"... they just do. Same with those that veer toward the needlessly inspirational and/or sentimental... Maybe if I just relaxed and supported people regardless of their content, I might free myself from this prison of my own making.
I recently tested out the 'post liking = better person' theory: The image was a beautiful fall landscape somewhere upstate followed by a photo of the poster’s beautiful face drenched in sunlight with a caption about 'healing' and the 'precious ephemerality of golden hour' (!).
I fought my instinct to ignore it and went ahead and hit 'Like.' And you know what? It took nothing. I felt nothing. Except for a little glimmer of positive self-regard. Maybe being a little nicer, a little more generous...."
Meade and I lived through the Nixon hate fest in the 1970s. What did the Democratic Party give us after the hated Nixon withdrew from the scene? We got Jimmy Carter as a President, a notorious failure, and then 2 candidates who failed to win the presidency — Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis.
I said "I liked Dukakis," and I really did at the time. I offered that Buttigieg reminds me of Dukakis. Something about his manner and his voice and style of speech. All of that was made to order for my taste.
Meade said: "Oh, I liked Dukakis. I like Buttigieg. I've finally lived long enough to realize I don't want a President I like."
If you're thinking of trying to top Meade's line by saying "I want a President who likes me," Meade already said that too, but I think "I don't want a President I like" is the more important concept here.
The "other guy" was President Ronald Reagan. Neither Meade nor I liked Ronald Reagan. [CORRECTION: The other guy was George H.W. Bush. Meade and I did not like him either. Meade still doesn't like him: "He wasn't good enough."]
Michael Dukakis was Governor of Massachusetts. He was succeeded in office by William Weld, who's running for President right now, in the Republican primaries, challenging Donald Trump. The next elected Governor of Massachusetts was none other than Mitt Romney. After Mitt Romney came Deval Patrick, and he's running in the Democratic Party primaries right now.
Somehow, Governors of Massachusetts keep thinking they should be our President. There's a funny old NYT column about that. Hang on a second.
My boyfriend, Ed, has authorized me to tell this personal story about us, because it bears on the Presidential campaign. A few years ago I developed an infatuation with someone else, and then it fizzled out - mainly because of the shrewd way Ed handled the situation. He just began referring to this other guy, whose name he knew perfectly well, as ''the Governor of Massachusetts'' (which he wasn't). I'd come home on cloud nine, and Ed would say, ''So, did you have fun with the Governor of Massachusetts?'' This would deflate me....
"... and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women. And I really hope people are paying attention to that because it should be worrisome that he has permitted this culture — not only permitted, [he] seems to really be very much supporting it. And I don't think we want to go down that road again where you campaign by insult and attack and maybe you try to get some distance from it, but you either don't know what your campaign and supporters are doing or you're just giving them a wink and you want them to go after Kamala [Harris] or after Elizabeth [Warren]. I think that that's a pattern that people should take into account when they make their decisions.... Then this argument about whether or not or when he did or didn't say that a woman couldn't be elected, it's part of a pattern. If it were a one-off, you might say, 'OK, fine.' But he said I was unqualified. I had a lot more experience than he did, and got a lot more done than he had, but that was his attack on me. I just think people need to pay attention because we want, hopefully, to elect a president who's going to try to bring us together, and not either turn a blind eye, or actually reward the kind of insulting, attacking, demeaning, degrading behavior that we've seen from this current administration."
ADDED: She's talking about Bernie the way Democrats talk about Trump.
AND: Nobody likes you is a classic childhood taunt.
PLUS: How much do you care whether the politicians like each other? Does that benefit Us the People or is their inwardly directed cliquishness a danger? Do they like us?
"His badness is a foregone conclusion, but so was that of George W. Bush a decade or two ago, when many people saw his work as lightweight, and Reagan was also viewed with disdain.... The hate is more vehement these days because there is so much hate all around us, so many problems to assign blame for and so much pain and desperation."
Mr. Koons is a lightning rod, and has been for some time. It is fashionable and easy to hate his work. In certain quarters of the art world it seems to be required — collectors, many dealers and museum curators excepted. Its badness is a foregone conclusion, but so was that of David Hockney a decade or two ago, when many people saw his work as lightweight, and the late work of Picasso was also viewed with disdain. (It’s fashionable for the art world young to dismiss Picasso entirely, which, if you want to be an artist, is sort of like cutting off one of your legs and not admitting what the other one is standing on.) The hate is more vehement these days because there is so much hate all around us, so many problems to assign blame for and so much pain and desperation.
I'm interested in the idea that there is so much hate all around us and a particular person is "easy to hate." And then what? Do the sophisticated people examine their own tendency to hate and get especially hard on themselves when their hate settles on someone who's easy to hate? Is the idea that you will hate, but it's lowly to hate what is easy to hate. Show some discernment, and stop and look at yourself if what you are hating is what is fashionable to hate and you're acting like you're following a requirement to hate this particular target, accepting a foregone conclusion.
I have this theory that it's not enough to be likable, not enough to make it very big — having your artwork sell for the highest price for any living artist, getting elected President of the United States. You've got to also be hateable.
[I]f you're going to study "likability," you ought to also study hateability. It seems to me, the guys who've been winning the Presidency also have hateability. Speaking of trying too hard, maybe female politicians try too hard to expunge or hide any hateability, and that's what makes them seem to lack qualities — [like] "intelligence, expertise and toughness" — that we sense are crucial in the Leader of the Free World. We're not electing a Friend. We're electing a Protector.
The NYT headline about Koons tells us to stop hating him. I'd put it a different way: Understand how hating Jeff Koons is why he really is better than the artists you like.
The art critic writes:
The various curved forms of the “Rabbit” — head, torso and legs — function as a cascade of concave mirrors. Often compared to an astronaut, the creature is at once alien and cute, weirdly sinister and innocent, weightless and yet armored. The idea that something is inside, or nothing is, is equally disturbing. “Rabbit” is intractable, a little warrior, yet it also vanishes into its reflections, which are full of us looking at it.
And, indeed, the various curved forms of Trump — head, torso and tiny hands — function as a cascade of concave mirrors. Often compared to a Cheeto, the creature is at once alien and cute, weirdly sinister and innocent, weightless and yet armored. The idea that something is inside, or nothing is, is equally disturbing. Trump is intractable, a little warrior, yet he also vanishes into his reflections, which are full of us looking at him.
ADDED: As many commenters (beginning with DimWhit) are saying, the curved forms of "Rabbit" are not "concave" as the NYT art critic has it. They are convex. So vexing!
"Before this, people liked or disliked one another, of course, but it wasn’t until after the Civil War, when middle-class men began to see virtue and character as essential to personal advancement, that success in business required projecting likability.... Americans were also taught that being likable was a quality that could be cultivated as a means to get ahead. In 1936, Dale Carnegie’s 'How to Win Friends and Influence People' warned that those who tried too hard to be liked would fail: Theodore Roosevelt’s naturally friendly greetings to everyone he passed, regardless of status, Carnegie noted, had made it impossible not to like him, but Henrietta G., now the 'best liked' counselor at her office, had been isolated until she learned to stop bragging. (Though looking back, we have to wonder: Would Henry G. have needed to hide his accomplishments?).... But as Dale Carnegie might have told [Hillary Clinton], if there is anything worse than being unlikable, it is wanting too badly to be liked.... That Mrs. Clinton lost the nomination in 2008, to a political virtuoso but still a virtual novice, seemed for some illustrative of the troubled relationship between gender and likability in politics. But then she lost in 2016. That voters could see Donald Trump’s rambling and bullying as authenticity seemed proof for many that the likability game was permanently rigged in favor of men.... Likability is associated with an emotional connection between candidate and voter that makes a politician worthy of trust. And yet because that connection is forged almost exclusively through the conduit of mass media, it can never be really about the candidate but only voters’ fantasies about how a politician they can never know ought to be. That women are disadvantaged by a dynamic that emphasizes fantasies over real achievements should perhaps come as no surprise: Popular fantasies about women, sadly, still don’t tend to feature intelligence, expertise and toughness at the negotiating table.... What would it mean if we could reinvent what it is that makes a candidate 'likable'? What if women no longer tried to fit a standard that was never meant for them and instead, we focused on redefining what likability might look like: not someone you want to get a beer with, but, say, someone you can trust to do the work?"
