Take it away, Eddie Glaude (ignore the video cover—it has almost nothing to do with the interview):

Immediately after watching this, I bought Eddie Glaude’s new book America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries. This is a book to be read slowly and contemplated.

I’m only at page 85, but here is something worth quoting in regard to my discussion of “dismemberment visions” in part 1 of this Substack. Discussing the death of Reconstruction by the time of the country’s first centennial, Glaude says that W. E. B. Du Bois had written that “Each generation sought to shift its load upon the next” and the quote continues, “Consequently we often congratulate ourselves more on getting rid of a problem than on solving it.”

Then Glaude says:

This delusion of ridding ourselves of the problem is the beating heart of American exceptionalism. After the catastrophe of the Civil War, some twelve years of effort to rebuild the Union, and unfulfilled attempts to address the role and place of the formerly enslaved, the country decided to engage in one of the most remarkable moments of disremembering in its history. It would use the 100^th anniversary of its founding as the occasion to do so. Slavery would be put aside. Black people—the problem people—were ignored or brutally discarded, and the greatness of the American project was celebrated in the full light of its material successes. Evidence of the bounty of God’s promise could be seen throughout the land, while the nation convulsed with unimaginable racial violence. (85, italic emphasis is mine)

My comment: Such convicted “disremembering” mandates the “dismemberment” I wrote about in part 1.

Betsy Robinson is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright (also a former actor). She has written about books for Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Oh Reader, and many other publications. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators were published by Kano Press in 2024. She writes funny stories about flawed people and examines our herd culture. www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.

It took intense therapy to recover from it—or, as I described it, “get glued back together.” I likened it to “being shattered.”

I do not recommend this as a healing method. But I learned a lot from it: what never to do, how to be self-aware about what I could and couldn’t handle and say “no” when it was too much rather than surrender to some group leader.

But another thing I learned was worth the experience: With the help of a qualified and brilliant therapist, I came back stronger and clearer than I’d ever been in my life. And that feeling remains. Gradually, fears that had inhibited me my whole life simply evaporated. I grew to know that I can “process” on my own and learn things I don’t know—one of my greatest joys. I learned to trust myself.

Dismemberment Visions

In shamanism there is a common experience: visions of being dismembered, or eaten by a wild animal. It can come in awake visions in an altered state or it can happen in dreams. In my novel Cats on a Pole, I wrote a fictionalized scene of what happened to me in my breakdown and added a dismemberment aspect.

In an awake dream, she saw her hands break off, finger by finger. Then her feet and legs. “Don’t be afraid,” said a voice, and she saw that it was the ghostly being she’d met at Luanne’s. Only this time it came as an animal, and it was eating bits of her hands. Horrified, Harmony watched as her rib cage split apart. I’m crazy, she thought. She was wide awake watching this thing reach for her face, when the door banged open and chatting, laughing students poured in.

“Hi, Harmony, are you feeling any better?” one asked, flicking on the lights.

Harmony checked to see where her legs were and found they were right where they belonged. Not only that, but the ghost animal was gone. “Huh?” she said, trying hard to sound sane.

“You should have come with us to lunch. We had Chinese.”

A day later, Harmony calls her therapist:

“Hello?” said Dr. Thompson.

“Oh, it’s you!” said Harmony. “I was expecting a machine.”

“Harmony?” said Dr. Thompson. She’d gotten home last night and wasn’t due to resume sessions until next week. She’d dropped by the office to check mail and had picked up the phone on an impulse. “What’s the matter? Are you all right?”

“Um,” said Harmony. “I miss Delilah [her dead dog], and I’m afraid my legs are going to fall off. I couldn’t even do one-two-three-jumps.”

Dr. Thompson told Harmony to come right over—to take a cab.

Harmony couldn’t remember the cab trip, but the next thing she knew, she was sitting on Dr. Thompson’s beaten-up couch. Only this time, Dr. Thompson was on it too—holding her so her body wouldn’t fall apart. Harmony had told Dr. Thompson about the girl with polio and the ghost animal that wanted to eat her face after her arms fell off. There was something about a guy wanting to beat her with a stick, but she wasn’t sure if that was real. And Dr. Thompson just held her. Harmony didn’t hear any thoughts because Dr. Thompson wasn’t thinking. For the first time in thirty years, she just held someone and Sigmund Freud could go to hell.

Dr. Thompson had spent her last week of sabbatical at an alternative therapies conference where speakers included everyone from neuroscientists who mapped God in people’s brains, to yoga masters who talked about the healing ability of the kundalini or “snake energy” coiled at the base of the spine, to shamans from Africa and South America. The shamans had described something called dismemberment visions where their bodies fell apart and were eaten by powerful healing animals. Although it went against all her psychotherapeutic training, Dr. Thompson was having a very strong impulse to deal with Harmony’s obvious psychosis as if it were a shaman’s vision.

What this has to do with now

I believe we are currently going through “dismemberment”—politically, culturally, and in many cases, personally.

For some people, it might be too much—they may not have built up the psychological muscles to handle it. But for many others, it is right on schedule: for instance, for people whose legacy is being used and misused. For them, it is right, and maybe in their bones they know this and are even excited for the changes that will come when we “come back together”—as is the trajectory of dismemberment in shamanism.

So perhaps people for whom this unprecedented breakdown is untenable can be helped by the perspective of those who have been through “it” (the coming apart) before.

And perhaps people who are debilitated with fear might consciously consider the perspective that this is how beings and societies change. The bigger the changes required, the greater the temporary dismemberment.

A short reading from Cats on a Pole.

I will do a part 2 of this topic tomorrow.

Betsy Robinson is a longtime student of the Siddha Yoga Correspondence Course, a daily meditator, graduate of a four-year healing school, studying trauma healing, and former managing editor of Spirituality & Health magazine. She is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright. She has written about books for Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Oh Reader, and many other publications. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators were published by Kano Press in 2024, and earlier novels won prizes from Mid-List Press and Black Lawrence Press. She writes funny stories about flawed people and examines our herd culture. www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.

I’d watched it, maybe not in 2001 when it debuted, but a long time ago, and I remember very little of it, although I loved it. I remember that it was fun seeing (and still is) actor Richard Jenkins who plays the deceased father of the funeral-house family because I spent a summer where he was an actor and I was a playwright at the Eugene O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, and I adored him. He was self-deprecating and one of the easiest people I’d ever shot the bull with. He is also one of the best actors in the USA and deserves to be noticed.

At the time, I knew nothing about him other than I liked him. Since that time in 1982, he has become quite well-known, and I love watching him fly. Each time, he is a surprise—a new color and new level of range. Even though I’m sure you don’t remember me, Richard Jenkins, I’m applauding from afar.

Because the internet now allows you to take deep dives finding out about anything and anybody you fancy, I’ve been looking up some of the other Six Feet Under cast members, and I got to Lauren Ambrose, who, at the time of the show’s inauguration, was a kid playing an edgy, troubled kid, and now she is a 48-year-old woman who studied opera.

Huh?

Holy Toledo!

Which leads me to wonder, what don’t I know about all people I assume I know. Which of course, because my life is committed to Self-knowledge based on the belief that there is only one Self that embodies all of us, leads me to wonder what don’t I know about my Self.

Even without the internet and TV and stories, how could anybody ever get bored in these amazing lives we live?

Betsy Robinson is a longtime student of the Siddha Yoga Correspondence Course, a daily meditator, graduate of a four-year healing school, studying trauma healing, and former managing editor of Spirituality & Health magazine. She is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright. She has written about books for Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Oh Reader, and many other publications. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators were published by Kano Press in 2024, and earlier novels won prizes from Mid-List Press and Black Lawrence Press. She writes funny stories about flawed people and examines our herd culture. www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.

You know that moment on a rollercoaster ride when, just as your car reaches the top before a drop, your heart grabs? Even though the ride has been designed and tested to be safe, you never know. And once you’re into the drop, you scream bloody murder.

Some people love the thrill.

I do not.

Well, this morning in meditation, I suddenly had the sense of being at the top of the rollercoaster hill and then dropping in pure energy. It wasn’t just energy though. It was Intelligent energy with agency—the means to do something. On one hand it was thrilling to feel the power of that. On one hand it put me in a state of pure awe that this is ME, this Energy drives me whether I’m realizing it or not. And on the other hand, it was really hard to stay in the awareness of something so huge and, if I lost it, trust it was still there.

And it is so easy, when I lose the trust and faith, to go into fear that doesn’t even feel like fear. In fact, sometimes it feels like certainty or hubris—dry and loveless. When I drop into that, I’m fully in my ego, refusing to recognize that this illusion of drop control is my way of trying to feel in charge of what is really driving my car—electricity, a good design, some kind of journey that is beyond my comprehension.

But miraculously, in contemplation, I suddenly realized my own hubris, my childlike notion that I am driving this car, and consequently, my fear at the fact that I am not arose big-time.

Feeling the fear brought me back to a child state. Better to be in that, holding faith and trust and fear all at the same time than giving in to the adult sublimation of it through hubris, superiority, and illusion.

Betsy Robinson is a longtime student of the Siddha Yoga Correspondence Course, a daily meditator, graduate of a four-year healing school, studying trauma healing, and former managing editor of Spirituality & Health magazine. She is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright. She has written about books for Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Oh Reader, and many other publications. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators were published by Kano Press in 2024, and earlier novels won prizes from Mid-List Press and Black Lawrence Press. She writes funny stories about flawed people and examines our herd culture. www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.

The book opens with the most transparent explanation of research I can imagine any journalists writing—more than 1,000 interviews and the categories of people interviewed, derivations of direct quotes, explanation of background without sources, and reasons for paraphrasing. This is necessary because otherwise the fly-on-the-wall reporting detail in this book would be almost fantastical. But I believe these two writers have done something spectacular and true:

They have written a balanced, detailed, dramatic story with characters, with such clarity that it almost defies the chaotic times they are recounting. They give us a full picture of the USA’s immigration problems as background to the growth of our current brutal immigration enforcement. They fill out people I’ve heard dismissed as “unqualified” for their jobs in such a way that I found myself liking a few of them (notably, Steve Witkoff). In short, the reporting feels unbiased.

This book is like driving a clear path with the most eloquent tour guides you can imagine explaining what we are seeing through Trump’s reign of chaos, where one second, serious negotiations can be taking place, and in the next second Trump is seriously proposing, “We’ll just own Gaza!” (92) and expecting everyone to applaud the idea. The authors’ commitment to telling the truth, avoiding easy tropes, makes what’s shocking even more so. And sometimes funny—for instance, the silent battle between Donald and Melania regarding him stealing her things to redecorate his bedroom; the astounding description of his room from its era as a bankers box storage repository to his habit of littering the floor with food wrappers and ice cream tubs and sometimes throwing out priceless White House silverware along with food detritus. In addition, the detail about the ballroom added a possible motive for Trump’s demolition:

Mrs. Trump, who preferred a quiet environment with minimal disturbances and objected to living in a construction zone, had repeatedly expressed concern about the size and location of the ballroom. (98)

When we look at the demolition now, are we seeing a private war and retribution?

Many of us (I include myself) have seen certain issues in very simple terms. In a section (Part II) titled “Retribution,” the buckling of big law firms, media companies, and universities who’ve given in to Trump’s demands and threats is clarified. The book deftly spells out the thinking of those who’ve buckled and exactly how many fronts they were being attacked on—the broad stroke explanation here being, if you are convinced you might win the battle in court but die in the process (your institution will be forced out of business), do you capitulate? Understanding both sides makes these issues more excruciating to contemplate, and I’m grateful to the authors for spelling things out so clearly.

In the same section, the unequivocal inanity, without any complexity, of the likes of internet provocateur Laura Loomer prancing into the Oval Office and succeeding in the elimination of government personnel on her unfounded accusations is truly shocking. There is a growing sense of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party here, and the pacing of the revelations is dramatically perfect.

And the final chapter of “Retribution” tells how Trump went from an adversary of AI to a champion after he demanded and received a government stake in Intel, a private company. What? So googled to see where else he has done this. From Google AI:

“Trump’s administration has aggressively pursued an industrial policy demanding direct equity stakes, profit-sharing, or “golden shares” in private companies deemed essential to national security and critical supply chains. This spans multiple sectors, with some of the most prominent companies including: Intel: The administration took a near 10% equity stake in the semiconductor giant in exchange for billions in federal CHIPS Act funding. Artificial Intelligence: The White House has held exploratory talks with OpenAI and Anthropic regarding direct government equity stakes, as part of a broader push to distribute the economic advantages of AI. Critical Minerals & Metals: The government acquired direct financial interests in several mining and energy operations, including a 15% stake in rare earth producer MP Materials, as well as stakes in Lithium Americas Corp. and Trilogy Metals Inc..”

For people who are terrified that those on the left want communism, let the record show that Trump is practicing communism—insisting on owning private companies.

Under a section titled “Plunder,” there is a discussion about cryptocurrency, which all the Trumps are invested in up to their eyeballs. But like a lot of material on this subject, it blurs or ignores what crypto actually is. Trump originally called it a “scam” until he realized how much money there was to be made and he trusted that his sons understand enough about it to take care of that.

I wish the authors had done research about crypto and exposed it for the real scam it is. My sole education is from the documentary Everyone Is Lying to You About Money, but I think I understand it well enough to be alarmed at how involved our government, and by that I mean Trump et al., are in it. The usual pattern with crypto is that those who run it make a killing and those who invest lose. (7/1/26 UPDATE: Trump made $1.4 billion from crypto.)

If I had to make a generalization about Trump from this book, he is without ethics and prone to do what he wants and cavalierly “see what happens.” This applies to everything from knocking down a building to healthcare to murdering fishermen without evidence that they are running drugs to going to war to shooting people exercising their first amendment rights. On some level, people are not real to him. Since he’s historically seen soldiers who volunteer and die as “suckers and losers,” he apparently considers them to be disposable. And this term, he is functioning with very few people who can or will act as guardrails.

There is a difference between newspaper articles, even a long series of them, and a book. This is a detailed historical record of what is playing out in front of us; some of it is so current and such common knowledge that you can skim it. Nevertheless, the book is valuable as a historical document and will be even more valuable to historians in the future (or, if you haven’t been paying attention and want to get current, it provides a way to catch up).

I’ve seen criticisms about employed journalists doing double-duty by writing a book that could be published (and read for the cost of a subscription) by their employer, The New York Times. This book is a book and demands the long form. It is worth paying for.

Betsy Robinson is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright (also a former actor). She has written about books for Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Oh Reader, and many other publications. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators were published by Kano Press in 2024. She writes funny stories about flawed people and examines our herd culture. www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.

I was the lone realist. I was often scared, but looking back, I’m grateful that I always dealt with whatever was happening, and many times in my life that tendency has saved me. I don’t waste a lot of time in hopeless situations.

Others don’t feel that way. Perhaps the reality is so scary that they shut down. They cannot hold the dual states of danger and ability to negotiate it.

As an adult, I twice took a series of women’s self-defense classes (aptly called "Prepare") and both times some student came up with a question as to whether taking self-defense somehow would attract violent situations. And both times the teacher answered with analogy:

“Do you have insurance?”

“Yes,” replied the student.

“Do you think having insurance causes your house to burn down or you to become sick?”

That put to bed the worry.

Lessons & Questions

I recently wrote in my piece Mirror, Mirror about realizing and committing to change my impulses that are unkind. This leads me to the kind of questions that Mark Helprin wrote about in his wonderful new novel Elegy in Blue.

Elegy in Blue is the story of a man who killed someone who was about to kill many people, and then he is vilified for it. He had no right to take the law into his own hands, yet he made a split-second decision that ended in somebody’s death. Was this right or wrong? Is there a right or wrong? This story is a version of that famous “trolley problem,” psychological experiment where you are asked to choose, in an impossible situation where one or more people are about to die, whose death to cause with your actions. Or inaction.

So I ask: If there is a dangerous truth in front of us, and there is no way to predict how many people will use that truth to take protective actions and how many will freeze in fear, do you choose to illuminate that truth or stay quiet?

Is illuminating it unkind for those who will succumb to fear? Is that unkindness worth the risk that others may act or prepare for action in ways they might not have done without the knowledge?

When is the truth unkind?

When is it worth illuminating anyway?

I believe self-responsibility mandates owning your fear, and perhaps anger, if you have it, and owning responsibility for spreading what might be debilitating to some on the belief that it’s for the greater good . . . and owning consequences if you’re wrong.

As I said in my review of Elegy in Blue, this places you in a straddle over Occam’s Razor. It’s painful and cannot be reduced to an easy dictum.

Betsy Robinson is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright (also a former actor). She has written about books for Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Oh Reader, and many other publications. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators were published by Kano Press in 2024. She writes funny stories about flawed people and examines our herd culture. www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.

To the Bicycle Messenger on Madison and 52^nd Street in New York City:

You probably don’t remember me, but I will never forget you … and what we shared.

It was the summer of 1980 or thereabouts—long before I became a journalist or a novelist or an editor. It was hot because I was wearing a soft white cotton dress with shoulder straps. I wasn’t that interested in clothes, but when I’d seen this dress, it had beckoned because of its unconstricting beauty and flow, and I needed dresses that I could stand inhabiting for eight mind-numbing hours a day doing temp work in New York City offices. I was headed back to one such office and in a hurry because my hour lunch was almost up.

Madison Avenue and Fifty-second Street or thereabouts. A midtown torrent of people and vehicles. I don’t remember if the walk light was green when I stepped off the curb. It might have been. It might not have.

The week before, the light had definitely been green—the green “Walk” sign solidly radiating permission as I stepped off the curb on quiet Central Park West. No cars even waiting at the red light, so I didn’t bother to look to my left to see the cyclist hurtling toward me. And when she slammed into me, I was too stunned to do more than gasp, “The light was green!” To her credit, she leapt off the ground and checked that I was unhurt before speeding away on whatever mission required that she ignore all traffic lights under the assumption that pedestrians would yield to her.

But on this day—this hot summer day one week later on Madison Avenue—I not only saw but I heard you screaming at me to get out of the way, and in a kind of frantic flashback of the previous accident, I stepped right in your path as you heroically tried to avoid me.

What happened next is as vivid as right now:

As I sprang to my feet, yelling, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It was my fault,” a crowd almost magically materialized around us—me a young white temp, you a young Black bike messenger. You lay on your side, still straddling your bike and you didn’t budge as the crowd began convicting you.

“It was my fault, I’m sorry,” I cried, hysterically babbling about getting hit last week when it wasn’t my fault, but this time it was my fault, and oh god, oh my god. And as you lay there breathing, the mob leaders around us—a burly white man and an older Black man—began yelling:

“Don’t say that!” ordered the white man. “You got hit. It’s his fault.”

“Speak the truth!” countered the Black man, sounding like a preacher. “She’s speaking the truth.”

Ignoring both of them, I looked down at you on the street. Your weary eyes stared straight ahead, and it knocked all hysteria out of me. “I’m sorry,” I said more softly. “Are you all right?”

Slowly you crawled to your feet.

“I’m so sorry. Is your bike okay?” I said, reaching out to caress it.

And as the mob around us dispersed as quickly as it had materialized, you looked at me. “I hate my job too,” you said. Then you straddled your bike and pedaled away.

I was a white girl in a white dress, and I hated what had just happened and that I’d been the cause of it.

I’m now old. I’m an old writer, so I can tell this:

We are now in an era that the late poet Leonard Cohen called a time of the “tyranny” of social media mobs—an era that has been weaponized by skillful trolls to cause maximum chaos on both sides of the political and cultural divides, thereby derailing our democracy. But mobs are an ancestral human characteristic.

In 1939, published in his collection of essay observations, One Man’s Meat, E. B. White wrote:

“The cells of the body co-operate to make the man; the men co-operate to make the society. But there is a contradiction baffling to biologist and layman alike. On the same day last spring that I saw a flight of geese passing over on their way to the lonely lakes of the north (a co-operative formation suggesting a tactical advantage imitated by our air corps)—on that same day cannibalism broke out among my baby chicks and I observed the brutality with which the group will turn upon an individual, literally picking his guts out. This is the antithesis of co-operation—a contrariness not unobserved in our own circles.”

I’ve never stopped wondering about you. You had long, sensitive hands. Did you like to read like me?

My first literary introduction to mob mentality was Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”—have you read it? It shook me to my core because, even at age sixteen, growing up in a peaceful little village, I knew it was true: the power of being in a self-empowered mob is too seductive for most of us to resist. When you’re part of a self-righteous mob, you don’t have to think, to discern, to pay attention to nuance. You surrender your conscience to the group energy and thereby derive a “high” of superiority.

Shirley Jackson’s description is chilling because of how ordinary it is:

Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head. Old Man Warner was saying, “Come on, come on, everyone.” Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.

“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.

Do you remember the people around us? You never looked at them that I could see. The mostly white people, as lingering and volatile as a storm cloud about to burst, hungry for me to blame you, and the one Black man using the moment to preach.

“Let’s get her!” I’ve read progressive people comment on the latest Facebook story about somebody acting egregiously, instantly triggering a movement of public shaming.

“They’re an angry woke mob!” declare our fearful leaders, and suddenly millions of people are reduced to an unthinking herd.

“They’re all terrorist Muslims.” “They’re dirty Jews.” “They’re less than human and should be executed!” “Attack their children!” "Bloodsport," Pete Buttigieg called it yesterday.

It’s this way on both extremes of the political divide.

Did you read Becoming, Michelle Obama’s memoir? She talks about the common public perception in the beginning of her political life that she was “an angry Black woman” because she expressed her ambivalence about basically throwing off a cliff the life she’d known and loved in order to support her husband’s political career.

“Angry Black woman/man” reduces a human story to a cartoon. As does “white privilege” and “white male privilege” and the myriad expressions that diagnose a whole group of individuals with negative characteristics and motivations. I think these names absolve us from feeling the complexity of empathy, which makes us all vulnerable in the grey area of identification, compassion, and the opposite.

I loved Michelle Obama’s Becoming. It is a discerned story from a discerning master of understanding nuance. And the thing I loved most was her message at the end: If you don’t like the narrative, change it, she said. If you don’t feel as if you are part of the story, tell your story. Tell it publicly. Tell it compellingly. Tell it honestly.

So, all these years later, here it is:

What happened in 1980 to you was completely my fault. I regret it to this day. I often think about you and wonder what became of you. “I hate this job too,” you told me, acknowledging what I silently shared with you: I hated being seen as a white girl in a white dress; I hated being surrounded by a mob, screaming in support of me and largely ignoring you. We were two people with histories that went deeper than being Black or white, or a bike messenger and a temp, or anybody’s split-second perceptions. We were two hurting people flattened on a street corner—two sad, weary people. And, even though I don’t know your story, I wager that, to this day, we share a loathing of the mob mentality and would rather pause to root out a nuanced, complex, possibly contradictory truth than act in hasty delusion.

Betsy Robinson is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright (also a former actor). She has written about books for Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Oh Reader, and many other publications. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators were published by Kano Press in 2024. She writes funny stories about flawed people and examines our herd culture. www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.

To me, it looks like violence. Violence to something or someone that the perpetrator hates. Displaced violence wreaked on an available body.

From Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, which I’m currently reading, re chronic conflict between Donald and Melania about decorating their rooms and the White House:

Mrs. Trump, who preferred a quiet environment with minimal disturbances and objected to living in a construction zone, had repeatedly expressed concern about the size and location of the ballroom. (98)

(Later on, page 224, Trump calls Melania a “minimalist” because she is not a fan of all the gold in the Oval.)

When we look at the demolition of the East Wing, including the first lady’s office, I can’t help wondering if it is founded in the most primal motives—childhood family: the withholding mother Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, wrote about in her magnificent Too Much and Never Enough. Trump’s mother, also named Mary, was:

. . . the kind of mother who used her children to comfort herself rather than comforting them. She attended to them when it was convenient for her, not when they needed her to. . . . Especially when it came to her sons, she acted as if there were nothing she could do for them. . . . The impact was especially dire for Donald and Robert, who at two and a half years and nine months old, respectively, were the most vulnerable of her children . . .(23)

So maybe Trump’s infantile destruction was evoked by his present mother surrogate, his bitter wife. Are we seeing a private war and retribution?

Is the entire presidency more understandable in that light since the protagonist is a person whose emotional development was arrested at age two and a half?

If this is so, are there any insights about more effective methods of negotiating this crazed child?

P.S. What does this look like?

[Complete review coming when I finish Regime Change.]

Betsy Robinson is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright (also a former actor). She has written about books for Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Oh Reader, and many other publications. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators were published by Kano Press in 2024. She writes funny stories about flawed people and examines our herd culture. www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.

Haberman and Swan recount Trump’s effusively warm meeting with Joe Biden during the transfer of power in January 2025, followed by more cordial gestures by Trump, and then they tell how eventually Biden felt “hoodwinked” by the act:

In the weeks ahead, Biden would look back at the brief display of civility in the Oval Office and feel hoodwinked. As Trump’s old patterns resumed, Biden sank into disbelief and dejection as he and his administration soon found themselves subject again to Trump’s daily abuse. (27)

Something to Know about Bullies, Psychopaths, and Narcissists

Having grown up in a family ruled by such a person, I believe I have something to offer:

It is absolutely critical to realize that all of life is an “act” to such people, motivated by getting what they want.

I am sad, but unsurprised, that Joe Biden didn’t know this. One would hope that somebody who’d been an international negotiator dealing with all kinds of psychopaths would know this. But I understand.

Once you learn this about someone like Trump (and make no mistake, there are plenty of others; they just don’t usually succeed to such public heights—with the notable exception of White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller as well as Elon Musk, according to later chapters in this book), you also learn the consequences of ever letting on that you do not believe their act. Ergo, the entire Republican party.

It is simply easier to “play along”—pretend that the person is genuine when they are pretending they’re genuine, because confronting the act as an “act” will instantly cause an aggressive explosion.

Rather than face that, many people shut down, pretend along with the pretender, do whatever is necessary to not evoke a nuclear explosion.

Speaking of nuclear explosions, I watched this interview with psychologist Dr. John Gartner, one of the 27 authors of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, an analysis by clinical psychology experts of Trump prior to the first election:

Gartner warns that Trump will set off a nuclear explosion and is presently grooming us for this. This might sound like hyperbole, and I hope it is. I hope that if or when Trump makes his attempt (and I believe he will), some sane person or people will intervene because no matter how far they have enabled Trump, this will be a bridge too far.

But I also worry that too many people, like Biden, will refuse to acknowledge what is right in front of us: no matter how good Trump sometimes is at feigning being human, he is lacking the essential qualities of empathy, shame, love, and any version of good sense.

Betsy Robinson is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright (also a former actor). She has written about books for Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Oh Reader, and many other publications. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators were published by Kano Press in 2024. She writes funny stories about flawed people and examines our herd culture. www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.

“Stop! Stop! No more!” screamed my enflamed wrist tendons. It was 1998, and for the last hour I had been transcribing a tape recording of a deposition about a New York City Transit accident. I was mid what felt like a perpetual free fall, having quit a job that made my psyche hurt, and in my third year of scurrying from one part-time job to another—dog walker, gal Friday, and deposition transcriptionist—trying to figure out how to survive as a writer with money work that felt good. I’d grown used to the adrenaline shooting through my stomach, and except for the rebellion of my tendons, the numbness of mindless work was a relief.

The first hour of the transit case was the questioning of an articulate African man (his accent sounded Nigerian) about the specifics of his accident. I remember nothing he said except that his sister was also involved in the accident, and whenever she was mentioned, his voice filled with dread and foreboding as he referred to her very strong opinions and his inability to say anything for or about her; she would have to speak for herself.

Interesting. A little scary.

I finished him. Stretched out my wrists, screamed, held them under hot water, replaced the wrist supports, and, with tendons throbbing, forged onward into the next tape. Oh, to have a nonpainful way to make money and orchestrate life exactly the way I wanted it without having to deal with jerks and mean people.

Surprise! This new tape was the African man’s sister. Again, I cannot remember specifics, but I do remember that in answer to one of the first identifying questions, she declared that her birth date was February 7, 1951. The reason I remember is that this is my birth date, and because of that, I began to listen with particular eagerness and curiosity, on the edge of anxiety.

At the time, I didn’t know that this would be the last tape I’d ever transcribe, because I was about to move on to a new job that would actually lead to a happy career. But in retrospect, the fact that I was listening to this tape makes sense. I’ve always loved my birth date, and I wondered if this obviously smart African woman felt that way too and if she might convey a special message. Was that why I was sweating?

The woman seemed annoyed to be there. It was clear she had other places that required her presence—doing things that she actually wanted to do. Her tone was arrogant, dismissive, and absolutely certain of her rightness. She had multiple graduate degrees and a high-powered job where she was in charge of everything and everyone.

As the interview progressed, her annoyance with the transit authority examiner became palpable through my headphones. He was a nice, well-meaning guy. I knew this from listening to many hours of him questioning people. He was not terribly bright, but he was friendly. I liked him. And the more dismissive the African woman became, and the more exhausted and oppressed my friend the examiner became, the more I disliked her and wanted to protect him. So now I was really sweating.

Why did she have to be so superior and mean? Who did she think she was anyway? Couldn’t she see he was just trying to do his job? Why couldn’t somebody as bright as she see that she was accomplishing nothing but hurt?

Ding: February 7, 1951. Aquarius: intelligent, independent, original thinkers who can be detached, stubborn, judgmental, aloof, and extremist.

I’m interested in psychology, had had a ton of therapy, and had read plenty about the personality characteristics of my type according to every study from astrology, to enneagram, to Reichian characterology and Myers-Briggs categories. I was currently enrolled in a healing school for heaven sakes where the M.O. to uncover our hidden issues and true feelings was a presentation process which I found to be the equivalent of public psyche stoning. I’d seen plenty of people stiffen and glare when I expressed my opinions. But until this moment, I’d never seen what they were reacting to.

Even if she were brilliant and right about things, why did this African woman have to be so mean? So superior? So unkind?

Ding: see my image in this mirror.

Ding: realize that none of this was haphazard; I was being given a great gift.

Ding: say “thank you” and use my intelligence to see how I, too, alienated and hurt people, and try to change.

It is very hard to turn your astute observational talents on yourself. But in that moment and into the new job that shortly followed, I did my best.

Many years later, I’m still doing my best, with new appreciation of that time of ignorance. Yes, I was often obliviously unkind, but I can see that I was also accruing experience that is only now coming to fruition. For more than 20 years I have been a journalist and novelist, drawing on what I learned in my age of oblivion, free-falling between money jobs, perplexed about how to make a living. I’ve spent a lot of that time listening to other people through my headphones—not only Transit Authority depositions, but Life magazine photographers, news correspondents at different media, business people playing dirty tricks on each other by secretly recording phone calls they swore they were not taping, and more. I have sold two articles that were birthed in that time: To the Hero on the J Train That Crashed on the Williamsburg Bridge 28 Years Ago (Compressed Journal of Creative Arts) and a piece about photographer and Renaissance man Gordon Parks (Next Avenue—no longer in print). I’ve written novels about being lost and clueless and sometimes not even knowing how lost you are (Plan Z by Leslie Kove and The Last Will & Testament of Zelda McFigg), both of which won awards from their publishers. In July of 2024, I published my novel Cats on a Pole that grew out of the gruesome “psyche stoning” of healing school. I never could have produced this work during my years of ignorance. And the glacially slow process of mucking my way through made it all the more fertile.

Now, even though I probably fail more than I succeed in being always kind, my commitment is solid. Because of that African woman—that amazing ding—I will never again not know when I’m unkind, and the inner repercussions of that—a heart that screams louder than my tendons ever did—is motivation to try again. Once you have truly seen yourself in the mirror, once you’ve clearly identified the only real trouble and know that it is inside, there is no unknowing possible. And it is only when you’ve seen all of yourself, accepted both the positive and negative and committed to kindness, that you can even begin to love yourself.

Betsy Robinson is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright (also a former actor). She has written about books for Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Oh Reader, and many other publications. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators were published by Kano Press in 2024. She writes funny stories about flawed people and examines our herd culture. www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.

I’ve never met Phyllis, but she reviewed one of my books on Goodreads, and because I’m nosy, I checked her out, and we connected over our near obsessive love of Percival Everett’s work, which at the time, was not that well known. So now, if one of us learns anything about Everett, we alert the other one.

When I was screaming about Everett to the unhearing reading masses, occasionally someone would bite and they always asked, “Which book should I start with?” because one look at the man’s output overwhelmed them. Depending on who they were and their taste, I would recommend a more traditional story such as So Much Blue, or the wildly picaresque I Am Not Sidney Poitier. But what I really wanted to recommend to everybody was God’s Country.

God’s Country by Percival Everett, my 2018 Review

A hilarious and moving western as only Percival Everett could imagine and write it.

Curt Marder, a “no-good, free-loadin’, back-slindin’, dog-lipped son-of-a-mud-rat” who owes everybody money, hires Bubba, a Black tracker, and the two of them, along with a kid called Jake, set off to find the white men who masqueraded as Indians and burned down Marder’s homestead, killed his dog, and kidnapped his wife—the worst sin being the dog murder, as far as the white cowboys in this rollicking tale are concerned. This is a wild chase, a quest story, an 1871 western buddy road trip, a social satire with plenty of substance under the laughs. It veers from zany to horrifying within sentences and ends with a scene and a message I know no words for but it gave my whole body goosebumps.

God’s Country, second reading 10/27/20, review

The first time I read God’s Country, I was in a blur of admiration, awe, glee, and so many other emotions at Percival Everett’s genius and alacrity to tell such tale of racism and ignorance through the eyes of a racist, ignorant buffoon. This second time through, I read slower, receiving medicine that cannot be gulped. And on page 114, I thought to pause and look up a line, so casually dropped that if you didn’t know the reference (I didn’t), you might miss it: “I celebrate myself, and sing myself.” A search unearthed what may be the soul of this book: Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” from Leaves of Grass. Whitman, who appears in a cameo, wrote an epic poem that says pretty much all there is to say about existence. And, although Everett’s book is nothing at all like Whitman’s poem, now I understand this book a lot better; everything from the title to the extraordinary ending took on new vibrations—although I could never and would never want to parse or analyze this amazing book.

Coming March 2, 2027: Serious Music

According to publisher Penguin Random House‘s publicity writer:

A thrilling, darkly comic journey of a Black musician making his way from the trenches of the Somme, to the jazz clubs of Harlem, to the illicit inner sanctum of Woodrow Wilson’s White House, by the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author of James.

In 1918, Arthur Champion is one of a handful of Black students attending the Oberlin Conservatory of Music when he runs afoul of a vindictive professor and finds himself unceremoniously enlisted in the United States Army. What ensues is one man’s sweeping voyage through the decade, a kaleidoscopic view of America during seismic social shifts from the author hailed by The Chicago Tribune as “our current Great American Novelist.”

A brilliant interrogation of racism and ownership in art, Serious Music is a breakneck, high-octane read, thrumming with the electrifying humor and rigorous moral clarity that is the hallmark of this masterful writer’s contribution to American letters.

It is available for pre-order now, and pul-ease do not buy it on Amazon. Try Bookshop.org which has the same discounted prices—hard cover, paperback large print, and e-book (you can read on an iPad or any tablet on Bookshop’s app).

But if you want to get a taste of Everett’s work before March 2027, try God’s Country. In my opinion, in its understated yet blatant hilarious, furious way, it portends all that is happening now.

Betsy Robinson is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright (also a former actor). She has written about books for Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Oh Reader, and many other publications. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators were published by Kano Press in 2024. She writes funny stories about flawed people and examines our herd culture. www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.

It is the story of Erno “Zvi” Spiegel, “an unsung hero of the Holocaust who risked everything to protect the most vulnerable in Auschwitz—dozens of young boys, many of them twins, targeted by Dr. Josef Mengele for brutal pseudo-medical experimentation. Through courage, compassion, and ingenuity, Spiegel shielded these children from death and unimaginable harm.” (Quoted from PBS copy.)

It took me a couple of tries to watch it because when I first started, my heart and stomach went into such knots that I turned it off. But the next day, I was ready and watched the whole thing, despite the feeling that any second I could dissolve in tears. If these people could endure what they did and make a record of it, I certainly could endure watching it . . . and maybe writing about it.

I’ve written before about the mass reaction of Jews to this kind of story (see Curt Bloch: An Imagination Exercise). It is as if we know in our bone marrow that it could have been us. There is a visceral identification with what we are seeing.

I believe it is this visceral identification and history in our DNA that blots out all else and informs many Jews’ extreme positions defending Netanyahu and anything done in Israel’s name. It is not just the horrific events of October 7^th, but it is historical memory that at any moment we could be locked up, wiped out, labeled nonhuman garbage. And I believe it is a parallel extreme, plus a lot of historical antisemitism, that allows so many other people to reduce all Jews and Israel (which is diverse in population origins with up to 70% disapproving of Netanyahu’s handling of the war) to the “cause of the atrocities.”

I have questions

When you see people or groups of people singled out for bad or unfair treatment, do you believe you must carry this kind of memory in your DNA to be overwhelmed by the knowing that It could be me?

Must you come from a legacy of this to know it could and will be you if there is no uproar from the general population?

What turns off people’s capacity to instantly know that, were they in somebody else’s circumstances, they, too, might be walking across deserts and forging rivers to avoid being murdered?

What shuts off the empathy and identification valve?

I do not believe It could be me is relegated to only Jews or only Black people or only Native Americans or only, or only, or only . . . I believe everybody who is willing to profoundly wake up will not only understand, but experience that it could be them.

Ding-ding-ding! Time to wake up.

Betsy Robinson is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright (also a former actor). She has written about books for Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Oh Reader, and many other publications. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators were published by Kano Press in 2024. She writes funny stories about flawed people and examines our herd culture. www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.

I’ve lived in New York City for 53 years as an adult. (I was born here but moved to a small village when I was two or three.)

I am not a sports fan so I wasn’t part of the Knicks mania. But I liked that it was going on and celebration and love were in the air.

I didn’t watch the celebration of the Obama Center opening, except for clips and reading some speeches, but I love that I can feel the love and maybe will be motivated enough to go to Chicago, where I’ve never been, and see it firsthand. I’m certain I will be accepted there as a visitor.

I love that I can love our new mayor, one of my neighbors feels the opposite, and we still get along.

I’m not a terribly social person, but I loved when my best friend who I met in the hallway of my building more than 40 years ago came over yesterday and we chatted about getting older and politics and our spiritual practices—she’s Buddhist; I’m nothing but follow the Siddha Yoga practice of meditation and contemplation.

I love that the day before that, I phoned a woman I met on a bus on my way to buy groceries because the local Trader Joe’s is closed for renovations and everything local is too expensive, so I’m commuting to the uptown TJ’s. I love that I spontaneously met this woman on the bus because we were copacetic and she gave me her card because her man friend has groups of men friends from childhood who he meets with and she would like to have some kind of women’s group. Neither of us had any ideas of what kind of group, but we were interested in meeting on a park bench to brainstorm. We never synced but I love that we tried because that kind of thing is possible in NYC from a bus meeting.

I love that I spontaneously went out the other day, not knowing where I was ultimately going, but I wanted to donate a book to a little free library box outside a school two blocks away, then return another book to the library a few blocks downtown from there, and then—who knows, but I ended up going to Central Park and doing the marathon walk about the Ramble and home the way I did for decades with my dogs. I sat where I used to sit with my first dog. I went everywhere I used to go with all three dogs. I missed them but it was sweet missing, not debilitating. I never spoke to another human, and that was what I wanted and it was fine.

I belong in this city. As idiosyncratic as I am, as off-the grid in my interests as I’ve always been, I belong in this country which was founded on the right to be who you are, obey laws, express freely as long as you don’t hurt anyone, and now, as legacy media is dying, write freely by cannonballing into the new and exciting independent media full of journalists working on their own without big companies dictating what they can and cannot say. I love being part of Substack in my tiny, little way.

Inclusion and diversity are this country. It is our birthright. And anybody trying to do away with that or twist it into something toxic—Well, they certainly have a right to say what they want; I support that as I support free expression for everyone. But the notion that such diseased, frightened, constricted thinking could take over this ever-evolving ideal of freedom and equality is ridiculous. There are simply too many of us who know we belong here.

Betsy Robinson is a longtime student of the Siddha Yoga Correspondence Course, a daily meditator, graduate of a four-year healing school, studying trauma healing, and former managing editor of Spirituality & Health magazine. She is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright. She has written about books for Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Oh Reader, and many other publications. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators were published by Kano Press in 2024, and earlier novels won prizes from Mid-List Press and Black Lawrence Press. She writes funny stories about flawed people and examines our herd culture. www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.

I’ve lived in NYC a block off Central Park for 52 years, and when I got my first dog in the 1980s, I became aware of the animal abuse running rampant in Central Park. It was the carriage horses. Since I was in the park every day, no matter the weather, their abuse was impossible to ignore.

I’m not a “horse person,” but my childhood history includes horses so I know enough to recognize when I horse is not big or muscular enough to do the job of pulling four double-size humans in a carriage around Central Park. As I saw withers tremble with the effort and haunches nearly collapse going up hills, I found myself looking away in shame. When I walked on Central Park South and witnessed horses literally baking on the hot blacktops of New York City’s summers, sometimes neighing repeatedly in distress, I began calling and writing letters—begging for something to be done. My counsel persons ignored me for years. After a cop in Central Park ignored my pleas for him to enforce the heat law (no horses are allowed to work when it is 90 degrees or more), I phoned the ASPCA and offered to work for free if they could just give me some legitimacy to register complaints. They declined my offer.

That was all in the 1980s, long before cell phones, social media, and whole organizations formed around the issue, long before inept Mayor Bill De Blasio took up the call because one of the well-funded organizations donated a lot of money to his campaign. (He failed to pass the legislation replacing horses with electric cars.)

In the mid-2000s, I found myself writing ad nauseam on Facebook—whole essays about whatever abomination I’d just witnessed and I was confronted by a member of the Central Park Conservancy, which long battled the animal welfare community on this issue but has only recently changed sides. She claimed that seeing carriage horses was necessary for New York City kids who never saw horses. Not one word or openness to the awful treatment of these animals and their lives without pasture, let alone running or grazing time, boxed on top of each other in small cells in a dingy West Side stable.

Today, after reading about the latest deaths and accidents (8 in 13 months)—of both horses and people—I’m at my wit’s end. Here’s the latest: 18-Year-Old Killed After Carriage Horse Bolts and Flips Carriage in Central Park.

And for more background and history, see animal issues journalist Tracy Basile’s Village Voice article from four years ago: When Ryder Fell, NYC’s Carriage Horse Industry Moved (Again) Into the Spotlight.

Our new Mayor Zohran Mamdani has taken up the cause to end the abuse, retire the horses to much overdue ease in sanctuaries where they can live out their lives humanely, and somehow overcome the romantic fantasies around horse-drawn carriages that no longer fit our city of vehicles, fumes, and speed.

Why am I writing this?

One reason only: to spread the word about the abuse that tourists visiting NYC don’t realize when they see the pretty carriages drawn by horses in colorful headgear lined up next to the park. I beg you, if you visit New York, understand the truth of this outmoded industry and do not patronize them.

Betsy Robinson is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright (also a former actor). She has written about books for Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Oh Reader, and many other publications. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators were published by Kano Press in 2024. She writes funny stories about flawed people and examines our herd culture. www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.

Step Nine
“Made direct amends to such people [one has harmed] wherever possible, except where to do so would injure them or others.”

