How do you know if you believe in something? If you believe something, how do you know what it is? If you believe something, how do you know if it is possible that you are making a mistake? If it is possible that you are making a mistake, can you specify clearly what are the telltale signs you are making a mistake? (Other than the gun discharging?) Is it possible you have never in your entire life brushed against anyone — not once — and were unaware you were unintentionally making contact (howsoever minor) with another person?

Is it possible in your entire life, as an active, successful actor/director that you may have been distracted somewhat from paying sufficient attention to the possible dangers of pointing a loaded gun at the head of a crew member? Have you ever been in this position before? (How many times?) Is it possible you were overly confident? Why were you so confident in an armorer who was operating for the first day of her life in this capacity? If it had been your daughter — not the defendant — and another actor — not you — pointing and twirling a gun at her face, would you have been comfortable with the situation?

If the blank bullets — say six of them like the ones that I’m now placing on the table — if one of them was mistakenly a real one, would you be able to tell the difference? If so — how? What are the signs? In the past, when you’ve prepared for action scenes containing fights or brawls, have you rehearsed the scene in advance? When you pointed the gun was it necessary to point it directly at her face? Why? As an action star, do you tend to strive for authenticity? Do you consider yourself a good, professional physical actor, so far as authentic physical acting is concerned? (Are you a good shot in real life?) If you are holding up an authentic live bullet — like I am, in one hand — and holding up a blank in the other hand, could you tell the jury what the difference is? Was this film a project you believed in? i.e., Is the film a project you believed in aesthetically? Or did you take it for the money primarily?

Have you ever fired (in preparation for this film) at a shooting range? Do you ever go hunting? If you were in preparation, did you aim well away from the head of the decedent? Do you think anyone would have noticed on the set? In your preparation, how important to you is an aura of authenticity to project?

One of your most talked about performances was playing Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, in preparation for which you boxed quite a few rounds in a gymnasium. I saw you on television say in regard to this, “Come on, let’s see what you got.” You’re noted for macho roles, which occasionally spill over into real-life altercations. Was part of your attraction to taking this role its macho appeal?

“Is belief an experience?” (Ludvig Wittgenstein)

Actors talk about the importance of seeming believable in imaginary roles. To what extent did you identify / not identify with the main character?

THE POLITICIZED PSYCHE

At almost the opposite end of the continuum from the patient who feels persecuted by the impersonality of “just business” relationships which seem to engulf him, is the person who insists on viewing every detail of his or her daily existence as the offshoot of a complicated chain of political events. Because such people tend to see even their inner most psychical selves as politically shaped, I use the term politicized psyche to describe them. What follows is a common profile drawn from a number of patients I have worked with. I offer it in order to illuminate yet another dimension and instance of narcissistic giving.

“The most outstanding characteristic of the politicized psyche is its belief that everything that psychically occurs is somehow connected — either as a byproduct or direct target — to a gigantic web of social interrelationships that are dynamically enveloping, infiltrating, and transmuting society. Thus, no matter how hurt, trivialized, or discounted one feels, there is the redeeming sense that one is, nevertheless, a part of a process, howsoever painful, that is meaningful. To a large extent, therefore, a politicized psyche replaces a self-identity with a social identity (i.e., one whose main configurations have been internalized and particularized from external political events that have been deemed critically shaping for the social class or ethnic group with which the individual most powerfully identifies). When the politicized psyche has a negative social identity (e.g., considers itself to be a member of an oppressed minority) which is often the case, then a solution is sought, not in changing the self, but in changing society. Since the assumption is that the root of the discontent is external, the normal superego self-criticism and perceived failure to measure up to the ego ideal are more or less automatically projected onto the relevant social institutions which have been deemed culpable. Which places the politicized psyche in an immediate dilemma: on the one hand, relief is promised from the internal tension and wear and tear on the psyche engendered by a negative identity, by deflecting anger and frustration away from the self and by mapping it on to society at large; but, on the other hand, the realistic possibilities of converting such a negative social identity into a more positive one through the strategy of seeking to actively implement, or merely to just wait for the required social upheavals, are almost nil. On some level the politicized psyche not only knows this but even manages to score points with itself by using the long odds against rehabilitating a corrupt social order as proof that one has earned at least a kind of honorary psychical red badge of courage. Thus, the politicized psyche derives much of its self-same not through individual concrete accomplishments (after all, no one person can be expected to be blamed for failing to right society’s wrongs) but from this admirable adoption of a David-Goliath identity. It follows from this that the politicized psyche can act out with impunity because it sees itself as a splendid lone wolf protector against an unjust society and in such a context of oppressive social crises, acting out becomes, not unrestrained self-indulgence, but the responsible enactment of a troubled social conscience. With much the same rationalization, feelings of rage and contempt can be freely ventilated and retrospectively justified by pointing to the magnitude of the social crimes against which they are purportedly targeted. And, similarly, overreacting bursts of excessive emotionality and fits of hysteria can be explained away as a byproduct in understandable fallout of a state of abnormal psychical strain produced by a pathological depriving and unconscionably indifferent society.

In addition, the politicized psyche substitutes for the regular interpersonal dyad, the romantic situation of the individual pitted against a repressive political regime. When this is the case, it is easy to see that interpersonal relationships on the whole are forced to become more abstract, impersonal, and rigidly defined (because they are politically restricted). Moreover, a person tends to be emotively reactive: i.e., how you feel depends, not on your frame of mind when you start out the day but on what the newspapers or media tell you about that part of the current affairs that you are especially interested in, that you cannot help but feel passive. And when things go wrong — since being viewed globally, they can assume the proportions of a large-scale disaster — it is natural to feel persecuted and, again, since it is not one person but massive social collectives who are persecuting you, it is not farfetched to believe you are being conspired against.

The politicized psyche is, thus, vulnerable to paranoia, but it is difficult to recognize and deal with such paranoia, because if the designated enemy is an inhumane social institution or an oppressive governmental body (e.g., the police force or the Rightwing press), by virtue of the laws of probability pertaining to large numbers, there are bound to be numerous confirming instances of whatever persecutory trauma one is on the lookout for. From a psychological standpoint, therefore, the politicized psyche will typically lack the structure of a cohesive ego, if only because it tends to base its reality-testing on the slippery foundation of the ebb and flow of large-scale political events. By contrast, the reality-testing of the ordinary non-politicized psyche — although also resting on the unpredictable changes of everyday life — will be considerably more reliable in as much as it will basically restrict itself to those contingencies upon which the individual ego has the best chance of impacting, and, therefore, of partially controlling. Thus, comparatively speaking, the reality-testing of the politicized psyche (often to a pathological degree) will be less structured and more provisional.

For all of these reasons, when it comes to personal relating, partners will be looked upon as potential personifications of principles and political viewpoints, rather than as constellations of unique psychical forces; and compatibility of ideas or politics will be preferred over compatibility of personalities. How one votes or how one thinks, therefore, often becomes far more important than how one relates, which does not mean, however, that politicized-psyche relationships are essentially cerebral, ideological partnerships. In point of fact, they can be intensely, volitively emotional, but the reason will seem to pivot on momentous politicized ideas that are thought to hold the key to the future of mankind (they themselves being actors in an historical drama which transcends the significance of the individual players). When this is carried to the extreme case, when two likeminded politicized psyches join in relationship, they may actually experience themselves, not as lovers, but as underground cell members or diehard comrades in a great and glorious cause.

Finally, it should be clear by now, that the narcissistic-giving component in such cases is to believe that politicizing the psyche is somehow offering another person something far greater, more meaningful, committed, and richer than a simple, one-on-one human relationship that is based on a reciprocal and profound intimacy.

“All in” is an increasingly popular slang expression, meant to convey an unambiguous commitment to a controversial issue. Such a person may not be your bro, but they are down when it comes to taking a stand on this particular matter. Actors and TV directors of crime thrillers like it because it helps to define something that most people believe in but few can define: loyalty. Why is loyalty important? Because it is a lynchpin of trust. Why is trust important? Because without it there is no rational reason why anyone should lower their guard sufficiently to take a relative stranger into their confidence. Trust is like a guarantor — that the effort invested in the other may one day be paid back when it was most needed. Note how questions have a branching effect. Good questions generate more good questions. Trust maybe the most valuable asset in the ongoing challenge to cross the bridge between being a solitary self — accustomed to being a central cog with no particular need to move or change position — to everything that is required to be a healthy functioning part of a group being / self.

DISCLOSURE:

This was drawn home to me in post-World War II middle school in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where I was taught, required, to stand up each morning, in class formation, and (hand over heart) recite by rote “The Pledge of Allegiance.”

I Pledge Allegiance

to the Flag

of the United States of America

and to the Republic

for Which it Stands:

One Nation,

Indivisible,

with Liberty and Justice

for All.

What did that mean? The more I thought about it, the less I understood it. Intuitively, I understood it was, allegedly, a role-model for the kind of allegiance to our country that would be required once we graduated from middle school, if our nation came under attack. We were being asked to promise that we were ready to join in its defense. There is no mention of the draft, whether it is or should be voluntary or mandatory. No mention of the armed forces, army, navy, or Airforce. No mention of the possible use of chemical weapons which have been banned after the first World War. No mention of nuclear weapons which were being secretly stockpiled. In its place was the strange sounding nuclear winter, a doomsday concept in which the triggering of the first thermonuclear H-Bomb (whether intentional or accidental) would be the prelude to a holocaust, a global killing field from which the world would never recover.

DISCLOSURE:

What follows is a very trivial incident in the scope of the surreally, politically fraught world we live in. To my mind, it resonates profoundly (without intending to) with the mindset of our times. It is one thing to live in interesting times, it is another to live in an era so rancidly fractious, so politically splintered, that it can (and has) been called (perhaps for the first time in history) a philosophically instantiated, historical embodiment of the existentially inflected mantra, The Center Does Not Hold. Which led me to term the recent campaign to determine the 2024 President of the United States: An American Tragedy.

As I’ve said, on various occasions, if there were a gun to my head and I were forced to choose between Donald trump and Joe Biden, I would vote ten times in a row for Joe Biden — but there isn’t a gun to my head, so, I will do what I generally do: I will bypass the voting booth and vote with my typewriter instead!

I continue to feel — as I have always felt — that my individual vote counts for absolutely nothing (and shouldmean absolutely nothing) from a political standpoint. Does that mean I think every vote is equal? Absolutely not. If that were true, then it would mean that every candidate — regardless of how individually qualified or unqualified they were — would be equally qualified (which is, by definition, logically impossible).

That is why I have never, as a writer, aspired to be an influencer. I do, of course (as does everyone who writes on the internet) have some followers (whom I call my happy few); But the only life lessons I think are worth learning are the ones that are personally earned. Trying to find a pain-free path in life is like trying to climb a mountain with no degrees of difficulty or trying to accomplish something meaningful that does not entail risks. The essence of the attainment of meaning is that it represents a willingness to suffer and, if necessary, to fail. Something that is meaningful is something that is dangerous. It is something that, by its nature, cannot be controlled, cannot be predicted. Often it is something that you have never been able to accomplish. There is no better example than attempting to dive for the first time from a height you have never attempted. Whether it is four feet, ten feet, or twelve feet, there is always that moment when you have to leave your safe place, that place from which you have always jumped, always managed to overcome your fears that — by jumping in the air from a new height — you may somehow seriously injure yourself. You may screw up the landing, fall off the diving board, misjudge the necessary critical distance, fail to propel yourself properly from the end of the diving board so that you would not prematurely land on someone still in the water. I would imagine the horrible occurrence of — just as my head was about to hit the water — the head of another boy who had preceded me, who had successfully executed his daring descent to the new depth of the pool and, unknown to me and him, was about to resurface at the exact time and place that my head was about to break the surface. The thought alone, of two young heads crashing into each other violently, helter-skelter — mine from a height of 5’10’ plus the height of the diving board above. The worst-case scenario was that our skulls would be split open and some of our brains would spill into the water. It would be the most horrific accident in the history of our neighborhood pool. One of us or both of us might die. One of us or both of us would suffer lifelong brain damage. My fear of diving had been intensified by an older first cousin, who had served in the second World War. One of his wartime stories involved a young recruit who, swimming in the ocean for the first time, had been caught in an undertow and drowned. A good buddy who tried to rescue him would lose his life in the attempt (and be posthumously awarded a Medal of Honor).

I have written about my childhood fears of the ocean beaches, and especially ocean waters. Given these fears, I could only wonder at the motivation and mindset of the person willing to voluntarily assume the responsibility of being the Commander in Chief. What was the minimal skillset and level of relevant experience that was required? What counted as on the job training? You were either the President or you weren’t. Being a Vice President (Joe Biden, Kamala Harris) was seen as a negative; as someone who, at best, was capable of being a reliable understudy in the advent of an emergency.

Joe Biden, when he originally ran for President, announced he was running as a transitional figure (given his age). When he blatantly broke that promise, he offered the lame excuse that he had come back because the times were so terrible and, only he could fix it.

I continue to be fascinated by the level of denial of people (especially in the arts and politics) who seem to effortlessly capture the attention of everyday people. There seemed to be no simple, clear-cut, obvious reason to explain their power. Movie stars can come in all sizes and shapes. There were cinematic beauties whom you couldn’t take your eyes off; their bodies and features so symmetrical they seemed engineered. (An actress — who was a recent graduate of NYU-AFI film school — seemed over the moon by a simple offhand remark by one of her agents: You have a perfect nose. She turned her profile slightly towards me, laughing as she did so, making sure I had an ideal view of her wunderkind of her a nose. I tried hard to memorize what I was seeing. (But how do you memorize a nose? Is there a technique? First you get a sense of how symmetrical the nostrils are, how aesthetically they blended into the bridge of her nose, how gracefully they flared, etc. I wonder if I should ever encounter a nose like that again, could I pretend to nonchalantly comment and confidently say, You have a perfect nose. Are there parts for perfect noses? Does that give your client an edge on a currently sought after part that is being contested? If I submitted her picture and my client got the part, could I nonchalantly (but cleverly) quip, Well, I guess my client got the part by a nose.

As I write this, there is headline in the times that the recent midair collision between a commercial airline (carrying 64 passengers) and a military Blackhawk helicopter (carrying four passengers) had collided in midair. It is the worst American midair collision in two decades. There are no survivors. The new administration of Donald Trump is between a rock and a hard place: There has to be someone to blame. It can’t be anyone remotely connected to the President. So Trump, true to form, almost immediately begins to concoct conspiracy theories: The horrific midair collision was an after-effect, a product of left wing protests originated by Obama, that air traffic controllers are, “too white.” Meaning there is not enough diversity, not enough equality, which means that pressure from the woke, left wing Democratic radicals for greater diversity no matter what the cost, led to a lowering of the rare technical skills necessary to be a top-performing air traffic controller. Does Trump believe that? It doesn’t matter. Millions of his radical right wing followers do. And there is nothing that influences the Influencer in Chief and Commander in Chief than the ability to attract votes. More than any politician in memory, Trump values power over principles. The only vision for America that Trump cherishes is a vision in which he wins whatever election he’s entering. This is true of all high-profile, successful politicians, but no one, to my knowledge, can approach Trump. When it comes to the shameless, feral pursuit of total power — benefitting him and him alone — Trump is ALL IN.

Gerald Alper is the author of Portrait of Artist as a Young Patient (Psychodynamic Studies of the Creative Personality), and his latest book: God and Therapy (What We Believe When No One is Watching).

If ever there was someone who could be called sui generis, it was Roger Penrose.

His father, Lionel, was a renowned polymathic genius. One of his brothers won the British Chess championship ten times. Another brother (Oliver) was an eminent professor of mathematical physics. There were distinguished mathematicians and artists in the family tree. Roger is fond of (and famous for) illustrating his most esoteric, serious ideas with strikingly original geometric drawings. I once asked Sean Carroll, who had introduced and referred to him in one of his public lectures as “the artist, Roger Penrose” why he had identified Penrose (who had never been acknowledged as a professional artist) that way (rather than as a world-famous Nobel Prize winning theoretical physicist), and he replied, “It was a joke.”

As a youngster, Penrose was so original, so into looking at things from his own perspective, that he was initially misunderstood and underrated by his teachers. He seemed to take an unusually long time to finish routine classroom assignments. His teachers wondered if he was “slow,” as did Penrose himself: “My mind seemed to work much slower than my classmates.” There was a growing consensus in middle school that it might be best if he would be held back a year. He was saved by an intuitive teacher who wondered if the problem — rather than an innate cognitive deficiency — was perhaps a super abundance of imagination. What if Roger Penrose didn’t so much answer questions, as muse about them? What if he wasn’t so much trying to get a good grade as — something almost no one does when taking an important test — searching for underlying, hidden deeper meanings? Inspired by his hunch, the teacher allowed Roger to retake the test (which he had failed dismally) but this time allowed him to take all the time he wanted. The hunch paid off. Roger went from getting close to zero to getting every question right. The same strategy paid off several years later when it came time for him to choose between medicine (the choice his father practically demanded) and mathematics — Penrose’s clear preference. Lionel (hoping to convince his son of the error of his ways) arranged for a very special entrance test to be administered to Roger: He would be given all the time in the world to correctly solve a series of very challenging, advanced mathematical problems. In order to qualify for admission to the university (Cambridge) all Penrose had to do was get one of these super problems right; And he had a whole day to do it. Penrose not only rose to the challenge, he got every single problem right. A star was born! From the beginning, a pattern would be set. Whatever he tackled, he would begin by reimagining and trying to reinvent the question so as to better understand it. As Sean Carroll would later say, in another lecture, Roger Penrose completely changed the way astronomers conceptualize the passage of light (by introducing the geometric figure of the light cone). Puzzled as to the cumbersome way the passage of light was then traditionally depicted, Penrose devised the (then) radical conception of the light cone. He showed it to his older brother Oliver (the Professor), who was impressed but puzzled, and suggested he show it to his friend Dennis Sciama, a leading figure in contemporary British cosmology. Sciama, quick to realize Penrose had a once in a lifetime originality, would become a lifelong champion of Penrose and a personal friend. Stories abound about Penrose’s creativity.

In 1972 the international physics community had sufficient talent — and ego — to ensure there was no consensus as to who was the smartest person in the room; But within that elite group, many people recognized Roger Penrose’s highly unusual abilities. “Roger’s math had something magic about it,” recalled Rainer Sachs, the German-born cosmologist who had watched Roger Penrose’s reputation grow through his collaborations with Steven Hawking. “Comparing the two, I always felt Hawking’s calculations were comparatively straight forward — had I been smarter, better educated, more focused and harder working I might have come up with some of them. Roger’s were completely alien. Never could I have started one of his calculations — which always seem to begin with an epiphany. Hawking was a human genius. I was just so impressed with Penrose’s insights which seemed to stem from some superhuman life form.”

Many relativists had a powerful feel for formal math — errors and calculations leapt out at them the way off-key notes rankled a musician’s ear. Not Roger. Equations required too much mental labor and restricted his creativity. His “magic” came from the shape of things. He preferred to run his fingers along the curves and twists of space and time and find in those graceful lines the story of how every particle, force, and phenomenon acquired its properties.

Complex geometry, with its poetic mix of real and imaginary numbers held one key to unlock the relationship between general relativity and quantum mechanics. Conformal geometry, with its scaled invariants and preserved angles contained another. Together, they offer passage into the mathematical world “hiding behind the real world.”

Geometry had as much — or more — material reality as a piece of chalk or a wine bottle. Roger could manipulate and shift his mathematical constructions with an ease that seemed otherworldly to those around him.

‘I know no one who even approaches him in intuitive feel for the content of alternative formulations of geometry, and no one who comes close in his lectures and writings [to bringing such a wealth of insights to the service of his colleagues.] I count him as a unique asset to the world of learning,” John Wheeler, wrote of him in 1972. Wheeler, a titan of American theoretical physics, was influential, not only for his own science, but for his ability to identify and encourage talent in those around him. He could name fewer than five scientists anywhere in the world who could come close to equaling Roger’s accomplishments and potential. That year, Roger was under consideration for election to the Royal Society, the United Kingdom’s prestigious National Academy of Science. “If the Royal Society wants the most distinguished man easily named in the field of mathematical physics, it should lose no time in electing Roger Penrose,” Wheeler told the selection committee.

Wheeler was trying to lure Roger from London to Princeton, but Roger’s memories of Texas put him off moving to America permanently, much to Wheeler’s disappointment. “I must say it has taken me some time to become adjusted to the sad thought that there are factors about this country which rule it out for you in the years immediately ahead,” he wrote to Roger. “If outlooks were to change…I personally would hope that somehow or other it might be possible to renew the proposal which we have just been discussing back and forth across the Atlantic so seriously.”

Like his floating astronaut, Roger reached a point where he could take a moment to survey his surroundings and appreciate the unexpected places his journey had taken him. The concepts that bore his name — the Penrose triangle, the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems, Penrose Diagrams, the Penrose-Newman Constants, and Penrose Notation — had made him a prominent and successful “brand” within the world of mathematical physics. Roger pushed further into unexplored territory letting Twister theory (which he had invented) lead him closer to the fundamental geometric nature of reality — even as forces beyond his control threatened to tear his life apart. On top of everything else, Roger’s marriage to Joan was falling apart. Roger had fallen in love with one of his students (Judith). While Roger waited for his telegram to have the desired results, a letter Judith had written weeks earlier arrived at his office at the university. She had mailed it to Bayfield, where it had just missed him. After several days of delay, it had at last made its way to Boston. Two more letters arrived the next day. His calm and optimism returned. He was so delighted to hear from her that it took him several readings for him to notice that she was still angry with him. She rejected his dismissal of their history and his marriage as “mere practicalities.” And she cared even less for his analysis of her “demons” and “fantasies.”

“Only two things I’ll say now…firstly, I’m very glad that you reject the ‘fantasy’ solution to the problem,” she wrote. “We are both too honest to have a very superficial relationship based on preserving each other’s fantasies. Secondly…I disagree (as you thought I would) with your analysis of my feelings, or most of it anyway.”

He apologized for his “two-bit psychiatry” but expressed no regret about his earlier letters, given how important she was to his work. He was embarrassed. His telegram had revealed what a worry-nut he could be but he carried on psychoanalyzing away at Judith’s resistance to their relationship.

JUDITH DANIELS

Penrose, although married and with children, began to feel he had made a mistake in marrying Joan (his first wife, who felt the same way). The difference was Penrose was looking for a safe way to get out of the marriage while Judith was looking for a way to hold on to what she had.

Judith, a young candidate for a degree in theoretical physics with Penrose as her supervisor, seemed to be the answer. Judith, who had been worshipping Penrose for years, was clear on one thing: She did not want a romantic, physical relationship with the octogenarian and profoundly idiosyncratic Penrose. When Penrose, after controlling himself for about ten years, finally made his move — leaning over to kiss her for the first time — she stopped him in his tracks. She reminds him about Colin, her boyfriend (whom she will later marry briefly). Hasn’t she told him, on various occasions, that she does not want a physical relationship with him? Someone she sees as a father figure? Bewildered at what he considers a classic case of mixed signals, Penrose (perhaps the only time in his life) explodes — taking a nearby bottle of wine and smashing it against his leg. Fortunately, it does not break, but it is the end of their fantasy romance.

One of the many virtues of Patchen Barss’ biography is the considerable length and detail he devotes to Penrose’s profound need to be supported by a female muse in his heroic quest to tackle and solve the biggest questions of the universe. In his long and glorious career (still strong at 92) Penrose will win the Nobel Prize in physics (2020), be knighted by Queen Elizabeth, receive the order of merit from Britain — just one of 25 living people to do so — and many other major honors. He has consistently sought out the biggest fundamental problems in physics and searched for the simplest, most unifying answers. The area he specializes in — spacetime — is considered least accessible to the contemporary technological wonders of particle physics. The basic building blocks of his unique theory (what he calls twisters) do not have: emotions; emotional experiences; desires, interests; have no stake in existence, no existential qualities; do not collaborate or relate; are not relational, transactional, goal-oriented / ambitious; they are not educable, i.e., they cannot learn; they are not pragmatic or self-interested; not time-sensitive or personal; they have no GPS; they have no measurement problem.

This novel spacetime unit (twisters) is in stark contrast to conventional physical objects. You can just walk around the object in your mind, you can’t do that with a number. It doesn’t immerse you like a wave. It doesn’t have definite boundaries; It is transient, it is shapeshifting, it is in motion; It is inherently dynamical; it has history (there is an origin story). It isn’t personal (you engage with it, it doesn’t engage with you). It doesn’t have needs, it is not dependent on you for its continued existence; It’s not acquisitive, not directional, intentional, or sensible; it’s not narrative, impulsive, or self-contained; it’s not inhuman or materialistic.

Roger knew other cosmologists weren’t going to like his explanation of how gravity arrived at that highly structured state. “There is a profound oddness underlying the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the very nature of the Big Bang. In relationship to this, I am putting forward a body of speculation of my own, which brings together many strands of different aspects of the universe we know,” he wrote. “The scheme I am now arguing for here is, indeed, unorthodox, yet it is based on geometrical and physical ideas which are very soundly based.”

He asked physicists to let go of the very idea that the universe began with the Big Bang. The low-entropy universe didn’t just burst into existence 13.7 billion years ago, the story began much earlier. To prove it, he returned to one of his favorite areas of mathematics: conformal geometry.

He let his mind drift once more to the distant future. The universe, as a whole, was expanding; but gravity would cause denser regions within that expanse — galaxies and galaxy clusters — to collapse. The incessant pull turned old galaxies into new quasars. Ravenous blackholes absorbed billions or trillions of solar masses’ worth of material. Stars winked out of existence. Behind ever-growing event horizons, information was destroyed forever. The universe grew so cold and empty, hyper-massive black holes began to boil away with Hawking radiation. It might take a googol years before the largest blackholes completely evaporated. Leaving the universe sparsely populated with high-entropy radiation — an endless expanse of massless photons.

“The thing that started me off was really thinking about the photons and how boring the remote future was going to be. All the blackholes gone. Just these photons drifting forever and ever and ever. This just struck me as incredibly boring. This is a very emotional argument, if you like. But then I thought ‘who’s going to be bored in this universe?’ Well, mainly photons. But it’s very hard to bore a photon. Not because a photon presumably has no actual experiences. That was not the point. The point is that time for a photon is always zero. You just look at the way time dilation works: the time with respect to that photon from creation right through to infinity is zero. So, where do these photons go? They don’t want to be cut off from existence. Is there something on the other side? What could it be? That was the point, or I thought, ‘Hey, could it be a stretched out Big Bang?’ Massless particles do not experience time. They also don’t experience space. In a universe full of only photons, distance and scale cease to exist.”

Roger let his mind drift backwards. 13.7 billion years to the cosmic pinpoint that supposedly started it all, when the universe was trillions of degrees too hot for matter to form. It, too, was filled with massless particles. It, too, had no clocks and no rulers. The beginning and the end were both conformally invariant. At each terminus, scale disappeared. Viewed through the lens of conformal geometry, each was indistinguishable from the other.

He recalled M.C. Escher’s iconic lithograph “Print Gallery”. A boy stands in a gallery looking at a print of a cityscape. The lines curve ever outwards, the gallery print expanding into an actual city. The city contains the gallery and the gallery contains the boy looking at the print of the cityscape. The image expands endlessly and cyclically, passing through the same starting point.

Could this be the shape of the universe? If he could look far enough into the future, would he see the back of his own head? Would he see another universe entirely? Had he found a clever mathematical trick or a physical truth? A world-behind-the-world? A place where curves and angles have greater reality than even time and space? The realm Roger spent a lifetime escaping to might actually exist at the beginning and the end. These two distant extremes might be one and the same.

He hovered where the birth and the death of the universe bled into one another. He traveled further back and further forward to other scaled invariant transitions. An endless cycle of heat death and fiery rebirth. Non-stop expansion. Entropy would always increase, but every so often the perspective would change — a conformal “zoom out” to infinity — such that the large became tiny, cold became hot, old became new, and the cycles began again.

Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC) was a difficult sell. To make it work, every last massive particle — all the electrons, protons, and neutrinos, plus all the dark matter — had to be eliminated from the universe. Not all of it would fall into blackholes. He required some other physical mechanism to cause rogue particles to “fade away.” He also struggled with the question of falsifiability. Would it be anymore possible to test the existence of previous universes than parallel universes? What happened to time’s arrow during the transition from one aeon to the next? How could a new universe begin after time had been eliminated from reality? As it drifted through the transition from a dying universe to a cosmos reborn, these challenges all seemed manageable. The story was too powerful, too beautiful, too elegant to be wrong.

Conformal Cyclic Geometry eliminated the need for inflation and Stephen Hawking’s cosmological singularity. The expansion required to homogenize and flatten the universe no longer had to happen in a tiny fraction of a second. Gravity naturally emerged into a new aeon in an extreme low-entropy state — resolving Roger’s questions about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. As a new universe spilled out quarks and gluons, cosmic radiation, stars and galaxies, hot spots and cool spots, rivers and volcanoes — entropy never stopped increasing. The Second Law could carry on for eternity.

In 2010, he published his fourth popular science book, Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe. He continued to highlight his disagreements with Hawking. “Hawking himself has been one of the strongest proponents of the viewpoint that information is indeed lost in blackholes.” Yet at the 17thInternational Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation held in Dublin in 2004, Hawking announced he had changed his mind and publicly forfeited a bet that he and Kip Thorne had made with John Presskill, arguing that he had been mistaken and that he now believed that the information must, in fact, all be retrieved externally to the hole. “It is certainly my personal opinion that Hawking should have stuck to his guns and that his earlier viewpoint is far closer to the truth.”

People weren’t sure what to do with CCC. Reviewers called Cycles of Time “heretical”, “radical”, “speculative”, “unorthodox”, “not for the faint hearted”, “abstruse”, “an intellectual thrill ride”, “controversial”, and “a quite extraordinary hypothesis.”

Roger did find the prospect of heat death boring and depressing. CCC appealed to him first aesthetically, only later did he become convinced it was true. In academic circles, CCC was met with confusion, discomfort, and an uneasy sense that its author had gone “off the rails.”

Roger dug in.

He told other physicists exactly where to go look for evidence of CCC. At the end of an aeon, conformal geometry compressed the unimaginably slow evaporation of a blackhole into a near-instantaneous burst of energy. The blast would be powerful enough to pierce the transition between aeons, reverberate through opaque plasma for 379,000 years, and manifest as detectable patterns in the CMB (cosmic microwave background). “The supermassive blackhole radiation comes bursting through. What does it do? All the Hawking radiation stretches out through regions, which looks like about four degrees in the sky…about eight times the moons diameter,” Roger Said. Such spots wouldn’t be warmer or cooler than the rest of the CMB but would have less variation over all in energy levels. In a 2018 paper, published just five months after Stephen Hawking died, he suggested these spots be known as Hawking Points, ostensibly in recognition of Stephen’s contribution to the theory. Were Stephen Hawking alive, though, he would have wanted nothing to do with CCC. The name struck some scientists as more opportunistic than collegial. “He called them Hawking Points, which I find kind of distasteful because Stephen Hawking had just died. If it was done for publicity purposes, Roger Penrose didn’t need publicity,” said Douglas Scott, a professor at the University of British Columbia.

Scott was one of many physicists who accepted Roger’s challenge to test CCC. More out of respect for the man, than the idea itself. “It was only a prediction because Roger said it was a prediction. Nobody else understood why there would be a low-variance circle in the sky. And there is no chain of reasoning that says whether or not you detect these things, rules out, or rules in, CCC. But, he said it was a prediction so we went off and tested it,” Scott said.

His team’s analysis turned up no evidence of patterns in the CMB that matched Roger’s description. By the time they published their response, Roger had already posited another prediction. At a lecture at Princeton, celebrating 50 years since the discovery of the CMB, he said there should be concentric rings of low-variance energy in the CMB that were also remnants of the previous aeon.

Scott was in the audience and, once again, gave Roger the benefit of the doubt. “I was in two minds of wondering whether to say anything or just keep my mouth shut. I couldn’t stop myself. I said, ‘You know, if you really think there are multiple rings we’ll look for them.’” He put an undergraduate student on the project to go look for these rings, who did, in fact, find ring-like patterns in the radiation map but did not find any reason to connect them to CCC. In anything as complex and detailed as the maps of the CMB, such patterns could easily arise randomly.

Princeton physicist David Spergel faired similarly. “Roger reached out to me on the CCC stuff. I was leading the analysis of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe data at the time, and he asked me whether I would collaborate on it. I encouraged Amir Hajian, one of the postdocs on my team, to work with him. Amir didn’t find the pattern that Roger was looking for. He didn’t see what Roger wanted. Roger refused to publish. He didn’t want to hear that it wasn’t there.”

There was no surprise and no joy amongst scientists refuting Roger’s theory. He was liked and respected which made it all the worse. “I have seen a phenomenon in many brilliant scientists who were able to accomplish a lot by not listening to people and going their own original path. But as they get older they should be listening more. Instead, they listen less,” Spergel said. “You run out of people telling you when you’re being an idiot because there’s nobody above you anymore in the scientific food chain. When you’re young there’s a bunch of your colleagues who are equally smart and they say, ‘hold on a minute, what the hell was that?’”

As Roger increasingly ignored his critics, he also stopped listening. He no longer cared if his ideas made no sense to anyone. He became hyper-focused on finding anyone who would give his ideas a sympathetic hearing. Despite responses from people like Douglas Scott and David Spergel, he was convinced the scientific community was ignoring him. “There’s something rather nice about being wrong. If you find out you were wrong about something, it can open things up. You think, ‘I’ve been going on the wrong track, that’s why I was stuck.’ That has happened to me. What I don’t like is what is happening with my cosmology stuff. How much attention does it get? Zero. Now that is spooky. If there was something wrong with it, they should tell you. If there’s not something wrong with it, they should say, ‘gosh, that’s a good idea.’ I don’t find anything pro and con, I just find zero. And I find that extremely frustrating.”

In addition to academic responses, CCC was covered widely in popular science and media, as well as by PBS, the BBC, the New York Times, multiple high-profile YouTubers and bloggers, and major newspapers around the world. Nothing could shake Roger’s sense, though, that he was being ignored.

That sense might have been exacerbated by one of his other major ideas getting lost in the shuffle of a Noble Prize-winning discovery. Back in 1982, a few years after Roger had published his five-axis aperiodic Penrose tiles, an Israeli crystallographer named Daniel Schectman, discovered a metallic alloy whose atoms were organized unlike anything ever before seen. These structures, which Schectman called, quasi-crystals, shared the pentagonal geometry of Penrose tiles, an atomic arrangement previously dismissed as impossible. It was as though Roger had invented a fantastic species of animal and zoologists had then found that very creature living in the wild. So, in 2011, Schectman was the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his discovery of quasi-crystals. Roger’s work was not recognized. “I thought it was outrageous the way the chemist wrote him out of the story in the citation for the Nobel Prize,” said Lionel Mason, Penrose’s longtime colleague at the Oxford Mathematic Institute. “Of course, the problem there was that he published his quasi-crystals in a recreational mathematics journal.”

Schectman described Roger’s influence on his quasi-crystal discovery similarly to how Roger described Kepler’s back-of-the-mind effect on his development of his tiles. “I was familiar with Penrose tiles, of course,” Schectman said. But he wasn’t consciously thinking of them as he did his research. “I didn’t know what it was. I repeated my experiments time and again over the next months. At the end of my sabbatical, I knew exactly what it was not, but I still didn’t know what it was.”

From Keppler to Penrose to Schectman, pentagons kept reappearing and revealing new secrets. In this case, Roger was satisfied to let the shapes that he had originated have a life of their own. He consulted on many architectural projects related to Penrose tiles but never pursued prizes or commissions. He did enjoy his growing celebrity. In North America, across Europe, in India and Australia, crowds lined up for hours for a chance to hear him speak. Fans asked for autographs, and he appeared regularly on the BBC and other major media. He felt very well-rewarded.

Only with his newer, less adulated ideas did he feel shortchanged.

With each year, Roger became more unrelenting. He refused to slow down. He accepted endless media requests and speaking engagements and maintained a punishing travel schedule well into his eighties. An entire world of fans, friends, and colleagues enabled and encouraged him to keep traveling and speaking. His eyes dimmed, his blood pressure increased, his memory grew less reliable. Friends and family watched Roger’s reputation fade while Roger worried he wasn’t working quickly enough to shore it up. He repeatedly expressed the fear that he suffer the same fate as the German climatologist Alfred Wegener. In 1912, Wegener hypothesized that continents more incrementally around the surface of the planet, were changing oceanic boundaries in rising up mountain ranges. Critics treated his theory as at least as crazy as anything Roger put in his books, no known physical mechanism could cause such movements. Wegener died years before his continental drift theory was vindicated. Roger couldn’t bear the thought of twister theory, orchestrated objective reduction, or CCC suffering the same fate. He needed them taken seriously in his own lifetime — if only to ensure work on them continued after he was gone.

“I’m not particularly interested in putting myself forward as a historical figure,” he said, “I am very concerned that these ideas not get lost.” Roger knew other cosmologists weren’t going to like his explanation of how gravity arrived at that highly structured state.

“On the afternoon of October the 5, 2018, I sat at a crumb-covered table in Roger Penrose’s flat about to conduct the first interview for this book.

Roger moved around his kitchen preparing tea and biscuits. He left the lights off. Macular degeneration had left him nearly blind. He navigated mostly by touch and memory. Gray autumn light filtered in through the windows, which overlooked the canal where narrow boats and swans passed unhurriedly. Stacks of moving boxes filled various corners of his flat, and framed prints and paintings leaned against walls, waiting to be hung.

He instinctively picked up a copy of the tetrahedral puzzle he had designed during his undergraduate years. He slid out a piece that locked several others in place, and six irregularly shaped multicolored chunks of plastic clattered onto the table.

He shuffled the pieces around as we talked, feeling out small bumps and indentations that provided clues about how they fit back together. Meanwhile, he wandered from story to story, subject to subject, attempting to assemble the key fragments of his disjointed life. He drifted between cosmology, artificial intelligence, crystallography, blackhole physics, and chess puzzles. He talked about higher-dimensional Platonic Solids, alternatives to the standard twelve-note octave, the death of his mother, and the influence of Dennis Sciama. Every new tangent left a previous thought unfinished. When he got more comfortable, he disclosed that he and Vanessa had recently separated. Alone for the first time in more than 30 years, he insisted solitude just gave him more time for research.

As he spoke, his hands appeared to be running on a separate system. They kept working the pieces of the puzzle, turning and interlocking until, with no flourish whatsoever, he slid the final three pieces simultaneously into place. He once again held a smooth tetrahedron, about four inches high. With barely an acknowledgement, he broke the pyramid apart and started again. ‘It’s all complicated and it’s all connected,’ he said.

He gave me a tour of the geometric puzzles, games, and oddities he’d amassed through a lifetime of mathematical play; plastic gears and wooden tiles, multicolored resin cubes that unfolded into jagged shapes, a Klein bottle, a collection of tiny cardboard polyhedra he’d made as a child. There was no sign of his many awards, medals, and plaques, which were stowed out of sight. These toys were the badges of pride in the light he chose to display. In the years that followed, Roger and I spoke for hundreds of hours by phone, video conference, and in person. I met his siblings, sons, colleagues, and former spouses. I read his published and unpublished writing. Each interview, notebook page, and old fax added a new piece to the puzzle. The process by which a human being emerges from there constituent parts — be they quarks and electrons or stories and memories — works differently from a jigsaw. The moment never comes when the last piece clicks into place and the puzzle is complete.

On a snowy day in February 2019, Roger and I walked from his flat to the Ashmolean Museum where Roger’s collection of M.C. Escher prints was on long-term loan. I reached out to help steady him on a steep hill where broken ice covered an already treacherous stretch of pavement. He brushed me back. ‘If I fall, you can help me up,’ he bristled, jamming his walking stick into the ice and carrying on.

Later, on the same walk, he paused in the chilly air. ‘I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone. It’s a theory I think about. I don’t think it’s true but I think there’s something to it…What if people alive today are visitors from the future who bought tickets to come back and have a 21st century experience?’ He absolutely did not believe consciousness could jump through time or from body to body. He just liked thinking about the idea. It helped him make sense of his experiences. Imagining himself as a ticket-holding consciousness from the future reinforced his self-image as a spectator to, rather than the architect of, his own story. He had trouble taking credit (and responsibility) for his extraordinary life: He hadn’t designed the laws of physics that governed how his future unfolded. I asked him more than once how he had evolved from a relatively obscure, pure mathematician to become Roger Penrose, famed creator of impossible objects, tamer of infinities, and storyteller of the universe.

‘It would have been stranger had I become anyone else.’

I asked him if he considered himself a generally happy, unhappy, or neutral person. With long pauses, he said, ‘Listen to the opening of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion. It’s happy and sad at the same time.”

We walked up and down Oxford streets, visiting the office he still kept at the Mathematical Institute, various flats where he’d once lived, the two campus areas paved in Penrose tiles, the bakery that made his favorite seed bread, and muddy wooded paths along the city’s waterways where he took his daily walks. He showed me the “Nick Woodhouse shortcut” he’d named for another Oxford mathematics professor, which entailed squeezing through a gap between a fence and a building to cut off about two meters of the walk across campus.”

For whom, then, is this book for?

It’s for anyone and everyone who is curious about the vicissitudes, the Sturm and the Drang of creative genius.

Gerald Alper is the author of Portrait of Artist as a Young Patient (Psychodynamic Studies of the Creative Personality), and his latest book: God and Therapy (What We Believe When No One is Watching).

If there were MAGA celebrations the morning after (and there were) you would not have known it from the Metropolitan tabloids. The real story from the standpoint of tabloid drama was how stunned, how freaked out, how despondent, how at a loss for words the experts were the morning after. Or, perhaps, not that they had no words, but that the words seemed so meaningless.

Yes, this was an historic event, a gamechanger, the greatest comeback in political history; but it landed as though it were the political equivalent of the sinking of the Titanic. How could that be?

Desperately, even before the election was officially called, revisionist writers were busy flipping the script. The man who had been mercilessly vilified as the “worst president in US history” was now being hailed as a “master of the media,” someone who’s a strong man in the mold of Senator Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, and Governor George Wallace. He was a proven liar but, no one had died from his lies. He had “a big personality,” he projected “charisma,” “energy.”

But there were no body bags to his first administration, as there had been, and still are, in the Biden-Harris administration: over 40,000 non-combatant Gazans killed; 6000 buildings bombed daily; 2000 buildings utterly leveled; over one million Gazans uprooted from their ancestral homes and driven by cattle to Rafa (already dangerously overcrowded); over one million Lebanese recently uprooted from their ancestral homes (by order of Israel); billions of dollars in military aid (including super 2000 pound bombs left over from the second world war supplied regularly by the United States through the entire war (and still being supplied as I write this).

[Disclosure: A month ago in Joe Biden’s final speech to the United Nations, as reported by New York Times Peter Beinart: “The Gaza Health Ministry recently released a catalogue of the names and ages of Palestinians killed in this war: the first one hundred pages are comprised entirely of the names of children who died under the age of 10. Their lives will need to be accounted for when historians gauge how Joe Biden shaped the soul of this nation.”]