Potter fails to make a serious attempt to understand what people who like Donald Trump like about him. She tosses out the Trump hater's aversive summary, "rambling and bullying." Potter purports to be interested in "reinvent[ing]" what likability is, but she never takes the trouble to consider the ways in which Donald Trump has reinvented likability. She does breeze through the historical example of Theodore Roosevelt, though she only looks at him second hand, letting us know how Dale Carnegie saw him — "naturally friendly."
Potter rankles at the contrast between the male Roosevelt and the female ("Henrietta G.") who tries too hard, and she jumps to the feminist question whether the problem people had with Henrietta was her femaleness. Carnegie may have been right. People responded to the naturalness of Roosevelt's interactions and felt put off by the artificiality of H.G.'s trying too hard.
If we reframe likability as a sense that you can trust the other person, the distinction between Roosevelt and Henrietta G. already fits that frame! Roosevelt seemed natural, as if he really was friendly and showing his real self, and Henrietta felt like a phony who was trying to extract something from us.
Now, Trump haters, think about Trump and why the people who like him like him, and think hard. Don't shield yourself from the truth by reflexively interposing Trump-hating ideas like "rambling and bullying." Trump stands up in front of crowds for an hour and more at a time and speaks directly, without a script. You get to see how his mind works. He's a real person. It's weird but it's natural— natural in some way that's available to a 70ish billionaire TV-and-real-estate man from New York City.
By the way, if you're going to study "likability," you ought to also study hateability. It seems to me, the guys who've been winning the Presidency also have hateability. Speaking of trying too hard, maybe female politicians try too hard to expunge or hide any hateability, and that's what makes them seem to lack qualities — Potter's trio is "intelligence, expertise and toughness" — that we sense are crucial in the Leader of the Free World. We're not electing a Friend. We're electing a Protector.
IN THE COMMENTS: Automatic_Wing said:
"You're likeable enough, Hillary" was funny because everyone knew she wasn't.
Let's see it again:
What I notice, watching it again today, is that Hillary was ready with a funny response. The question seems planned, and her response seems to have been practiced, and it is funny. She says "That hurts my feelings" in a mock-feminine way, then adds, sarcastically, "but I'll try to go on." I think the idea was to insinuate that her critics were sexist to talk about likability and to be likable by displaying that she didn't really care about those criticisms. Obama stepped on her little routine. (Paradoxically, that routine of hers was very feminine.) And he was actually kind of mean, saying she was "likable enough," which is to say, not all that likable, certainly not as likable as I am, but I've got so much likablity that I can spend some of it on being kind of an asshole to you, Hillary. Ironically, that ad lib meanness was likable! And it underscored how practiced and phony her effort to please us really was. She was trying too hard, like Dale Carnegie's Henrietta G.
The former First Lady said this to a crowd in Boston last week:
As far as I'm concerned, any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against their own voice in a way. To me, it doesn’t say as much about Hillary ― and everybody’s trying to wonder. Well, what does it mean for Hillary? No, no, no. What does it mean for us as women? That we look at those two candidates, as women, and many of us said, ‘That guy. He’s better for me. His voice is more true to me.’ Well, to me that just says you don’t like your voice. You like the thing we’re told to like.
I'm using the transcription from "Millions of American women disagree with Michelle Obama: Donald Trump is their voice," by Eugene Scott, who "writes about identity politics" for The Washington Post. He says, "But what Obama and other critics may not understand is that Trump's voice actually IS the voice of many of his female supporters — the traditionalist voice that speaks out against a liberal culture that many conservative women feel has left them behind."
