, an interview of a professor of philosophy reinforced what you have known about consciousness and your own thinking of what a gifted human you are in the areas of metaphysics and consciousness. Either a human knows about these areas or his mind is shut off, blocked off from understanding these matters and has to resort to the crutch called "God" to explain the mysteries of the existence and the universe.
Restless, listless, sleepless and penniless, Sofia Papastergiadis, the heroine of Deborah Levy’s gorgeous new novel, “Hot Milk,” feels about as miserable and alarmed as it is possible to feel. We meet her just after she drops her laptop on the floor, shattering both the screen and the illusion of well-being.
“My laptop has all my life in it,” she says. “If it is broken, so am I.”
At 25, Sofia is a half-English, half-Greek anthropology student who works in a London cafe called the Coffee House but mostly tends to the petulant demands of her mother, Rose. The two have come to Spain seeking a last-ditch cure for the constellation of bizarre and possibly psychosomatic ailments that plague Rose, including, perhaps, an inability to walk.
Sofia has her own ailments, starting with her awful relationship with Rose, but most of them are psychological: disaffection, insecurity, fear, confusion, anxiety, a sense that she is in danger of floating out of herself, Bowie-style, “in the most peculiar way.” The title, “Hot Milk,” evokes the charged connection between mother and child and also sounds a bit like “hot mess,” which many of its characters are.
At its heart, the book is a tale of how Sofia uses strength of will, rigorous self-examination and her anthropological skills to understand and begin to repair things that are holding her back. She learns to stand up for herself, to take risks, even to behave badly. She becomes bolder.
Perhaps this sounds tiresome or conventional, a typical coming-of-age story. It’s not.
What makes the book so good is Ms. Levy’s great imagination, the poetry of her language, her way of finding the wonder in the everyday, of saying a lot with a little, of moving gracefully among pathos, danger and humor and of providing a character as interesting and surprising as Sofia. It’s a pleasure to be inside Sofia’s insightful, questioning mind.
“I am living a vague, temporary life in the equivalent of a shed on the fringe of a village,” she says. “What has stopped me from building a two-story house in the center of the village?” Watching a young woman offer a cigar to her husband one evening in Athens, where she travels briefly to confront the father who abandoned her years before, she says: “My problem is that I want to smoke the cigar and for someone else to light it. I want to blow out smoke. Like a volcano. Like a monster.”
As with her earlier, equally accomplished book “Swimming Home,” a febrile tale of desire and betrayal, Ms. Levy has set a seemingly simple story against a backdrop thrumming with low-key menace and sly, dry humor, sometimes in the same paragraph. “Hot Milk” takes place sometime after the 2008 financial crash, and there is a sense of imminent catastrophe. People are unemployed. The young man who tends to Sofia’s jellyfish sting in the “injury hut” and who will become her lover is studying for a master’s degree in philosophy but “considered himself lucky to have a summer job on the beach.”
There is menace, too, in the sea, which is teeming with nasty stinging jellyfish known as medusas. (The book is full of references to Greek mythology, but it wears them lightly.) Then there’s the wacko Dr. Gómez, who runs a Spanish health clinic. His unconventional approach to Rose’s illness includes taking her to lunch; having her to write down a list of her fears; forcing her to throw away her medication; and giving her a car to use, even though she says she has no feeling in her feet and cannot operate the pedals.
Anyone who has been a mother or a daughter knows how fraught the relationship can be at its worst, a toxic dance of power, guilt, competitiveness, dependency and resentment. The relationship at the heart of “Hot Milk,” that between Sofia and Rose, is as dysfunctional as they come. “My love for my mother is like an ax,” Sofia explains. “It cuts very deep.”
Sometimes her mother excoriates her; other times she grabs the boundary between them and tosses it into the sea. “You have good hands,” she declares, as Sofia dutifully gives her a massage. “If only you could cut your hands off and leave them with me while you go to the beach all day.” She’s also prone to making fantastically narcissistic remarks, for those of us who collect them. Hearing about some newborn kittens, she asks, “I take it the mother is in good health after the birth?” (“I noted she had not asked after the babies,” Sofia says.)
Most of us have been through periods when, like Sofia, we cannot silence the punishing, constantly assessing voice in our heads, the one that turns everything that happens, every encounter, every thought, every feeling into a referendum on our lives as a whole. It’s wearing to be perpetually taking your own mental temperature, to be always re-evaluating.
So it’s inspiring to see Sofia begin to find perspective, to feel empathy and understanding toward others. These include Ingrid, the sexy woman whom she also begins sleeping with; Dr. Gómez’s oddly lazy daughter, a nurse in his clinic; and even her father’s new wife, who has troubles of her own. For one thing, she is 40 years younger than Sofia’s father.
As for the amusing Dr. Gómez, he may be an awful clinician, but he’s prone to sudden and surprisingly apt observations. “You are using your mother like a shield to protect yourself from making a life,” he says. Later he declares that he has lost interest in finding out what is wrong with Rose and is more concerned with Sofia. “My question is this,” he says. “What is wrong with you?” How moving it is to watch the vivid, courageous Sofia try to figure that out.
A writer wannabe. I am interested in writing short stories. I regard myself primarily as a poet. I love the arts. I am passionate about preserving the territorial integrity of Vietnam against the current Chinese quiet take-over.
