Heraclitus Was Wrong—You Can Step Into the Same River Again and Again and Again.

A reflection on why it’s been hard for me to write.

Since the election, I’ve been experiencing writer’s despair. Not writer’s block, or an absence of ideas. But despair. I’ve tried to rev myself up by watching and rewatching cable tv series and doing the kind of background research that usually fascinates me and gives me plenty to chew over. But although the ideas come, they don’t seem to deserve to be taken seriously enough, or perhaps the thought of taking them seriously enough to write about them is just too exhausting. What good would it do to contribute more to the ever-growing pile of post-election analyses? On the other hand, I couldn’t seem to get in the right “space” to write about television and movies.

In general I’m exhausted. I get into bed earlier and earlier, and if I wake up at 3 instead of making coffee and getting out my lap desk (my old writer’s habit), I rebunch the pillows into the most comforting shape, wait to fall asleep again—and often have nightmares in the hours between 3 and 5. I’m eating too much sugary stuff and my old nervous habit of twisting long strands of my hair into a knot that I then tear off has come back. I fantasize about getting a new puppy. We already have three dogs.

Edward says just I should just exercise more and wait for my spirits to lift. But I fret that if I stop being a writer—even for just a little while—I’ll disappear. So I thought that I’d look for a previous piece to repost, maybe from a couple of years ago or something from a book of mine, just to stay connected with my Substack and FB communities. But then, browsing en route to the earlier pieces, I saw one that wasn’t very old, but with a title—“Liars and Believers”—that I didn’t understand. I of course was the person who had given it that title, but I couldn’t remember what I had in mind. So I opened up the stack, and saw it was written in May, during the “Hush Money” trial. ¹

With some updating of facts, it could easily have been written yesterday. And reading it made me realize how much my current gloom is due, not just to concern and fear over what the next Trump presidency will bring but the feeling of being pulled back into a thick, suffocating swamp that once seemed like a temporary roadblock to the future but that I now experience as a more-or-less permanent environment. It’s shown that it’s too sticky to be drained, too spread out over everything to be contained. It’s continually regenerating, regrowing its clinging sludge. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. And no effective rinse agent.

And already it’s being treated less as a monstrous growth that one should shudder in the face of and more as an “administration” to be reported on. That’s how it grows—by absorption, like the blob of the old sci-fic movie.²

(Please forgive my awkward, mixed metaphors. I’m struggling to capture a feeling, and I’ve never been great at that.)

My piece might speak more clearly than my flawed images. Here’s an abbreviated version (I’ve left out the “receipts”—testimony from transcripts of the trial):

“The Jinx Part 2,” chronicles what happened after millionaire Robert Durst, taking to himself on a mic he didn’t know was “hot,” accidentally confessed to “killing them all”—his first wife, his best friend, and his neighbor (who he also dismembered.) Putting to one side (for the moment) ongoing cable news commentary on the “hush money” trial of Donald Trump, it’s the creepiest series on television right now—not because of the killings themselves, but because of Durst’s apparently unflinching faith that, despite all the evidence—including his own filmed “hot mic” confession and bizarre admissions on the stand—he can bamboozle his way out of a guilty verdict. Or at least, into a special prison full of conveniences for “old, sick people.”

Is he deluded or what? Testifying In a wheelchair, seeming so papery frail he might die at any moment, Durst’s voice is shaky and barely audible; later the same night, on a telephone call with his second wife it’s noticeably louder and stronger. Does he not know the call is being recorded? Does he just not care? Is it all just some kind of weird game to him? It seems like the latter, when at one point, the prosecutor asked if he killed his friend Susan. “NO.” “But if you had, you’d lie about it, is that correct?” “CORRECT.”

WTF is going on here? What world is Durst living in? It’s not easy to name it, but it’s not unlike the same world Donald Trump was living in when, at a recent rally, he gave a shout-out to the “late, great” Hannibal Lecter, referring to the (fictional) psychopath as a “wonderful man.” The only difference is that Durst was found guilty, while Trump has managed, so far, to get away with his delusions and deceptions: 71 percent of Republicans describe him as “honest and trustworthy.” And he may bamboozle his way not just out of jail but into a second term as President of the United States.

