Search Results for: Where Do You Find Such A Woman

My grandmother spoke Yiddish and knew little or no English. But we managed to communicate in the ways of people who loved one another.

She did not live to see my blogging and social media world, but it would have been familiar to her in many ways.

The yenta is a formidable figure in Jewish History. Yentas consider everything their business, and no one is safe from criticism or unwanted advice.

Today, yentas are once again a regular feature of my life.

My grandmother complained about the yenta-kvetches all the time; she was always fending off busybodies, intrusive relatives, and people who love to find and share bad news and gossip.

She prided herself on minding her own business and refusing to judge other people (except Richard Nixon.)

I learned to identify these people because when they came over to my grandmother’s house, they would talk excitedly in Yiddish, and when they live, she would roll her eyes, spit three times to ward off the evil eye, and turn to me and sigh:

“Eiyee,” Johny, a yenta kvetch!”

Yentas don’t follow most rules of etiquette. They are loud, intrusive, and refuse to be criticized, corrected,  or deterred. I think the yenta’s I knew considered themselves holy extensions of God, tasked with setting others straight.

My grandmother said some other things, but I suspect they were curses in Yiddish; I didn’t understand them, she refused to translate them.

The yenta-kvetch is a yenta with some sting and a chip on her (mostly they were women then, but online, there are plenty of men embracing this work now) shoulder.

In fact, “yenta-kvetch” are among the very few Yiddish sayings or phrases that I picked up as a child and remembered.

Both terms are in the dictionary.

A yenta is loosely defined as “blabbermouth” or “gossip.” Synonyms for yenta are circulator, gossip, gossiper, newsmonger, tale-teller, talebearer, tell tales.

A “kvetch” is a habitual complainer: synonyms are beach, bitch, bleat, carp, complain, crab fuss, gripe, grizzle, grouch, grouse, growl, mumble, moan, whimper, whine, wail.

I was never very good at languages, and the women in my family would always switch to Yiddish when the conversation got interesting so the children would have no idea what was happening in their lives or the world.

My grandmother often spoke in her own tight circle about what has ironically become one of the deepest and richest strains on the World Wide Web: the “Yenta-Kvetch.”

I never expected to see them when I grew up and moved away. They are forbidding. They are multiplying like mice online of all places.

They tell me what to wear, what to buy, what to feed our animals, how to treat Maria. They correct my spelling errors, root out typos, ask me what brand I bought, and then tell me it is too expensive or flawed in some way.

There are political yentas, animal rights yentas (on the nasty side of yentahood), livestock yentas, food and marriage yentas, and life yentas.

The yenta-kvetches are the ones I fight the most with, the ones telling me I am not nice enough, or what to write, or how their sister Sarah died the most horrible disease from diabetes.

A yenta kvetch from Minnesota wrote to send me a long and detailed list of every person she ever knew who had toes and feet removed because they didn’t take care of their diabetes. “Pay attention to this,” she scolded. Yentas are not the most sensitive people.

I used to think of people like that as trolls or busybodies, but in recent weeks the voice of the yenta stirred up the sometimes faint memories of my youth. Now, they are no longer a Jewish issue; we all belong to them online.

They include every faith and belief system, the only thing they all have in common really is social media.

I hear from them almost every day.

They did something my grandmother never did; they have embraced new technology. In some ways, it was made for them; I feel they secretly helped create it, they may have been looking for was to grow and dominate.

Social media is ubiquitous, and so are the Yenta Kvetchers,  the meddlers and complainers of the modern world.

When I bought my handy snow blower, the yentas told me it was not powerful enough; it was too expensive, it wouldn’t work in upstate New York. Get the gasoline kind, wrote one, her Uncle Sam loved his before he keeled over of a heart attack.

Yenta-Kvetches online can be men or women. Just yesterday, Steven Zagres posted this message about a claim I made that a post of mine had gone viral: “A few thousand shares on Facebook is “going viral on the Internet.” Wow. Get over yourself, Jon!”

Steven was correct. When I started writing online, a few thousand shares meant going viral; It takes much more than that now. I corrected it. Wow, indeed.

I’m not sure how to get over myself; it’s the only self I have.

Steven could have simply pointed out my mistake to me, but he also had to complain about it, as if he had been victimized somehow by my ego. That is the voice of the yenta- kvetch. All of my foibles and mistakes are personal, aimed at them.

As my grandmother pointed out, they never have anything good to say about anybody. They don’t do compliments.

But it was the tone that gave Steven away. He is a kvetch, if not a yenta. But you don’t need to be Jewish any longer to be a yenta-kvetch; you just have to have WI-FI.

The yenta has long been associated with Jews. On the sixth season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David called Ted Danson, a “yenta.” Jewish children are often told not to be such a yenta when they ask grownups too many questions.

As I am wont to do, I started searching online and in my books for some yenta history. Of course, there was some.

I searched online through the most definitive Yiddish dictionary of all — Dr. Uriel Weinrieich’s Modern English-Yiddish Dictionary. He defines a “yenta” as a vulgar/sentimental woman. Another Yiddish dictionary offered five definitions for yenta: a gossipy woman, a blabbermouth, someone who can’t keep a secret, a vulgar and ill-mannered woman, a shrew, or a man who acts as the above women do.

It’s true that the yentas who e-mail me are not above cursing, but I can’t say most are vulgar.

Wikipedia had a completely different sense of the term.

They say “Yenta”  is a Yiddish woman’s given name, a variant of the name Yentl, ultimately thought to be derived from the Italian word gentile, meaning “noble” or “refined.” The name, they said, has entered what is called “Yinglish” – i.e., become a word referring to a woman who is gossip or a busybody.