A tranquil mind is the first requisite for good judgment. Good timing is important in making amends. What is courage? Prudence means taking calculated chances. Amends begin when we join A. A. Peace of mind cannot be bought at the expense of others. Need for discretion. Readiness to take consequences of our past and to take responsibility for well-being of others is spirit of Step Nine.

This week I’ve watched two video stories that ended in the subject committing to step nine and following through.

The first story was an HBO documentary called Bring Me the Beauties about a cult of models, including the main subject, John Hoyt, known as Hoyt Richards when he was one of the most successful models in the world and a member of a New Age cult.

As a member of this “family,” Hoyt becomes a recruiter, bringing numerous others into this mess. He is interviewed from the vantage of his present life where a lot of his work is to help others exit from cults. He expresses deep remorse for his actions and inactions that contributed to others being hurt, and he is devoting the remainder of his life to making amends.

The second story I saw was an interview done by journalist Don Lemon of a former MAGA influencer. Because I’ve never followed that stuff, she was new to me, and her immediate charisma and authenticity on camera were apparent. Several times Lemon asked her, “Why should we believe you are sincere now [given her history of lying]?” And each time she answered that you shouldn’t believe her. Instead, you should watch her actions. I don’t care enough to follow her story beyond this interview, but I was intrigued by her presence and honesty about being involved in a cult, and I’m hopeful that she will take actions to make amends to some of the many people she’s hurt.

Lack of amend-making has brought us to this moment.

The Jim Crow abortion of Reconstruction after the Civil War leads directly to Trump and MAGA who are presently battling to further erase that fact as well as truth in signage at National Parks!

My Substack Who writes the history you believe? is packed with citations that I’m not going to repeat here. Read it if you “want the receipts,” as journalists say.

Amend-making is critical to moving on. We will not move on with lies that will inevitably crumble like a floor made of shifting sand. The time when that worked is over simply because of the magnitude of today’s lies and the numbers of people affected. So amend-making is synonymous with survival, in my opinion.

If we want to survive, all of us must survive—not just a few billionaires under the delusion they can build homes on private islands with off-the-grid energy sources and a stockpile of food and weapons. This is nonsense. Those things will run out. If the people who are the infrastructure of humanity go, so go they.

Shame, humiliation, remorse, and sadness are mandatory. And the sooner we face that, the faster we will get on with the project of living. And paradoxically, amend-making is bolstered by our simultaneous joy and celebration: yesterday in NYC and Chicago, people came together in their love of a basketball team and our beautiful complex culture on display, and the feelings were contagious. We could feel our power. Power to love, change, and acknowledge painful truths and make amends.

Betsy Robinson is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright (also a former actor). She has written about books for Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Oh Reader, and many other publications. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators were published by Kano Press in 2024. She writes funny stories about flawed people and examines our herd culture. www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.

Blurbed by all kinds of famous writers and chosen by Oprah for her book club, John of John by Douglas Stuart has garnered the kind of audience that writers dream of. I finished it yesterday. 400 pages, no sweat. The writing is really good, and the story of a homosexual father and son (this is revealed immediately so it is not a spoiler) on a windswept island off the Scottish mainland is gripping.

But I’m less interested in the specific characters and story than I am in what it evoked in me.

The father is a sometimes brute who hides his homosexuality from his son. The entire story is driven by his toxic stream of secrets and how much he loathes himself for them.

Midway through I had to put down the book because I was overwhelmed by my own family secrets and thinking how much would have been changed or never happened if people in the past (1) could have acknowledged the truth of their feelings and experiences, and (2) could have passed the information down.

I think it was both an inability to acknowledge or even know the truth that stopped everything, and that led to absolute devastation for the next generation who, without knowing it, were infected with various family “diseases” in the form of toxic behavior.

Once, when I was very young, I found my mother’s childhood scrapbook in a basement cabinet. The first pages were filled with newspaper articles about her as a young piano prodigy who played at Carnegie Hall. Stunned, because this was something I knew nothing about, I immediately went to her and asked about it. Did she sit me down and tell me her story? Nope, she had a tantrum about my invading her privacy. “How dare you?!” she yelled as if I were her contemporary rather than a young child. “That’s mine! You had no right to look at it.”

As adults, she and I became best friends and sometimes writing partners, and we never spoke about the past. However, in her last year, when she wrote a will, she left me the scrapbook. Did she remember? I can only guess.

I wish things could have been different, but even as I type that, I know it’s ridiculous and I probably wouldn’t really want it, because I really like me now, and I would not be the way I am without all my experiences.

Yet . . . what if she had had the capacity to not only acknowledge the truth of her experiences and pain but talk about them to me?

I never had kids, and it’s something I’m glad about. Even proud of. Once I said that to a young relative and she looked stung—as if what I’d said was completely unacceptable to feel let alone voice. But I am glad. I didn’t hurt anyone. When I was of birthing age, I was so confused it would have been impossible not to continue the ancestral damage of one generation to the next. People always like to think they will do things differently from their parents, but in my experience, I’ve often seen that their overcompensation wreaks the same havoc. I didn’t do that; I feel good about it; my life was made for something else.

Douglas Stuart did something remarkable in John of John. He wrote it. He conveyed through such specific characters in a specific land at a specific time something so basic about the damage of refusal to accept ourselves and how that damages those who rely on us for love that the story probably relates to everyone in some private way.

Betsy Robinson is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright (also a former actor). She has written about books for Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Oh Reader, and many other publications. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators were published by Kano Press in 2024. She writes funny stories about flawed people and examines our herd culture. www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.

In this clip, she works with a dog, Buttons, who she trained herself. He and she had such mutual love that he could almost not contain himself before his performances.

I particularly took notice because I had in my head that, in the summer of 1971, I’d not only met Eleanor Powell when I was serving as the worst props person ever to work in theater, but that when I’d ironed and burned the skirt she had to go onstage in, in less than an hour, she was one of the kindest people I’d ever met. I approached her cowering, expecting to receive a well-deserved chewing out. Instead, she calmly looked at the circle of burn on the seat of the skirt and said, “All right, let’s see what I can wear instead. Let’s see what we can do about this.” I don’t remember what happened after that because I was in shock from her kindness.

Anyway, watching her tap dance threw me back in time, and I realized not only what an amazing person she was but the fact that I knew nothing of her genius as a young dancer highlighted my own ignorance and hubris. There was no internet then, but still, if I were not so stuck in myself and my insecurities, I might have found out who some of the “star package” stars who appeared that summer were.

Floored by her dancing, I then went down an internet hole, searching out more about her.

I watched a half-hour documentary called “The Rest of the Story” where I learned Powell’s amazing history from being so shy couldn’t talk, to going to ballet class to come out of herself . . . to becoming a Broadway and movie star. What impressed me most was her almost super-human core—both physically and spiritually. It seems that nothing had the power to make her belief in what was right waiver. In a time when racism was the way of the world, she worked and learned with Black people, becoming the student of one of the great tap dancers after she spent every one of his performances lying on her stomach in the wings studying his feet, and he took her on. When being a movie star had no draw for her, when an offer came, she dealt with it by naming an extraordinary salary demand to turn off the interest. Instead, she was offered the money, and then more money. At the peak of her career, she retired to have a family and eventually do a Christian TV show.

