My Father--Gone but Still Appearing

I’ve written about my father before, in my book about my mother’s life and death. And I thought, of course, that I was done with him, my father. Jack, as we boys called him, died in 1993. By the time my mother was facing her own end in 2010, most of the people who knew Jack were gone. More startling, many of my mother’s friends, at the end of her life, had never known my father.

I was writing about Franny, my mother, who had decided to stop eating and drinking, and fast until her death. I was writing about my family, who warred over old grudges and new crises: two of the brothers wanted to give my mother the option of a quick death by helium. The third brother did not, and threatened (we felt) to call the cops. And I was writing about my father, since he had been the great love of my mother’s life, as well as the bedrock in all of ours. 

For me, the son, it was a terrible time. For me, the writer, it will never be better. So much was happening in my life at that time that nothing could prevent it spilling over into writing. What writer could ask for more? And so, in those heated days, I wrote the chapter on my father when I was travelling on a bus from Chicago to Madison. The bus travelled through Janesville, Rockford, and close to Jefferson Prairie, Wisconsin. My father himself had travelled through all of those places, though his journey took decades. In fact, on those many bus trips when I wasn’t writing, I would see the sign for the exit to the old farmstead: Shopiere Road. Forget the spelling—it was always pronounced SHOWpeer road.

Was it his grandfather or his great grandfather who had come over from Norway in the 1850’s or 60’s? I was told and I forgot during my youth and early adulthood; years later, I googled the Lutheran church where my grandmother’s funeral had been held, and the weddings of my cousins held as well.

That Norwegian Lutheranism stuck—to varying degrees—to that side of the family. Jack’s brother had religious tracts seemingly everywhere: in the bathroom by the toilet, in the barn, in the tractor. Jack never got the religion, but he couldn’t escape the morality that either went with it, or was behind it.

What am I trying to say?

He hated bastards. He hated people who cheated, cut corners, or put their own agenda first, at the expense of others. When he first came to Madison, World War II was winding down or had ended: there was still rationing of meat, however. And so when Jack got the tip that someone—a butcher?—was selling horsemeat, he ambushed the man. His weapon, as it would be for most of his life, was one of the five or six Leica cameras that he wound up owning.

The guy was sent off to prison: his parting words were along the lines of, “I’ll get you, Newhouse, when I get out!” It made my mother nervous, and so my father bought a pistol, which he kept in his sock drawer.

We laughed at him, of course—what kids wouldn’t? And we did point out that—since the bullets were kept locked up prudently somewhere else—Jack could always throw socks at the gun-wielding ex-con….

He went on. There was the police chief, Bruce Weatherly, who got into a tangle with the city council. The ante got upped and upped, and the tangle became a war. Jack knew the story from the beginning and through the multiple salvos back and forth. In the end—big surprise—the city council prevailed, but only after the chief, while drunk, crashed his car into a truck. And my father, of course, maintained that the police chief, who wanted to institute needed changes, had been—though pig-headed as well as drunk—right all along. And so the ex-police chief was licking his wounds down in Florida, or perhaps the southwest; he was hitting the bottle, as well. And one day, his wife could take her drunken / broken man no more. She shot him, killed him, and only narrowly escaped with her own neck.

I don’t remember the police chief’s name; I do remember (I think) that the wife / widow’s name was Inez. But I do remember what she said to my father when she blew through town, a few years later.

“You’re the only person in this town I came to see.”

(Years later, I met another and later chief of police, who told me that Weatherly ran a perfectly good police department, for the fifties. Of course, the department was running wiretaps on prominent figures, and one of the nuggets mined was about the daughter of a city councilman. The daughter was working as a prostitute somewhere in the west; who knew who that ever got played, if at all….)

Jack had grown up in lilliest of white environments. But I think he must have felt a special kinship with the very small black community of Madison in the 1950’s. Many of the families had been in the community for generations; one or two were descended from slaves. (In fact, one of the early members was Eston Jefferson, the son of Sally Hemings and, yes, Thomas Jefferson). The black community wasn’t large, but it was, Jack felt, very solid.

Jack seemed to know everybody, and so there were names that floated around, in my childhood. One of them was Odie Taliaferro (officially Odell Taliaferro) but who was he, and what had he done?

