… and Mr UD smiling through the cold. Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

Although UD grew up right down the Amtrak corridor from New York City, she seldom traveled there; even as an adult, she’s visited shockingly few times. UD has spent more time in Ubud, Bali, than in NYC. Yet she notices that she has, over the years, developed a curious sort of home wisdom about one of the most prominent subcultures there.

These rough and ready truths of hers are not, of course, based on nothing; like many literate people, UD has been reading about that city and its inhabitants all her life; and from what she has gleaned, she has derived some modestly explanatory takes on some of its more notorious denizens.

Most broadly, she finds that firmly situating Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Michael Cohen, Charles Kushner, Marc Kasowitz, and many other Trumpish madmen — but especially Donald Trump himself — in New York City helps us understand them. It’s helpful to see them as emerging out of a particular ecosystem in which their behavior is perfectly normal.

On a lower yet still fascinating level, firmly situating two recent high-profile identity-fakers (Jessica Krug and Hilaria Baldwin) in NYC also helps us understand them.

Let me start with the lunatic White House.

New York City, let us say, rears, attracts, and encourages hyperdriven hypercompetitive crazies who just go all the way. Their nature is to charge into everything – money deals, marriages, parenthood, politics – with supermanic frenzy and without a thought – without one thought, I tell you – for the morrow. Bankruptcy? Divorce? Jail? Fuck it. Trump ran headlong into a ridiculous quest for the presidency and look what happened! NYC people simply keep breaking through – that’s the thing. They don’t think of life as a series of steps which will if you’re not careful eventuate in bad outcomes which will pain you and those you love and condemn you to hell or whatever — they don’t think like normal people. The Big Mo on steroids – that’s their thing. Competitive capitalism unbound. Competitive everything unbound. No shame, no fear, no brakes.

Did you see either of the films based on Madoff? In both films, if I recall correctly, someone at some point looks at him and says something like Why did you do it and why didn’t you stop? The why did you do it part has no NYC resonance; the not stopping part – not stopping until THE ENTIRE WORLD ECONOMY TANKED AND HE COULD NO LONGER PAY OUT REDEMPTIONS – is echt Trumpy NYC. If you’re a Trumpy New Yorker, only some form of global collapse will stop you. Recall that up to the moment of his arrest Madoff was a singularly respected, highly placed, and well-connected New Yorker. A pious New Yorker – Yeshiva University’s treasurer!

Hell, Trump’s the president. And in case you haven’t noticed, he’s not planning to stop being president. Susan Glasser writes:

… Trump has remained … obnoxiously unrepentant. … He does not want to let go, to cede the spotlight, to renounce his outsized claim on our collective consciousness….

And you know that at no point in the real Madoff story did anyone ask him why he didn’t stop – that line was edited in for hayseeds outside NYC like UD, cuz otherwise the film would make no sense in any moral world she and her like can imagine. No one around Madoff ever stopped doing anything lucrative or personally advantageous, no matter how sordid, and Madoff would never have stopped either.

Once Trumps and Madoffs are truly a spent force, once they decide it’s safe to slow down and decamp with their winnings (even spitfires get old and lose their fire), they make a purely lateral cultural move – to their house in Florida.

*******************

People look at Donald Trump as a singular, ab nihilo dude; they can’t fathom his past behavior and they certainly can’t fathom his present. But he and Giuliani are behaving exactly the way people pickled in their brine always behave: Advance, Advance, Advance and the world can fuck itself.

Central to NYC-style heedless advancement is lying. You misrepresent yourself; you misrepresent your financial worth; you misrepresent the value of anything you have to offer. And of course you lie about other people; you make up obviously jackshit stories about Obama being born in Kenya and George Soros controlling Congress and Joe Biden stealing a presidential election. Advance, advance, advance, lie, lie, lie. In your NYC world everyone’s obscenely on the make and everyone lies. Lie it forward. No lie is too edgy, absurd, out there, shameless. Bigger the better. Keep going. Seems to work fine in DC too.

************

Look at Harold Brodkey’s take on this slice of NYC culture. His perspective is that of an artist, not a crazed capitalist, but he evokes the same Trumpian world, one part mania, one part lying:

I was always crazy about New York, dependent on it, scared of it – well, it is dangerous – but beyond that there was the pressure of being young and of not yet having done work you really liked, trademark work, breakthrough work. The trouble with the city’s invitation was that you were aware you might not be able to manage: you might drown, you might fall off the train, whatever metaphor you preferred, before you did anything interesting. You would have wasted your life. One worked hard or not at all, and tried to withstand the constant demolishing judgement. One watched people scavenge for phrases in other people’s talk – that hunt for ideas which is, sometimes, like picking up dead birds. One witnessed the reverse of glamour – that everyone is jealous.

It is not a joke, the great clang of New York. It is the sound of brassy people at the party, at all the parties, pimping and doing favors and threatening and making gassy public statements and being modest and blackmailing and having dinner and going on later. (Renata Adler used to say you could get anyone to be disliked in New York merely by praising that person to someone nervous and competitive.) Literary talk in New York often announced itself as the best talk in America. People would say, “Harold, you are hearing the best in America tonight.” It would be a cut-throat monologue, disposable wit in passing, practiced with a certain carelessness in regard to honesty. But then truth was not the issue, as it almost never is in New York.

New York City is also where we find the highest-profile imposters – people who, like fictive Manhattanite Jay Gatsby, lie all the way down to their corpuscles. Jessica Krug: White, Jewish, affluent; Gatsbyized black, hispanic, poor. Hilaria Baldwin: Offspring of people whose ancestors arrived on the Mayflower; Gatsbyized a Spaniard with a strong accent and a shaky grasp of the English language.

