I watched some Rachel Maddow in the hotel room for the first time in years. It’s sad. Authoritarianism, J6, more authoritarianism. “This is what you wanted, American people, so now you have it,” Maddow said with a bitter look. She seems not to consider herself an American based on this statement.

You’d think that if years of Trump, authoritarianism and J6 brought a complete electoral wipeout, people would manage to pivot. Isn’t this what the Rachel Maddow crowd always recommends to us? “Learn to code”, embrace change, “just move”. But when it comes to setting an example and showing some intellectual agility instead of lecturing everybody on how stuck in their ways they are, there’s bupkes.

The preachers of how great change is seem to not be very good at changing.

The New York Post editorial board on their meeting with RFK Jr:

“When it came to that topic his views were a head-scratching spaghetti of what we can only call warped conspiracy theories, and not just on vaccines…In fact, we came out thinking he’s nuts on a lot of fronts.”

I don’t know much about this dude RFK and what I know I don’t like. But the sane people in charge of health brought us the opioid epidemic, the obesity epidemic, the autism epidemic, COVID lies and lockdowns, a mental health collapse, and the normalization of puberty blockers and mastectomies for children.

Health has been more full of nuts than a squirrel hideout. One finds it hard to be particularly outraged about RFK after all this.

Yesterday I finished reading Anthony Trollope’s novel Can You Forgive Her? and I want to use it to give some examples of how our subjectivity transformed in the historically short period of time since Trollope wrote.

In the novel, a young wife tells her husband that she never loved him. She loves somebody else, she says, and wants to run away with him. The reaction of the husband – a Duke and a Lord of Parliament – is unlike anything we can comprehend. Without a word of reproach, he abandons a political appointment that was the dream of his life and with infinite patience and gentleness starts nursing the marriage back into good health. The leader of his party is angry that the young lord can’t fulfill his political duty but when he understands what happened, he removes all objections.

The way this young man takes on his shoulders the responsibility for the emotional state of the family is not something we see today. The Duke’s complete lack of woundedness when his wife tells him she’s passionately in love with another man is incomprehensible to us. If our wife or husband publicly becomes silly with somebody else and declares their love for another person, we can claw our way to forgiveness and peace with the help of a priest or a therapist maybe by the end of next year. Unlike the Duke in Trollope’s novel, we have very large egos. They are so large, they are poking out of us and anything can would them.

Another big difference is that in today’s world, if anybody is going to make these enormous efforts to save a marriage and moderate everybody’s emotional responses, it will be a woman. In Trollope’s world, that role fell to men. Only yesterday, I saw a story that went viral on Twitter. A young woman got hysterical and screamed at her husband of 4 years that she despises his hobbies and she thinks they are stupid. Now, she says, the husband withdrew, won’t accept her apologies, and is talking about divorce. She’s trying to remedy the situation but he’s completely checked out. We hear such a story and we think, “yeah, obvs. She insulted him and of course he wants nothing to do with her.” Our subjectivity is that of neoliberal consumers. The wife turned out to be a faulty product, so the husband is justified in returning her to the store and getting himself a new one. He is a man in a completely different way that Trollope’s Duke was a man. We believe deep inside that it’s the wife’s role to emotionally regulate the relationship. It doesn’t occur to us that, like happens in Trollope’s novel, a husband can help his wife manage her emotions, that he can see himself as responsible for her emotional states.

What women do has expanded enormously since Trollope’s times and what men do has shrunk. And I don’t mean professions or making money or anything like that. Men have ceded a lot of ground to women on emotions. It’s not good or bad, it’s simply a different subjectivity.

Now, Trollope lived at a tail end of another massive change of human subjectivity that occurred in the West in the latter half of the 18th century. A human being that was possessed of a range of emotions that had to be minutely traced and moderated came into existence then. The genre of the novel became massively popular because that was the arena where people could immerse themselves into thinking about emotions and try out different scenarios of dealing with them. Religion – which was everything to humans before then – was replaced with our feelings. The external authority was substituted with the internal one. We don’t worship God. We worship minute shades of our emotional life.

I don’t like historical fiction precisely because of this. Its authors populate the past with versions of their 21st-century selves and we end up with medieval girl-bosses and such instead of people who actually existed back then.