Jewish historians say the use of the word yenta as a word for “busybody” came about after the humorist Jacob Adler, writing in the Jewish Daily Forward in the 1920s and 30’s, wrote a series of comic sketches featuring the character Yente Telebende a henpecking wife.

Jewish or not, if you are online much,  you will hear from them, or have heard from them already.

I may be one of the first bloggers to associate the term yenta with the rapid rise of busybodies and scolds and critics on the Internet. If Jacob Adler could change the content of the term, maybe I can too, because the definition of “yenta” sure fits many of the people I hear from regularly.

My theory is that every family has a yenta-kvetch, a grandma, aunt, neighbor, uncle, or sister somewhere around. Social media is a gift from God to the yenta-kvetch, for many tears of modding and whining and complaining.

Here are my give-aways for identifying the yenta-kvetch:

The yenta-kvetch loves to give advice, but it is almost always bad—bad advice about dogs, bad advice about food, bad advice about the cost of things, dreadful advice about health care.

I realized recently that if I followed the advice of the yentas closely, every person or animal I know and love would be dead many times over.

People with reasonable advice offer it as a suggestion; the yenta-kvetch only gives commands:

“You must worm your lamb immediately!” (The vet says, “worming is not usually recommended for the Northeast. I’d wait on that.”

The yentas came after me yesterday when I wrote that I was going to a manicurist on Monday.

Diabetics, they said, should never go to a manicurist, they didn’t know what they were doing and could hurt my feet. Many of them were diabetics who had taken a hospital course on diabetes.

I resisted the urge to invite them to come and trim my feet. Or to tell them a doctor had suggested my going. We’ll see how it goes.

One yenta told me my dog food (she saw in a pantry photographed)  killed her neighbor Sophie’s chihuahua,”get rid of it immediately.” One kvetch scolds me for taking Zinnia for rides in the car; she could suffocate if I closed the windows, I am told.

One e-mailed me to suggested her favored diet for diabetics. She told me to use it every day. I showed it to my doctor; she said the diet would kill me in a week or two.

Then, there are the correction yenta-kvetches. They kind of work for me. I use a proofreading program that makes more mistakes than I do, and I am Dyslexic.

So there will be some typos. And there is no shortage of pissed-off retired English Teachers on the Internet, and along with the yenta kvetches, I am covered.

I don’t really even need my proofreading software. My typos don’t get to live long. The yentas of the word kill them.

I must say that yenta-kvetches are good, if not necessarily nice, editors. They seem to be well-educated and meticulous. They read every word. I exploit them when I can.

Often yentas fight for correction credit. One woman lambasted me for fixing a typo without giving her credit for being the first one to tell me. She insisted it was her correction I followed.

Also, beware of the yenta’s Uncle Harry and Aunt Beulah stories. Their experiences rarely have any revelation to your experiences. But don’t tell the yentas that.

 

I started to cry the second this unexpected e-mail arrived from the Psychoanalytic Society of New York.

Dr. Marianne Goldberger, the first person I ever turned to for help, had died months ago. Today, the Psychoanalytic Society invited me to her memorial service with remarks and a video of my memories.

It was a virtual remembrance of one of the most wonderful people I had ever met and one of the most influential people in my life.

Every time I look at this photograph, I cry.

This was the face of the woman who gave me the most remarkable and transformative experience of my life.

I do not believe I will ever meet or know anyone like her in my lifetime.

It seems like another world when I first went to see Dr. Goldberger, and I guess it was. She was very much of another time, and I wonder if there are any longer such people – so brilliant, so graceful, so educated, so warm.

I was the CBS Morning News executive producer and going to pieces. The pressure of that job brought up all of the old demons in my life. My daughter was just born, and I was wracked with fear and pain.

I loved being a reporter but hated being a boss. My life was one continuous panic attack, and that was tearing me up from the inside.

Dr. Goldberger was a  Freudian analyst, trained in Vienna’s classical way, where analysis was invented. Analysis was, for years, the gold standard of mental health treatment.

I first met her in Baltimore when she was training to be an analyst and where I fell apart and had my first silent breakdown. She helped me, then moved to New York soon after I met her.

I moved there later, and we connected again.

The therapy Freud created was meant to release repressed emotions and experiences, make the unconscious conscious, bring about a cathartic (healing) experience so that the patient can be cured of his or her neuroses and helped.

Our world has little time or money to pause life for analysis, which takes years at its best. We are all too distracted and too busy.

The primary idea behind psychoanalysis is that all people possess unconscious thoughts, feelings, desires, and memories.

At the time I became an analysand, analysis was considered the most profound and most penetrating form of psychotherapy. It required a tremendous commitment of time and determination to get through it, and it was considered life-changing.

It was certainly an elitist’s treatment. Who else had the time or the money?

Analysis barely exists now, except for the very wealthy.

Few health insurance companies will pay for it, and most modern therapy is done in a more focused, limited way: we don’t need to penetrate every detail of the past anymore; we are dynamic and practical, we focus on the problem, not the cause and move on.

Freudian analysis has been overtaken by many different forms and views of therapy.

I will always be grateful I got to experience it for four or five years with a renowned student of the form, Dr. Marianne Goldberger. I saw myself in a new way; it was the beginning of a lifelong process of opening up.

Sometimes I thought she was perhaps too nice to challenge me, but then I just realized she was nice. It was who she was.

In analysis, there is a period where the patient transfers love and feeling onto the analyst. It’s called “transference,” and I felt that for Dr. Goldberger, but that is a phase, and the experience ended up being about much more than that.

She helped me, a lost young man, find the truth about myself or at least start the process of trying. I didn’t know it would take a lifetime, but she did. She told me.

She was an exotic person to me, a purebred European intellectual from another age. I was, I admit, in awe of her intellect and presence.

I was always fascinated by and drawn to psychoanalysis, the deepest and most expensive and transformative kind of therapy. It suited me in every way. I wanted to go deep; I needed to go deep.

I also balked at submitting to her or anyone else.

For most of the first two years of my analysis, I refused to lie on the couch or speak. Dr. Goldberger would sit looking at me, that warm smile never entirely leaving her face, her hair in a bun.

When I mentioned my obstreperousness to her, she shrugged and said, “it’s okay, it’s your time and your money. You are doing what you need to do. When you are ready, we’ll talk about it.”

And so we did. Since she wasn’t going to fight with me, I gave it up.

Dr. Goldberger was a Freudian, of course. She was born in Austria and studied with Anna Fraud, Sigmund Fraud’s daughter. The protocol was demanding, I agreed to see her four days a week for an hour session each time.

I never knew the details of her move to America, she never spoke of it.

I had only met one other woman in my life like Dr. Goldberger. She was also Jewish, a brilliant intellect, and a refugee from the holocaust. That was Hannah Arendt, the famed moral philosopher who turned the world upside down when she went to Israel to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann.

Hers was the only college course I took from beginning to end before I dropped out. She is also no longer alive. How lucky I was to have met both of them.

Arendt was the one who coined the idea of the banality of evil. I always associated the two as somehow being connected. I doubt they even know each other.

I suppose Arendt might have met Dr. Goldberger at some brainiac party in New York, I can’t say, but they were always “the two women” in my mind; they seemed to tower over everyone else in their dignity and intellect.

If they had met, it would have been quite a conversation.

Dr. Goldberger’s office was on the ground floor of a Park Avenue Mansion; I had never seen anything quite like it. I ran into many famous people in her waiting room; I’ve never disclosed their identities to anyone.

No one in my office knew where I went every day at lunchtime; I could never have lunch with anyone. I was a mystery.

The CBS health plan paid for every penny, no matter how long it might take.

And in so doing, I undertook this extraordinary journey of the mind, one which is no longer accessible to people like me but affected my life in so many ways.

The funny thing about Dr. Goldberger was my realization over time that she liked me and admired me, something that never crossed my mind in our sessions. She saw the good in me, something I have never quite been able to see.

She got me to pause in my terror and rage and meet the person behind it.

I liked her from the first. Although she was formidable, nothing was intimidating about her, not even when she called me out on a lie or loss of perspective.

I could always make her laugh, which made her crazy. She would smile and nod her head but couldn’t hide the laughter. But I could never fool her or hide from her.

She guided me through the painful times in my less.

Unlike contemporary therapists, she wanted to hear every detail of my life, often more than once. She diagnosed my free form anxiety and prescribed some valium to help me sleep at night. (I took valium for 30 years before giving up any addictive drugs.)

When I started talking, it was as if we talked for years. My life just poured out of me. It needed to get out.

When I was trashing myself for not living a moral life, I remember her nodding and smiling and saying very softly: “Mr. Katz, I came from Vienna just before World War II. You’re really not that bad, I can assure you.”

I laughed out loud and saw the wisdom in that statement; she was bringing me down to earth. She was showing me that self-hatred is neither noble nor useful.

She told me to ease up on myself and not take myself so seriously.  I learned that day that I just wasn’t as important as I thought I was. Nor as bad. That was liberating.

I saw Dr. Goldberger for about four years, and then I moved to upstate New York. I remember saying goodbye; there was no drama or emotion, just that smile and a nod.

“I’m always here,” she said.

After I moved, she always found a way of reaching out to me and reminding me that she was always there. I’d heard that Freudian and their patients never really said goodbye.

When I broke down before meeting Maria and sought a therapist’s help in Saratoga, I called Dr. Goldberger and asked if she would speak to the therapist, who wanted to talk to her about me.

“Of course,” she said, “but why didn’t you come to me? I know you better than anyone.”

I don’t know why I didn’t go back to her. Perhaps it was because there was no one to pay for analysis anymore, and I didn’t want to ask her for help And I needed someone who lived nearby, not four hours away.

She was already retired by then, but we did talk for a while, and I remember that warm feeling of hope and understanding that she generated. She really did know me better than anyone else, and perhaps better than anyone will ever know me.

My new therapist was a dynamic social worker, far from the slow and agonizing analysis pace. She was remarkable in a different way.  There, we worked quickly, and in two years, I  had healed enough to leave therapy and go on with my life.

My new therapist has helped me get my life back. This was what I needed then.

But there is no longer anything like the grace, leisure, and time of my analysis, of that huge and beautiful office on Park Avenue,  of that brilliant and dignified woman, of my hearing my own voice for the first time.

I was astonished to be invited to Dr. Goldberger’s Memorial Service, to be held online in the Spring. I don’t know and may never know how this came about, how I got on the list of people worthy of coming to her memorial service.

I knew Dr. Goldberger had died last year, but I did not expect to ever hear from her again. She opened up something very deep in me with grace, humor, and yes, I think love.

I often think of her sitting in her Elizabethan Chair in that beautiful room, the hum of Park Avenue outside the window, the beautiful paintings on the wall.

I think of her watching me, smiling at me, listening to me.

Perhaps she was the mother I always wanted to have – honest, nurturing, and accepting.

I cry every time I see that photograph; it perfectly captures her spirit. She had given up her bun, by them, and her sometimes severe gaze. But it was so very much her.

I wonder if I’ll ever be able to look at it without crying.

Perhaps she just wanted to be remembered. Perhaps she just wanted me to feel good about myself by knowing someone as impressive as she was would like me to honor her at her final service.

I know there’s a message for me in there somehow. Eventually, I’ll figure it out.

“Sedition: The stirring up of discontent, resistance, or rebellion against the government in power. Organized incitement of rebellion or civil disorder against the authority of the state, usually by speech or writing.” — Constitution.com.

