The historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, nearly 75 years ago. And yet her thoughts on the subject of tyranny and lies speak so very clearly to today:

• “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”

• “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world - and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end - is being destroyed.”

• “When evil is allowed to compete with good, evil has an emotional populist appeal that wins out unless good men and women stand as a vanguard against abuse.” . . .

     After the victory of Donald Trump in the recent election. Christina Hepner Brodie investigated, for her Current Events group in Falmouth, Massachusetts, what would be involved in moving to another country.

     “I eliminated Australia, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand, which I also researched,” she writes. “If I understood correctly, they are only looking for workers, not retirees. Australia even removed their ‘retirement visa’ in 2018.”

     She did put together a chart with considerable information on what would be involved in moving to Costa Rica, France, Italy, Mexico, Panama, Portugal and Spain. “All the research is from online,” she explains, “mostly (but not all) from websites created by the countries.”

• Click here for the introduction to the chart Christina Hepner Brodie wrote for a group of friends in Falmouth, Massachusetts.

• Click here for her chart.

      In many ways, we’ve been living through the golden age of American sports— desegregation and the rise of the black athlete; the ascendancy of pro football; the expansion of baseball, basketball and ice hockey; the growth of soccer; Title IX and the explosion of women’s sports; the ascent of ESPN and its imitators, and the ability to view at home or on our phones almost any major game or match at any time.

      More than perhaps any other previous generation, we have been, in fact, inundated with sports for the entirety of our lives; it may be the one common thread running through our times. The greatest athletes of our era have become renowned and almost totemic figures, more popular than politicians, as famous as performers, more influential than writers or artists.

      But who have been the absolute best?

     It's a close call (unlike the 2020 election, despite trump's claims—and did you know that lowercasing the “t” in his name is de rigeur?). And I won't fall for the “law” bait—i.e., it'd be way too easy to cite lawyering as life's worst job. It would be in the running had I not spent my 40 years lawyering as a polluter reiner-inner.

      The candidates are the non-music jobs I had ‘twixt undergrad and grad school. Part of it was about quick and dirty— literally and figuratively—ways of making at least a little money; the other part was about this bougie boy learning what it was like to work with one's hands. Those jobs are in a virtual, and I don’t mean in the web sense, tie for worst.

      First we’ll mention the landscaping job I had in Chapel Hill during an undergrad summer and the one I had outside Albuquerque, NM, in the summer after receiving my undergrad degree. That’s when I first learned how bad I was at manual labor. . .

      Postmortems and finger-pointing following the Democratic debacle on Election Day (i.e., the restoration of a now even more-untethered Donald Trump) are inevitable.

      Previously, I have come down hard on Joe Biden, for his obstinate refusal to step aside in the face of obvious physical and mental weakness—and, also obviously, for going back on his word not to run for re-election.

      At the risk of piling on an old man, I could not help but agree this week with virtually all of what conservative New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens had to say in a succinct analysis of where Joe Biden’s presidency went wrong—and how it doomed the Democrats to defeat . . .

      In these post-election days, elites have taken a pummeling. They’ve been repeatedly blamed for losing this election, thus sacrificing our democracy. They’ve been variously accused of contempt for “the great unwashed,” for ignoring the needs of the common people, for disdain toward Joe Sixpack and obliviousness to all those blue-collar folks getting their morning coffee in rural Pennsylvania diners.    

      And that’s, apparently, what voters rebelled against.

      Listen to Bernard Goldberg in the Washington newsletter, The Hill:

      “Trump’s win is a rejection of elite condescension…For quite some time, elites have looked down on ordinary Americans. The elites thought they were smarter than the folks who live in “flyover country,” who they often saw as hayseeds who ate at places like Red Lobster. And you got the impression that they not only thought they were smarter than ordinary Americans, but that were better than ordinary Americans.” . . .

      The voices of artists are essential to democracy. 

      Moving to New York to study dance in 1973, I retailed at Macy’s and was an answering service operator, janitor, artist model and office assistant to support myself. Short-term contracts and unemployment benefits subsidized my performing career. In between tours, I finished my college degree in psychology and was a nanny and pre-school teacher. 

