“Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.”
~ Toni Morrison
I’ve always been anxious. I’ve never thought of myself as depressed. I think now that whenever I felt depression coming on, I chased it away with anxiety. Sometimes my body had to take it very far: bizarre symptoms that in the 19th century would have been called “hysterical.” Then I would recover and write a book—not about myself but about things buried in culture that grabbed me and said “Get better; you have to write about me.”
My students were always surprised to hear of my several nervous breakdowns. They saw the books, went to the public lectures, and they felt my mothering of them. I told them about my breakdowns to help them with their own anxieties and depression. I’m sure the information was hard to square with the confident person I was on the stage and in the classroom, and in my writing, with the person who adopted a baby when she was past 50, with the person who wasn’t ever afraid to talk back.
That confident person is as real as the fat little girl she carved herself out of. But she’s always been more fragile than she appeared, and she relied on certain things that I don’t know how to describe yet. I envy fiction writers because they can keep doing what they love even when faith in the untangling that “reason” (or just call it intelligence) promises is gone. Their work can be an offering: here, come into this other world, it’s actually your world but I’ll show you some new things about. They may care—some care very much—but they don’t have to butt up against this culture directly. Their brains—as I imagine it—aren’t constantly in argument with it. That’s a crazy-making habit now. But also a difficult habit to break.
There are lots of more clearly “personal” reasons why I’m depressed. And there are lots of things happening to all of us that are more than enough reason for all of us to be depressed, frightened, angry. But I used to be able to write about those without my writing itself being undermined by a “why?” “what for?” But now I am, and it’s a new kind of depression for me.
I don’t mean that I feel unappreciated by those who read my work. I do feel appreciated. I mean a kind of loss of faith in the place of criticism in today’s world. We’re glutted with published words naming and diagnosing the state of things. Every MSNBC anchor and regular commentator has a book or/and a bestselling substack. They are like snowflakes: each one may be different, but together it’s a big storm that the windshield wipers don’t work against. And although the surface appearance is “democratic,” in fact there are many things that are policed, that can’t be said without accusations. At the same time, other ideas rise to the surface, becoming “official” and unquestioned. The media pays attention because they are cowardly and protective of their own, and are mostly lazy thinkers. They latch onto things and repeat and rinse and repeat until they are used up, displaced by some new headline.
If you’ve lived your life being rescued from depression by the pleasure of having insights and ideas, by the finding of words and examples to communicate them, by discovering what hasn’t been said, what people are ashamed or bullied into not saying, and saying them out loud in your work, it’s depressing.
That which isn’t spoken about
About six years ago, a picture popped up on my ancestry site that I had never seen it before, and neither had my sisters. It was a photo of my mother, very young and wearing a white dress with a doily-like lace hat on her head and what looked like a veil. “That must be a wedding picture from her first marriage,” one of us speculated. It had to be, as there was no doily, no veil, no pictures, no wedding at all when she married my father. Exiled to New Jersey (from Brooklyn), my mother pregnant with my older sister Mickey, they had “broken up” two marriages.
The unusual circumstances made it extra scandalous, as my mother’s first husband was the brother of my father’s first wife. But I didn’t know about that until I was eighteen. I grew up knowing my father had been married before—It was impossible to hide it, as there was a son. But they hid whatever they could. My older sister was my father’s biological child, but because they were still married to the brother and sister at the time, they had to adopt Mickey to make it legal after the divorces and remarriage. My sister, finding the adoption papers in a drawer, spent years—I don’t know just how many as the whole story was shrouded in mystery—believing she was adopted. Eventually, they told her the truth.
My mother and father weren’t big on truth. They carried a lot of shame with them over the Flatbush scandal, but even about more trivial things (like taking me to the dentist or getting my polio shot) they’d lie rather than have to deal with whatever chaos the truth might stir up. From immigrant families, any dreams of upward mobility bashed by the depression, they had too much else to deal with than to worry about “good parenting.”
I read memoirs in which the writers seem to have vivid, specific recall of people and events from their childhoods, and I know I could never do that. I remember the things that my parents engraved into many-times-told stories, but I don’t know which of them are family mythology. My father loved to create entertaining (or, on the other hand, angry) narratives and my mother never dared correct him about the details. He liked to brag about his daughter’s talents, but had a lot of stories about our deficiencies, too, that he told with equal relish. Did I really say “My father is coming home on Saturday” when I was not even walking yet? (Susie is dazzlingly but almost bizarrely advanced.) Did I try to bite off my younger sister’s toe when they brought her, a day-old infant, home? (Susie was so jealous she tried to kill her little sister.) Did I actually get dropped on my head when I was an infant (brought up whenever I behaved however my father considered weird or emotionally excessive)? Or was all that part of my father’s imaginative construction of me?
When my sisters and I sat down to write a piece together, we discovered we had very different versions of many things, including the circumstances of our parents’ deaths. While I know that my mother ultimately died of a series of strokes, I don’t know exactly what kind of intestinal damage or disease had physically undermined her so badly; there was no autopsy, and Mickey, Binnie and I seem to have come away with different diagnoses, perhaps depending on how much we got from our father. We have different versions, too, of how and why the doctors proceeded with surgery on a benign skin cancer when my father was in heart failure. It’s my belief that there was medical malpractice there, but my stepmother and older sister didn’t want to pursue that, and so the exact circumstance just sort of evaporated.
Much of our family history was a kind of cover-up, in which the anxieties, superstitions, projections and misplaced protectiveness of those in charge at any given time determined how reality was presented.
Maybe I’m creating a mythology too, in connecting all this to what I’ve been inspired by/driven to write about all my life, but when “official” narratives (in the telling of history, in the news, in the various clubs that set the rules) control what can be seen or spoken of, I go into fight mode and have to talk back, have to stand up for what’s been obscured, censored, exiled. A dedication to truth? “Truth” is too big and abstract a word. More like an extreme—itchy, throat-constricting, heart-racing—allergy to the lies told by those in power.
If you feel crazy, you’re not alone.
Everything in our collective culture seems to have gone about as low as it can go lately. And I’m having nightmares every night about a lover from decades ago. In those nightmares, he’s rejecting me in a different way every night. In reality, it was a magical, sensual, thrilling relationship that got messed up, and I suppose my nightmares are a mourning over everything that was wonderful about it and is long gone. I haven’t even been in contact with him for 25 years. But you know these things are always layered. And I think a lot of other things are packed in there too, besides “personal” grief. We don’t talk enough about how the political invades the psyche. I can’t fully absorb that I’m actually 78, and I’m stupified by how stuck we are in the Trumpian horrible. They are brick walls that I can’t get over.
So many lies. So many lies. Shameless lies. Lies said with such confidence. The puppy-killer in her little fighting-Barbie cap. The despicable little worm who leads the House. It’s such transparently dedicated, ruthless thought-control and alternative-reality promotion. It’s been happening for a long time, but I’m finding the brazen-ness particularly staggering lately.
When we were driving home a few weeks ago from a mini-vacation, I heard Dahlia Lithwick speaking on MSNBC about the SCOTUS decision that will allow the citizenship of babies to vary from state to state. Dahlia said that she thought our three valiant dissenters must be feeling crazy. Thanks Dahlia Lithwick, for saying what never gets said in the endless academic discussions about the legal intricacies!
How can these sisters do it?? Are they able to even have lunch with the others? To sit in the same room with them? When I try to imagine what it’s like to be them my brain feels like it’s going to shatter.
Our lives are easy compared to what they have to deal with. But that word—“crazy”—was actually good to hear because I know it’s how a lot of us feel. And it never gets addressed. The media uses the term “normalize” a lot, in talking about all the rules, laws, behavior Trump has been allowed to get away with. But they don’t get into the depths of how crazy that “normalization” makes us. Nor—except for Lawrence O’Donnell, who I count on to make me feel less insane—does their reporting reflect the ghastliness of it all.
I have physical evidence. I’m prediabetic and use a glucose monitor to help me from sliding into the diabetic zone. Some of you may not know this, but glucose responds to anxiety, and my own system is particularly sensitive. The day of the SCOTUS decision, I spiked exactly in correspondence with what I was watching/listening to/reading about the SCOTUS decision. I spike whenever Jewish anxiety over the phrase “Globablize the Intifada” is dismissed as “one interpretation.” I spike when the mainstream media reports Donald Trump’s “disillusionment” with his once-adored Putin as though Trump is a normal president who is just rationally rethinking international relations instead of a toddler having a tantrum because Putin didn’t allow him to fulfill his delusional fantasy of ending the war because, you know, only Trump could fix it. I spike as I watch the official media line on the 2024 election become one version or another of Biden or Harris blaming. I spike as “charismatic” male politicians set the standards—not just covertly (the usual) but brazenly celebrated by the media—for what the Dems should be looking for in leadership.
Bernie Sanders constantly trashing the “establishment” makes me spike too. It’s all well and good to say “aren’t you ever going to let that go, Susan?” But my glucose knows what those who didn’t live through 2016 and 2024 the way others of us (mostly Black and/or female and/or now being defined as “geriatric”) did can’t comprehend. It never ends, it just shape-shifts, and our instincts are attuned to when a new shape is emerging. I’m like a small animal sensing the lurking predator: my nose sniffs it out, my fur stands up, my stomach clenches.
Blaming the Democrats is Wrong—and Dangerous
Ever since the election, commentator after commentator on MSNBC has found a way to make Democrats’ “Infighting” and/or “people’s anger at the Democratic Party” or “the need for new leadership” equivalent in importance to the growing national protest against Trump. They did it by making it the main “takeaway” of local town halls, by highlighting interviews with Dem-disgruntled attendees at the Sanders/AOC “Fight Oligarchy” rallies, by pointing out that Sanders’ criticisms of Democrats got the most resounding applause at those rallies, and by interjecting at every opportunity that “it’s not just the Republicans that are the focus of people’s anger.”
First it was all about the Dems holding those pitiful little signs up and not walking out en masse when Al Green was ejected for heckling (and later censured) during Trump’s talk.
Then it was all about Schumer’s call on the continuing resolution.
The first was a mistake. Clearly, the Dems were still too much under the spell of Michelle Obama’s “When they go low, we go high.” But let’s have a little tolerance for lag time. It took them a little too long to realize that civilized rules were no longer in order.
As far as Schumer goes, I thought it was a mistake at the time but now I’m not so sure, considering that the most successful resistance to Trump has been in the courts, which would have been disabled if the government had shut down.
Nomatter what you think of these two happenings, surely it was an over-reaction—powered by the drooling media—to declare most of the sitting members of congress “ineffective,” “spineless,” and “out-of-touch.” Oh yes, and I almost forgot: “elderly.”
Bernie Sanders (himself “elderly,” have you noticed?) can always be counted on for stoking that fire. He starts speeches and interviews with (often very effective) descriptions of the Trump horror-show. But then he just can’t resist a little equalizing rant about how “neither party” is “capable” of generating a grass-roots movement (apparently not true, if you’ve been watching Rachel Maddow’s daily reports), how Democrats have “failed the working-class” (still defined by him in old Marxist terms in which, for example, feminist Democrats’ tireless fight for reproductive freedom and access is apparently not esteemed a “working class” issue) and how both parties are “controlled by billionaires”:
“You got a Democratic Party, in general, that is dominated by billionaires, just as the Republican Party is. That operates under the leadership of a bunch of inside the Beltway consultants very well paid who are way out of touch with the 32,000 people here today.”
Bernie doesn’t seem to notice that he’s doing that false equivalence thing. “Yes, the Republicans are terrible, BUT the Democrats are at fault too.”
The false equivalences aren’t only to be found in speeches and sentences that outright equate the Republicans and the Democrats. “Equal time” on news shows also creates false equivalences in Trump’s America. A major segment of the MSNBC Sunday show one morning featured Democrats chastising other Democrats for being “lazy” (Beto O’Rourke) and not addressing working people’s issues but focusing instead on “transgender and abortion” (Mitch Landreau—and yes, he actually did suggest “abortion” was peripheral to “most people’s lives.” And no one on the panel objected.) The next segment was about Trump’s absurd claims that he doesn’t know anything about anything, and a passing mention of the Republicans continuing failure to stand up to him. And somehow, the panel also managed to return to the subject of what Democrats are doing wrong.
“It’s on the Democrats to keep the issues alive,” the commentators say. “Democrats are bad messengers” you say.
Do you know what the word “media” comes from?
Mediate: “To intercede, interpose, intervene, come or go between.”
There are no pure “messages” in our mediated world.
YOU deliver what’s worthy of being “news,” YOU deliver the “message.” YOU “interpose” yourself between the raw world and the reader/viewer.
And every day the corporate media focuses on “what the Democrats are doing wrong” they normalize the reprehensible behavior of the Republicans in congress.
In this totally banal, self-serving way the media fails us, and has for a long time.
The blame and shame should rest squarely on Republicans EVERY DAY.
The Problem with Letting the Media Write History
The phenomenon starts with some well-known reporters who get to schmooze with a bunch of Washington insiders and journalist pals who vent their anger and disappointment about the election “on background”(no names.) They pull a shitload of impressionistic quotes, imagined thoughts and novelistic, hyperbolic descriptions into a narrative. They make sure to highlight the candidate’s worst moments (even the most trivial and nearly all of them pertaining to “optics”) and skip quickly over the best. They (or their editors) slap on a sensational title and a subtitle that promises to reveal the truth of why Hillary/Kamala/Biden lost the 2016/2024 elections. And then they make the rounds of all the news and interview shows, virtually all of them hosted by colleagues whose interest is in promoting their friend’s book, not challenging its narrative. (On Piers Morgan, Tapper gets away with claiming that “it [the Biden “cover up”] may be worse than Watergate.”)
The book reviewers seem unconcerned about “balance,” the contribution of these books to the historical record, or the fact that Donald Trump is either a missing person (“Original Sin”) or comes off as a conquering hero (Allen and Parnes’ latest, “Fight”) They alternatively praise the book the way one would describe a work of fiction (“Reads like a Shakespearean drama on steroids”—The Los Angeles Times) or as a definitive, “deeply reported,” “well-sourced” historical account that “takes a sledgehammer to Joe Biden’s legacy, already in grave disrepair” (Rolling Stone). This reviewers’ glee—after all, this is a highly clickable “scoop” for him too—is shameful. “For anyone interested in politics and Shakespearean tragedy, there’s something on every page,” he writes.
I always read (or watch) whatever I’m going to write about, and that’s meant forcing myself to slog through a lot of hateful, superficial, self-satisfied crap. People keep asking me why I still watch Morning Joe, still read the latest hit-job. The answer is always the same: so I can write about it. I’m not deluded; I know what I write has no chance of making its way to the people who actually are in a position to change things. But this thing I do is in my DNA; there’s no escape.
So, I had to read the Tapper book:
And then there’s Jonathan Allen/Amie Parnes’ latest, “Fight.” It follows in the tradition of “Shattered”: Lots of gossipy chapters that emphasize why Kamala was a problem candidate, many totally imagined thoughts and conversations, minute analyses of everything SHE “did wrong,” zero analysis and criticism of Trump’s campaign or the insidious planning and backing that went into it, and—surprise!—not a word about how the mainstream media (of which Allen and Parnes are members) empowered Trump and continually raised doubts about Harris. They did the same thing in their book about Hillary and 2016.
“Dishy” or Just Trashy? How “Fight” Normalizes Trump, Dumps on Kamala, and Lets the Media Off The Hook For the Disaster of 2024
In 2017, I had the misfortune of having my own book on the 2016 election—The Destruction of Hillary Clinton— published the same week as reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes’ Shattered.
“She ran a bad campaign.” That’s a familiar tune. Seems like whenever a woman runs—that “lousy campaign” thing happens. Not surprisingly, it excuses the “mainstream” media of their own contribution to voters’ perceptions and misconceptions. Allen and Parnes aren’t unique. In the hundreds of books and articles and interviews and panels that have “diagnosed” the disastrous outcomes of both 2016 and 2024, the mainstream media has never featured any discussions focusing on their own responsibility. The reason? It means taking themselves to task. The world of publishing/journalism is a tight club that protects its own. The New York Times and MSNBC aren’t about to devote space to a major expose of their failings.
Wanted: An agent who is willing to take a chance selling a book that’s critical of how the corporate media (not just Fox) has played an indisputable role in bringing Trump to power, by (sometimes cluelessly, sometimes not) undermining the candidacies of female leaders. It happened in 2016, it happened during the primaries of 2020, it happened again in 2024. And if the current dissing of the Democratic “establishment”—many of whom are Black and/or Female—persists, it’s going to happen again.
The Tyranny of “The Left”
In 2019, my next-to-last semester before I retired, I had the worst class I’d had in my many decades of teaching. I’d been on sabbatical the year before, and during the time I was off campus I’d apparently become a “neo-liberal” “terf” who “misgendered” students, “passive aggressively” assigned a critic of “progressive” jargon (it was a writing class, and the use of jargon was the topic that week), and deliberately mispelled a Middle-Eastern student’s name. (The “d” and the “f” were close together on a tiny keyboard, what can I say?) The student who’d been the victim of what she called my “micro-aggression” then posted private emails—between me and another student, as well as those intended only for our class—(a confidentiality they’d all agreed to at the beginning of the course) with an accusatory commentary that led to a mile-long thread so incendiary (and, at points, anti-semitic) that I eventually had to ask campus police to stand guard outside my classroom door.