After Jack died, I got the story: the Taliaferros took advantage of the new open housing law, and moved to an all-white neighborhood. They woke up to a cross burning on the lawn one night.

It was the kind of thing that drove my father nuts, so he did what he always did: wrote a story. And that meant he went and talked to the neighbors. Ostensibly it was for the story, but really it was to say, very slowly, with his eyes boring into the interviewees:

“Someone burned a cross on their lawn, but I know it couldn’t be you, because you’re good people, and they’re good people, too. Aren’t they!”

When Jack got into this mode, neither family nor neighbors could resist him. The neighbors learned to live with Taliaferro, and Odie never forgot it.

The open housing law, in fact, was something else that Jack and the State Journal had championed. I knew that, and I think I remember that Jack—rather smugly—claimed that the more liberal Capital Times had been against it. (The rivalry between the State Journal and the Cap Times—run by ‘that damn Bill Evjue’—spilled frequently into animosity…)

So it was another battle: this one more successful than Weatherly. What I didn’t know—until the Historic Madison Facebook page published a letter my father wrote in 1991—was that the battle had been fought with his usual buddies. Those were Henry Reynolds (who was the mayor) and Oscar Rennebohm (who owned enough pharmacies in town that the statue of Miss Forward, atop the capitol, was really reputed to be Lady Rennebohm, pointing to the site of the latest drugstore).

So I knew the story—sort of—of the open housing ordinance. But I didn’t know the story of Calvin Harris, or his mother, Willie Lou. And then, in an odd twist of fate, I did.

My old man—he’s supposed to be dead, you know. But he crops up, usually in photos posted in Historic Madison. And sometimes, I get a little more of the story. More often than not, I get a lingering scent from the past. And questions. That aerial photo he took of Edgewood College—was that the one he never got paid for? It was in the late 40’s or early 50’s: he had a young family and no money. So he took the photos, and found himself handing them to Sister So-and-So, the president of the college. So he was bracing himself to ask for five bucks, when she said…

“…God will reward you, my son.”

Ah, they knew how to do it in those days!

And what, by the way, was my father doing up in Mauston, or wherever it was? Because I stumbled on the photo on the Wisconsin Historical Society website while looking up Mary Ann van Hoof, to whom the virgin appeared several times in Necedah, Wisconsin. The story went national, and I peered at the pictures of the farmhouse and the subsequent shrine: had Jack taken those? No way to tell, but who knew that that neck of the woods had had a long association with spiritualism and mediums? And suddenly, there was my father’s photo in the Historical Society’s webpage: the only description was “two women testing the medium,” or something of the sort. The “testing” involved a good bit of rope, which gives the whole thing an edgy feel….

Well, I’ll never know what test those women were doing—nor will anyone, I suspect.

“You’re dead,” I tell Jack on occasion, when he pops up without warning and without explanations One of the photos in the Historical Society is of an old man knitting; the photo was taken in the early 50’s, and the man must have been 80 if not 90. So who was he, and why was he knitting, and what was his wife doing? Smoking cigars? Testing mediums?

Could it be that the old man was more unconventional than his sons? After all, I call my brother John, who is a lawyer in New York City, and who, like me, neither knits nor tests mediums. He remembers the name of Weatherly, the police chief, and then brings up…

“Remember Jack his dancing girls?”

“Anna Nassif,” I told my brother. Nassif was professor of modern dance at the UW, and Jack liked to photograph her work. What was the fascination? Perhaps it was the positions that a dancer could assume, or the angles, or the play of bodies against nature. That may have been it, since my mother would tell us, “your father’s not here; he’s off with his dancing girls on the rocks.”

It was accepted: my father had his dancing girls on the rocks, and left us all bereft on various Saturday mornings. The fact that neither Jack no Nassif—both unconventional but completely proper—would ever venture off the rocks and into the bushes made the whole thing sillier.

So we laugh about Nassif and the dancing girls, and John wonders: why am I thinking of Jack? I tell him about Historic  Madison, and Facebook, and then about the YouTube videos I’m seeing of Renée Fleming and other opera divas. The man who interviews the singers always asks at the beginning: who took you to your first opera?

And so I asked myself—who had taken me to my first opera?