Having said that I must reiterate from what I have repeatedly said, “Although I have never voted for either Joe Biden or Donald Trump: if there were a gun to my head (there isn’t), and I have to vote, I would vote ten times in a row for Joe Biden over Donald Trump.”

So how did this happen?

Shortly thereafter, a friend contacts me with an email telling me that she is “heartbroken” and asks, “How are you doing over there?”

Am I heartbroken?

No. Absolutely not.

I am saddened, and more than a little frightened about whether his comeback (as promised) turns into a payback! For what? For some of my recent (suddenly emboldened), anti-authoritarianism articles (just when I thought it was safe to get back into the political water).

Right now, as I write this, there is a front-page article in the New York Times (11/12/2024) reporting that 50,000 troops (some of which are North Koreans) have just gathered in a recently Russian-occupied city in Ukraine. They are receiving daily up-to-date training — by combat-hardened Russian veterans — on how and when to introduce the latest and most deadly long-range, ground-to- ground artillery (powerful enough to strike deep into Russian territory).

Increasingly, the Ukrainians — outmanned, outgunned, and woefully undersupplied — have been heroically hanging on by their fingernails (in a kind of Custer’s last stand) to stave off a looming invasion of Ukraine’s last and most sacred citadel of freedom and determination, Kiev.

They rightly fear, as do many of the western democracies, that “if we fall, you fall” (the famous cris de couer from Vladimir Zelensky in 2022 on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine).

The totally unexpected reaction of Donald Trump (“Let Russia do what it wants with Ukraine.”) could not have come (from the standpoint of Ukraine) at a more critical time.

Biden, in the first two years of his long sought-after ascension to the presidency of the United States, had been unwavering in his support of the embattled Ukraine. Immediately, he had begun funneling billions of dollars (in desperately needed medical aid and advanced weaponry — allegedly for self-defense) to Ukraine.

Blindsided, by the unrelenting ferocity of Ukraine’s extraordinary defense of its sovereign right to self-government, Putin would subsequently admit (in hindsight), “I really thought Ukraine would waive the white flag in about 12 minutes once we arrived, and welcome us, and join us — but that didn’t happen.”

No Ukrainians put down their weapons, raised the white flag, and joined the invading Russians. Despite which, the Russians doubled down. They kept calling up more and more troops from the hinterlands of Russia; embracing an unprecedented, diabolical tactic of releasing thousands of hardcore, convicted and dangerous criminals from jail, in exchange for their signed contracts (giving permission) to be immediately called up to the frontlines of the most ferociously contested battlefield. As reported by a former high-ranking commander in the Russian army: i.e., tens of thousands of completely untrained, poorly equipped, freshly recruited ex-convicts are lined up within yards of the waiting, armed Ukrainians, told to crouch, keep their heads and helmets down, wait for the signal from their commander to charge. The result of which is that wave after wave of pulsating human life instantly become fodder for the entrenched Ukrainians.

Yet, despite the staggering death tolls, there are clear gains for the Russians. The ensuing crossfire helps illuminate the previously camouflaged position of the exhausted but entrenched Ukrainians and to a certain extent wears them down. There are limits to how much punishment even the bravest and most determined human resistance can tolerate. The Putin-led Russians are playing a very cynical, but effective, long game. Does anyone ultimately benefit from this? Not from anything that I, or anyone I know, can see. If the Ukraine finally falls, Russia gains the undying scorn of the worldwide western-style, freedom-loving countries.

We will be closer to a nuclear holocaust (as Joe Biden warned) than ever before.

One of the hardest things to accept (for America) is that it is not just Trump, authoritarianism, or the right-wing fanatics that’s crazy — it’s the whole world. It’s hard to accept that all the political shibboleth continuously spewed by the left and right were, in the final analysis, almost of no apparent benefit at all.

It’s hard to accept that some of the most sophisticated defense weapons ever devised have been co-opted by one of the most ruthless, heinous expansionist invasions in a century. Who will forget the seemingly miles-long parade of leftover, outdated second world war Russian tanks that, all of a sudden (almost comically), got mired and stuck in the Ukrainian mud.

We have forgotten that wise saw from the 50s that the map is not the territory. To which, we can add, that the computer is not the mind; that the universal right to defend one’s freedom, one’s country, does not include the right to commit wholesale genocide. That just as no one is above the law, no country is above the universal human rights mandate not to commit a crime against humanity (i.e., Israel invading/occupying and doing everything in their power to existentially exterminate and destroy Hamas, Gaza, Lebanon, all real or imagined enemies of Israel. Never before has the United States been as politically and evenly divided as after the recent 11/5/2024 election. Half the country seems to see the other half as pure evil — who happen to share exactly the same opinion of their accusers.

Never before have the American tabloids been so riven, so fractious, so devoid of a singular humanistic point of view — yet so desperate to be all things to all people. Never before have the boundaries between media become so blurred. What once was conscientious, fact-based reality, has become a competition for reader attention, for ratings, for what sells. There is a sense that newspapers are suffering from a post-pandemic kind of journalistic identity crisis. Unmoored from any consensual internalized system of values, they search for validation from their ratings, spreadsheets, and data mining. As never before, newspapers seem to lack self-confidence. It is as though, without inner belief to anchor them, papers lack a subjective frame of reference, a human-centered perspective to guide them as how to engage or interpret events. Sensing their lack of connection, readers lose hope in their prospects. Without conventional guidelines (“Hey, get your newspaper! Trump calls Nancy Pelosi a B!”) newspapers lose their sense of being the first responders, the watchdogs, and the whistleblowers of violations to the public wellbeing. Without agreed upon standards, there cannot be agreed upon sanctions for infractions, howsoever egregious, to these commonplace standards. Jurisprudence without compassion seems moralistic, punitive, and self-serving.

It is never clear when a major newspaper like the New York Times endorses a candidate, a party, a cause, whose interests are being served. Traditionally, it’s claimed that whatever unfolds, there is always and can only be one goal: the overall betterment of the entire country. And so there can only be one disagreement: What is the best path (out of millions) that can take us there? Every politician, every statesman, will claim their deep belief, their deep commitment, is to the equal distribution of opportunities and benefits to everyone. They will claim their know-how, their expertise, their passion lies in their allegiance to the sacred democratic goals. They will tell you in their stump speeches, how their core values, their politic souls, were tempered in the white-hot heat of their most personal struggles for freedom: Elizabeth Warren telling how her own mother, after decades of being relegated to the side lines, was told to just “put on her best dress” and join the workforce in order to “save” her debt-burdened home for her young children to grow up in; Joe Biden tells, and tells again, the heartbreaking story of the tragic deaths of his first wife and their infant daughter, (“Who would ever want to hurt her?”) on the eve of his becoming the youngest US senator in United States history and, again, decades later, when he was asked, beseeched, by the weary elders of the democratic party to come back from semi-retirement and lead the party to a glorious victory over the nominee from hell.

Out of a plethora of scenarios, here is a secular, naturalistic, psychological way to think of the Trump Bump.

First, Donald Trump is not evil (no one is). He is mortal. His being does not violate a single law of physics. He is sui generis — really sui generis. There has never been someone like him. He is the gold standard when it comes to being a black swan: a freakishly unlikely conjunction of characteristics literally never seen before. A trained molecular biologist having gained access to Donald Trump’s closely-guarded DNA would — contra no less an authority than Bill Maher — find nothing to dispute his claim that he is a Homosapien, and nothing but a Homosapien, all the way down. Donald Trump, in short, is us; and we are him. (What is that dumb school yard expression? “Fool me once, shame on you — fool me twice, shame on me.”) There are no excuses. If ever there were a case of (beware of) answered prayers: this is it.

Donald Trump is, was, always has been, and always will be America’s greatest con artist. He is the gold standard when it comes to in-your-face, brazen selfishness. He is so righteously self-empowered, that he enjoys telling you, in advance, what he is going to do, no matter how outrageous. Half the time he does exactly what he says he is going to do; half the time he doesn’t. He makes the most consequential decisions on the basis of a whim. There has never a president who so relishes payback. The idea of graciousness and forgiveness seem to have never occurred to him. Empathy and compassion for the downtrodden are not in his playbook — they are for losers.

As I write this, he has just declared a state of Martial law, pertaining to an estimated two million immigrants who have allegedly entered (or been allowed to enter) the United States. There is no known precedent for law to even begin to accomplish this. Is it legal? Is this a trial balloon to see how far he can go; to what extent he can upset the natural order of things? Is he trying to upset the natural order, to tear down the natural order, or: to rebuild from the ground up, a new order?

Or is he just having malevolent fun? Does he even know what he is doing? Does he care? Amazingly, he’s seemingly convinced half the country he’s a sort of mad political superman.

Or is he reacting to the understandable pressure? As he must now deliver presidential miracles.

A Problem of the One and the Many

The problem of the one and the many has been around for thousands of years. Is reality one humungous, godlike thing or is it many things? Is the puzzle of existence solved when we see how all the pieces fit beautifully together, or should we start by thinking pluralistically? What is e pluribus unum — out of many, one — really telling us? Not surprisingly we take it both ways. When threatened we want allies. When free to enjoy the fruits of our struggles we want separation, unencumbered by the obligation to spread the wealth. Typically, politicians, depending on the context, classify themselves as uniters or dividers. They are either for or against whatever the status quo is. The singular vision they all share is the one in which — in whatever election they are currently engaged in — they emerge victorious. They cannot, of course, say that. So, they say in the style made famous by the Ukrainian president, Vladmir Zelenksy, “If we win, you win. If we fail, you fail.” Over time, self-interest becomes fused with what’s good for the public. In the event of an actual war, each side claims its overriding goal is peace. Each side claims it is acting purely in self-defense. Each side claims that there is no ill will towards the country or land they are destroying. Each side claims they personally think highly and warmly of the indigenous people they are being forced to fight. Such binary thinking — us against them; yes or no; to the victor belong the spoils — has existed at every level throughout all of history. The person who can combine vibrant but disparate socioeconomic-cultural strands into a meaningful tapestry (sometimes called a weaver) is especially lauded.

In science, there is no greater name than the genius (Newton) who miraculously could see — in the fall of an apple and the evolution of the sun — not a resemblance but an identical dynamical law (at a different scale) at work.

There is no greater name than the uneducated chemist’s assistant (Michael Faraday), who saw, in the almost infinite wealth and diversification of electrical and chemical phenomenon spanning the universe, a strange new force. He called it electromagnetism living in a strange, new type of space which he called the field.

There was no greater name than the man who came next: James Clerk Maxwell, who stood on the shoulders of the greats who preceded him, who was the first to grasp the scope and breadth of Faraday’s revolutionary concept of the field. He was the first to write down the four fundamental equations (which still stand today) which would unify and validate the mountain of disparate magnetic, electrical, optical phenomenon, that was rapidly accumulating in the 19th century. In an unprecedented, amazing example of grace and acknowledgment, the young unknown, James Clerk Maxwell, would give full creative credit toward the venerable aging Michael Faraday. All he had done, really, was to create a sought-after mathematical formalism for the wonderful scientific discoveries, decades ago, of the youthful Michael Faraday. The lion’s share of creative credit must go to Faraday.

Now, fast forward to 1905. On the mantelpiece of a young unknown patent clerk (Albert Einstein) stood three photos of Newton, Faraday, and Maxwell. Einstein is on the brink of introducing to the world the greatest revolution in our fundamental understanding of space and time, since Isaac Newton. Yet, in the great tradition of his predecessors, it was Einstein who would say “All I did was to stand on the shoulders of James Clerk Maxwell. The synthesis he created (uniting magnetism, electricity, and light) under the umbrella of the term electromagnetism, and the revolutionary concept of the field, is greater than anything I’ve ever accomplished.”

Compare that kind of passing the torch of power and truth back and forth to the internecine warfare America has been subjected to since 2016: the fateful day the Mad King, Donald Trump, took that historic ride down the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his grand decision to join (and quickly take command of) the Tower of Babel race to determine the Republican nominee for the upcoming election for the presidency of the United States

In a matter of days, I had made my decision. Under no circumstances would I ever vote for Donald Trump. If there were a gun to my head and I had to vote, I would vote ten times in a row for Biden over Trump.

It didn’t matter. What I was certain could not happen — that Donald Trump could be reelected — did happen. There is no lack of theories to explain the unexplainable.

Here’s mine.

Not that people have forgotten — but that they don’t care.

Don’t care?

Yes.

Think of the greatest most horrific tragedy imaginable — Pearl Harbor; the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, on Nagasaki; the fire-bombing of Dresden (killing one hundred thousand people); of fifty million people dying as a result of World War II; six million Jews killed (one million of them were children) during the Holocaust; twenty million Russians killed during the reign of Stalin; Rwanda; Serbia; September the 11th.

What is the deterrent value of such genocide?

Well, there must be some.

Whatever it is, it cannot keep pace with the exponential growth of wartime weaponry technology. Whatever the killing power of the military was one hundred years ago, it is thousands of times greater today. The arms race is not between democracy and dictatorship; between freedom and authoritarianism; between East and West; between good and evil. It is more between individualism and group think. There is a profound difference between how an individual alone and an individual in a group acts. It is the difference between being a part of something that is bigger than you — something that contains you — and being something that is relatively complete in itself, something big enough to contain things other than itself.

From this perspective you are either inside (the container) or outside (the container). From this perspective, a thinking being who is a person will be in the inside (usually the center) of the container. From this perspective, a thinking being who is a person is someone who is free to determine, without outside interference, the direction in which they move. Someone or something that attempts to block or redirect their autonomous movement is regarded as an oppressor.

From that perspective, autonomous motion — such as Aristotle thousands of years ago first hypothesized for the planets, such as Newton strove to incorporate in his majestic law of universal gravitation — can be seen as a common thread promising to unite the physical and the psychical. From that perspective, freedom in the beginning is about movement; it is about intentionality; it is about agency.

Now, fast forward.

What happens when the individual encounters, as it must, the group?

Depending on the strength of the will to move and the size of the group, there will be an accommodation. Can the individual surf the group like a rider on a horse, redirect its superior power so that it, at least partially, can serve the rider’s needs? Famously, the French historian Le Bon postulated that the dominant outcome when the individual encounters the group, is that the individual becomes disempowered. His subjectivity and autonomy shrink. He succumbs to the gravitational pull of a mob rule. His mind turns off. It is pleasant to wait for the roar of the crowd, if it is a performance or a sports arena. Le Bon saw the net effect of the rowdy, excited crowd as essentially negative. Building on Le Bon’s idea of crowd hysteria, Freud saw the charismatic mob leader as someone who was able to channel the adoration and identification of the mob of its majestic leader for his own strictly selfish purposes.