It took me completely by surprise—until I realized that I had a small but determined cell of students who’d come armed with the knowledge of my Hillary Clinton book and the tweet-storms led by enraged Sanders-supporters. That was where the “neo-liberal” came from, with all the rest soon to follow from the certainty that I was of course on the wrong side of everything.
I’m very glad that I retired soon after. If I was still teaching today my miss typing of my middle-eastern student’s name might lead to far worse than the antisemitic undercurrent in that Facebook thread. In those days, had I wanted to discuss the many faces of hatred and suspicion of Jews throughout history, I think I could do so without eliciting a “what about” of some sort, I think my students would have appreciated hearing about my own experiences, both overt and subtle. I think but I’m far from sure. At the time, being branded as an “oppressor” was anomalous to my experience; today, I realize now just how much (negative) weight my criticisms of Sanders had been hung around my neck, how much my book had branded me among his supporters.
Ever since the 60’s, when I identified with “the left” myself, there’s been that tendency to divide everyone up into those on the side of justice for the oppressed and “those who are part of the problem.” You were either one or the other—a duality that didn’t allow for much contextual or historical thinking and that drove me out of political action groups. And it has continued, shifting in the specifics but not in the shape. Today, in 2025, it’s not enough to despise Netanyahu or be horrified by the destruction in Gaza. To not be “part of the problem” you have to denounce Israel in every way and accept all the simplistic, historically inaccurate understandings of those who consider themselves “pro-Palestinian.” Offering any kind of complicating context for the Israel/Hamas war, any criticism of media bias, or even any attempt to explain why “globalize the intifada” is hate-speech to many Jews (including myself) puts one on the wrong side of the divide.
In the current iteration of the divide, It’s been decided that any Jews who stubbornly insist that to win our trust Mamdani must renounce the words that chill us to the bone are narrow-mindedly focused on our own “interpretation” or, worse, Islamophobic.
We aren’t allowed, either, to recoil from the past actions of groups to which Mamdani belongs and that we still await his dissassociation from. On October 13–just a few days after the October 7th massacre—David Faris published a piece in Slate exposing how quickly “the left” had taken to inflammatory discourse excusing Hamas. He was virtually alone among journalists in calling attention to the fact that it
“…doesn’t come just from online Redditors, Instagram influencers, or Twitter leftists…New York’s Democratic Socialists initially supported a Manhattan rally at which protesters appeared to endorse the attacks as justified resistance. “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years,” wrote a groupof Harvard undergraduates in a statement endorsed by 33 student groups on campus. Student groups at other schools have used a silhouetted image of a paraglider—one of the methods the Hamas murderers used to breach the wall between Gaza and Israel—on posters supporting Palestinian resistance. In a piece published Wednesday in New York magazine, Eric Levitz recounted similar expressions of support for Hamas from supposed left-wing individuals and groups.
As the numbers of Palestinian dead climbed, the construction of the war as between Israeli “colonizers” and “innocent Palestinians” continued to obscure the virulent and violent hatred that fueled the October 7 attack. The mainstream media went right along with it, publishing horrifying pictures of the destruction in Gaza—fair enough, if at the same time they weren’t so seemingly oblivious to the many-times-stated objective of Hamas to eliminate Israel “from the river to the sea”:
From an interview with Hamas spokesperson Ghazi Hamad:
“The Al-Aqsa Flood (Hamas’ code name for 10/7) is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth, because we have the determination, the resolve, and the capabilities to fight….
[The interviewer asks: “Does that mean the annihilation of Israel?” And Hamad responds:]
“Yes, of course. The existence of Israel is illogical. The existence of Israel is what causes all that pain, blood, and tears. It is Israel, not us. We are the victims of the occupation. Period. Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On October 7, October 10, October 1,000,000 — everything we do is justified.”4
You don’t have to be a defender of Netanyahu’s actions (which I’ve never been) or blind to Palestinian suffering (which I’ve never been) to see the perversity of Stanford students holding a “Sit-In to Stop Genocide” (even before Israeli troops had crossed into Gaza) while celebrating October 7 as an “act of resistance.” But students were only following their elders. More from David Faris’s excellent piece:
Since the shocking, unprecedented, and ongoing incursions into Israel by Hamas militants on Saturday, the media and social media discourse about culpability has been maddening. Through the fog of war, Americans (and beyond) of every stripe have been roped into expressing support for “sides” of a conflict that many do not understand. This war is complex, and its layers of pain have been formed over many years, battles, and untold deaths. So, perhaps some recent statements, especially from students, have just been ill-conceived. But that hasn’t made the loud, if small, minority who has chosen a reflexive and counterproductive display of support—sometimes, but not always, accompanied with a caveat—for the execrable Hamas any less painful or abhorrent.