I first read the quote here at The Federalist, in a piece by Inez Feltscher, who rejects the idea that conservative women fail to think for themselves and says: "[I]magining that women on the Right are mere sock puppets for their husbands, sons, and fathers is a crucial illusion for an ideology that has constructed a political paradigm entirely upon identity."
I just want to note the irony: Michelle Obama is herself telling women what to like.
What I'd like to tell women (and other people) to like is endlessly asking: What do I like?
It's not easy to know, especially since part of the propaganda that surrounds us is about our "own voice." But those who tell us to be in touch with our own desires are often merely trying to make us believe that what we want is the thing that they are selling. We see that in endless TV commercials for food and cars: You know you want it. Like your insides are crying out for this sandwich. This car expresses what you, deep in your heart, have been trying to say. This shirt is you.
We're used to that kind of persuasion, for political candidates as well as commercial products.
It's harder to play this game out in the open, the way Michelle Obama is doing. Once you call attention to the way the other side drew people in by making them feel that their candidate expressed what they really felt inside, you're waking us up to the fact that you were doing that too, and you seem rather pathetic complaining that your depiction of the customer's internal desires didn't work on many people.
Complaining about your ineffective sales pitch won't make it more effective: We said true women vote for women, and those women who did not feel what we meant to make them feel are inauthentic women. Our "voice" was their "voice." If they rejected us, they rejected themselves.
Said openly, it sounds absurd.
I think I've seen ads for commercial products that play with this idea of misunderstanding your own true desires. You see a guy happily eating a sandwich, and his inner voice prompts him about some other sandwich, superior to this sandwich in so many ways, until he stops mid-bite, looks at the sandwich, and drops it and goes running off and is suddenly seen getting a sandwich at the advertiser's store.
That might be funny and persuasive, but now try to imagine a Democratic Party commercial that depicts a pro-Trump woman, enjoying what she thinks are her true desires, then realizing how Democrats really are better, and running off to join the liberal crowd and finding happiness at last. Hard to picture that being handled well. From what I've seen, it's better to keep it subliminal:
"No matter her words, they are framed by a style steeped in cheerful Hallmark history. That is bound to inform how they are received. If much of the administration still channels Wall Street (the Oliver Stone version), Ms. Sanders offers visual reference points of Main Street (the Fox version)."
The last paragraph of "Sarah Huckabee Sanders and the Optics of Relatable Style" by Vanessa Friedman in the NYT. Friedman is a fashion writer, and I accept the politics-and-fashion genre of writing, even though it does have a much greater impact on women than on men. Women could just take up wearing dark suits the way men do. Since we don't, we're giving writers much more to write about.
By the way, I'm so tired of the fromWall Street to Main Street cliché, but Friedman did put a twist on it, making it not the real Wall Street and Main Street, but media representation of it. So I guess it's kind of okay. And this is fashion writing, where the cliché is more commonly from the boardroom to the bedroom.
I hate clichés in writing, but it might be good for serious people to wear utterly predictable clothing. Men have their suits, and Sanders has her "stack-heel beige pumps and a ubiquitous single strand of pearls... a series of almost identical knee-length, round-neck dresses in colors like red, green, black and fuchsia."
(How does fuschia can get into a "colors like" sequence with red, green, and black? That's rhetorical question. I'm just making a stray observation about the careless use of "like.")
"Never! Whether it’s Tony Soprano or Philip Roth’s Zuckerman, or even James Bond, male protagonists are never subjected to such criticism. But when it comes to women – every critic feels that he or she has the right to complain. I once read a 19th Century review in which a cranky male critic said of Jane Eyre, 'I would never hire her as a governess!' This may seem funny to you – it’s certainly absurd, but it happens all the time to women who write. I’ve often wondered how we can change this. In the US, Hillary Clinton was pilloried for being ‘unlikeable’ so we got Donald Trump who, not even three months into his presidency, has historically low approval ratings – yet was he somehow more ‘likable’?"
What a golden age we live in. Maybe it doesn't look that way to you now, but looking back, you will see it. We love Obama, the person. Oh, maybe some of you only like him, but you've got to at least like him, the most likeable person who ever ambled onto the American political scene.
I mean, I know some of you hate him, personally, but you are a tiny group. Those who don't like Obama's policies and his methods still overwhelmingly like or love Obama the man.
You might not notice this pleasant feeling, but you will. Just as you don't notice physical comfort and mental peace, you will notice when it's gone. And the feeling of loving the President is about to become very obvious, because we are not going to love the new President.
But that's a good thing. We need our distance, so we can look critically at what is being done to us and to the world. We're going to feel bad — even those of us who vote for the winner — and we should. It will keep us alert.
I haven't had the feeling of hating the President since early 2001, when George W. Bush first took over. Unfortunately, I lost that hating feeling later that year. I'm getting ready to hate the new President, and I don't want a repeat of 2001. I don't want to have to lose that feeling of critical distance from the President of the United States, and I know exactly the kind of thing that could wreck it for me again.
ADDED: Interesting — unintentionally revealing? — use of the word "like." Not liking something doesn't make it untrue. If it's just a question of not liking it, Jacob Tobia doesn't have a compelling argument.
1. Power Line's John Hinderaker has a lot of problems with Hillary Clinton's story of what it was like for her to take the LSAT in 1968. Last May, Hillary said: "We were in this huge, cavernous room... And hundreds of people were taking this test, and there weren’t many women there. This friend and I were waiting for the test to begin, and the young men around us were like, ‘What do you think [you’re] doing? How dare you take a spot from one of us?’ It was just a relentless harangue.' Clinton and her friend were stunned. They’d spent four safe years at a women’s college, where these kinds of gender dynamics didn’t apply." Were the young men actually saying those things to her and her friend? We see the usage "were like" followed by statements a magazine (New York) put in quotes, but it's not quite an assertion that these words were said. It's more of a dramatization of what Hillary felt at the time, perhaps because of something they said — "harangue" implies some speaking on the part of the men — but perhaps Hillary is relaying only her sense of what they must have been thinking.
2. Recently, Lena Dunham described her experience at the very swanky Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Gala sitting at a table next to the talented, attractive football player Odell Beckham Jr. She said: "And it was so amazing because it was like he looked at me and he determined I was not the shape of a woman by his standards. He was like: 'That’s a marshmallow. That’s a child. That’s a dog.' It wasn’t mean. He just seemed confused." Again, we see something in quote marks with a to-be-like intro: "He was like." He didn't actually say those words. Dunham was simply performing her subjective ideation around what he might have been thinking about her. It's comical and she's a comedian. It has the advantage of being self-deprecating. But it attributes mean thoughts to him. He never said those things, and it's not that hard to tell that the quotes are not real quotes. But it takes a liberty with another person's mind.
3. I'll be looking for things to add to this list. I just noticed #1 today, and it made me think of #2. Send me suggestions. I'm especially interested in the "He was like" usage to grab the female privilege to present mind-readings of men. I'm not totally condemning the belief in and use of this power of women to read the minds of men. Figuring out what's really going on in other people's minds is one of the highest levels of human thought. It is what great novelist do. The key is doing it well and doing it ethically. Like a great novelist. Or a great comedian. Or great feminist scholar. But you have to work on that power, and it's not easy to be great, and even when you are great, you're going to annoy and outrage a lot of people, and they're not all going to bow down and acknowledge your greatness.
IN THE COMMENTS: I went first with:
An award will be given to the first person to make what I believe is THE most predictable comment.
After a number of incorrect efforts, I wrote:
Prize not yet won.
Thanks.
When I posted that, I read a couple more comments including the winner, by campy:
Predictable comment: there are no great feminist scholars.