As never before, we live in a time of unparalleled group think. As never before, there has been open warfare between the dominant political parties. Without the slightest pretense of agreeing to disagree. There seems to be an almost homicidal impulse to destroy the opposing party. Theories abound as to the cause or causes of such maniacal frisson. Here’s just one philosophical common-sense idea I would like to put forward.

National, global politics have gotten too big — not too big to fail, too big to succeed. We have lost touch with our origins thousands of years ago, as a nuclear family with about two to five people. In our transition to radically industrialized, urbanized, technologically driven, information-based, we have lost sight of the fact that at the vital center of any human group there should be a politics of meaning. A century ago, Bertrand Russell presciently warned that the bigger a group gets the more insensitive it becomes to the needs of the individual.

There are lessons to be learned from evolutionary biology and psychology. For millions of years, the genome of homo sapiens (essentially unchanged) was built (by natural selection) to accommodate a small, land-based tribal species. It was not built by genetic engineering; it was built the old fashion way.

But it’s not personal. Accidents happen, but not because it’s personal. Genetic defects —

millions of them — are not intentional, they are not payback, God’s punishments for failure to fully embrace his commandments. In The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, David Quammen’s magnificent biography of Darwin’s struggle to penetrate the mysteries of evolution, he returns, again and again, to the age-old problem of theodicy: how could an all-powerful, all loving, omnipotent God create a world with so much evil in it? To Darwin, there could be no rational, no logical answer to such a profoundly self-contradictory situation. To Darwin, the greatest naturalist who ever lived, it was supremely important he see the world as it was, not how he wished it to be. What Darwin saw was that the world was incredibly old, much older than anyone thought, had to be older, for the process of natural selection he had uncovered to take effect. When Lord Kelvin, one of the greatest physical scientists of the day, weighed in insisting the world could not possibly be as old as Darwin was claiming, Darwin admitted he (then) knew of no physical evidence supporting his audacious claim of evolution, but continued to stand by his (purely intuitional) claims; and, astonishingly, as time marched on, it would be Darwin, not Lord Kelvin, who would be vindicated!

Now, fast forward.

The claim that authoritarianism — ruled by dictators, suppression of the right to self-representation — is superior to Western democracies has never been proved. How could it?

There are, however, certain simple truths, that most people, all things being equal, seem to overwhelmingly agree on (including me): that might does not make right; that political power corrupts, and total power corrupts totally; that peace does come from strength, but strength does not come from military empowerment, it comes from well-earned trust; that truth and trust come from openness, self-disclosure that is not based on imitation, or deception; that artificial intelligence (Deep Blue; ChatGPT) is not human intelligence, it is expert-task machine intelligence — but it doesn’t sell to say that; that the nature of human communication cannot be imitation, must be emotional, dialogic, and authentic.

Gerald Alper is the author of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Patient (Psychodynamic Studies of the Creative Personality). His new book is God and Therapy (What We Believe When No One is Watching).

I wanted to go and I didn’t want to go.

November 2023, among other things, was going to be the centenary of his birthday. In case anyone doubted he would make it, he told one reporter that he planned not only to be there but, “I’m very much looking forward to it.”

Announcing what he was planning to do, no matter how forbidding, and then following through on it, was something he was known for. Norman Mailer (a cofounder along with Fancher and Dan Wolfe, and perhaps, as its earliest defector) once said, mockingly and admiringly: “If you want to advance your position, to smash through the center and gain three yards, give the ball to Ed Fancher — he was a full back!” (note: Norman Mailer, at about the same age as Fancher, had once declared himself to be a physical coward, as a youth).

Before I could decide if and how I could possibly be invited to his centenary, life intervened. I would be startled to learn that Ed Fancher had very recently died. There was no mention of a centenary celebration that had or had not been held, but he had achieved his primary goal; he had lived to be 100.

I was surprised by how immediately sad I felt, how unprepared for his death I had been, although for decades, I was aware of his always advancing, great age. And in no way did he appear indestructible, but fears of death, and more importantly, fears of life, did not seem to concern him.

Upon graduating from the University of Alaska, he had enrolled in the army in 1942. Because he was adventurous and athletic, he was sent to the ski patrol in the Italian Alps. He served without injury until the war was over. Once when asked by his student — since he had experienced a great deal of combat — if he had ever experienced fear, he said, “I was terrified.” As an illustration of just how traumatizing actual combat could be, he related how, once, as a civilian several years removed from the end of WW2, he had heard, while walking, a nearby car backfire and, before he could realize what had happened, he had hit the ground.

And once, when I was in supervision with him, along with two other supervisees — all of us enthusiastic candidates for a Fellowship in the American Institute of Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis — Fancher revealed, uncharacteristically, that he had just returned from Italy.

It was the anniversary of the Liberation of Italy — the day Fancher and his fellow soldiers had to climb a cliff and then outfight a last-stand German resistance.

“You know”, Fancher once told us, “a group of us have a reunion every year in that town and we re-climb that cliff together. And, every year, just about everybody in that town comes out and cheers us on. To this day (25 years later) they still remember us.”

(Sensing the answer would be positive), I asked, “was it hard for you to climb it?” (he was then over 60)

“Well, I made it.”

That was Ed Fancher. Short and to the point. And I asked him ( again, when I was in supervision with him, and he was over 70) if he still rode horses (a lifelong passion). He said, simply, “Yes, I do.” He may not have said much, but you knew he meant what he said. And that there was always more he could have said, had he chosen to.

For me, there were two Ed Fanchers. There was a small town boy who grew up in upstate NY, who played full-back in High School, whose father was a vice president of a telegraph and telephone company, and who very much wanted his son to have military training. Instead, he would have to settle for a strong willed son, who opted instead for the Univ of Alaska (hoping it would placate his father), because it had a very strong ROTC program. This was the Ed Fancher who dreamed of one day founding, what he hoped would be, an open University. He didn’t know what an open University was, other than a place with as few rules as possible, but he knew it was a place where everyone had a chance to voice their view. And that was as good a description as any as to what the Village Voice would become.

It was founded in 1952, in a two bedroom apartment, and it very, very quickly became the first weekly newspaper in America to offer a serious alternative viewpoint. It would be imitated endlessly. It would make Ed Fancher a famous person in the history of American journalism. He had gone from being a more or less penniless GI (but with a small inheritance) who, along with his best friend Dan Wolfe, (a fellow WW2 veteran who had served in the pacific), and Norman Mailer, (who was also a WW2 veteran, but, already at 25, a famous novelist -The Naked and the Dead ) had founded The Village Voice. They had done it, on a wing and a prayer, “knowing absolutely nothing about publishing,” and amazingly, 17 years later, would cash out when they sold it to Carter Burden for three million dollars.

That was the first Ed Fancher — the Ed Fancher that I never knew. The second Ed Fancher, the one I would meet, was almost 60 years old, already in full stride in his second career as a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst. As a seemingly inveterate bachelor, he had met Vivian, the woman who would become his lifelong wife. To my mind, this was the only Ed Fancher, the one I revered.

In the eulogies that kept coming in, his death — had long been expected, but for which no one had seemed prepared. More than one person referred to the “passing of a Great American.” I had never thought of anyone in those terms. But, if I had to, I would say that Ed Fancher came closer to that characterization than anyone I had ever met in the past 50 years. In my newly reinvented identity as a featured weekly psychology and cosmology editor for the popular online magazine Medium. com, I’ve met and interviewed world class cosmologists, theoretical physicists, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and neuroscientists. They were all first rate, some of them were certified geniuses. But they were one-offs, in no sense did I consider what I had was a relationship. They were all lifelong academics, they were knowers and I, regardless of what I did or didn’t know, was a humble truth-seeker (a part I knew how to play really well).

Ask two people the definition of a great man (or woman) and you will get two different answers. Here’s mine: this is someone who, regardless of their limitations, their uncertainties, had a clear sense of their boundaries. They knew what they knew. They were generous in what they gave. They were confident in what they had achieved. They were instinctively nurturing. They sought self-empowerment, rather than power over others. They welcomed competition. They liked to challenge themselves. They were interested in growth as opposed to stimulation. They sought opportunity rather than novelty. It added up to a refreshing (and rare) sense of clarity. What you saw was what you got. Which did not mean they lacked depth; it meant they not only had depth, levels, they had complexity. There was more to them than met the eye. Comparatively speaking, they had multitudes within, but there was also clarity, centeredness. They were very much in the now. But when you were with them, you knew there was more to them (as mentioned), but they made you feel in that moment that nothing was more important, nothing held their attention more than you did.

I first encountered him in 1980, when I took my first official course in Freudian Theory. Fancher was one of the very few Freudian psychoanalysts who taught in the American Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. I took courses with him over a period of two years. For whatever reasons, I seemed to be the only student in the institute who had an extensive background when it came to studying the works of Freud. I remember a classmate confronting me at the end of one particular class, “Can you tell me just why you’re taking this course?”

The unnerving process that would eventually purge classical psychiatry of most of its roots in classical psychoanalysis was well under way.

I saw immediately, despite his reserved, unflappable low key manner, that Fancher held Freud in highest esteem. Once, in an effort to bring to life the historic importance of The Ego and the Superego — which he had just assigned to us to read — he had exclaimed in a burst of exuberance:

“And now, with this new concept of the Superego, we can actually have conversations with ourselves about anything — psychology, politics, astronomy — anything ; never before could we do that. Freud, with his revolutionary new model of the SuperEgo, explains how and why this happens…(long pause…) No other model does that: yes, there are flaws with it, but this is the best we have…(long pause…)”

I doubt if anyone in the class shared in his wonderment at the structural beauty of Freud’s new theoretical edifice. It was almost too good to be true. (could it actually be — that I was his best student?)

Once, when the concept of the preconscious came up — one of the least discussed of Freud’s tripartite model of the mind, the preconscious — Fancher blindsided me (in a playful way) by saying, “ Ok, first let’s ask Jerry, and if he can’t answer the question, I’ll try.”

For once, I rose to the occasion, gave as short as possible and succinct an explanation, offered a commonplace example that anyone could identify with, and then sat down.

When it came time for me to undergo group supervision, and an opening occurred, I chose Fancher.

It seemed a logical choice. The two other students in my group seemed to agree as to the esteem in which we all held our chosen mentor.

“I would refer anyone I knew to him without hesitation,” said the lone woman in our group.

“So would I,” joined in the third member of our group; an intense young man who was in the process of being awarded a doctorate in social psychology from a local university.

Both of them seemed puzzled, however, not only by how deeply I was invested in the nuances of psychoanalysis, but why I seemed to think there was something useful and relevant to be gained by studying it so intensely.

Fancher, by contrast, thought otherwise. He welcomed whatever special learning I had and did not regard it as competition. Once, when a student I knew well confessed to Fancher that she was intimidated by my apparent knowledge of Freud, Fancher (chuckling) replied, “So am I.”

In the long run, none of it mattered. Fancher treated me exactly as he treated the others. Part of his appeal was his consistency, the clarity with which he seemed to understand and apply the fundamental therapeutic principles in which he believed.

Here’s an example: When I told him how flustered I had been when working with a patient who had suddenly said, “You? You’re dead.” He said compassionately, “Look, you’re taking this personally, Jerry. You know you’re not dead. Instead of being defensive, why not show him you’re not dead by talking about it (which of course would benefit him therapeutically).”

It made such obvious sense to me, I never forgot it. Every chance I got I used it (in my own way, and it always worked to some degree. ) There were times I did not agree. For example: it was one of his personal Freudian rules, a recommendation always to address his patient (even if they were sobbing) as mister or misses. The idea was — no matter how empathically concerned you were, you wanted to reinforce the fact that it was a professional relationship. I got it, but I couldn’t be comfortable being that formal and neither could my two co-supervisees ( as they would privately reveal to me). Even Fancher himself couldn’t always do it. He told me the story of one of his patients — a schizophrenic young woman — who once confessed that she felt so rejected by his unnecessary formality (to her) that she doubted she could any longer continue to see him. At which point, for the first time in a long career, Fancher allowed himself to address a patient by a first name. I especially liked it when Fancher, say, after listening quietly for 20 minutes , would tell me something I had never heard before, something I had never thought was possible:

“Jerry, why are you working so hard here? It’s not necessary — you’ve gotten through the negative transference, you’ve worked on a relationship to his mother — It’s enough.”

It stunned me — and I always remembered it — that someone — at something as important and profound as the process of psychotherapy, could actually work too hard. But it reminded me, decades ago, in middle school, when a teacher (Miss Gaynor) — noting how nervous I was about the precise time and place when a particular quiz was going to be — suddenly with a broad smile, said, “Jerry, don’t worry so much!” And this stunning me at the time. All I did was worry, ever since I could remember; but it never occurred to me, not only was it not a praise-worthy, necessary thing to do, but that it was actually a useless, absurd thing to do to myself. I received my first lesson, which came to be called object relations. This was the idea that few things were as important as how you treated yourself when taken as an other! e.g., how you imagine other people see you is as important as how you treat yourself.

And here’s a final example (although there are literally hundreds more I could give):

[Disclosure: This is an excerpt from my book The Dark Side of the Analytic Moon: A Memoir of Life in a Training Institute (Chapter 3: In Search of a Mentor)]

It was a seismic moment in the history of my psychoanalytic training, in a flash of insight I saw many things: One, that I had a gift of connecting the dots and reading the emotions of others. That there were levels of things that were said. That some things were not said, that sometimes things that were not said were more important than things that were said. That people hide things from themselves as much as from others. That few things were more hidden than anger and aggression, that it is easier to be hidden than to be direct. That language is a narration, an on the spot narration and is rarely consistent. That what people think, feel, and say are not evenly distributed. That people, socially, act and speak in ways that are fragmented and complex. That it is always a mistake to think that when people say something that they want to be understood on all levels. That people on some level, always want to be understood, but on their terms.

Although I had known and worked with my patient for almost a year, I suddenly realized that there were important aspects to our relationship that I overlooked, or was in denial about. She was competitive with me. She was dissatisfied with the progress (or lack of progress as she saw it). She didn’t feel I genuinely cared about her. She didn’t particularly trust me. She could be manipulative. She did not find the therapy very stimulating. She didn’t feel that what I had to offer was very worthwhile, I could go on. A window had opened up, but I’d have to go through it. I had work to do.

This was what I learned, therapy was a road, but you had to take it. What I liked best about being a psychotherapist is that — unlike any other art or science — it dealt with meaning (e.g. Victor Frankl’s classic, Man’s Search for Meaning).

Gerald Alper is the author of Portrait of Artist as a Young Patient (Psychodynamic Studies of the Creative Personality), and his latest book: God and Therapy (What We Believe When No One is Watching).

“We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.”

pause.

full stop.

what about women?

slaves?

slave holders?

Native Americans?

the unhoused?

the impoverished?

the illiterate?

the mentally incapacitated?

We see at once that it is a long, but narrow, prejudicial list; that almost immediately calls for a Bill of Rights which, in turn, calls for amendments.

We see at once how, not outdated (so far as its core values are concerned), but quaint it seems when measured against our present understanding.

Almost immediately a problem presents itself — very much unresolved, even today:

How literally do we take what it seems to say?

For example, when it says we have the right to arm ourselves, do we take it as conservatively and literally as possible? Are we constrained to be in-step and interpret the constitution as an eighteenth century American colonial would? That only muskets and sabers are to be used to fend off predatory British Colonialists from invading their home and violating their rights?

Are we to interpret “arm ourselves” as the NRA would? With a minimum of restraints? (I.e., AK-47s, machine guns, and glocks)?

Or is there a sweet spot in between?

And, if so, who gets to interpret that?

We immediately see the problem: Everyday language, unlike mathematical logic, is not binary, it is polysemous. Which is another way to say that it is culturally coded, that it needs to be continuously contextualized, I.e., politicized. Which means, of course, that no two people would interpret the same local events — which, by definition, means how they individually and particularly affect the life of each person — in the same way.

We need a politics of meaning; not of power, not of acquisitions, not of land-grabbing. We need to understand that while language moves, principles don’t. (e.g. which is why statues never move.)

When a seven-year-old child protesting her right not to be bullied by a bigger child, or a random adult, critical of their behavior: “You’re not the boss of me!” (as I sometimes hear.)

What remains to be clarified is who exactly do they recognize as their boss? Their mommy? Daddy? Their parents? Their older siblings? Friends? For whom is that youthful declaration of independence intended? To what extent is this an authentic rebellion? Or is it just an impulsive, petulant, exhibitionistic performance?

I’m writing this two days before the 11/5/2024 Presidential Election which is being called one of the closest — if not the closest — election in political history.

The American people are being asked to choose who is to be the democratically elected ruler of the free world for the next four years. They are being asked to pick a constitutional ruler (‘a boss’) of — not just their own local patch of a free world — but for a huge country containing about a third of a billion people.

We see that a national identity is not nearly the same thing as an individual human identity. It does not have the same unity, cohesiveness, or durability of a single human being. A single human being has a unique single genome, no two genomes (even in identical twins) can be the same. A national identity contains millions of diverse identities — that are often factious and warring with each other. There is a profound difference between a group identity (‘Born in the USA’), a jampacked sports stadium roaring for the home team (that shatters almost instantaneously the moment a championship game is over), and an individual human being, possessor of an ever-changing but indestructible germ line.

In sum, an individual identity is composed of a personal culture that cannot be programmed, politicized, or quantized.

No one has ever looked through an electron microscope, the spreadsheets of the LHC, LIGO, or the revolutionary James Webb Telescope, and seen a poem, a thought, a dream, or a prayer (although they are as real as anything).

In short, Vote.

But not just with your stomach, your bankbook, or your home; but with your dreams, your hopes, and your human values.

Gerald Alper is the author of Portrait of Artist as a Young Patient (Psychodynamic Studies of the Creative Personality), and his latest book: God and Therapy (What We Believe When No One is Watching).

“YOU’RE FIRED!”

Disclosure: I’ve never met or had any contact with Maureen Dowd or anyone who represents Maureen Dowd, but I was inspired by her recent satire, “My State of the Union Fantasy”.

“He’s mad…really mad.”

“Who’s mad?”

“Donald Trump.”

I was sitting with my wife watching the runup to the upcoming November 2016 Presidential Election for the Presidency of the United States. It just kept getting curiouser and curiouser.

It began with Donald Trump riding down the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his historic decision to enter the race as a nominee for the upcoming Presidency for the United States.

Followed by a baffling sequence of events:

His immediate ascension to a commanding lead, immediately becoming number one in an already overcrowded field of largely unknown, untested Republican candidates.

The revelation of his astonishingly complete lack of experience, interest, or knowledge of any kind of governance.

His obsession with his ratings; and constant watching of television.

His unselfconscious — seemingly proud — admission that never in his life had he read a single book and that (famously) he could “murder someone on Fifth avenue and still get elected.”

His shameless nostalgia for the good old days when “pussy grabbing was no big thing.” When it was understood that there was no such thing as truth, only stories about truth, and that all his alleged lies were the creation of fake news and a profound inability to appreciate the beauty and genius of his (as he alleges)truthful hyperboles.

Perhaps most disturbing, however, was his apparent indestructibility.

How could one man survive the pussy grabbing tape? The years’ long grinding investigation by the ultimate pit bull investigator, Robert Mueller, two serious attempts to impeach him, the sensational STORMY DANIELS accusations, and a tabloid avalanche of Me Too lawsuits by women claiming sexual abuse? One mega million-dollar, record-breaking award for punitive damages against him after another.

Then, as if that weren’t enough, for the first time in history a former United States President is indicted by independent (Democrat) investigator, Jack Smith. Not for his part in inciting mob violence in the infamous January the Sixth assault on the capital but for the infinitely more commonplace banal malfeasance of lying about a hush payment to one of his female accusers. Incredibly, he is unanimously convicted of over 34 felonies stemming from this single case.

My moment of clarity in 2016 was not so much a prediction (which would come later) as a sudden understanding:

At the root of his pathological gamesmanship was an unhinged perversity — prompting Bill Maher to dub him Our Mad King (as in Nero fiddled while Rome burned) — that clearly had gone beyond the bounds of any kind of consensual understanding of sanity.

The Goldwater Rule — that it is unethical for any licensed mental health practitioner (as I was) to publicly diagnose someone whom they have not personally examined — prevented me from doing so, had I been so inclined. I was not so inclined that in what I saw was so raw, so unvarnished, it did not require a technically nuanced clinical description.

Plain English was fine.

Amazingly, eight years later, Trump does not seem to have learned anything. Even more amazing, neither has the American public who once again have voted him to lead the Republican party in 2024. If anything, Trump (who’s approaching 80) appears to be more divorced from reality than ever.

Here, in no particular order, are just a few more of the bizarre statements made by Trump in just the past few days.

To JD Vance, as Vance prepared to debate Kamala Harris: “Don’t forget to mention her low IQ.”

“If Harris wins, it’s all over for America.”

“If elected, I will fix the Israeli-Hamas war in one day.”

“If elected I will be a dictator, but only for a day.”

“I will immediately deport millions of illegally undocumented immigrants.”

“I will instantly send out death squads of police to deal with murderous illegal Venezuelan gang members.”

“I will force NATO to pay their fair share.”

“I will stop alleged illegal starving cannibalistic immigrants from eating our dogs and cats.”

“I will immediately strike a deal between Russia and Ukraine that is fair to both sides.”

Let’s not forget (in another context entirely),

“I do not care, let Russia do whatever they want with the Ukraine.”

CODA

My moment of clarity in 2016 — “He’s mad…he’s really mad.” — would prove a lynchpin to my ability to make sense of the hellzapoppin-reality tv-nonstop drama that would instantly become the signature of the Trump presidency.

To My Mind the Craziest Thing Was:

On Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, “It’s a genius move.”

Whatever someone may say about that (if not repeated than certainly never withdrawn), that alone, in my mind, is enough to thoroughly disqualify Trump from any possible consideration for the office of the Presidency of the United States.

That leaves Kamala Harris who, so far, has surprised everyone (including me) by being confident, level-headed, and overflowing with energy and charisma.

Her only drawback is she has no governing experience at this level, no signal accomplishments to her credit (such as being the chief architect of a major new bill), despite three and a half years as vice president. Thanks, in no small part, to Joe Biden’s determination that (under no circumstance) would he allow her (or anyone else) to outshine him during his stay in the oval office. This changed, of course, when Nancy Pelosi convinced him — as only she could — that he was heading towards a historic defeat; at which point, he made a startling about face and sprinted for the nearest exit.

That leaves us with a world in turmoil, multiple wars and no ceasefire in sight.

As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has brilliantly written with nearly three months to go we have no functional sitting president of the most powerful country in the world.

[Note, just after I wrote this, an article appeared in the New York Times entitled “The Missing President” wherein they speak of Putin seeing an opportunity to use Trump’s grudge against Ukraine. The reader will recall this is a reprise of the accusation for which Trump was (unsuccessfully) impeached in America.]

As I write this, the 2024 election is seven days away. The issue will finally be in the hands in which it belongs: the American Public. As Woody Allen famously cautioned us in “Annie Hall” when the country was at a similar crossroads with Vietnam (in which all paths led to certain doom):

“Let us pray and hope we choose wisely.”

Gerald Alper is the author of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Patient (Psychodynamic Studies of the Creative Personality). His new book is God and Therapy (What We Believe When No One is Watching).

He may be, in my opinion, America’s greatest living satirist, but for some reason he likes to refer to himself as being a “comedian.”

As in, “I’m only a comedian”. If he is a comedian, he is a plus one. He makes you laugh and he makes you think (for which some people have never forgiven him). He is by turns and in various measures (in addition to being a comedian and a satirist), a truth teller, a savvy chronicler of the vicissitudes of cultural mores, a provocateur, a whistle blower, a prophet (famously, if not the first, the loudest and most insistent to warn that if Trump should lose in the 2020 presidential election, he would literally refuse to leave the Oval Office in 2021!

The scope of his talent is so sprawling as to spill over into areas that are never associated with comedy: he is at times an amateur philosopher (although a very good one), a raconteur and wit who can hold his own with anyone. At the end of his introduction, he has this moving tribute: “My relationship with the audience is the relationship of my life. Kids? I don’t have time for kids, I’ve got to write this editorial. It’s always been where I put my energy. It’s what I love most. That’s my truth; that’s the way I was born; that’s what my body is telling me to do, and always has. It’s why I’ve always treated the audience like they are my friend- and I mean a real friend. I trust them enough to say things they may not want to hear. We don’t agree on everything, and we don’t have to, because friends don’t leave each other over that. We even fight sometimes, because honesty is love and friends don’t bullshit each other. I know, you get that already or else you wouldn’t be reading this.”

Disclosure:

I love comedy, all kinds, especially stand up. At the bottom of my list is political comedy. I have two objections. First, is that it isn’t funny. I have a hard time recalling the last time I laughed out loud at a pointedly political joke (other than by Bill Maher). Second, is that by necessity obscure. Unless you know the backstory- the cast of characters, the relevant dynamics, who did what to whom, and the time and place in which the political misdemeanor being spoofed occurred- it might as well be as if you were being told a joke from another culture. The more a joke is like a mystery or appears to be like a puzzle to be solved by your intellect (an IQ test, an Easter egg hunt), the less likely you will find it funny. Finally, it also helps if you have a personal stake in the incident and the outcome.

From the standpoint of psychology, the relationship of the preforming artist to his audience is profoundly nonreciprocal. It is based on the artist’s imaginary projection of what the real people (whom he will occasionally encounter) may be actually thinking and feeling (although they would never tell him that). As such, it cannot be especially empathic or interactive in a genuine human sense (because it cannot be). But, in the hands of an artist like Bill Maher it can be both profound and beautiful. So what is a real relationship? If it’s real then it has to be reciprocal. How then does one manage to spend time with a hundred thousand (or a million) fans?

You spend time with them the old fashioned way. You do it one by one. You talk to them. You look at them. You become accustomed to the sound of their voice (and vice versa). You see them. You notice things you never noticed before no matter how many times you watched them on your screen (i.e., their eye color; their posture; their height; the landscape of their skin; the sound of their laugh). You immediately recognize the difference between the digital presentation of their persona and the real thing. You experience in short the shock of the real: how little congruence there is between the actual and the imagined. One crucial difference: the imaginary, idealized person can never reject you, unless you want him to; but the suddenly embodied artist as in the performing artist brought to life can brutally reject you in any moment (i.e.: Jerry Lewis detesting and ridiculing Robert De Niro in The King of Comedy. To therefore actually meet, howsoever briefly, the object of their desire is to step out of their comfort zone as the adoring anonymous fan. That’s one main reason that- out of thousands and thousands of more or less heartfelt self narratives of genuinely troubled artistic souls I’ve listened to (as a psychotherapist) I do not know of a single person who went to the trouble of reaching out to an artist of rock star charisma such as Bill Maher in the hope of inaugurating some kind of a meaningful relationship. They instinctively know better than to emulate in real time the torturous cinematic path of Robert De Niro and Sandra Bernhard in The King of Comedy.

Shortly before I wrote this, I heard that Bill Maher, who likes to stay close to his comedy roots, dusted off the best of his routines standup and headlined a major show in a Las Vegas venue. At the end of which he reportedly received a ten minute standing ovation. Imagination that! (as Kurt Vonnegut Jr. loved to say). I have no idea how many autographs he signed (if any), to what extent he chatted with anybody in the audience after the show and the ten minute standing ovation was over. But I’m confident, that when everyone dispersed, that 99% of the audience did not subsequently strategize how to forge “the relationship of their lives” with Bill Maher (although many may have dreamed or fantasized about just that). Why not? Because it is impossible! In what way? In every way. Human relationships flourish and grow in only one kind of soil: reciprocity, steady nurturing contact and substantive feedback and shared life experiences. The performing artists I work with, how soever different, share one thing. They are in pain. The fantasies that originally inspired them have long ago withered. They have learned the hard way, that acquiring an MFA impresses almost no one. They have learned that receiving a great review from an influential professional critic is meaningful only to the extend that it translates into increased ticket sales.

No shock is greater to the aspiring performance artist than the realization- that the bottom line for the entrepreneurs who fund the artistic venture of their lives is profit (cold hard cash). It is not that they do not support and appreciate and enjoy aesthetic excellence- it is that the raising of the bar on the humanities and the arts is a very low priority in their lives.

So one of the great double binds of the young performing artist in America is: that on the one hand they are willing to bet their lives on the humanistic pursuit of an aesthetically meaningful engagement that resonates so much in their souls and on the other hand- that except for their family and close friends no one cares.

The only thing to compare to the charisma of the media rockstar is the sports superstar. In an effort to understand the dynamics of charisma, the necessity of a level playing field, the toxic feedback that can quickly accrue when there is not only a willing suspension of disbelief but a willing suspension of a need for a level playing field I wrote my first book: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Patient; Psychodynamic Studies of the Creative Personality in 1990 (It would prove to be the cornerstone of everything that I would subsequently write). I was obsessed (then and now) with the inequities, the prevalence and the pathology of power games of every stripe in our culture. Mostly, I became concerned with the sturm and drang of those troubled artistic souls who are routinely gathered under the umbrella (or catch basket) of the cultural outsider.