      After a vision quest in the Himalayans, I managed two dance companies and a festival. Philanthropy called; suddenly I was funnier and smarter, until I left the foundation—accolades and joyful embraces ceased overnight. Moving to Minneapolis, the culture wars of the ‘90s had me battling right wing media, religious leaders and politicians who cared little about the truth so long as they could raise money off controversy. . . .

      Before we left the country for a few weeks abroad, we wondered whether it would be better or worse to not be in the states for Election Day. We really couldn’t decide.

      Turns out, it was much, much better.

      Instead of being immersed—really submerged—in it all, we explored ancient streets. Instead of following minute-by-minute vote tabulations, we drank some ouzo. Instead of falling into despondency after the tabulations were finished, we ate moussaka. Instead of commiserating with friends on the days after, we wandered through the ruins of the Minoan civilization.

      It was, that is, easy—maybe too easy—to forget what was happening, what had happened, 6,000 miles away. . . .

     This fall, I’ve been reading Clara Bingham’s book “The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973.” It has immersed me in this decade of turmoil and huge social and cultural changes.

      I was too young to really experience and understand the events happening in the U.S. during this time period. As a young woman in the early 1980s, I didn’t realize how lucky I was to be able to walk into a bank and open a checking account without a man’s signature or to apply for a credit card or to get a prescription for birth control pills and walk into a pharmacy to have it filled, no questions asked. . . .

      You know that Donald Trump, President-elect Donald Trump, has in recent days nominated some flagrantly unqualified and deeply wrongheaded nominees to fill some of the most important positions in the government of the United States.

       To review, a few:

•       Now-former Congressman Matt Gaetz, himself the subject of an ethics investigation in the House, as Attorney General.

•       Former Representative Tulsi Gabbard, whom Republican Senator Mitt Romney has accused of having embraced "actual Russian propaganda," as Director of National Intelligence.

•      Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who subscribes to a number of unsubstantiated scare stories about polio and Covid vaccines, as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Allow me to note that these appointments are not only terrifying but surreal. . . .

    Trump is saying the election gave him a “very big mandate.”

    Rubbish. It wasn’t a mandate at all. It wasn’t even a “red shift” to Trump and the Republicans.

    It was a blue abandonment. 

    We now know that nine million fewer votes were cast nationwide in 2024 than in 2020. . . .

Not easy to know what to say after what happened last week at the polls in the United States. It is tragedy. It is nightmare. Here I note that it is also farce.

Click here for a half-minute video meditation on the return to power of Donald J. Trump.

      As we’ve gotten older, so has our metabolism. That’s why we’ve all probably gained some weight since the days when we could actually fit into our old college sweatshirt.

      Metabolism, as we all well know, is the sum of the chemical reactions in the body's cells that changes food into energy. When your metabolism slows and it and you can sometimes barely get out the door in time for a 2 p.m. urologist appointment, it’s time to think about dieting.

      I mean, we could, of course, eat a bit less, but that may be too complicated. So, instead, we have several popular dieting plans that many of us follow. . . .

     In reverse order of terribleness: 

7.  Reagan defeats Mondale 1984. President Ronald Reagan seemed astoundingly lucky. He had survived a deep recession, which knocked out inflation, and then benefited from a booming economy. Walter Mondale, a fine senator, seemed miscast as a presidential candidate and hurt by having served as vice president in the seemingly mostly unsuccessful Carter administration. The result of this election was not surprising.

6.  Nixon defeats Humphrey 1968. Richard Nixon’s awfulness was manifest. Nonetheless, it was difficult to get too upset over this election because we were so unexcited about the guy who lost: Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who, while a committed liberal, proved unwilling to break with President Lyndon Johnson on the Vietnam War.

5. Reagan defeats Carter 1980 . . . .

As I approach my ninth decade, and, supposedly, increased wisdom, there are still things I just don’t understand.

• I don’t understand pineapple on pizza.

• I don’t understand Barry Manilow.

• I don’t understand how Donald Trump could have once been our president.

• I don’t understand daylight savings time.