As a dancer, she does moves that look impossible—a full backbend and then up from a splayed standing position. As she learned from her Black teachers, she breaks beats into micro-bits of complicated taps so that her feet become an additional musical instrument. And as she does this, her core—her middle—seems to be made of solid muscle.

What would it be like to be that solid where it matters? I wondered.

I read her credits and was puzzled when I could find no record of the star package theater tour she’d been part of when I burned her skirt. Confused, I searched and searched . . . only to discover that I’d never met Eleanor Powell. It was Eleanor Parker!

I laughed so hard.

And then I was grateful for my mistake. It had allowed me to meet this extraordinary human being—somebody who had started out as shy as I was as a child, someone who’d gone her own way no matter how off the acceptable-behavior path it was deemed, someone who was completely directed by her inner sense of Rightness and Truth.

Betsy Robinson is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright (also a former actor). She has written about books for Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Oh Reader, and many other publications. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators were published by Kano Press in 2024. She writes funny stories about flawed people and examines our herd culture. www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.

“Yeah,” seconded RFK, Jr. “I heard of a case in the Midwest somewhere. I swear a whole town. Cancer. So they started levitating. Everybody in the town. It’s cutting edge. No more cancer.”

“I’m the anti-gravity president!” continued Trump to the gaggle of reporters. “And to prove it, I’m ending the war in Iran. They’ll never know what hit them cause our tanks will fly.”

“Yeah,” said Hegseth. “Fly. Like he said.”

“Excuse me, Mr. President, don’t the planes already do that?”

“Don’t be a jerk,” said Trump.

“Mr. President, do you have evidence about gravity causing cancer?”

“Shut up. And all of you low-IQ morons have got to stop reporting that I’m falling asleep. If you had half a brain, you’d know I’m disappearing time.”

“Mr. President! Mr. President!”

“You, Kirsten Kristen Kaitlin, the piggy that never smiles.”

“Mr. President, are you actually saying you stop time when you close your eyes?”

“Yup!”

“Excuse me, Mr. President. Julie K. Brown from the Miami Herald. Can we get back to the Epstein files for one second?”

And he blinked three times and disappeared.

Betsy Robinson is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright (also a former actor). She has written about books for Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Oh Reader, and many other publications. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators were published by Kano Press in 2024. She writes funny stories about flawed people and examines our herd culture. www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.

However en route, in fact blocking all routes on Fifth Avenue, I ran into this.

The joyous Puerto Rican Day parade.

I am not a big fan of loud parades, so even though my beloved dog Maya was from Puerto Rico, I’d never attended the parade. As I stood there in the heat, I wished Maya a happy Puerto Rican Day and a happy every day if they have days in spirit.

Then I about-faced and headed home.

If I could do smellovision, I’d do it for this Linden tree.

Betsy Robinson is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright (also a former actor). She has written about books for Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Oh Reader, and many other publications. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators were published by Kano Press in 2024. She writes funny stories about flawed people and examines our herd culture. www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.

Yesterday I published a Substack, Who To Vote For, about my dilemma choosing a candidate to vote for in New York’s 12^th District election, and when I posted it, YouTube’s automatic cover of the debate I’d watched came up with “Kennedy” heir Jack Schlossberg front and center. Since he is not even a front runner and the YouTube/NY1 (the media company that broadcasted it) presentation was the antithesis of my commitment to truth, I was annoyed, to put it mildly.

A few days before that column, I’d written one called Money . . . The Cage You Don’t See if You’ve Always Had It which discussed “marquee value”—another word for hype, glitz, and drama—this thing that draws us even when we deny or aren’t aware of it. Schlossberg has marquee value because he is a “Kennedy.” It didn’t matter how much he bristled during the debate when he was questioned about that, he also is aware of it and used it to the hilt—donating more than a million dollars of his wealth to his campaign and inserting Kennedy into his name on the ballot.

Trump’s genius is in hype, glitz, and drama. Also, it helps that he is completely amoral. He learned the truth of marquee value at the knees of his mentor Roy Cohn. It is his first nature to practice that the truth is whatever he says repeatedly. Time and again, he has proven that whatever he repeats will eventually be accepted by enough people to elect him or do battle at his order. He learned early that he could be a failed businessman with multiple bankruptcies and a dismal reputation, but if he represented himself on TV as the opposite, that is what people would believe about him. He learned that merely plastering his name everywhere reinforces his lies as truth and his impotence as power.

I think he is absolutely right.

The only antidote to this

The only antidote to this comes down to individual commitment to seeing our addiction to fame, hype, and glitz. It is immaterial whether the compulsion is a so-called “positive” one (as in we are drawn to people we have positive feelings for and we put them on a pedestal) or “negative” (as in we are compulsive about people we enjoy hating). It doesn’t matter whether you’re a person with superior- or low self-esteem. If you think you’re better than others, you are suffering from an addiction to your notion of self-importance. If you think you are less than others, same thing, flip side, because you imagine others have importance portrayed by marquee value which has been carefully nurtured; you are believing in the lies.

I am including myself in all this.

For instance, I’ve wasted time trying to watch a TV series that many people have lauded as “the best thing ever on TV.” At first view, I thought the acting was all over the map, from really good to really awful. I stopped watching it. But after more years of hearing “best thing,” I actually put myself through this again and only quit mid-episode second season when the lead actor, a Brit with the worst American accent I’ve ever heard, played a scene where he was supposed to be a Brit trying to do a bad American accent, and not only did he come out of the scene for the sheer ridiculousness of it, but the entire cast dropped character and laughed . . . and apparently the director thought this was good acting worthy of being broadcasted?

I have many other examples of my own addiction and most of them have to do with craving success because I thought it would mean I “had a right to exist.” Do you need me to deconstruct the fucked-upness of that?

Addiction to hype is the great destroyer of freedom

If we are addicted to what are really our projections (the notion of superiority or inferiority in others), nurtured and fed to us by people trying to sell us something, having equality consciousness—also known as FREEDOM—is absolutely impossible.

Let me parse that.

If you believe anybody has more right to exist than you do, if you believe they have so much worth that you should worship them or defer to them when you’re unsure of your instincts or opinions, you are not free.

If you believe you are inherently worth more than others, your vision is tainted and you are not free.

Freedom comes when you feel worthy and you deeply experience the worthiness of everyone—no matter their fame, poverty, status, or the hype around them. When this happens, the hype feels like such a joke, you don’t even get annoyed by it. You merely go on your way in truth.

The beginnings of truth may be emerging

I noticed in the comments for the District 12 Congressional debate video (Substack, Who To Vote For) that many people voiced a version of “the media have done a really nasty job ignoring schwalbe’s candidacy.” The truth of the event, despite the misrepresentative video cover photo, was that nearly unknown candidate Nina Schwalbe absolutely swept the debate. She spoke without any glitz; she got along with everybody, was good-humored and expansively knowledgeable; and she has no interest in power or fundraising. She merely wants to get in there and fix the problems—which has historically been her work: fixing ailing systems. She is a scientist and used to work at USAID. The fact that so many people noticed and mentioned this gives me hope.

Are we waking up? I hope so.

In case you’re interested: See Nina Schwalbe and particularly watch what she has to say in the second Congressional debate. The only break she’s gotten is that hers is the first name on the ballot in the list of candidates. If you live in NY-12, I hope you will consider voting for her.

Betsy Robinson is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright (also a former actor). She has written about books for Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Oh Reader, and many other publications. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators were published by Kano Press in 2024. She writes funny stories about flawed people and examines our herd culture. www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.