President Trump got the Dissing of his life yesterday when the U.S. Supreme Court Court rejected his efforts at sedition and overturning the Pennsylvania election of Joe Biden without offering a single comment.

Sociopaths feed on attention. There is no greater slap in the face than to offer them none.

At the time of the American Revolution, Trump and many of his loyalists would have been thrown in jail or tarred and feathered by now or worse. Sedition was considered an awful crime and taken seriously.

Thomas Paine would have had Donald Trump for lunch.

In our time, he will get a new radio or TV show, hold court in a garish palace in Florida and continue to try to punish the country that rejected him by gnawing our democracy.

Some people might judge his handling of the pandemic as criminal as well; I think I do. He helped to kill thousands of innocent people through his indifference and narcissism.

But that is a judgment for another time and other people. We can only handle so much at once. History will not be good to these people.

That is life in America as we head for 2021. We have to play the cards we are dealt with. We fell asleep. We are awake. The latter is a lot better than the former.

To me, two of the most important words of the year are “sedition” and “sociopathy.” Those words tell the story of America this year, and perhaps, next year as well.

The Supreme Court, knowingly or not, helped to define the drama and import of 2020.

There was no argument or dissent, or explanation in the court ruling.  No grand arguments or explanations.

The message was “denied:” in judicial English, that means, “no, go away.” And that is from the President’s friends.

That was his last true shot at upending the election.

It also marked some new realities for those following the rough year our democracy is having.

First, for me, this was a reminder not to stereotype or pre-judge people. There has been great hysteria and hand-wringing all year about Trump’s stuffing the federal judiciary and Supreme Court with his puppets and robots.

All three of the justices he boasted about appointing refused to support him, along with Justice Clarence Thomas, for all practical purposes a rubber stamp for Trump and the far right.

So did a dozen or more Republican judges who stood up for our democracy all across the country, many appointed by Trump.

Hours before the court ruling, Trump tweeted that it was time for the Supreme Court to “do the right thing.” They did.

Apparently, Justice Amy Coney Barrett was instrumental in the  Supreme Court court’s decision to ignore Trump’s effort to turn the country from the Democratic Republic into the Banana Republic.

She may vote in many ways progressives dread and dislike, but she is nobody’s rubber stamp. I am reminded not to hate or dismiss people I disagree with.

So, here we are. Biden is the next President, whether some people like it or not.

And the advantage he has in being 79 years old is that he doesn’t really care what people say about him or use the right titles for him. He doesn’t need to be re-elected.

He will, I imagine, try to do his best against overwhelming odds, and will at the very least halt or weaken some of Trump’s cruelest and most corrupt efforts and policies.

There is a lot of additional hysteria about the idea that our democracy has been irrevocably damaged by Trump’s Don Quixote (or is it Caligula’s?)  crusade against the election.

To me, that misses the real story. The center held.

Republican and Democratic judges and poll officials by the hundreds counted ballots fairly and stood up against Trump and his followers’ treasonous attack to upend a fair and legal election.

Democracy put up a huge fight, and democracy won.

We got a lot of lessons about patriotism and treachery. That happened in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War as well. It seems to be an ingrained tradition in a diverse and divided country.

The integrity of the election and the federal judiciary withstood with glory and dignity the most serious attack on our democratic structure in American history. Our system of appointing independent judges for life seems to work, at least this year.

This was a huge test. We passed, no matter what Donald Trump says or does.

It wasn’t pretty, and it won’t be easy, but the system gets an A for hanging on and an F for electing a disturbed, incompetent, and increasingly pathetic person as President.

What on earth has this poor man accomplished in four years?

A lot of people voted for Donald Trump on November 3, but millions more voted against him. And he can’t handle it. Sore losers everywhere have a leader now.

I am happy to be a lonely voice in the woods saying I don’t believe this will happen again, at least not in my lifetime. The country is on full alert.

The other big story is the realization and acceptance that the Republican Party is no longer a political party; it is now a cult powered by believers and demagogues, not citizens willing to participate in a democracy.

The party has made clear what is best for the country is not what drives them; they have become a system apart from civility, decency, tradition, and freedom.

We no longer need to wait patiently for them to “do the right thing,” they haven’t, can’t, and won’t—time to accept reality and move forward. That is sorry news, we need them for our democracy to work in a balanced way.

I have to say I fended off that sad idea until the past few months when Republicans sat quietly by in the face of Trump’s brazen sedition.

If ever there was a need for and test of political courage, this year demanded that. Many thanks to the Republican judges, poll workers, and state officials who saved our democracy.

A curse on the cowards in Congress who did not. I believe in truth and justice, and I am convinced they will pay the price for their treachery.

I predict that the true conservatives and moderate and independent Americans and  Never Trumpers will somehow band together and form a third political party, a party that could break the bipartisan log jam and make it much more possible to negotiate political differences in a civil and meaningful day.

We tend to see the future in terms of the present, but it never works out that way.

I have no insider information, but I believe that a third party is an inevitable consequence of  Republican extremism and partisan gridlock.

The year 2020 has shown us that the Republican Party is a much greater threat to our freedom than any Democratic socialist in the world.

Trump has shattered and then destroyed the values and traditions of his party, it will either cease to exist as a viable alternative or find a way to move away from him and his poisonous brand of politics. In a bloodbath like that, my money is on the Republican establishment.

If you follow the media closely, you can be forgiven for forgetting at times that Trump was defeated by an impressive margin.

Even by many people who don’t trust Democrats to run the country, his policies and politics have been rejected. He is a loser now, big-time, and that changes the way he is perceived. As he may learn, saying an election is fraudulent doesn’t make it true. Saying you are a winner doesn’t make you one.

Trump acts like he won, perhaps even believes that he won. But he didn’t win. Past that on your computer screens and empty walls.

To me, the court’s ruling sets in motion the beginning of the national rejection of Trumpism. No rational or just person can still insist the election was stolen.

I don’t believe America has been weakened so much as to permit the takeover of the country by irrational and enraged people.

This is now the party that sends thugs with rifles to the homes of health workers’ and vote counters to terrify them and their families—a curious image for a national political organization that claims it can lead a nation.

The testosterone brigade, with their big rifles and flags and big pick-ups (you have to have all three), is now eating the party’s young.

Trump’s defeat was one sign of a turning table, the awakening from the nightmare. Biden’s steadfast persistence and restraint are another, and the Supreme Court’s unanimous and jarring rejection of Trumpism is another.

The Republican Party has made it clear that they will not respect the President-elect or work with him. Don’t get your hopes up.

But Biden’s victory is significant, even as Trump still hogs the air time. As Trump has repeatedly demonstrated, the American President has enormous power to circumvent even a hostile Congress.

He will be able at least to reverse, block or change Trump’s inhuman and consequently hatred of refugees, denial of climate change, destruction of the civil service, and his administration’s rape of the American wilderness.

That is a huge deal, and I am grateful for it.

I have no idea how well Kamala Harris will do as vice-president, but Biden has said he will not seek re-election. It is also a great deal that an African-American/Indian woman will be in a strong position big to make h her case and try to replace him.

Kamala Harris has been quiet these past few weeks, and out of the limelight. I suspect that will change.

I am inspired by the courage of countless very ordinary Americans who managed this difficult election -many of them Republicans – and who bravely and almost unanimously defended it. The party has far fewer cowards than Congress, and thank God for that.

This is a time to be clear about what to expect, how to react, and just what has happened.

Trump screwed up the pandemic, he screwed up infrastructure plans,  the North Korea initiative, he screwed up his campaign to smear Biden as senile, he messed up his dreadful campaign, he blew his effort to overturn it.

He will be as nasty and opportunistic and infectious as he can be. Flow in the stream of life, accept it, don’t fight the reality of it.

I can’t believe what a dunderhead Donald Trump has been this year and during this election. He is no Hitler.

If you’re going to try to overturn a national federal election, at least find or manufacture one credible bit of evidence that it was fraudulent. CNN branded his lawyers “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.” He just looks ridiculous.

Trump doesn’t have it in him to pull off a coup d-etat. He can’t even acknowledge the painful deaths of many thousands of Americans.

Neither do the boobs and bubbleheads he chooses to represent him. At this point, I doubt if Rudy Giuliani could get a traffic ticket thrown out of court. What a tragic ending for such a consequential man.

We are all confronting the now indisputable fact that we elected a President who is mentally ill. I can’t say I’ve completely figured that one out how or why that happened.

We were pushed to the edge of the cliff, but we didn’t fall off.

My mind keeps going back to Dr. Lance Dode’s revealing article on sociopathy as reprinted in The Dangerous Case Of Trump by Dr. Bandy Lee of Yale University.

“Indeed, there are generally two life paths for people with severe sociopathy. Those who are unskilled at manipulating and hurting others, who are not careful in choosing their victims, who cannot act charming well enough to fool people, have lives that often end in failure. They are identified as criminals or lose civil court battles to those they’ve cheated, or are unable to threaten their way back to positions of power. But those who are good at manipulation, at appearing charming and caring, at concealing their immoral or illegal behavior, and can bully their way to the top, do not end up as outcasts or in prison. There is a term for these people: “successful sociopaths.” They are the ones who most fool others into thinking they are “crazy like a fox.” Even their characteristic rages may appear almost normal. Instead of having a visible tantrum, they may fire people or sue them. What is important to understand is that their success is on the outside….They are still severely emotionally ill.”

Dr. Dode was also good enough to post the official diagnosis of sociopathy as reported in the official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM, that psychiatrists use to diagnose patients.

Here are the traits of antisocial personality disorder as defined in the current DSM:

“Sociopathy is a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others, occurring since age 15 years, as indicated by three (or more) of the following.

l. Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behavior.

2. Deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying…or conning others for personal profit or pleasure.

3. Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead.

4. Impulsivity and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults.

5.Reckless disregard for the safety of self or others.

6. Consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations.

7. Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another; and

8. Evidence of conduct disorder (impulsive, aggressive, callous, or deceitful behavior that is persistent and difficult to deter with threats or punishment) with onset before age 15 years.”

According to the DSM, one only needs three of those symptoms to be diagnosed as a sociopath. As I read it, Donald Trump scores 100 percent.

Sometimes, this year seems to me to be something out of a mad novelist’s creative mind.  How did we elect Mr. Bumble Head?

I expect to wake up one morning and find it a dream. I sometimes do have to blink to remember that all of this s true and has really happened.

I believe that it happened because good people fell asleep, distracted by their own lives’ needs and desires.

At the very least, we are awake now and have begun the long and arduous task of redefining what freedom and responsibility mean to us. I think we’ve done pretty well, all things considered.

Getting Trump out of office is a huge start. It’s really up to us ordinary folks to figure out where we go from here.

We got us into this mess; we got us out of it, at least for a while. That’s the neat thing about democracy. It’s a wheel that never stops turning, and we are all responsible for where it stops.

I don’t care what the polls and surveys say about Republicans and the presidential election. Life is more complex than we have been led to believe.

I am quite to the left, I am sure, of almost all my neighbors and friends. I disagree with almost all of them most, if not all of the time.

These are born and bred Republicans, not the testosterone powered children in big trucks who rush around with Big Daddy flags and banners.