The opera was Carmen, it was in the auditorium of East High School, and I must have been ten or eleven. I had just started playing the cello, and somebody must have told my father to take me to the opera. So there he was, and there I was. Where was my mother? Was she sick, or was this a father / son thing?

We never know, when we do things with the young, what we’re sowing, if anything at all. And the seed was dormant for many, many years, though I would become a classical musician, among other things. But opera? It was never a passion, until I heard a voice on the radio, a decade or two later. It was an ad for an appearance of a very young Jessye Norman; in the background, you could hear her singing somewhere in the middle register. Suddenly, extraordinarily, her voice opened up and stilled to the most unimaginable sound I had ever heard. It was a glorious, pianissimo high note. It came out of nowhere and lasted until all time. I knew I had to hear that woman, as I have heard so many other women—and men—before her and after her.

“Who took you to the opera,” asked the interviewer.

“You did, Jack,” I tell my father. He looks up, nods, and then goes back to being dead. Until he turns up again, on Facebook or the Historical Society, or in stories. I’d forgotten, until my brother reminded me, about the police chief and the dancing ladies on the rocks. And I’d almost forgotten about that first opera, in the high school auditorium. We were both a little unsure about what we were doing there.

“Sorry,” I tell my father, disturbing his peace once again.

“I never said thank you,” I tell him.

But I also never forgot.

     

  

  

We Are Not As We Were....

“Life sucks,” said Lady, rather uncharacteristically, since she normally is quite cheery. “Everything sucks after Donald Trump.”

“I know what you mean,” I told her. “I’ve decided, I can’t do Facebook any more than once a day: otherwise, I’ll be in a total funk. And that goes for the news, as well. But the big question is: what to do? Call my representative? Jennifer González? Who has no vote? Am I deadened already? It’s just two weeks now since the brute took office, and I’m feeling completely beaten down.”

We move to the back of the gift shop, where there are sofas and a half-moon stage.

“Can I tell Marc your story?” Lady asked a woman sitting nearby; the woman didn’t respond.

“It’s OK,” I told her. “Everybody has the right to keep their own story private….”

Lady tells me anyway: the woman’s children got taken away from her.

“She’s a wonderful mom,” said Lady. “The kids are very happy, you can tell.”

The lady begins to cry. A man comes in, and hugs her.

“Husband?” I whisper to Lady.

“Boyfriend,” she mouths back.

I go off in search of a paper towel.

When I come back, the boyfriend is explaining: this is why he is not a Federalist.

Well, neither Lady nor I had much of an idea of what a Federalist might be, but it soon became clear. The boyfriend, it turned out, was against any government intervention, and was indignant that his home state—Mississippi—had been forced to enact seatbelt legislation.

“We had to do it to get funding for the highways,” explained the boyfriend.

“But that’s a good thing: seatbelts save lives,” said Lady.

“Well, if you want to be a damned fool, you should have the right to be,” said the boyfriend. And then he went on to tell us more of his philosophy. In fact, it soon became apparent: the philosophy was vastly more interesting than the woman’s children.

That’s when I got up to leave….

“She lives in the projects,” Lady told me later. “So she’s in the system….”

Lady clearly has absorbed a bit of anti-Federalism. Or maybe not…who am I to say.

“Anyway, some of her neighbors got pissed that she was going to move with the boyfriend to Mississippi, so they told the Family Department that she was neglecting her children. So they set up a sting, luring her to a local park, and then taking the children…..”

She says it matter-of-factly, as if children being taken from a mother were a normal thing.

I ponder it all: the woman who is weeping in the back of a gift shop, the children who are who-knows-where, the boyfriend who values his philosophy seemingly more than his girlfriend’s children. Does any of this make sense? Are we at the point where children can be ripped from a mother’s grasp?

There’s nothing to be done, it seems, about the woman’s children, since she has now left, and her boyfriend as well (though apparently separately). But then I violate my oath, and turn guiltily to Facebook. And that’s when I learn that prayers are being sought for the pregnant wife of an elder at the Third Presbyterian Church in Staunton. This because an old friend is either the minister or in some way connected to the church.

I wrote to my friend and asked: what about a lawyer? (As an atheist, I’m a little weak in the prayer department….) And that’s when I learn that they’re working on it, but it’s a rather specialized field, and the hearing will be in Alexandria.

Somehow, it all seems to make sense, I think, since the point of it all is that nothing makes sense.  And the other point?