I gave a single small example here but subjectivity is much bigger than what I described. The concept of children meant something completely different. Parents, family, love, duty – everything meant not what it does today. God meant something completely different. Even the most religious people today can’t begin to perceive God like those who lived 500 years ago. Look at Michaelangelo’s frescoes or the Canterbury Cathedral. If you stay with it for a while, you can maybe glimpse a tiny shade of the feeling that animated their creators.

I’m sorry this is long but this is a big issue that can’t be explained in a couple of sentences.

P.S. There’s also a novel about the Duke’s later life and it shows what he is like as a father to his adult children. The novel is a paean to fatherhood and I wrote about it here. We see a man who, by measure of his times, is almost elderly but he still grows as a person and tries to figure things out. Trollope has an amazing cast of male characters and I recommend him most sincerely.

A heads up: academia now really loves the words “ecosystem” and “spaces of care.” Both terms mean budget cuts because everything always means budget cuts.

Previously, “interdisciplinary” was a favorite term. It meant you could get rid of half of the workers and have the remaining half do the work of both. So, budget cuts.

They will blame Trump for the budget cuts so we need to record and remember that budget cuts were happening for years before this election.

This will be a long quote and I apologize in advance but I’m promoting this guy because he’s, in my opinion, a great American writer in the making. Thanks to social media, we can now witness the creation of an artist in real time and contribute with money and comments as the process develops. I’m posting this quote not because this is his best writing (and it really, really isn’t) but because he describes his process and I think it’s priceless information:

I’m a firm believer in the “daily bench.”

You’ve got to find a public bench with a faraway view within walking distance of your house. And you’ve gotta walk there every day, rain, shine, or snow, and sit for an hour.

And I mean sit. Don’t do anything. Don’t bring a book or your phone. At most, bring a cigar, or a Rosary, or talk to yourself, or sing, or whistle. But you’ve got to sit there and really just relax. Come alone most days if you can.

Everywhere I’ve ever lived where I’ve done this, I flourished. And people around me noticed — “there’s that guy again!” — and I wound up chatting with people and making friends. But more than anything, my mind was my own; the ‘blank space’ in my schedule unlocked ideas and energy I otherwise might’ve lost.

Find your bench.

https://x.com/shagbark_hick/status/1857100946628661407?t=T8of7Rjr-Q_eH4WVqE3xow&s=19

Once again, his actual literary writing is not this. I’m posting his off-hand social media comment but I’ll start sharing excerpts from his actual art and you’ll see, this dude is really talented.

At an earlier session today, the speaker said he was gay more times than there were people in the audience. So everybody got two or more notifications about the speaker’s gayness.

This was quite a feat given that his talk had absolutely no connection to gayness or anything sexual.

Imagine a group of 350 academics gathered two weeks after Trump swept the election. Imagine the moping, the drama, the self-aggrandizement, the apocalyptic hand-wringing, the endless repetition of pronouns and identity labels that is supposed to signal “resistance.”

After you’ve imagined this, you will realize why I feel cynical and low-energy. All I want to do is go to my room and read Trollope but instead I’m tortured by one of the most embarrassing land acknowledgements I’ve ever heard and, believe me, I’ve heard way too many.

The keynote speaker is Canadian, and Canadian academics have become way more cringe than even the American ones.

I’m waiting for the keynote, which promises to be the most boring thing in existence, so here’s a Jewish joke to cheer everybody up:

There is an election for a rabbi in a synagogue. Everyone says Rabinovich would be a great choice. Chaim stands up and says,
— I am against Rabinovich because his daughter is a prostitute.
- Chaim, what are you saying! Rabinovich does not have a daughter at all. He has four sons - that's all!
- Well, I said my piece, and you decide.

My memory is terrible and I’d never be able to keep track of what I said on which show. This is why it’s great that I’m a person of very limited (and that’s putting it really mildly) imagination and can’t invent anything. This way, I’m exactly the same on every platform and nobody can accuse me of being dishonest.

Another funny thing is that I’m now constantly expecting to be tapped for an appearance, so I’m seriously overdressed at every point in time. My conference is at a large hotel where there’s a wedding being celebrated at the same time. Hotel personnel constantly tries to reorient me from the conference side of the building to the wedding side because I look like a guest.

Here’s the video of me in the darkness, and I swear I’ll stop posting these videos because I’m sure they are getting on everybody’s nerves at this point. The topic is “Education in the Trump Era”: