The suicide, at 25, of Jamie Raskin’s son Tommy (I’ve met Raskin a few times – he’s my district’s member of congress) prompts a beautiful remembrance essay by his parents.

What to say? UD‘s longtime readers know that her father – an eminent immunologist at NIH who had a good marriage and friends and four healthy kids – committed suicide when he was 58. Ever since that happened, she’s done a lot of thinking and reading and writing about the act, and these words by Elaine Ellis Thomas (her son Seth killed himself) convey a good deal of what UD has concluded about it.

Suicide brings on a very particular and peculiar kind of grief. The guilt and second-guessing and pure horror that someone could end one’s own life cause excruciating pain for family and friends. I have learned more about this than I care to know in the time since Seth died. Although we still know very little about John Miller’s tragic passing [Miller was a music instructor at Yale], I thought it might be helpful to share some of that hard-earned knowledge.

You could not have prevented it. Even if you think that you could have on that particular occasion, there is no guarantee that it would not have happened some other time. If you are wondering why you didn’t go with John or ask him to come over if he seemed out of sorts, don’t blame yourself. Seth’s roommate was in an adjoining room when he died. Having someone nearby made no difference at all.

If you’re trying to make rational sense of how something like this could happen to someone with such talent and such a bright future, you really can’t think about it rationally — there is no rational explanation. Normal people, those who are not sick in some way, do not kill themselves. Our most basic human instinct is for survival, so to cause one’s own demise subverts that in ways our healthy intellects can’t imagine.

If you’re thinking that John made a choice to end his life, I can’t agree. Whatever was tormenting him — depression, mental illness, some event that threw his mental wiring off kilter — that is what took him. As I said before, it isn’t a rational choice. Suicides are committed by people driven by a distorted mental and emotional reality. It isn’t really a choice.

I think a lot of people sensed these truths very strongly a couple of years ago when one of the goldenest of golden boys, Alan Krueger, killed himself at the age of 58 (same age as my father). Brilliant, handsome, courtly and kind, at the very top of his game, Krueger had it all – an Ivy League professorship, high-level positions in the federal government, a seemingly happy personal life, etc. Yet off he went, with not one of his many friends having had an inkling, as they tell it, that something was disastrously wrong inside his head.

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

Another thing UD has come to understand about suicide – there are several pretty clearly distinct kinds. We have already referred to two here – suicide among the young (Tommy Raskin), and suicide among the middle-aged (Krueger; my father). A third kind – suicide among the elderly – is the easiest to understand, it seems to me. Consider one such that I wrote about not long ago – my Northwestern University professor, Erich Heller. I gather, from reading about it, that Heller’s life sort of tapered to an end and he just got bored and lonely and sad. His younger life had been pretty heady, conducted among the literary and philosophical elite of Europe and America; in old age, with most of his friends dead and Heller frail, unwell, and pretty much alone, the whole existence thing must not have seemed much of a bargain. When things come to an end but you’re still sort of pointlessly hanging around, it can seem a little de trop to keep going through the (increasingly excruciating) motions.

I’ve written a lot, on this blog about universities, about student suicides. These may seem spontaneous, some sort of psychotic break, and can be dramatically – athletically! – enacted, reflecting in a final dark inversion the vitality and impulsivity of the young. But despite their seeming suddenness, most acts of suicide among the young are, as Camus wrote of all suicides, “prepared within the silence of the heart.” Many youthful suicides are carefully planned, and may feature rational, and very apologetic, suicide notes. Once people become, in Thomas’s words, “driven by a distorted mental and emotional reality,” their life becomes intense daily warfare between psychic pain that wants to kill them and doctors/pills/therapists/loved ones who want to save them. In notes like Raskin’s, which his parents released, the writer acknowledges, with what is left of his rational mind, that the war has been lost:

“He left us this farewell note on New Year’s Eve day: ‘Please forgive me. My illness won today. Please look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. All my love, Tommy.’”

Depression, to state what I guess is the obvious, kills most suicides. My father, diagnosed bipolar, died with a full load of anti-depressant medication in him, prescribed by a sympathetic and highly qualified psychiatrist. But the depression won that day. The symbolism of the end of the year spoke – insidiously whispered – to Tommy Raskin on his final day. Enough already. You’ve come to the very end.

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

The pathos of early life suicides lies in the irresistable thought that if somehow the lost could have just been – magically? – carried over the worst, if they could have been somehow sustained through the shocks to their sense of life as ongoing that they had to endure, they would have recovered and lived long lives. Heller we pity and understand; Krueger, like my father, presents as someone who was probably lucky to get 58 years, given what might well have been deep-lying, decades-long struggle against an immovably depressive disposition. But in the case of the young, like Tommy Raskin, I can’t help envisioning … I dunno… an Angels in America intervention that shields them until the storms abate.

Anyway. He was wise. See my headline. Hard to be a human. Ain’t it the truth.

Everyone’s got what to say about the country’s shift toward authoritarianism, but Jonathan Chait’s brief piece in New York, where he locates Republican rejection of democracy in the emergence of Newt Gingrich and Kenneth Starr, is a must-read.

To support Trump’s reelection was always to endorse an attack on democracy. The chief divide [within] the party was between those Republicans who denied Trump’s clearly signaled intent to attack the democratic system, and those who reveled in it.

This.

Thousands of people are dying every day now from the pandemic. What is Donald doing? He’s giving rallies with people crammed in together, not wearing masks. It’s almost like Donald is saying, “See. Fuck you. You rejected me. Fine, I’m going to kill all of you.” What is weird is that he is killing his own supporters. It is almost a type of performative omnipotence.

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

I’ve already, on this blog, cited Ubu the King, Trump’s closest precursor, who announces that as monarch his aim is to make his fortune, after which “I’ll kill everybody and go away.”

Samuel Beckett, Paris, 2021

Written at breakneck speed in response to dramatic political events, Beckett’s En Attendant Mon-Vote was originally composed in French and subsequently translated into English by the author.  We have signaled that unusual creative history by retaining the French title for this translated edition.

Notorious for the absurdity and nihilism at its core, En Attendant introduces the world to the bitter bickering, the pointless game-playing, the shameless histrionics, the conspiracy-theory paranoia, and the sheer human pathos of its central characters, Trumpimir and Giulagon — two men whose desperation to remain “center-stage” in their own lives is continually undone by their sense of the almost comic futility of existence.

Thus burdened, both men alternate grandiose aggressive activity with long stretches of withdrawn enigmatic silence, a silence broken, for Trumpimir, by repeated rounds of golf (see the character Luckleigh’s famous speech about golf, as well as tennis, late in the play), and, for both men, by farting in public.  Indeed it is the combination of meaningless trivial activity (golf) and the reduction of the human, with all its metaphysical striving, to the lowest animal forms of expression, which gives En Attendant its peculiar tragic/comic power.

We offer an excerpt from the play here.

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

Characters

Trumpomir
Giulagon
Luckleigh
Pozzeo

ACT I

A country road.  A tree.  A derelict landscaping company with a sign in front reading Four Seasons.

Evening.

Trumpomir, sitting on a low mound, is trying to take apart a voting machine.  He pulls at it with both hands, panting.  He gives up, exhausted, rests, tries again.  As before.  Enter Giulagon.

TRUMPOMIR: (Giving up again). Nothing to be done.

GIULAGON: (Advancing with short, stiff strides, legs wide apart) I’m beginning to come round to that opinion. All my life I’ve tried to put it from me, saying, Giulagon, be reasonable, you haven’t yet tried everything. And I resumed the struggle. (He broods, musing on the struggle. Turning to Trumpomir.) So there you are again.

TRUMPOMIR: Am I?

GIULAGON: I’m glad to see you back. I thought you were gone to Mar-A-Lago forever.

TRUMPOMIR:  Me too.

GIULAGON: Together again at last! We’ll have to celebrate this. But how? (He reflects.) Get up till I embrace you.

TRUMPOMIR: (irritably). Not now, not now.

GIULAGON: (hurt, coldly) May one inquire where His Highness spent the night?

ESTRAGON: On the phone. 

GIULAGON: (admiringly) The phone! With who?

TRUMPOMIR:(miserably) Raffensperger.

GIULAGON:  And he didn’t back you?

TRUMPOMIR:  BACK me? (Lets out an enormous fart.)  Certainly he didn’t back me. Refused to pick up the phone eighteen times before he finally answered and then he mocked me and then he released a recording of the call! … I’m still waiting… for my vote…

Or at least (in Trump’s favorite formulation), some people are saying…

Michael Bromwich, on the phone call that made it to “infamous” faster than you can say 25th Amendment.

(Additional lyrics: Telephone conversation transcript, Donald Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.)

RECITATIVE

Where’s my state? Raffensperger where’s my state?
Love me: Georgia was supposed to love me.

[Chorus: You’ve been nuts you’ve been mean And gettin’ fatter all the time We put up with you for much too long We have put up with selfish

And all your screaming too You’re always thinking of you All you can do is rant and rave Now we’re telling you it’s all over]

And I am telling you I’m not going

I’m staying I’m staying AND YOU’RE GONNA FIND MY VOTES

ARIA

The people of Georgia are angry The people in the country are angry. 

And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um That you’ve recalculated.

So look. All I want to do is this.

I just want to find 11,780 votes

One more than we have!

Because we won the state.

There’s no way I lost Georgia.

There’s no way.

We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.

And I am telling you I ain’t leaving!

Look what you’ve done to the president —

Look what you’ve done to the president

People hate what you did to the president.

So tell me, Brad, what are we going to do?

We won the election, and it’s not fair 
And I am telling you
I’m not going
I’m the best man I’ll ever know
There’s no way I can ever go
No, no, there’s no way
No, no, no, no way I’m leaving the White House
I wanna be president
I don’t wanna be free
I’m staying, I’m staying
And you, and you
You’re all gonna love me

And I am telling you I’m not going
Even though the rough times are showing
There’s just no way, there’s no way

I’m staying I’m staying I’m not going

Trump Lashes Out at His Government for

Accurately Reporting COVID-19 Deaths

“That, having denied plaintiff’s urgent petition that the Vice President of the United States be forced to personally decide the outcome of presidential elections, the court immediately grant Representative Gohmert the following injunctive relief;

that every American female who voted Democratic be forced to suck my dick;

that Jill Biden have the title “Dr.” forcibly withdrawn from her name, after which see above;

that the two Kims (Cardashian; Goowheelfoil) be forced to assume the Presidency/Vice Presidency within the next two weeks;

after which see first clause;

that Steven Lubet and his so-called Rule 11 be forced to suck my dick;

that Mike Leach be fired from Mississippi State and forced to coach at my alma mater, Texas A&M.

Respectfully submitted, in lieu of the streets running with blood,

Louis Buller Gohmert Jr.“

Sing along.

You’re as cold as ice!
Suckers.
You sacrifice
When you’re asked.
You always heed advice
You always pay the price,
I know.

I’ve skipped out before
It happens all the time. I’m closing the door
To leave the cold behind. I’m warm in St Bart
But posting each day
Fake Canadian tweets
Makes you think I stayed.

You’re as cold as ice!
But peons must sacrifice. 
I’m in paradise
And your taxes pay the price
Ho ho.

… an uplifting New Year poem full of wholesome wisdom.

Nah. Google New Year and you’ll get a zillion pages of those. No one with half a brain comes to University Diaries in search of uplift. Here’s this year’s year-end poem, which appeared in 2002.

NEW YEAR’S EVE, IN HOSPITAL

By Philip Levine

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

You can hate the sea as it floods

the shingle, draws back, swims up,

again; it goes on night and day

all your life, and when your life

is over it’s still going. A young priest

sat by my bed and asked, did I know

what Cardinal Newman said

about the sea. This merry little chap

with his round pink hands entwined

told me I should change my life.

“I like my life,” I said. “Holidays

are stressful in my line of work,” he said.

Within the week he was going off

to Carmel to watch the sea come on

and on and on as Newman wrote.

“I hate the sea,” I said, and I did

at that moment, the way the waves

go on and on without a care.

In silence we watched the night

Spread from the corners of the room.