We’ve stopped reacting, and that’s what they want. The government takes children away from a mother? The government bans a pregnant woman from entering the country? Even after the most rigorous vetting process in the world? Even after they take fingerprints and DNA samples? Even after the UN, for good sakes, does the initial interview?

“Non sum qualis eram,” I told Lady, and she completed the line: “bonae sub Regno Cynarae.”

We are not as we were under the realm of the good Cynara.

Yes, I thought. Cynara took a good look around her, and then took off? Who can blame her? Wouldn’t I, or perhaps even you, do the same? Yes, Cynara took off, leaving only the merest hint of her Alexandrine verse behind her, and who knows Dowson anymore? It will soon be, I tell myself, all quite normal: people will start to disappear, the news will turn astonishingly and consistently glorious about the Trump administration, and how happy we’ll all be, when the EPA is gutted and corporations become not just citizens but privileged citizens, or super citizens! Yes, yes—we’ll be smiling as we get down, five times a day, to pray toward Washington, home of our spiritual and political leader, Donald J. Trump.

Odd—the first thing I think of when I wake in the morning is that Trump is president.

Odd—I no longer remember Cynara’s face…..  

    

How Do You Solve a Problem Like the Donald?

We’ve got it all wrong, guys.

And since we had it all wrong from the very beginning, that’s why we’re in this mess. So why can’t we learn?

It was Amy Goodman, of Democracy Now, who said it: the press coverage of Trump was phenomenal during the primary season. And it was revelation after revelation, and were any of those revelations particularly good? Of course not, and so we all believed that the worsening news would at some point sink him.

It was the worst thing we could do.

We were operating on a set of principles that Trump had long since discarded, if indeed he had ever had them in the first place. And so we got the stories of his financial messes—the bankruptcies—and then the tales of all the suppliers whom he had bilked. Then the reprise of his three marriages, as well as the photos of his current wife. She appeared nude, though the vital bits were covered up; the handcuffs added that little spice to the whole affair.

It got worse and worse. Trump wouldn’t reveal his tax returns; a bit later, The New York Times suggested that he hadn’t paid taxes in a couple of decades. Then came the convention, and Melania’s speech, which was plagiarized. And through it all were grossly troubling signs: would Trump “lock her up,” meaning through his political opponent in jail? Would he refuse to accept the election results, if they didn’t turn out to be in his favor? The answers were respectively “yes” and “no,” apparently, and that was exactly not what our democratic system was all about. Whatever you thought about Obama, no one can say (including Trump) that he didn’t suck it up and put a good face on it, eight days ago (and during the whole transition period). Saying which, I can’t wait to read at least one chapter of Obama’s undoubtedly upcoming memoir….

Then there were boasts of sexual assault, and the numerous women who came forward and accused him of groping them. Did any of this make any difference? Of course not—not even to the Evangelical Christians. And all during this time, Trump was fomenting fear: the nation was a cesspool of illegal immigrants, ISIS was running amok, we were the laughing stock of nations. And who was the only person ready to take all that on, and ready to make “America Great Again?”

Read the biographies. Throughout his life, Trump has thrived on bad publicity. In this, he learned from his mentor, Roy Cohn, the lawyer who famously advised Joe McCarthy in the 1950’s. It was an old story, and though Trump made a show of threatening lawsuits against the media (and on occasion did), he never reacted as any of the rest of us would to bad publicity. One of the most glaring examples came when he was divorcing his first wife to marry his second; The New York Post, a newspaper that Rupert Murdoch took from intellectual to scurrilous, published an account of Marla Maples called “The Best Sex I Ever Had.” Trump thought it was great; everybody else was appalled. Most particularly since Trump had a 12-year old son in a private school; is it any wonder that the kid didn’t speak to his dad for a year? I absolutely agree that 10-year old Barron should now be off limits; I also think that a father who would subject his 12-year old son to his girl friend’s public appraisal of their sex is….

…do I have to finish that sentence?

“Do you have no sense of shame, Sir,” said someone famously to McCarthy (sorry, the internet is taking the weekend off, apparently). Rhetorical question, since we all knew the answer, just as we know the answer in the case of Trump. So now we have him in the White House, and that’s a problem. Right—so what do we do?

1.     Don’t engage him. Remember about that pig? He’s definitely having a good time dragging us all into the mud….

2.     Isolate him. Ignore Trump, stop putting his picture on the front page, and refer to anything he does as “a Republican initiative,” even his executive orders. Refer to him only as “the Republican president.” In fact, make the Republicans own him, and who can say that’s not fair? Paul Ryan wanted us to believe that he didn’t support Trump—remember that famous, courageous statement that he wouldn’t “defend” Trump, though he also wouldn’t, of course, denounce him? Every Republican is going to have to have his or her political future tied to what this madman does, and they’d better know it. Oh, and then there’s history, too.

3.     Triangulate. Trust me—OK, that sounds like the Republican president, sorry—the Republicans know that nothing lasts forever. The midterms are in two years, and what’s going to happen when 30 million people have lost their healthcare, our neighbors are fuming about protectionist tariffs, our allies are outraged at our betrayal, and the head of their party is a laughing stock? Do you really think they wouldn’t throw Trump under the bus?

4.     Go on the defensive. Take charge of the narrative: Trump claims that the elections were rigged? Well, they certainly were: by gerrymandering, by voter suppression, by passing in multiple states legislation that made it difficult for poor people, students, and the elderly to vote. In addition, the very assertion that there were illegal votes cast is an attempt to righ future elections. Question the legitimacy of Trump’s election, in international fora if need be.    

5.     Take a deep breath and stay the course. Yes, the Republican president hit hard, this first week, but do you think all of the problems are going to go away? There will be more attacks, and attacks on our own soil. The problem of immigration won’t be solved by a wall, though the expense will be prohibitive. Sick people will be turned away from emergency rooms and will come forward.

6.     Remember—nobody actually likes this guy. Unless you were really, really rabidly anti-Obama, it was hard not to like the former president. He was smart and he was funny, and he was famously a family man. Trump, by contrast, has reportedly no friends, and is it only I who think that there’s something a bit bogus about Melania staying in New York for Barron’s school year? Trust me, I would hate to disrupt our four cats in their accustomed daily life here above the shop (in this case, Payless Shoes), but if Mr. Fernández were unaccountably to be elected president? Trust me—I’d get out the cat carriers, call the movers, and get ready for four years in the White House. And why do I think that Melania, born in relatively modest circumstances, shouldn’t otherwise be jumping to live in the White House? Is there something a little off, here?

The truth is that Trump isn’t a demon. He is, in fact, quite pathetic. Throughout his adult life, he had to go and beg money from his father: at one point, the crisis was so bad that the father had to buy several million dollars in casino chips, to safeguard the money from other debtors. And while Trump senior expressed admiration at times at what his son had done, there’s a lingering feeling, as you read the biographies, that Donald felt he had never quite measured up.

In fact, he hasn’t. For all the gold toilet fixtures, for all the leggy and big-haired women on both his arms, did New York society ever take him seriously? Does anyone think that he has any intellectual capacity? (If so, read his inaugural speech, and compare it to Obama’s….) Was he able to create a solid base in the Republican Party, and do his cabinet nominees represent anything like the best the party has to offer?

He is, in fact, pitiful. I imagine him there, in the White House, with his wife and 10-year old son a couple of hundred miles away. No friends, and no one much to call, except his son and daughter-in-law. So he must do what he always does: sack out in front of the cable TV, and then reach for his unsecured phone to tweet or twitter. Being president of the United States most bring its share of loneliness, but why do I think…

…he’s the loneliest president of all?

Notes from the Abyss, Chapter 1

It was a time in my life when I faced two truths: I was utterly alone, and I was going nowhere.

In fact, I wasn’t alone. I was living happily with my husband of 8 or 35 years—depending on whether you count the time we’ve been together or the time we’ve actually been able to be married. (We had travelled to Boston in 2008—four years before the Supreme Court ruled on marriage equality—to marry.) And there were people around me whom I loved, and loved me in return.

The “alone,” then, was something altogether different. I wasn’t marching with my times—I had figured that out a while ago—but that was hardly the worst. In fact, the times were marching—at times it felt like goose-stepping—towards an unthinkable land.