Plenty of distinctions to be made amid all of this, I know. Hilaria (real name Hillary) ain’t much of a story. One… theatricalizes, mythologizes, oneself to be more interesting in the big city crowd. To stand out in hypercompetitive NYC. Baldwin is a strange woman, given to exhibitionism and self-praise, but who cares? Kim Kardashian for the west coast, and, for the sophisticated east, NYU-educated Hilaria Baldwin (though Kim comes by her exotic Armenianness honestly).

Krug’s far more insidious NYC tale carries ugly social implications having to do with the ideological corruption of universities and other institutions.

But both women share with the mad Trumpian lads that NYC thing: fake it til you fake it. Fake it more. Nothing exceeds like excess.

… but she has never seen so convincing a demonstration of tea’s benefits as this one.

UD shares a little end-of-the-year end-of-the-world wisdom with you.

… Kentucky-style!

… in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, haunt of presidents-elect.

Les UDs greet the early evening on their Rehoboth Beach balcony.

I can’t believe Doctorate Discourse has lasted a week. Here’s the deal: WSJ op ed & subsequent attacks are motivated by hatred of Joe Biden, with Jill Biden being used as a surrogate target. They should be dismissed as nasty & sexist, without arguments dignified as serious.

Jeet Heer’s tweet goes to why my Joseph Epstein commentary began with his unabashed praise of Sarah Palin [scroll down] during that election cycle. A hyper-scrupulous aesthete/critic who above all admires the writing of Henry James, Epstein claimed to find Sarah Palin more than intellectually and morally astute enough to assume the presidency.

Heet is correct that Epstein is best seen as a political hack, doing what hacks do — in his praise of Palin, a woman who embodies everything for which he actually has contempt, and in his attack on Jill Biden.

‘Secret Service May Recruit Ivanka to

Help Remove Trump from White House,

According to Expert‘

… that for decades every December UD has grabbed a Quiet Car at Union Station and taken the long scenic ride to Boston for a Polish Christmas. This year she’s home in ‘thesda with a small celebratory crew; and as is typical of ol’ UD, she’s happy with this, as she was happy with Boston. There’s an interest in ordering a small same day delivery treeish plant that sits on the dining table surrounded by gifts. The topiary bulls grazing outside in pachysandra (they honor Munro Leaf — author of Ferdinand — the last owner of our house) sport silver lights. The clear night skies have been blasting out, again and again, with meteor showers and conjunctions; yesterday’s sunny morning featured multiple contrails in formation. She prefers all of this to Boston’s blizzards.

A ce moment la (9:30 AM Dec. 24), nature has boiled up a wet and moody brew, and UD is happy with this. Why not. You want something expressive with your Christmas Eve dinner, and in a few hours smoky logs will heighten the gloom … Of course UD – knowing the forecast – should have gathered logs yesterday and kept them under cover blah blah blah, but UD is way non-Girl Scout. She will do her best with her Duraflame firestarter and other random kindling.

In two days Les UDs drive to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware – the summer White House – for their annual Atlantic New Year. As ever, blogging will continue.

… is one of many lucky people to have been sprung from jail by The Genius of the Carpathians. A lifelong thug, Esformes committed the largest Medicare fraud in American history.

And here’s the best news: He’s only 52! Decades of thuggery and thievery lie ahead of him, thank God.

Thank God, for the crime-ridden Esformes family (Esformes’ crooked father established the Esformes health care fraud business) also presents itself as way way way godly.

Not that certain branches of Orthodox Judaism (the religion in this case) need any more bad publicity, what with their anti-vax, anti-mask, pro-large-gathering, pro-welfare-fraud thing; but the newly-sprung Esformes will significantly add to the enlightened, law-abiding profile of this group.

My posts about Esformes can be found here.

… a scientist at NIH, gets her covid vaccination with other front line workers. With Fauci attending.

That will teach our mad bad king: Never appoint to your court anyone with a shred of independence.

This sentence, in an article about a speech Don Jr gave to a Trumpian youth group, is itself problematic. It fails to clarify that Don Jr did not intend to be ironic; the irony derives from the weirdness of a speaker who is himself semi-literate attacking another speaker for being semi-literate.

As to what Trump’s lad could have meant by “conform a sentence” — Let Scathing Online Schoolmarm start with this: Poetry is always an option. Poetry can always be deployed politically if people would like to do that, if people think it might be effective. Look at the way Anthony Hecht used not “conform,” but “inform” in this excerpt from a poem about his wife’s miscarriage:

[C]ould it be
That Jewish diligence and Irish jest
The consent of flesh and a midwinter storm
Had reconciled,
Was yet too bold a mixture to inform
A simple child?

If Hecht can twist that word cleverly, can play with connotation and pun (why were we unable to form within her a child; to in-form; to transmit our genetic information…), Don Jr can certainly poeticize “conform” … although SOS is having trouble detecting the connotation/pun/whatever that makes the phrase “conform a sentence” poetically suggestive…

The lad simply means “form,” doesn’t he? What has led him astray is too strong a love for the art of the con.

No. That’s not the reason NU’s English department (where UD was a student, and where she knew Epstein) quite consciously deleted Epstein’s name.

Turnabout is fair play. If Epstein is going to erase Jill Biden (not just her Dr. title, but anything other than the humiliating “First Lady,” for which he counsels her to settle), NU can do the same thing to Epstein. It’s all about (to use Jill Biden’s term for what Epstein tried to do) “diminishing.” You flatten another human being to nothingness; we’ll do the same to you. How does it feel to be diminished to some temporary nameless long-forgotten adjunct?

Epstein was strategic in his non-personing of Jill Biden; Northwestern will be equally strategic. Bruce Bawer unsurprisingly takes note of the diminishment. But he misreads its motive. Mentioning Epstein’s name would not be offensive; it would be unjust.