Trump, like Durst, is both a narcissist and a con-man. And increasingly, like Durst, he seems to be going off whatever rails kept him minimally balanced over the years. I sometimes fantasize that, like Durst and like the psychotic stepfather of the movie of the same name (“Wait, who am I here?”) he will dramatically decompose before our eyes and become a puddle of incoherency. But then I realize that basically he already has, and it doesn’t seem to matter at bit to a large portion of the population. Or to the various institutions that we at one time imagined would protect us from an authoritarian madmen having the nuclear codes.

Despite numerous books and articles, we’re still dazed and confused by the Trump phenomenon. How he got elected in the first place is one thing—that’s something we can diagnose and deconstruct (my own view is that it wouldn’t have happened had he not been carried over the finish line by Hillary-hate, media malpractice, James Comey, and—as we now know from the “hush money”revelations—criminal deception of the voting public.) But how he continues to bamboozle is something else. The mainstream media remarks at the capitulation of the GOP, as well as Trump’s thousands of devoted followers, in a kind of amazement. “How could this happen?” “The guy is a pathological, ego-driven liar. Don’t these people see it?” “What will it take to wake them up?” And then they offer their explanations: cynical power-grabbing, fear of Trumpian displeasure, mass hysteria, the fragility of our institutions, brainwashing, disorientation etc. etc. People on Facebook quote from William Butler Yeats on the center not holding. George Stephenopolis has described us as too numb to react to the constant outrages anymore. Like people in a bombed out city who become habituated to death. Charlie Sykes, in The Atlantic, likened the state we’re in to vertigo, less like numbness than “….something like airsickness, which results when we experience a disconnect between our senses—a nausea-inducing conflict between what we know and what we see….We’ve been led to believe that things work in a certain way, that there are mores and norms. We thought our world was right side up, but it now feels as if it’s been turned upside down.”

This is pretty fancy existential language. And certainly, some people may experience our current situation as nausea-inducing. I suspect they may be more used to a “right side up” world than those for whom it’s always been on a tilt. Personally, I don’t feel dizzy. I feel angry. I want to scream. I want to bash a hole in the wall. Fuck the “flickering standards.” Our standards are quite stable; they’re just grounded in groupthink, headline “news,” and winning PR. A “dissonance” between what we “know” and what we “see”? If only! Knowledge doesn’t seem to even figure into our lives much anymore. Vertigo? I wish that our understandings and representations (the Israel/Gaza war for example) would allow itself some vertigo instead of historically untethered simplicities. The mainstream media, although they regard and congratulate themselves as our heroic epistemological watchdogs, in fact bark and jump up, not on “truth” or even “facts” but on packaging the moment with words, images, chyrons—that pump up some events and “disappear” others. Events that are headlined, dramatized, and repeated slyly segue into the category of believability while those that are deemed less gripping slip into the purgatory of inattention. And if the chosen Big Story is ultimately proved groundless (as frequently happens) it’s easy to bury the retractions on page 10 (television reporters often just ignore their misreports.)

The trial is about to resume tomorrow. My husband Edward is sure that the jury will find Trump guilty. I have serious doubts. We go back and forth with each other in this current version of the same argument we’ve been having since the American voters lost their minds in 2016. The argument has taken a lot of different forms, but I’ll boil it down for you: Is there hope for us or isn’t there? He thinks there is—that the truth will out, the wicked will get their punishment, and though we once were blind, will some day see. He learned that hymn, I never did. But once—can’t say exactly when I lost my faith, it’s been brewing for quite a while—I had more stock in all those now near-defunct values (truth, fact, reason, yada yada) than even he did. Perhaps than most people have.