It was the fall of 2016. The Democratic Party had brutally stifled the one authentic voice—Bernie Sanders—and given the nomination to Hilary Clinton. I had seen the stifling first hand, since I had had to go to the next precinct over to vote in the Puerto Rico primary. (In Puerto Rico, we can vote in primaries but not in the general election). And once there, I had waited for nearly two hours to cast my vote for Sanders. Later, I was to find out that there had been somewhere around 1500 voting places for the Democratic primaries in 2012, but in 2016, the number had mysteriously and suddenly been reduced to under 500.

It was one more of a multitude of tricks. I sat in the café and watched as around the country, the machine imposed its will. Facebook showed one thing: the faithful were posting footage of lines stretching city blocks of people trying to attend Sanders’ events. And then Clinton would “win” the primaries or the caucuses.

In the end, I came to like Clinton. All right, perhaps “like” isn’t quite the word. She was certainly intelligent; she was certainly experienced. And she was certainly business as usual. But I only came to that opinion late in the days before the election.

And then, of course, there was Trump. What did I know of him? Only what I had read in The New York Times and other news sources (OK—so polarized are we, you will want to know. CNN and NPR, as well as the even more incendiary Democracy Now. Go ahead—brand me as a liberal….)

In fact, I knew nothing about Trump. I knew that he was famous, that he had “triumphed” in business, and that he was controversial. I knew that he had married and divorced, among very public circumstances. I didn’t know the names or number of his wives. I knew nothing about his business deals, though I knew it was real estate and New York. I had never heard him speak, and never seen him on TV. I also didn’t know that he had appeared on a “reality” show, since I had never seen a reality show. (Well, perhaps I had. When I had been travelling to Wisconsin in my mother’s final days, I had broken the trip to stay in a very cheap hotel close to the airport. I would eat deli food from the Jewel Supermarket, and watch television until the Scotch and the Benadryl had done their work. And there I had seen something called “The World’s Biggest Loser.” You probably know it, but I didn’t, and it was a revelation to me. The premise was simple: several fat people were featured trying to lose weight. Since this is as interesting as watching a parking meter expire, the action was fueled by a sadistic and of course very thin woman, who screamed abuse at the obese contestants.

It was unsettling, all of it. Though I was later to write a “confessional” account of the last days of my mother, I wasn’t much of a fan of the genre. I knew people who were obese: they struggled, they went on diets of varying efficacies, and they stayed in the background. And wasn’t the background where we all should be? Was it one of the Mitford girls whose governess had whispered, “Remember, you’re the least important person in the room,” even though, as a Baron’s daughter, she very likely wasn’t.

But the contestants on the show were very much not doing any of the obvious if not easy things to lose weight: eliminating carbohydrates, reducing calorie intake, and exercising. Instead, they were trading public humiliation for the chance to be a star. The odds, after all, were stacked against them. And even if they won—they were the biggest loser!—they would have prevailed only after having suffered the insults and taunts of the host. Oh, and had millions of Americans laughing at them.

And so I sat on the hotel bed, drank Scotch, and pondered all of this. I would go back to Puerto Rico, where I was teaching some 200 students or so, and they had all seen the show. This despite the fact that many of them would have trouble understanding it: still, it was in their world, not mine.

And so it was happenstance that I had stumbled on “The World’s Biggest Loser,” with the dominatrix named (if I remember rightly) Jillian, and not “The Apprentice” with Donald Trump. In fact, I was not to hear Trump’s voice, or to see any footage of him, until after he was inaugurated on 20 Jan 2017. I didn’t watch the debates—why should I? I had read enough to know that he was exactly the kind of kid that I had despised in high school: a loud-mouth, a braggart, an arrogant and errant bully. True, he had grown older, though nobody could say he had grown up. That happens to people; what doesn’t happen, or so I thought, was that anyone would take him seriously enough to nominate him and then elect him president.

I had seen, as I approached my 60^th birthday, a series of horrifying presidents. And I had seen spin, most notably for Ronald Reagan. But it was apparent: Trump was in a category by himself.

As were the times. For truth had stopped being important, or rather, the concept of truth no longer existed. What took its place was repetition, and that counted for everything. And since the proliferation of social media had diluted the prestige of mainstream news and allowed for fanatics to live comfortably in their niches, truth was whatever a person chose to believe.