• I don’t understand how to pronounce correctly the Greek word for thanks.

• I don’t understand why so many people are suddenly gluten intolerant.

• I don’t understand how, four years ago, 74 million people voted for a man who would foment an insurrection. . . .

      For much of my life, when I looked around a room, I would be pleased if I could convince myself, as I could upon occasion, that I was one of the younger people there.

      There were two reasons for this, both kind of obvious, but let me—since what I’m about to say is less obvious—spell them out:

• ·       First, there was the satisfaction of having accomplished something—something that qualified me for entry into that room—that people more experienced than I had accomplished.

• ·       And, second, I felt in some way more vital, less stuck in the past, than the venerable people around me in that room.

      I was, in other words, a bit of a youth chauvinist. Common enough then and now. Nothing too weird about that, right?

      What’s weird, what’s not so obvious, is that when I look around a room nowadays, I sometimes find myself enjoying being one of the older people in that room. I take a certain satisfaction in being one of the wrinkled. . . .

      What a F%#king Sh*T Show!

      Ok, I am glad I got that off my chest.    

      How in the world did our country get it so wrong!

      Are we really that stupid?

     Is it true that 52% of adults read at only a sixth-grade level?  Maybe that’s it.   Why did 54% of  white women vote for him but 93% of black women voted for Kamala?  Why would any women vote for a regime that wants to demean us, demoralize us, abuse us, defy our rights, and grab us by our pussies any time they want . . . .

      If there is any bright spot in the election of an ignorant criminal traitor as President of the United States—and the companion election of  a Republican Senate (and at this writing, even a GOP House) it is that Democrats finally may get their heads out of their butts and form a political coalition that includes everyone, not just people who look and act like me.

       Maybe the best quote I saw postmortem was this from an unnamed Democrat, quoted in the WashPost:

        “I will say this,” one House Democrat said. “The Democratic Party has a major working-class voter issue. It started a decade ago as a working-class White issue. It’s now gotten even worse and spread across racial lines.” . . .

     No.
     No, no, no.
     Seven time zones away, seven hours later in the day, we awoke to the inconceivable news.
     We had gone to bed with hope that America was the America we believed in. We woke to find that we lived in a very different America.
     We saw first that North Carolina, our state, had, for the third consecutive time voted for the pathological.
     We saw next that Georgia had gone down the same horrible path, then Pennsylvania. We had just finished breakfast when the last of the dominoes fell.
     We clicked on the Times website and read that in every state that had counted its votes, Trump had improved on his performance of 2020. How was that possible? How could memories be so short? . . .

      Some months ago, we ranked the presidential elections of our lifetime in order of how consequential we believe they were or would prove to be—consequential in a good or bad way. For that list, with explanations, click here. Here is the election we selected back then as the most consequential.

#1  2024  Trump versus Harris. This is the only election on this list upon which we do not yet have the benefit of hindsight. And it must be kept in mind that it is always easy to see the current election as among the most consequential ever. However, we do have reason to believe that Trump’s far-right backers might be less ineffectual this time—as evidenced by their “Project 2025.”  And he, or his family–as evidenced by the 2021 attack on the Capitol–might, if they gain power, never agree to peacefully surrender it. 

      And the short version of the other rankings: #20 1976 Carter defeats Ford. #19 2012 Obama defeats Romney. #18 1956 Eisenhower defeats Stevenson. #17 1992 Clinton defeats Bush. #16 1948 Truman defeats Dewey. #15 1996 Clinton defeats Dole. #14 1960 Kennedy defeats Nixon. #13 1984 Reagan defeats Mondale. #12 1952 Eisenhower defeats Stevenson. #11 1988 Bush defeats Dukakis. #10 2004 Bush defeats Kerry. #9 1968 Nixon defeats Humphrey. #8 2008 Obama defeats McCain. #7 1972 Nixon defeats McGovern. #6 2020 Biden defeats Trump. #5 1980 Reagan defeats Carter. #4 2016 Trump defeats Clinton. #3 1964 Johnson defeats Goldwater. #2 2000 Bush defeats Gore.