“You should change your life,”

he repeated. I asked had he been

reading Rilke. The man in the next bed,

a retired landscaper from Chowchilla,

let out a great groan and rolled over

to face the blank wall. I felt bad

for the little priest: both of us

he called “my sons” were failing

him, slipping gracelessly from our lives

to abandon him to face eternity

as it came on and on and on.

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

So a little anecdote, a wee life narrative, from Philip Levine, a Jewish guy who spent some life-endangered time in a shared hospital room entered into one early evening by a cheer-spreading (but not really) priest. Those of us who know Matthew Arnold’s famous Dover Beach may read Levine’s first lines as a kind of modern affectless highly concentrated summary of that angsty Victorian verse. Both poets consider the seeming pointlessness of life, nicely visually captured by the eternal in and out of ocean waves expiring on the shore:

[T]he grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin…

Every day a little death; then, for no particular reason, even maybe stupidly, a gulp of air and another plunge back to the brine, only to dissolve yet again. One More New Botched Beginning. Levine even takes the word shingles from Arnold, who laments

the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Naked because these fragile piles of sea stones have been abandoned again and again on the shore by the always-retreating, always-betraying waves of “new” existence. In Levine, you hate the sea as it “floods the shingle,” dousing it with possibility, and then – (Lucy: football; Sisphyus: rock; etc. etc. etc. ) – stranding it. And then the ultimate insult: Not enough that life is drear; there’s the insult of life – even crappy life – “still going” when “your life is over.”

So with that general statement done, Levine proceeds to his story. The visiting priest asks Levine (this seems an autobiographical poem) if he knows what Arnold’s fellow Victorian, the great Catholic poet John Henry Cardinal Newman said about the sea. The poem never says exactly what that was, but take it that the priest might have had this in mind:

[My conversion] was like coming into port after a rough sea; and my happiness on that score remains to this day without interruption.

But Newman spoke too soon; he experienced very serious depressions in his later years, and wrote one of the most-cited poems about that condition. And here’s a sample of his late-in-life prose.

I have so depressing a feeling that I have done nothing through my long life, and especially that now I am doing nothing at all. … What am I? my time is out. I am passé. I may have done something in my day—but I can do nothing now. It is the turn of others. … It is enough for me to prepare for death, for, as it would appear, nothing else awaits me—there is nothing else to do.

The merry priest tells Levine to change his life – consider conversion, one imagines, in order to be happier, and situated in a meaningful deathless world – but Levine replies that he likes his life, bitter existential betrayal and all. The priest then complains that holidays like New Year’s Eve are “stressful” for priests – presumably because everyone’s miserably reflecting on their lives the way Levine (who has the double whammy of illness and end of year to get him going) is. So the priest himself ain’t so jolly, having to gad about from drear hospital room to drear hospital room attempting to spread cheer. In fact he needs a break and is off to the biblically and californically rich “Carmel” to decompress.

The priest is now silent; together he and Levine watch the night “spread from the corners of the room.” They are being engulfed by metaphysical darkness… The priest can only repeat himself: The poet should change his life. “I asked had he been reading Rilke,” Levine sardonically responds. Rilke’s famous sonnet, Archaic Torso of Apollo, ends with that imperative: You must change your life. But it seems unlikely that the priest would be quoting Rilke’s erotic, non-religious, hyper-aesthetic poem; it seems likely that Levine is having a little fun with the little priest.

Not that we’ve ever left it, but the poem ends with a big thudding return to godless modernity, with the retired landscaper in the next bed (he’s given up trying to alter the earth), who hails from a town with a random unartful name, groaning with emptiness (“blank wall”) and defeat. And who does the poet feel bad for? The priest, with his absurd “my sons” designation (he’s much younger, one presumes, than either of these old sick men) and his disappointment that these two sinners seem to be failing big time at eternal life. Not only are they dying without grace (“gracelessly”); they are, more problematically, robbing the priest of his much-needed certainty of their salvation – hence his need to retreat to Carmel and deal with his stress.

Darkest of all is the priest’s own peculiar metaphysical fate, meted out in the last two lines: Salvific eternity itself may present to our sublunary minds as another hideous Sisyphean tableau, the chilling endlessness of … endlessness.

… 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.