These are working people, family people, farmers,  neighbors, and friends much like me. I don’t take polls, but I have yet to meet a single one who loves Joe Biden or who thinks he stole the election from Donald Trump.

They would just like Donald Trump to stay in office so he can set more of Washington on fire and so that the Democrats don’t get to screw them again with more devastating trade deals.

If they don’t get that victory, believe me, they will do their work and care for their families and move on. If Joe Biden breaks Democratic precedent and actually does something, they’ll be happy to cheer him on too.

They wear their big boy pants every day. They do not wake up in the morning, plotting to abolish our democracy.

And take this to the bank:

Eighty percent of them do not believe for one second that  Joe Biden organized a global conspiracy to steal the November election. They just wish he had lost.

Other than the increasingly unhinged ranting of the President himself, nothing makes fuzzy-headed liberals and progressives crazier than polls that report that 70 to 80 percent of all Republicans believe Joe Biden and Democrats literally conspired to steal the election from their brave and gifted leader.

How can this happen, they ask? How could all these people support such a flawed man?

How did  80 percent of the Republican Party, once so dull, stodgy and somber, come to believe something that almost every Trump-appointed judge in the country and most Republican election officials say is obviously false.

How can people who call themselves Christians embrace a man who has broken every one of the Ten Commandments and brags about it?

These quite shocking poll results about Republicans are faithfully reported by one news organization after another as if they could be true.

I can’t offer you any surveys but the one in my own head. They are not true. They couldn’t be true.

National polling in recent years are valuable in many ways, but they are poor predictors of the future; their findings have proven to be nowhere close to reality.

These polls spread a lot of fear and agony; they sink the hearts of patriots who see our very democracy bleeding to death before us. They make a lot of money for cable news channels.

I have to be honest and say I don’t buy this narrative, these hysterical and dubious poll results—common sense and where I live scream otherwise.

The pollsters got the 2016 election wrong.

They got 80 percent of the 2020 down-ballot election wrong.

Why, all of a sudden, do these improbably, even ludicrous poll numbers become sacrosanct and so easily accepted by our so-called elitist and best-educated voters?

One reason is that the poll surveys meet stereotypes of rural people and Trump’s core supporters. To vote for him, they must be, like him, racist, dismissive of science, uneducated, weak-minded, and prone to conspiracy theories.

It isn’t enough for them to just like his style and boldness; they have to be bonkers like him as well.

The media has prospered and grown fat these past four years, fattening over fear and hysteria, and nothing makes liberals more hysterical than dismissing their opponents as stupid, racist, and clueless.

Their devil is the bright young congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Ours is Notorious White Man Mitch McConnell, the evil scheming devil of the far right.

Devils are the centerpieces of our civic system; I’m glad Mencken didn’t live to see It.

I decided to take my own poll over the last few days.

I went to Jean’s Place, where Trump flags fly as proudly as Mickey Mouse flags at Disney World,  and I waited for a farmer to come out of the diner and get into his truck.

We know each other, and while we aren’t close, we have nodded and mumbled hellos.

I supposed a poll with greater numbers would carry more weight, but the farmer I ran into was just what I was looking for.

I asked him (let’s call him Andy) if I could ask him a question. Sure, he said, shoot.

If a pollster called and asked him who he was voting for, would he tell the truth? “Hell, no,” he said.

Why not? I asked.

“Well,” he said, “first, because it’s nobody’s business,” he said, “And secondly, because I love Donald Trump and Trump supporters know better than to tell strangers that they like Trump. They probably sell lists like that all over the Internet; nobody knows where those lists go.”

Do you think Joe Biden stole the election? I asked. “No, he said, “I might be old, but I’m not stupid.  It’s getting silly. He’s not smart enough or mean enough. But that doesn’t mean we won’t go down without a fight.”

I asked Andy if a pollster asked him if he thought Biden stole the election, would he say no?

“No,” he said, “I’ ‘d say probably. Voted for Trump and supported him for four years. If he needs my support now, I’m happy to give it to him. I’m not going to sell him out now, even if he is acting a little crazy, like a cow that eats curly dock and broom snakeweed..”

Would you accept Joe Biden as a legitimate President?

“Sure,” he said, “life goes on. I’m no guerrilla fighter. I don’t happen to think Democrats do things fair and square in general, but the election is pretty much over.  I’m not into secret plots..”

Did you know, I ask, that the networks called it for Biden three weeks ago?

He shook his head, “no,” he said, “I don’t watch much TV.

The numbers that suggest 80 percent of Republicans have lost their minds don’t add up for me. Common sense says it seems too big a stretch. Numbers like that sound frighteningly high, but the reality is more complicated, reports the New York Times and some political scientists.

This is one of those issues that really bears some thought.

There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that political partisans, which most American voters are now, often give answers that reflect not what they know or believe as fact, but what they wish were true, or hope becomes true or is what they say to support the candidates they like.

Before this intense partisanship, voters said what they believe. Now, they seem increasing to say what they are supposed to say. Thank labeling for it. Trump has forged a powerful connection with his followers. They won’t let go of him quickly or easily.

Political partisanship is an American blood sport now; winner takes all, opponents are enemies, not partners.  We don’t speak warmly of enemies and their motives. But that doesn’t mean we truly believe every awful thing we say about them either.

The pollsters call this partisan cheerleading.

They wonder if  Republicans are merely expressing support for the President they love by accepting his demonstrably false claims of fraud, just as most elected Republicans in Congress have – or do they really believe Biden managed a global conspiracy to steal the election without anyone noticing?

Are the vast majority of Republicans really saying they no longer have any faith in our country’s election system or are they reflecting radically different ways of looking at the world and supporting their passionately-held values?

Lonna Atkeson, a political scientist at the University of New Mexico suggests that these results should be taken with alarm, but also, some skepticism.

In a survey released yesterday by YouGov and Bright Line Watch, a group of political scientists who monitor the state of American democracy, 87 percent of Republicans accurately said that news media decisions desks had declared Mr. Biden the winner of the election.

That seems to rule out the possibility that many Republicans, like Andy, my friend at Jean’s Diner, are not aware of that fact.

Only about 20 percent of Republicans told pollsters they considered a Biden victory “the true result.” And 19 percent said they expected Donald Trump to be inaugurated on Jan. 20 – a belief that’s “unreasonably optimistic” at this point, says Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth political scientist who is part of the research group.

Digging deeper, he added, found that about half of the group expecting Mr. Trump to be inaugurated also said he was the true winner. The other Republicans all expressed some doubt about the outcome.

“There’s also a small set of people who acknowledge Joe Biden won, but not nearly as many as you would hope.” Given Trumpism, to tell a pollster that Biden won fairly is almost treasonous, an act of disloyalty and surrender.

Political scientists say many people give the equivalent of the party line answer to survey takers, regardless of their real beliefs. There are also numerous reports of Trump campaign staffers urging their followers to lie to pollsters when they call, so that support for Trump always seems higher than anticipated.

“The evidence is very strong that a number of people out there, even if they know the truth, will give a cheerleading answer,” said Seth Hill, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego. Many of the President’s base is eager to stick it to the establishment; he said, no matter what the establishment does.

Other voters say pollsters believe that what they sincerely believe and want to be true is the same thing. In past, elections researchers have long found that the winning candidate’s supporters have more faith that the election was fair than the losing candidates do.

Accusations of “rigged” and fraudulent elections aren’t new; they are as old as American elections. In other words, Democrats lose faith in elections when Republicans win, and Republicans lose faith in elections when Democrats win.

“Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage,” wrote H.L. Mencken. “In this world of sin and sorrow,” he wrote, “there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.”

No politician of either party has attacked the integrity of elections more than Trump, or for as often or more dishonestly. It ought not to be shocking that Republicans feel cheated and also enabled to feel cheated by their party’s leader.

He was and is loved by lots of people. That doesn’t mean they believe everything he says.

Again and again, we see that polls and surveys are an imperfect way of measuring real or long-lasting sentiment. All blacks and whites, no greys.

When I think about politics I tend not to think about polls, I think about the people I know and what they are like.

Does it really make sense that 80 percent of Republican voters – tens of millions of Americans – actually believe the entire election was fake when Republican judges, poll workers, secretaries of state, and governors from all over the country were the very people who managed the contested elections and who defended them again and again from  Trump and his lawyers?

If 80 percent of all Republicans believe the election was stolen, where did all of these Republicans come from?

It doesn’t make any sense when you think about it.

In one respected political survey, Trump supporters were asked shortly before Election Day how they would want him to respond if he lost, depending on the degree of loss: if they would want him to concede and commit to a peaceful transfer or resist the results and use any means to remain in office.

About 40 percent wanted him to take the latter option if he lost in the Electoral College and lost the national popular vote by only a percentage point. The same share wanted the president to contest the election even if he lost the popular vote by 10 or 12 points.

That, found the surveyors, suggests that a significant share of the President’s supporters don’t necessarily believe the election was fraudulent. Instead, they were prepared to support the president’s contesting of the election no matter what.

Clearly, the X factor here is a President with no respect for the history of the American political structure or love of democracy, one who was preparing his followers all year to expect a rigged election if he lost.

He was elected to disrupt the process, and so he is.

That would have a bearing on any political party if its leader behaved in that way. It’s not clear what people will feel once Trump is out of office, and the pandemic beings to recede and the economy begins to recover.

The irony is that many American elections used to be fraudulent and rigged. The Chicago Democratic machine was notorious for showering people with cash to vote a certain way

Our elections today are probably cleaner than they have ever been.

There’s a new presence in the White House; he may change some minds himself.

Trump’s supporters might very well see that a functioning government can do better for them than a dysfunctional one centered around a monomaniac. It isn’t as if Donald Trump transformed all of their lives or solved many social and economic problems.

If someone else can do that, we may find a political environment different from our gloomy expectations.

The lesson of our recent elections is that the people don’t speak with one voice. Not too long ago, Obama was a hero expected to alter the universe. Then Trump. Now Biden.

It may be that our expectations of these people are way too high in a greedy, partisan, and mistrustful populace. It might be they are too low. I can’t know that none of us has ever predicted the future accurately every time.

I can’t imagine that any of us will. My choice is to start listening to voices in my own head, not the findings of surveys with important but very limited conclusions.

 

 

 

 

(Friends, as you may have noticed, this column has shifted to a different phase as the election gets closer. I’m focusing on daily summaries of what you need to know that day, purged of partisan and media hype. I find the cable networks increasingly hysterical, and even the better newspapers are prone to drama and some fear-mongering for fear of losing all their new subscribers. I hope to do better and be useful, and perhaps spare some worry. The more people trawl around, the more anxious and confused they will be.)

Today is the final Presidential debt between Trump and Biden.

Expect Trump to keep beating his Hunter Biden drum and try to be more civil and focused. Expect to be nice.

I think the Hunter Biden ploy is both desperate and foolish. Hunter Biden doesn’t create jobs, halt pandemics, or raise or lower taxes.

Who really cares what his alleged laptop e-mails contain? Biden will be circumspect and “decent,”  his main job is not to rock the boat.

Trump is trying to replicate the FBI’s last-minute “October Surprise” about Hillary Clinton’s e-mails in 2016, which was believed to affect that election.

The Hunter initiative isn’t working outside of his base. Rudy Guiliani’s leak to the tabloid New York Post about Hunter Biden’s laptop having some controversial e-mails isn’t credible or documented.

And apart from Fox News, the mainstream media isn’t going wild, as they did with Hillary’s e-mails. And the Fox News audience does not need persuading.

Do debates matter at this stage? Probably not.

As I’ve said all week, Biden is running out of time, he retains a double-digit lead in the national polls, and in recent days, his state polls have been strong. Generally speaking, with 15 days before election day, things don’t (can’t) change much.

In one sense, the stakes are big, but not really.

This debate is the last major opportunity for Trump to show a saner and more presidential side to the very few undecided voters who remain.

Trump is hoping for Biden to say something stupid, which he has a history of doing. But Trump made such a point of branding Biden senile, that he actually looks and sounds great, even when he isn’t.

Trump has also managed to deeply offend many elderly voters with his assaults on Biden’s competence.

Trump has scheduled a score of MAGA rallies up to Election Day, convinced this will rally his supporters and push him to another surprise victory. More talking to the choir.

More than 42 million people have already voted, and there is little evidence that there are any significant numbers of people who have not made up their minds yet.

I’m betting Trump will lose control tonight and whine about another strong “biased” woman moderator and scream about Hunter Biden’s laptop. In the process, he will lose more women, independent and moderate voters.

Perhaps he can be restrained for at least a few minutes.

As he has been for some time, Biden will be careful and stick to his windy policy positions.

If it were me, and I were Biden, I would tell Trump that I don’t want to bring our children into our nasty politics, let’s talk about the virus. As the Democrats are learning about Donald Trump, it’s smart to not take the bait and let him define the narrative.

This is an election where there are critical issues, and people are paying attention for once. Biden will (certainly should) take advantage of that.

Trump’s mike may be muted for us, but he can still shout at Biden on stage, and Biden will be able to hear him. Trump will try to rattle him, force him off balance; I think Biden has been around long enough for him to handle it, as he did the first time.

By and large, the courts have stayed out of most state voting disputes.

Those Supreme Court votes have been 4-4, which could change once Amy Coney Barrett is on the court. Everyone is watching to see what Biden finally says about stacking the court, that might be tonight.

The last two weeks of this campaign will be incredibly stressful.

It will take some effort for many people to stay sane.

I’d pay attention to polling averages and shy away from “insider” analysis about how each campaign is feeling. They rarely have a better sense of things than the best polls.

Remember that the polling for the 2020 election has been thoroughly revamped and remarkably stable for months.

Biden has a substantial lead in national and state polls to the extent that reliably Republican states like Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, and Texas could conceivably go Democratic.

In our divided country, the idea that this is even possible is quite surprising.

Trump would need the race to tighten far beyond the point where a normal polling error could close the gap.

If I were those people arguing and posting on Facebook and Twitter all day, I would stop. You’re only making yourself and other people crazy or angry.

I am especially proud of the fact that I have never argued politics on Facebook or Twitter, it is a hopeless and narcissistic enterprise.  You’re not doing it for the public good, you’re doing it for yourself.

People arguing on social media have no right to complain about being stressed or fearful. They are enabling themselves.

The people supporting Trump and the people who hate him are not open to dialogue and unpersuaded by argument.

Time and history will answer why someone as reprehensible as Leave them to i. Trump was supported so blindly by so many people. And at the moment, it doesn’t matter. If people really care about this election, they will go out and do something.

There is lots to do.

Arguing on social media is about as useful as standing on your head in the road in rush hour traffic.

I’ve read a lot of these social media posts, they just feed each other anger, fear, and hate. Buy a turkey for an out-of-work and struggling family for Thanksgiving instead.

It’s important to remember that this is 2020, not 2016. Joe Biden is not Hillary Clinton; Trump has a record to defend; he isn’t just the rabble-rousing outsider. And his pandemic record is not a good one.

His campaign has been a catastrophe (Republican Pollster Frank Luntz said it’s the “worst campaign in history”), and Biden’s has been a model of discipline, restraint, and focus.

All that money isn’t hurting him either. The Trump campaign is just about out of cash. Biden has plenty of money.

Today, Biden is strongly favored to win the election. FiveThirtyEight has simulated the election 40,000 times to see who wins most often. Their sample of 100 outcomes offers the best idea of the range of scenarios their respected model thinks is possible.

That model found that Trump wins 12 out of 100 outcomes, Biden wins 88 out of 100.

One interesting study was published in the New York Times today; it shows that both candidates face a drastically changed electorate. Trump’s base has been relentlessly shrinking.

The cohort of non-college-educated white voters – they gave Trump just enough of a margin to win the election in 2016 – has been in a long term decline, while both minority voters and white college-educated voters have steadily increased.

That means his much-cherished base, on which he is counting to win the election, has dropped by more than five million in the past four years, while the number of minority and white college-educated voters has collectively increased by more than 13 million in the same period.

In likely swing states, the changes far outstrip Trump’s narrow 2016 margins.

Democrat strategists have taken to calling their often gloomy and fearful supporters “bedwetters,” and I did that for a while also, being a former bedwetter myself.

Lots of people don’t dare to believe Trump might lose. I’d work on getting used to that idea.

But I think it is important for liberals, progressives, and Democrats to understand that America is a work in progress, and the population is far from static. It isn’t a great mystery as to why Trump is in trouble.

It’s because we are changing, and in particular, women are changing.

A diverse population is inevitable, and the Republicans have put themselves in an awful spot, thinking they can somehow stop it. I see it the way Ruth Bader Ginsburg saw it, one-step-at-a-time, it won’t be simple, easy, or quick.

In just a few years, whites will be a minority in America. Nothing Trump can do will stop it, even if no immigrants ever come here again.

The President’s campaign is hoping that a massive voter registration campaign underway for some years will overcome those losses. That is unlikely.

That’s it for today, talk to you tomorrow.