I went into philosophy in part because it seemed like such a cool thing for a girl to do, but more deeply because my childhood was full of lies. Little, mundane but haunting ones: you think you’re going to a party but end up with some doctor putting an oxygen mask over your face, or they don’t tell you they’re dragging you to school to get a polio shot. And also really, really huge lies that make you doubt all official accounts of things: I was 18 years old before I was told that my mother was once married to my father’s first wife’s brother (yes, brother and sister; Flatbush was a small, Jewish world in those days,) that they ran away (to the wilds of Newark) together and had my older sister “out of wedlock.” I grew up with no trust in anything but my own efforts to cut through bullshit, to expose every cover-up, rip away every mask, excavate any truth that there was to be found in life. And philosophy seemed to be a discipline that would reward my skill/disorder (take your pick.)

My husband also found escape and relief in his choice of specialization. But not in order to find a clean, cool place to be. He comes from emotionally reserved, upper-class, very anglo stock. Lots of lawyers, who travelled to be educated in Great Britain. A building on the Cornell campus named “Boardman Hall,” after his great-grandfather. And their own house, non-ostentatious but stately, on a steep Ithaca hill, always smelled of firewood and Thanksgiving dinner. No garlic, onions, or cigar smoke. Everyone moved and talked slowly and deliberately. “You have such lovely, young hands,” his ever-polite, secretly anti-semitic father told me when we first met. You get the picture.

Growing up, Edward dated daughters of Cornell professors and did the expected things. But for whatever reasons—who knows why some people grow seamlessly into their communities, while others feel choked?—there was something in him that kept wandering away to other cultures and their art and music and literature. First it was France and French. But the French were a little too cold and stylish for him. He yearned for warmth. And when he discovered Russian literature and music, that was it. Everything missing from or denied in how he’d grown up: passion, depth, tears, talk. And Edward would also say: God. God wasn’t in the spare Presbyterian churches or monotonous hymns. For Edward, God was in Scriabin and Shostakovich, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

The thing about Russian literature: There are a few purely good heroes, but mostly everyone starts out flawed or incomplete or oblivious, and in the course of the narrative, has defining moments (those moments could be moral awakenings, they could be spiritual epiphanies, they could be some stark confrontation with a reality that’s been denied—as, for example in Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych”) that turn their lives around. I’m not going to wander off into literary examples now. My point here is: Edward, who recreates himself every time he dazzles a classroom of students with his perfect Russian accent (Russians have taken him for a native, despite his all-American looks), and who abandoned the slender, country-club debs for zaftig, argumentative Jewish girls, deeply believes that people can change, can learn. And no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary, he never seems to lose faith in that possibility. I love this about him, and it also gives me opportunities to try out counter-arguments. But lately, I’ve come to lose faith even in the value of arguing, and I wind up listless and irritated: “I hope you’re right,” I say, in order to end the discussion.

It’s hard for me to believe in some moment when “the truth” will hatch out of our current, unfortunately non-fictional morass of lies, evasions, and cons. And perhaps I’m especially skeptical because I once was such a believer in the grounding power of thinking. Not “Thought” with the philosopher’s capital “T.” Just ordinary thinking things through—past the illusions and the performances and the self-deceptions and the lies. That belief seems pretty naive to me now.

For a few years after 2016, I still genuinely believed that things that could change the course we seemed to be on. I grew up, along with others of my generation, with actual memories of Watergate and, even if we were too young to view it ourselves, a narrative about the bringing-down of Josephy McCarthy that shaped our imaginations about the possibilities—even inevitability—that the arc of the moral universe did indeed bend toward justice. There were grim realities, but there also were dramatic moments that changed everything:

"Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.… Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyer's Guild ... Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator; you've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” 

The 2016 election was a devastating blow. But for a long time afterward, we held out hope for our own Joseph Welch or Watergate moment, waited for the bend in the arc which would send the edifice of authoritarianism crashing down—or expose a President’s corruption, as we had witnessed during the televised final six days of the House Judicial Committee’s deliberations over Nixon’s impeachment. When the Committee brought three articles of impeachment against Nixon and the House voted to have the entire impeachment trial televised, Nixon resigned in a prime-time television address, and we cheered.

At one point, we thought Robert Mueller might provide our Joseph Welch moment. We waited and waited, and enjoyed a clever video in which Mr. Prosecutor Mueller, like some modern-day Elliot Ness, collared all the crooks from Flynn to Trump. What a relic it seems like now!

Our pulses quickened and our hearts gladdened when we heard The Report was about to be released. But Mueller, bless him, thought history was still written with a quill pen. He actually expected Americans to read 400 pages of dense prose and do the right thing by it. He didn’t “get” television at all. But disastrously, Donald Trump and his Attorney General Bill Barr, following the Roger Ailes playbook, did. Trump and Barr understood that the phrase “No Collusion,” said often enough before a viewing audience, could easily defeat evidence and argument. 

Watching Bill Barr replace Mueller’s painstakingly prepared, factually impeccable report with televised lies was a turning point for those of us who had harbored the fantasy of a politically disruptive report delivered by a hero who, in a devastating moment of televised honesty and courage, would save us from our increasingly corrupt “normalcy.” The indictments, with their courageous investigators and prosecutors—provided a brief moment of hope, which my husband celebrated and I remained skeptical about. But one by one, the lying liars, from state legislatures to the “Supreme” Court (I’ll never say it anymore without scare quotes) harassed and stalled and tortured the constitution to prevent the trials—all but one—from happening.

As the trial resumes, I know the political machinery for bending the arc in the opposite direction of truth and justice is still whirring away. And as for the ability of twelve individuals to see through it, to think through it, to—just in this one instance, please!—to reverse that arc? it’s hard for me to be hopeful. I can already see the dust stirred up by the ridiculous idea that “if Michael Cohen lied then, you can mistrust anything he says now” and the essential but tricky distinction between “reasonable doubt” and “beyond a shadow of a doubt.” I don’t imagine that Katy Tur and Chris Jansing are up to clarifying it for viewers. I worry that over the long week-end, the jurists are, at some point, going to talk with their relatives or turn on the television. And I’m anxious about the two lawyers on the jury; judging by much of the “expert” legal commentary on MSNBC, they have their own weeds to get lost in at the expense of common sense.

“Jaded” is way too pale a term for how I feel. “Despairing”? I’m still not quite there. “Loss of faith” about does it. ³

On May 30, the jury, to the amazement of many, did find Trump guilty—on all 34 counts of falsifying records—with his sentencing set for July 11th, well before the election, and thus seemingly safe from charges of James Comey-like interference, which lots of us felt had been a decisive blow to Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.⁴

I took the 12 New York jurors just a day and a half of deliberations to unanimously agree that Trump falsified business records to conceal a $130,000 hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels in order to influence the 2016 presidential contest.

On Facebook I shared some easy jubilance, but in my typically skeptical mode wasn’t ready to declare that we’d finally gotten our Joseph Welch moment:

The fresh air didn’t exactly sweep through the room for very long.

On July 1, in a 6-3 decision, SCOTUS set a broad new definition of executive power by ruling that former presidents are protected from criminal prosecution for "official acts" taken while in the White House. No guidelines were proposed for what constitutes the "unofficial acts” which don’t carry such immunity.

In a fierce and articulate dissent joined by Justice Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the ruling said the ruling left her with "fear for our democracy.” It “reshapes the institution of the presidency,” she wrote, and “makes a mockery” of the constitutional principle that no man is above the law. Justice Jackson added: "The court has now declared for the first time in history that the most powerful official in the United States can (under circumstances yet to be fully determined) become a law unto himself." 

Pres. Biden: "Today's decision almost certainly means that there are virtually no limits on what a president can do."

At first it seemed as though the Hush Money case—which involved virtually no acts performed while Trump was in office—would not be seriously derailed, unlike Jack Smith’s 2020 election subversion case, which was stalled in order for the trial court to determine what actions alleged by federal prosecutors to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power are official—and therefore protected—and which are not.

But no. As the most jaded of us suspected would happen, Trump and his lawyers managed to pull the Hush Money case under the umbrella of potential immunity, too, arguing that various witness testimonies in the hush-money case (such as that of former White House employees) and evidence (such as statements made while he was president) were official acts and thus excluded from prosecution. So the date for sentencing was postponed until September 18 to allow time for Judge Merchan to “weigh the possible impact” of the immunity ruling.

The delay was depressing but wasn’t as “stunning” to me as some pundits declared. Delay, delay, delay had always been Trump’s legal strategy, and it had always triumphed. What was astonishing, however, was Merchan’s September 6 ruling that sentencing be further postponed until after the election “to avoid any appearance — however unwarranted — that the proceeding has been affected by or seeks to affect the approaching presidential election in which the defendant is a candidate.”

Approaching??? The election was still two months away. James Comey had made his announcement 11 days before the 2016 election. And to this day, he defends his decision.⁵ Also, while Comey had announced the re-opening of an investigation, Trump had already been found guilty; the September date was just for sentencing. No one—at least, none of the legal experts I’d read or listened to—expected a jail term. Was the potential “effect” simply the reminder, to voters, of the guilty verdict? (If so, it might have been a useful factual corrective to Trump’s daily declarations, during and after the trial, that it was a political witch hunt. Instead, Merchan effectively gave Trump the final word.)

Some pundits speculate that had Merchan not been sure Trump would lose he wouldn’t have ruled for a delay. But political considerations are not supposed to enter into these decisions, right? Or am I mistaken about what the whole idea of “equal treatment under law” means?

Whatever Merchan’s concerns for the “optics,” whatever outcome he anticipated or desired, Trump won. And as President-Elect, he was endowed with the same mysterious deference that he seemed able to continually extract from our legal “system”—whether as a serving POTUS, a candidate, or a not-yet POTUS.

Are there any circumstances under which this guy is going to be held to account? While waiting to see what would happen with sentencing now, I was amazed and frankly disgusted at how calmly the legal pundits on MSNBC and CNN—with very few exceptions⁶—predicted and seemed perfectly fine with the likelihood that sentencing would be delayed until 2028 at the earliest. I posted on Facebook and “notes”:

Where is it written that a President-Elect can’t get sentenced? He’s not POTUS yet. Seems to me everyone I’m listening to is submitting to the Trump autocracy in advance. Isn’t this period the time for resistance? (Please inform me if there is a constitutional provision I’m not “getting.”)

Sentencing was indefinitely delayed, and no one ever did come up with a constitutional justification. The argument, rather, was that the judge needed to adjourn sentencing to have time to “weigh how to handle the prosecution in the wake of the former president’s reelection victory.” In the meantime, Trump’s defense is working like mad to try to get the conviction dismissed completely.

Of course, it’s still possible that the judge will have enough time before January to decide “how to handle” the reelection. I wouldn’t put any money on it.

To me, it seemed like concern over “optics” and that bizarre fear that Trump seems to inspire had won the day. His team was victorious, even as they continued their witch-hunt accusations: “In a decisive win for President Trump, the hoax Manhattan Case is now fully stayed and sentencing is adjourned," said Steven Cheung, Trump communications director, "All of the sham lawfare attacks against President Trump are now destroyed and we are focused on Making America Great Again."

The same swampy river. Again. Again. And again.

1. For more on the trial, see

Why I Don't Want to See Another Piece with "Porn Star" in The Headline

2. Thanks to

Binnie Klein

for this image.

3. ‘Taken from

Liars and Believers

4. See

Hillary Clinton’s Emails & Media Power

5. See https://medium.com/engendered/the-talented-mr-comey-7ad0f3008364?sk=15475df97353bfbd690cdb786731f92d.

6. Catherine A. Christian was a notable exception.