Bill Maher is one the very few writers whose book can achieve best seller dom in the New York Times even before it is published!

Bill Maher is, as I’ve indicated, sui generic- but let me specify some of the things I like about him. I think he has an underrated but superb prostyle (perhaps abetted by the fact that he keeps selling himself as comedian). His style is as original as everything else he does. It gallops along, combining samples of high and low culture. What it used to be fashionable to say about Humphrey Bogart’s persona “there was a sense of danger about him” is true of Bill Maher’s persona. You never know if he’s setting you up, lulling you into a false sense of confidence as he prepares to throw a Sunday punch. He can take a punch as well as throw one. He is by far my favorite guest of the plethora of guests he has hosted over the past twenty years. Of all the celebrities, talking heads, renowned intellectuals queuing up in the waiting room for their fifteen minutes of fame in the spotlight, I would rather see him than anyone else.

It is not because he is the brightest and the best (although he comes close). It is because he is the most original. He doesn’t seem to have a playbook or a teleprompter. If he does, he is a master at making you think he’s winging it- his best jokes and witticisms are as good as any that are being bandied about. So it will not surprise you I consider his book What This Comedian Said Will Shock You to be a quirky masterpiece. As a bonus: see his delightful spinoff Club Radom (it takes place as do all of the episodes in his beloved mancave in his beloved home in Los Angeles). In particular, see an episode between old friends and comrades in comedy- Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher. A rare treat (and an almost instant comedy classic)! Two comedy geniuses spitballing on what are the essential ingredients of a comedy gem (they complete one another).

In one corner we have Jerry Seinfeld, who never makes jokes about anything bigger than nothing. In the other corner is Bill Maher who never makes jokes about anything smaller than the milky way. Enjoy!

- Gerald Alper is the author of Portrait of Artist as a Young Patient (Psychodynamic Studies of the Creative Personality), and his latest book: God and Therapy (What We Believe When No One is Watching).

Joe Biden didn’t decide to ”pass the torch.” It was ripped from his hands by a panicky closet cabal of ersatz soulmates, best friends, trusted comrades in arms. He could barely walk, had good days and bad days when it came to talking. Increasingly he seemed confused. There was only one thing of which he was certain: he had decided he wanted, needed to run for a second term. He had proclaimed himself to be a “transitional figure”, but things had “changed”, they had “gotten more serious”. He was the only one, the “most qualified” to handle the job. Yes, he is aware that he is old, but “age is just a number”. Hadn’t he won the democratic nomination fair and square? He beat the guy once, he could “do it again”. Why should he hand the nomination over to some untested wannabe who has nothing to lose, nothing to prove, and absolutely nothing to offer? If it had to come down to the political equivalent of a humiliating food fight on the convention floor- as to who (given his age), was best qualified to carry the torch forward- then let it. Was there anything that might persuade him to change his mind? Yes, if the “Lord Almighty” came down and urged him to step aside- but he didn’t see that happening. He wrote an emotional, heartfelt letter to the powers that be-that he wanted the current ongoing discussion as to who had the democratic ticket in the upcoming November presidential election to mercifully cease.

But, it didn’t. His shockingly subpar performance in the nationally televised debate with Trump had “broken the dam”. The Panic that had engulfed the democratic party was dramatically escalating. One major donor after another had begun quietly “at first”-then not so quietly- calling for his removal. Nancy Pelosi, the unacknowledged leader of the House of Representatives joined in (sotto voce at first) but then, publicly suggesting he step aside, after carefully noting “the decision, of course, is his to make”. Biden responded, as he often did, by digging in and trying (not so subtly) to run out the clock. But, it was time to act. Nancy Pelosi, who never had any fear when it came to making major decisions that could make or break other people’s lives, stepped in. In a fateful meeting- the details of which we will have to wait for further memoirs to reveal as noted by the chief White House reporter Peter Baker- are shrouded in mystery-but it seems that this is what happened:

Nancy Pelosi, in another private meeting, made it painfully clear to the incumbent president that all the relevant polls indicated Biden and the democratic party were heading to a catastrophic defeat in the upcoming November presidential elections. When Biden defiantly demanded umambiguous proof “she allegedly said, “OK, put _on the phone””. What happened next to subject to interpretation.

Whatever it was-something struck a cord- and within a day and a half-Biden had made his extraordinary decision to step aside.

The Biden we saw on the opening night of the democratic convention- about a month or so later-remarkably seems to have made peace with his historic decision to step aside for his flashy vice president, Kamala Harris. There is euphoria in the rank and file of the democratic ticket. Kamala Harris, the former nobody, is surging in the polls. Trump-who sees himself as the center of whatever universe is currently inhabiting (in his mind) feels blindsided and betrayed by the presidential switcheroo. He was confident he could beat an octogenarian Joe Biden. He is not so confident he can beat a much younger, enormously ambitious, fearlessly dynamic woman.

The beautiful lie, as never before, is in full display in the past four days of the 2024 democratic convention that has gathered in Chicago to determine who is to be the new nominee for the president of the United States.

The beautiful lie, as I define it, is what happens when a person, a community, a political party, a country tries to embody-not just to embrace but to become-a cherished sacred ideal (something that is not physically real): freedom, love, goodness, compassion, togetherness, selflessness, heroism, spiritually. By definition it cannot be done. In spite of (or perhaps because of which), few feelings are as wonderful and powerful as those which are released. Think of the explosive joy, ecstasy, euphoria, the spiritual exaltation that greeted the actual coronation of the surprise eleventh hour candidate, Kamala Harris: the ten minute standing ovation; balloons rising; serenading “we love you Joe”; and also a one hundred and eight minute valedictory speech. It didn’t last long.

The beautiful lie is an illusion that an ideal can function and endure in a single living human being “i.e., Biden, Kamala Haris”. The illusion that an entire country (i.e., The United States) can be so spiritually enthralled and inspired-that it can actually function with the clarity, solidarity, cohesivity, and purity of a single human being (a physical human being).

The beautiful lie is the illusion that the sense of deep rapport with a sacred truth (saying goodbye to a great American) can be enduring; transcend the petty inroads of the march of mortal time.

The beautiful lie is the illusionary fusion of the ideal as a worthy goal conflated with the feeling of actually doing the required physical work (i.e., “I will fight for you” she will replace you and meet the fight).

Forgot is how quickly the magical fusion of a magical ideal (serenading a beloved departed leader; welcoming a charismatic successor “we love you Joe”) can dissipate. Think of the balloons beginning to deflate, of the stage, the arena emptying out; the music dying. Will anybody remember a singe face, a single voice, a single name of anyone they didn’t already know before the political coronation, celebration began? Will anyone want to remember-anything other than a salient detail or two that seems magically if momentarily elevated? Will anyone with the rarest of exception experience the kind a inner substantive structural change that William James once famously described as a bona fide conversion experience?

The answer of course is no. Which is why, regardless of how well the event went- there is always the cautionary reminder- don’t forget to vote. It is only a master con artist (like Trump) who can claim you only have to show up (vote once for me) and you will never have to do so again?

The American Tragedy (see Alper) is that there has to be more than beautiful illusions- if anything is to substantively change. There has to be- something that- not only has never existed but has been in steady decline (now approaching freefall) since Watergate- an enduring politics of meaning.

I’m a skeptic, not a contrarian, not an influencer. I do not want to come across as advocating a counsel of despair. So, here for the benefit of the happy few I count as my readers I want to end on a brief credo of what I consider the most fundamentally authentic positive features of the world in which we actually live.

If I were asked I would say I personally belief: That the Bible is a great but flawed book, best understood in the context of the times in which it was written; a repository of wonderous poetry and timeless folk wisdom, but not an infallible guide on how to live one’s life on the modern world; not a blueprint of how heaven and earth were created; not a picture of the afterlife. That the cosmologists or the true theologians of today, ones most likely to take us closer to the mystery of how our universe was created. That the meaning of our lives is not measured by whether the cosmos is indifferent to our suffering, but depends more on what we make of our relationship to the world in which we find ourselves. That the best answer to the meaningfulness of our death or the question of the afterlife will be find in the life that proceeded it. That as a nation, far more than scientific illiteracy, we suffer from what I once called existential illiteracy: the failure to wonder in an intelligent, creative, and mature way about the greatest question of all- the puzzle of our own existence.

As I write this, there is a report on the science channel on the latest findings of SETI which always seems to be the same. Decades of the most intelligent ultra high-tech, astronomical scanning of the skies have yet to produce a single authenticated instance of a message being received from an existential intelligence. Undaunted, they continue to surge. Some of the best minds in the world are devoting their lives to finding in the vastness of the cosmos a possible clue to the riddle of our existence, the mystery of life. Whatever the answer may be, whether it be joyful and uplifting or dispiriting, frightening, and isolating, they are more than ready to accept it, to deal with it, to discover whatever meaning there may be. I for one find that comforting.

- Gerald Alper is the author of Portrait of Artist as a Young Patient (Psychodynamic Studies of the Creative Personality), and his latest book: God and Therapy (What We Believe When No One is Watching).

For the first time in 58 years (since Lyndon Johnson) an American President has chosen not to run for reelection!

An act, according to Jon Meacham (one of the most admired of Political Commentators), that would certify Joe Biden “as an authentic American hero.” While The New York Times, White House reporter Peter Baker added “the dam had been broken.” Immediately thereafter, a growing chorus of friends, colleagues, advisors, aides, had stepped out of the shadows, joined forces and requested, regardless of the love, respect, and wellspring of gratitude for everything he had done for America — that it was time to bow to the march of time. He had been the oldest man to ever run for President, the oldest man to become the President, and, if reelected, he would be 86 years old by the end of the second term!

He had run in 2020 on the promise that he would be a “transitional figure” to a younger, more vital, future-oriented administration. But then he drank the Kool-Aid and, to an amazing extent, Joe Biden became transformed. To everyone’s surprise, he announced shortly afterwards, upon thinking it over, that he intended to run for reelection in 2024! It occurred to him that if he could become President, he’d be a great President. He could even be, with the united Democratic Party behind him, a 21st century FDR. A pattern emerged. If a problem arose that money could fix, he went BIG. If a problem emerged that money couldn’t fix, he talked BIG. It all seemed to go well, during the honeymoon phase to which incoming presidents are greeted.

But something was different on the night he delivered The State of the Union Address. The man who finally appeared to raucous applause, was strangely slack-jawed, his mouth gaping widely, eyes staring blankly ahead reminiscent of the thousand-yard stare. As I would write afterwards, (his face seemed lit with “the delirious joy of a child meeting Mickey Mouse in DisneyLand for the first time!”) He walked incredibly slowly, as though he were afraid he might FALL AT ANY MOMENT. Normally, it takes about two minutes for him to make the trip from the back of the auditorium — it took him ten minutes. The crowd wanted to see some fire in the belly — but he couldn’t do that. The best he could do was (as pointed out by White House columnist Peter Baker) “was to yell his lines’’. So instead of fire in the belly he gave them mania in the brain. Months later, he was scheduled to debate his old foe, Donald Trump, in their first 2024 televised appearance together, (on split screens) then an utterly bizarre turn of events occured: Joe Biden seemed to implode before the eyes of America. Repeatedly, he slurred his words, seemed lost, and at times appeared to babble. New Yorker Editor in Chief, David Remnick, in his review the next day, wrote that Biden’s Performance, “was the worst — in a major Presidential debate, he had ever seen.”

What had gone wrong? Theories abound, here’s mine — In order to strike a deal for a cease-fire in the Israeli-Hamas War — which (I believe Biden felt was pivotal in order to achieve his most overriding goal of being reelected President of The United States — he’s caved in and capitulated to Netanyahu’s insatiable will to power.

To better understand what makes Joe Biden tick, it’s helpful to look at the wondery, the sheer joy and love that Biden — with every fiber in his being strives to project — as he takes a selfie with just about anyone who comes into his orbit. We are to think — here is a man with a heart as big as Texas, with room for every single wandering lost soul — desperate for sanctuary. Such a man is a savior who wants only peace for humanity!

Such a man would never intentionally harm a single hair of a single unarmed Gazan. Such a man would never authorize a single bullet to be fired intentionally at an innocent civilian. Such a man would never (God forbid) authorize a single 2000 pound bomb to be dropped on Gaza. Such a man would never allow a single airplane to bomb a single, defenseless, non-military building in Gaza; would never stand by while there are daily bombings of 6,0000 buildings; while 2000 buildings are leveled; 1 million Gazans are uprooted from their ancestral homes and driven like human cattle to a Southern City of Raffa (already dangerously overcrowded and on the brink of a widespread famine).

Yet, such a man, of course, is Joe Biden! Am I saying he is a closet whistleblower about to tell the world that the Joe Biden they see has an evil doppelganger? No! Because he doesn’t have one.

Am I saying that he suffers from multiple personality disorder? No! I’m saying he suffers from multiple impersonations! One of his favored self-delusional impersonations is that he is an authentic, gold-standard President of the United states; that he has the right stuff to be president and that he was born for the role. That he is not simply someone, as New York Times columnist Jennifer Senior put it, who, right from the get-go, was a “furnace of ambition.”

As I write this, I read one tribute after another, citing Joe Biden as an American hero, and his act of stepping aside as “one of the greatest acts of patriotism I (Hilary Clinton) have ever seen.”

But that is not what I saw:

I saw a man who had to be driven into a corner to even consider relinquishing his claim to be reelected. I see a man who refused to take even slightest responsisblity on his part for the genocide (or whatever you want to call it) that is currently being perpetrated in Gaza by Israel. I saw a man who once again, at one of the most dramatic moments of one of his most important speeches — shamelessly plagiarized one of the most famous quotes in history:

Lou Gehrig, The Pride of the Yankees, in his immortal farewell speech to his fans in Yankee Stadium, “I know I caught a bad brake contracting ALS (the motor neuron disease that killed Stephen Hawking and would eventually kill him shortly thereafter) but as I stand here, in Yankee Stadium, talking to all of my fans I think I’m the luckiest man in the world.

And suddenly, with no connection whatsoever, but from someone who had just been pronounced by his personal physician “good-to-go” — but because it sounded so good, choking up, half sobbing, Biden cried, “Standing here, I’m the luckiest man in the world.” Nor was this a one-off. In a recent column, Maureen Dowd revealed that she had been the one who had broken the story ( sufficiently shocking at a more innocent time) — Joe Biden in his maiden presidential, campaign for president in 1968 had actually plagiarized (from a famous British labour leader’s speech (without acknowledging it) a strikingly colorful narrative fact of his life.)

Why is it that coming from several generations of coal miners, I was the only one to go to college? Was it because I was smarter than the others? NO. It was because I lived in a time when there was an opportunity to go to college!

Ecstatic at what he gushingly considered to be one of the greatest political speeches he had ever heard, Joe Biden decided to road test it on his own campaign trail. Delighted with the crowd response, it occurred to him that it would be even more impressive if the crowd thought that he was the author. So he began, not bothering to attribute the quote to its proper author, and, as he intuited, the audiences loved it even more. it did not bother him that there had neve been a coal miner in his entire ancestry, it sounded so damned good!

But it bothered Maureen Dowd, whose father had been a hero cop — assigned to protect FDR as he threw out the traditional first ball at an opening day baseball game. Ever the idealist, a young Maureen Dowd could not accept that the man who was running for the presidency of the United states could actually pretend to be the son of a coal miner to get votes! So she rode the story as only she could until Joe Biden, sadder but wiser, with his tail between his legs, withdrew from the race. To the everlasting credit of both of them, with a charade behind them there was no residual bitterness- and they would remain friends for 50 years.

As I write this, there is breaking news that Biden has negotiated an historical swap with Russia. We see eight joyfully relieved, freed American hostages are gathered around a podium in which a triumphal Joe Biden — looking more Presidential and more confident in his role as Commander in chief than he ever has, is addressing the Nation. His right arm is extended; his hand rests gently on the arm of a freed hostage who was closest to the podiuum.

It is a ‘come-to-Joe Biden-moment.’ The President is basking in a sea of adulation. It is, “a good day, a very good day.”

It is a photo-op day, and Biden does not intend to waste it. So, later, he will elaborate on how he sees this day as more than a stand-alone if historic event, but also as a “ kind of a larger story about how resilient America can be, has always been, when it comes to rebounding from a devastating loss.” He does not say it but we are to think of the great themes of his personal and political life: how, no matter how many times he has been knocked down, he has always come back stronger than ever. It is impossible not to put this in context with his decision, announced just days ago, that he will not run for reelection. He presents it as a noble act, of sacrificing his life-long political ambitions just as he is on the brink of a consummating theme — for the good of the country. Such an act, according to no less an authority than Hilary Clinton, “is the single most patriotic act by a sitting President she has ever seen.” The accolades continue to pour in.

Disclosure

I’m astonished by all this. The level of wishful thinking, of sheer denialism is mind-blowing! It is as if two of the worst wars — containing some of the most horrific crimes against humanity, on both sides. Are we to forget the 40,000 Gazans (civilians, women, young men, teenagers, children, babies) killed (more than in any war since the second World War); the six thousand buildings bombed; the two thousand buildings leveled; the one million Northern Gazans uprooted from their ancestral homes and driven like human cattle towards southern Raffa (a city already overcrowded with an excess of 1 million refugees on the brink of a pandemica sized famine — about to set in, courtesy of a ten-month long blockade imposed by Netanyahu, and still going); are we to forget the 2 thousand pound bombs (the largest and deadliest of the second world war) that have been dropped steadily on Gaza (provided by The United States and authorized by Joe Biden, the US Commander in Chief; are we to forget that for the past ten months straight (since October the 7th) for 300 days the Israeli-Hamas War, has gone on without a single cease-fire and that during this entire time, The United States has steadily funded Israel, providing necessary bombs, ammunition, medical supplies; have we forgotten that through all these killing fields, we have been forced to listen to Joe Biden telling us over and over again ,like a mantra, “our commitment to Israel is rock-solid, and will last as long as it takes.” “Israel has every right to protect itself.” “We stand for compassionate bombing.” Which, to my my mind, is a euphemism for what is really a delusional fantasy of a compassionate genocide (which, by definitioun, can’t exist).

I had hoped, with not much confidence that (as sometimes happens) a truly dramatic experience (such as Joe Biden has recently gone through) would have a residual benign effect of making him a sadder and wiser man.

I was wrong. Joe Biden is an obviously sadder man, as the weepy photo of him above clearly shows, but he’s hardly a wiser man. If anything, he has doubled down. He has, and seems to me, decided that if he had anything to do with it, his last three months in office are going to be a run for glory. He will make proposals such as the political world has never seen (e.g. his recent proposal to revolutionize the Trump-led supreme court by imposing a code of ethics upon it.)

Sounds great, doesn’t it?

But Biden knows it. It can’t pass the senate, and even if it did, he couldn’t possibly be around to savor its future benefits for America. Once again, Biden is playing a very cyinical game. He says that “it is time to pass the torch,” as if he was the one who made the decision not to run for reelection. He cannot be unaware that the entire country has been riveted in recent weeks by his desperate struggle to somehow in the face of a tsunami of pressure from just about everyone to step aside — to just hang on. He was already the presumptive nominee, the Democratic Convention was just three months away. If he could run out the clock, it would be almost impossible to oust him from the floor of the Convention. Joe Biden being Joe Biden, fought furiously to not be “pushed aside.” He made it clear that the last thing he intended was to pass the torch. They would have to tear it from his clutches, which is what they did. Denial is the most powerful defense mechanism by far, but it can only resist the concentrated counterforce of reality for so long. When he was on the brink of being forcibly removed from office by panicky ersatz Democratic friends he made his dramatic announcement. It was simply not true that he was voluntarily passing the torch. But Biden never had a problem telling the Big Beautiful Lie if he thought it might serve his cause. His game plan is to make it seem that everything that happens, which is politically good, is essentially due to him. He will take credit for plucking Kamala Harris from the shadows of being under his wing and putting her in the spotlight. He will take credit for any whiff of a peace accord, any hint of a possible cease-fire, he will switch his focus from the increasingly unpopular Israeli-Hamas War back to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He will paint word pictures of the powerful hitherto unimaginable coalitions — with Arab allies eager to help defeat Hamas, and sundry proxies of the designated real enemy Iran, all of which will lean heavily on his acknowledged almost magical diplomatic skills (as he sees it).

One thing he will not take credit for is the massacre that is continuing on a daily basis in Gaza. He will not take credit for the nearly two million Northern Gazans uprooted from their ancestral homes. He will not take credit for the 40,000 dead in Gaza; for the 2,000 buildings leveled; for the daily bombing and dropping of 2000 pound bombs (all authorized by him). He will not talk about his CHOICE to align himself with Netanyahu (whom 3 times Pulitzer prize winning journalist Thomas Friedman has aptly called, “the worst Prime Minister in the History of Israel, ready to sell Israelis down the river to stay out of jail.”

To me, it is almost sickening the way Biden refuses to take even one percent responsibility for his ongoing 10 month collaboration with a man increasingly perceived as a moral monster. It is inconceivable to me that Biden, with his incredible leverage as Commander in Chief of Israel’s greatest ally (The United States) and without whom Israel could not possibly wage this war, could not have more influence than he did. Had he chosen to really stand up to Netanyahu: i.e. “we will always be your Democratic ally but, we will never be your partner in a criminal genocidal invasion and occupation of another country. Unless you immediately withdraw and offer a cease fire, all military and financial aid will abruptly end. If you so much as intentionally kill a single Palestinian civilian our relationship is over.

Had Biden done so and he certainly could have, he might have been a 21st century Schindler (as in Schindler’s list). He might have saved thousands of human lives if he was willing (easily in my view) but he might also have so upset millions of progressive, pro Israel, Pro Zionist Jews that it would have been, in the worst case scenario, a tipping point turning the upcoming November Presidential Election against Biden. It was just that possibility (and in my view not very considerable) that seemed to literally paralyze and freeze him into being a lame-duck President. Incredibly Biden CHOSE not to choose. He chose to play both sides against the middle. He chose to fund the Israeli Hamas war while he simultaneously campainged for a cease-fire, for a more compassionate bombing (an attempt to sanitaze genocide) and for “aisles of safety” by which thousands of terrified Gazans could seek to escpe.

Incredibly, in an act of almost delusional grandeur, Biden is now attempting before our very eyes to micromanage both sides of one of the most horrific wars of the past 50 years. His original hope was to thereby gain enough votes to be reelected. Now, his quest is to be remembered as a great President. One hundred years from now, when scholars study Biden’s presidency, the focus will be on to what extent did Biden put his own needs ahead of the needs of the country.

For myself, I would like Biden to stop talking about his mission to save the soul of America and for once, to look into his own soul. For once, I would like Biden to take some responsibility — 1% would be more than enough — of the unthinkable heartbreak and tragedy inflicted on millions of innocent Gazans by “the worst Prime Minister in the history of Israel, ready to sell Israel down the river in order to stay in power.

If the reader thinks this is unfair (I know it is harsh), I ask them to briefly revisit in their minds the American Presidential campaign of 2020: summon up the countless pictures of a world-weary Joe Biden, emotionally bankrupt by the death of Beau, exhausted by 50 years of interminable campaigning with little to show for it. But fate intervened. A Nancy Pelosi, lead Democratic Party, made him an offer he could not refuse. He accepted the nomination to be the Presidential nominee and coasted to victory. Then he drank the Kool-Aid.

When the horrific October the 7th attack occurred Biden was confronted with a clear choice. He could do the obvious right thing, stand up to Netanyauh or abandon his promise to America not to run for reelection. He chose the road well travelled: the road that professional, hardened Politicians almost always take: he played it safe. He chose the road he thought would serve the best interests of his career. Then he told himself, as all politicians do, that it is also the road that serves the best interests in America. What ensued was an American Tragedy. Biden desperately wants to put his pivotal role in the Israeli-Hamas War behind him. He cannot admit there is blood on his hands (no politician has ever been able to admit this.) What they are now calling Joe Biden’s finest hour is hardly that if it’s too little too late. If he could stop trying to impersonate FDR and for once put his legacy last and the interest of his county first and that would be his finest hour.

- Gerald Alper is the author of Portrait of Artist as a Young Patient (Psychodynamic Studies of the Creative Personality), and his latest book: God and Therapy (What We Believe When No One is Watching).

“Folks, here’s the deal,” i.e., imho President Trump is the most selfish President in the history of The United States.

President Biden is the phoniest President since Nixon.

[Disclaimer: I am not an influencer; I have no desire to be an influencer. I have no affiliations to any political party, or person. I receive no money for any of these articles, they simply represent my belief.]

Biden One

Joe Biden will be remembered for two great things. Although many people could have beaten Donald Trump — it was he and he alone who stood up to Darth Vader, and defeated him easily at the polls (as I predicted — despite psychotic resistance — for example, the 1,6,2021 rioting of Donald Trump). The second great thing is his magnificent defense and rallying of allies to help fight off Russia’s psychotic invasion of Ukraine.

For that alone, as long as Ukraine’s culture endures — Biden will be remembered and revered as one of the greatest heroes in the darkest hours (an American Winston Churchill who could stand shoulder to shoulder with Vladimir Zelensky.

Biden Two

Which brings us from October the 7th to the present. My gut reaction is that Biden simply lost his mind. But I can’t say that. Nothing in the real world can be that simple. I don’t think it is helpful or possible to present a plausible explanation of Biden’s utterly bizarre response to the horrific events of October the 7th, but here goes:

There are countless theories, small and large, attempting to deconstruct Biden’s strange response. Now here’s mine.

It is not conceivable that Biden, long ago, did not almost immediately realize that Netanyahu’s promises are not worth the paper they’re written on or the breath it takes to enunciate them. He had shaken too many hands of too many demagogues not to know that — devoid of the character, integrity, and minimal sense of honor ( which almost none of them had) they could not be trusted. So, why did he brazenly throw his hat into the ring with Netanyahu on October the 8th (see photo above). Why did he allow himself to become almost immediately Netanyahu’s puppet (for six months until the voter pendulum swung his way?)

There is no other way to say it: Because he was utterly desperate. Because he was jonesing to be reelected President. Because, in some deep sense which I won’t attempt to analyze, and nor does it matter — he was panicking that without his Oval Office fix — that without the bells and whistles of the Presidency — he would be unable to find any meaning, inspiration, or purpose in a life that had been devoted to the passionate pursuit of power and of being the adored center of attention.

Sad to say, but without being the President and only the President, Biden doesn’t seem to find any meaningful reason to live life.

Incredibly, no one seems to see the elephant in the room. Joe Biden is attempting — in order to maximize his chance of being reelected by micro managing both sides of the Israeli-Hamas War. He is doing his best to come up with a cease-fire — but if there has to be an ongoing Israeli-Hamas, genocidal war — he wants to make sure that it will be a discriminant one! (which has never been done before.)

The End of Donald Trump

I haven’t forgotten about him. It is just that I think he is doomed. Everyday, he not only gets more and more crazy — he embraces it. The only way he could be elected — is if America suffers a collective delusion of grandeur (i.e. analogous to Germany in the early 30’s as it came under the spell of a rising young Hitler.)

I don’t see that happening. Then what is going to happen?

Predictions

There has been an unconscious consensus, an unspoken pact that no matter what, American voters cannot and will not endure another four years of Donald trump madness. From that perspective the recent trial and conviction in New York State of Trump’s hush-money felony can be seen as a trial balloon to see if it’s possible to try and convict a former President without the country, the fabric of our Democracy being torn asunder. And, I think the answer (although not finalized) is in. It certainly can! The main thing that happened — when Trump was unanimously convicted of 34 counts of Business Fraud was that nothing happened. The real prize, the holy grail, of bringing the Donald down — will not be the delicious schadenfreude that millions of long-suffering, salivating American voters will at last partake in. But what comes next?

And, that is — unless Trump throws in the towel and cries ‘uncle!’ (he’s part human after all, as even Bill Maher would admit.) For Trump, should he win, (unlikely, but stranger things have happened) to be forcibly removed from the Presidency (the perfectly legal -i.e. the 25th Amendment — and evidently justifiable ground of being mentally unfit to serve as President.

Conclusion

So if all else fails — the 25th amendment is our ‘get out of (Trump) jail’ card! The American Tragedy is that, at a time of maximal stress and nuclear threat, we are being forced to choose between Donald Trump — the worst President in the history of The United States — and octogenarian Joe Biden (the most ineffectual and burned-out President since Watergate).

Postscript

America will survive (easily). One Hundred Years from Now, when Presidential scholars focus on The Biden Administration, they will see the upcoming election in November 2024, in the final analysis, as a struggle between tweedle dum and tweedle dee.

See my next article on The Great Debate.

Gerald Alper is the author of Portrait of Artist as a Young Patient (Psychodynamic Studies of the Creative Personality), and his latest book: God and Therapy (What We Believe When No One is Watching).