I knew where this was going, since I had seen it well in Puerto Rico. “All politicians lie,” said my students, and looked at me with amusement when I challenged the assumption. Did I still believe in Santa Claus? Was I still waiting for the Tooth Fairy to slip me a quarter under my pillow? Some politicians lie more than others, I told them, and all politicians cite statistics and data that support their views. Why shouldn’t they? It’s up to us to get the full picture, and that means reading the news, and listening to the opponents.

But the news, said my students, was depressing, and also…well, the reporters also lied. So that meant that people chose candidates much as they chose their favorite baseball team. And of course, many people opted out of the whole thing altogether, as in fact many people opted out of the election. After all, only 55% of the eligible  population voted in 2016, which according to CNN was the lowest in 20 years. So we had two candidates that nobody wanted to have coffee with, much less spend four years reading about and watching. Yetch! And would it make any difference who won?

I wondered about that, and so I read what was—if anything—supposed to be a rather more than tempered account of Donald Trump. Called Trump Revealed, the book went all the way from the Donald’s paternal grandfather (the immigrant from Germany, who did in fact seem to operate some hostelry in which women of less than rigid virtue were welcomed) through Fred (father) and through the three marriages of Donald himself. And sorry reading it made indeed.

It is as useless to summarize the book as it was (and is) to post anything on Facebook. And in a sense, it misses the point. I read the account of the small business man in Atlantic City who made the signs for the Trump Taj Mahal, thinking that he was getting a big break by dealing with the tycoon. He waited and waited for payment, joined a group of other contractors waiting for payment, and eventually wound up receiving less than full payment. And there went the family business, as well as the land on which it stood.

It was hardly the worst story. Apparently, Trump had gone through a phase where being a Lothario was important to him. And so he had gone on radio with Howard Stern—another guy I know nothing about—and they had talked “locker room talk” for months. Could Trump have bagged Lady Diana? Yes, was the answer, and he (Trump) had been sending her flowers, before she got herself killed. And he announced that he was having great sex with Melania, and then passed the phone to her. “Yes,” she confirmed, every day, and it was terrific.

But all this is useless, and besides the point. And what is the point? Nothing is more revealing than what the bankers did to Trump when his empire was in fact failing, and when even father Fred couldn’t help. The bankers, it must be said, acted as badly as anybody else: they did to Trump what they were to do to the public in the first years of the 21^st century. That is: they lent money like crazy to Trump, and often were unaware or uniformed of the other financial burdens that Trump had taken on. And so the chickens had done what they do, at the end of the day, and the bankers were left with the question: what to do?

In fact, the very thing that had gotten Trump into the mess got him out. Just as they believed that he was incapable of failing, he then became too big to fail. He was worth, said one of them, more alive than dead. So they put him on a strict budget: a monthly allowance of something in the six figures. Not hard for you and me, but apparently a challenge for Trump, who nonetheless had Melania sporting a diamond ring as big as a pigeon’s egg. And how had he gotten it, the bankers wanted to know? Easy, Harry Winston had lent it!

Of course, I believe these stories because I read them, and 30 or 40 percent of the public believes that Obama was (is) a Muslim born in Kenya. So who’s to say?

And that, of course, is the problem. Because a book is just as reliable as the website Buzzfeed; Facebook is every bit as valid as The Washington Post or The New York Times.

And so we had Trump, who had either developed major personality disorders at some point in his life, or who had arrested his development somewhere around age 12. None of that is particularly interesting. What amazes is that everyone had let Trump get away with it all for all his life, as well as stumble into the White House with a loss of almost three million in the popular vote.

And so I spent the fall of 2016 watching an incompetent braggart get away with it all. For none of it mattered. He hadn’t paid taxes, as reported by The New York Times? Perhaps, but who knew, since he was the first candidate in recent memory not to disclose his taxes returns. He groped women? Who cared, since the buds who were going to vote for him thought that was cool, and the Evangelical Christians thought that was a lesser thing than that demoness, Hillary, with all her support for abortion et al. No, none of it mattered, since there was no longer any truth, nor any metrics to get us to the truth.

Well, I told you at the beginning at the beginning: I was utterly alone, and I was going nowhere. And part of me, yes, watched with horror the ascent of Donald J. Trump. But that was only one part of it. For it became clear…

…while Trump was definitely the tail wagging the dog, the dog had been bred very much by the Republicans.