Apparently, though, it’s unacceptable to criticize the “pro-Palestine” movement for any misdirection—not even the celebration of a terrorist attack as a courageous act of “resistance.” When I wrote a stack about the media’s failures in “reporting” concerning Hamas—nothing in there that could be seen as minimizing the horrors in Gaza—I was accused of “defending murderous Zionist terrorist extremists.” In another, I was accused of “dehumanizing” Palestinians. And then—because I’m human, and just as raw as everyone else—I got pulled into a conversation that did no one any good. You know, one in which we either are throwing grenades or feeling mortally wounded.
I’m pretty sure I never called anyone an “antisemite” in that stack. Yet even when neither Israel or Palestine was mentioned in my stacks or notes—my focus has almost always been either media bias or how it feels to be Jewish today—there was the inevitable complaint: “Why can’t I criticize Israel without being called an antisemite?” Nowhere had I said you couldn’t criticize Israel or equated such criticism with antisemitism. My actual arguments were untouched by those using my comments page as an opportunity, not to discuss the issues I had raised but to advertise the commentator’s political credentials.
Here‘s another “why can’t I”? Why can’t I criticize Zohran Mamdani for constantly wiggling out of condemning “globalize the intifada” without being decried as on “the wrong side of history”? Without being reminded of the allegations of sexual abuse against Cuomo? Without being told, as one commenter said, that I am “a loon” who should “Go join the Trumpers but be honest about it, you’re a racist.”
When Kamala Harris was running, she was harassed by both the “left” and the mainstream media for answers that were declared “deflecting” or “evasive.” But Mamdani is the darling of the left and the “liberal” media right now, and so excused for his deflections and evasions.
I’m not urging that he be subjected to the “gotchas” that the media constantly threw at Biden and Harris. But as of now, they seem to have abandoned any concern about the issue at all—just as they seem to have forgotten the existence of Hamas, the fact that Hamas started the war, could end it by returning the hostages, built their various headquarters and hostage-holding dens under civilian hospitals and schools they evidently see as containing expendable Palestinians, and can’t be trusted to violate any ceasefire, as they did on October 7.
Mamdani says he doesn’t want to “police speech.” But free speech and hate speech aren’t the same thing. “Globalize the intifada” is arguably hate speech—at the very least, a large proportion of both Jews and antisemites take it that way. Mamdani might see it differently, but that doesn’t change the fact that antisemitic violence is a very real—not just “interpretive”—danger. Please don’t tell me about the Jewish people who support him or how many Jewish friends he has. His personal feelings about Jewish people are not the point. I’d just like him to acknowledge clearly and unequivocally that we are not crazy “loons” to feel that statements calling for the “globalization” of what was historically a stream of violent attacks against Israel are personally threatening to Jews “globally.” I’m pretty sure Mamdani would not describe the condemnation of racist epithets against Black people as “policing” speech. I’d like to see him apply the same criteria to hate speech against Jews. Right here, in the United States, where we are experiencing an undeniable upsurge of antisemitism. We’re a part of the “globe,” aren’t we?
Is that too much to ask?
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A medium, liminal between two worlds, embraces both of your meanings. Reading this I feel like we’re twins in many ways. I send to hugs and a mind that understands everything you say here. I don’t understand being blind to BS’s odious misogyny. No different than being blind to DJT. 🤮
So many words you’ve written and yet not nearly enough. Your commitment to clarity, to exposing the Emperors with no clothes (nor brains, nor shame, nor soul) falls like music on exhausted, “crazy” ears. I’m so grateful for you. I’m also deeply horrified by what you had to endure on campus so close to your retirement. (I wonder if any of us academics get out of here alive). Consider me friend and ally. Your personal stories parallel many of my own in uncanny ways, especially in how your body tracks the horrors of the world so accurately with pre-diabetes symptoms. I’ve been going thru some personal hell recently to which my body responded with narcolepsy and digestive distress. So, I conducted an experiment. Every time I left home for a day or more, I was able to stay awake in the pink of health. Once returned, however, I would fall fast and deeply asleep all day, waking only to visit the bathroom. Ha! What I thought was food poisoning turned out to be good old fashioned stress, and I am now acting accordingly to eradicate the stress. All of this is to say, Thank You for all you write which scours the darkness with light and helps the rest of us feel seen in a never normalizing world. Strength to your arm!