The prize is front-paging. Congratulations, campy. And I appreciate that you put your award-winning comment in the voice of someone else making the wisecrack that pre-annoyed me and not as your own disparagement of feminist scholarship. Huzzah!
"... it suggests that you’ve despaired of being loved for who you really are. And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they’ve fallen for your shtick. Those people exist to make you feel good about yourself, but how good can your feeling be when it’s provided by people you don’t respect? You may find yourself becoming depressed, or alcoholic, or, if you’re Donald Trump, running for president (and then quitting)."
From "Pain Won't Kill You," a 2011 commencement address, delivered at Kenyon College, by Jonathan Franzen, which you can read in the essay collection, "Farther Away." [AND: Full text here.]
Few US political commentators took his campaign seriously and many suggested he was only in it for the publicity.
In a statement, he said: "After considerable deliberation and reflection, I have decided not to pursue the office of the presidency. This decision does not come easily or without regret, especially when my potential candidacy continues to be validated by ranking at the top of the Republican contenders in polls across the country."
Modesty is not a Trump characteristic and this is reflected in his statement. "I maintain the strong conviction that if I were to run, I would be able to win the primary and, ultimately, the general election."
He added: "I have spent the past several months unofficially campaigning and recognise that running for public office cannot be done half-heartedly. Ultimately, however, business is my greatest passion and I am not ready to leave the private sector."
That will bring you to a page with your ad preferences. Under the “Interests” header, click the “Lifestyle and Culture” tab. Then look for a box titled “US Politics.” In parentheses, it will describe how Facebook has categorized you, such as liberal, moderate or conservative.
(If the “US Politics” box does not show up, click the “See more” button under the grid of boxes.)
Facebook makes a deduction about your political views based on the pages that you like — or on your political preference, if you stated one, on your profile page. If you like the page for Hillary Clinton, Facebook might categorize you as a liberal....
Even if you do not like any candidates’ pages, if most of the people who like the same pages that you do — such as Ben and Jerry’s ice cream — identify as liberal, then Facebook might classify you as one, too.
I've never "liked" any political candidate or political party or political cause on Facebook. According to Facebook: "You have this preference because we think it may be relevant to you based on what you do on Facebook."
Today, we see the first poll data that post-dates the Brexit results — partially post-dates. The referendum took place on June 23rd and we knew the result beginning June 24th, so 4 of the 7 days covered in this new Quinnipiac poll (PDF) took a reading of Americans who could have been influenced by seeing how the British voted:
As the pollster puts it: "Democrat Hillary Clinton has 42 percent to Republican Donald Trump’s 40 percent – too close to call – as American voters say neither candidate would be a good president and that the campaign has increased hatred and prejudice in the nation...."
“It would be difficult to imagine a less flattering from-the-gut reaction to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton,” said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll. “This is where we are. Voters find themselves in the middle of a mean-spirited, scorched earth campaign between two candidates they don’t like. And they don’t think either candidate would be a good president.”
That's one way to look at it. These nasty people are fighting too hard and too dirty and that's off-putting to us Americans, who like harmony and niceness. In the end, we're not going to vote for the more likeable person, so it's not going to be an election like 2008 or 2012 or 2004 or 2000 or 1996 or 1992 or — I can't believe how far back this goes! — 1988 or 1984 or 1980 or 1976. America will have to grow up and vote for somebody we just don't like. Most of us anyway. I know some people love Trump. I even personally know at least one person who actually really loves Hillary.
And then I was reading this Bernie Sanders op-ed in The NYT, "Democrats Need to Wake Up," and the wake-up call, for Bernie, is Brexit: "Could this rejection of the current form of the global economy happen in the United States? You bet it could." He says: "The global economy is not working for the majority of people in our country and the world. This is an economic model developed by the economic elite to benefit the economic elite. We need real change."
That would seem to point straight at Trump, but of course, Bernie Sanders is not going to do that. He quickly cautions us not to go there:
But we do not need change based on the demagogy, bigotry and anti-immigrant sentiment that punctuated so much of the Leave campaign’s rhetoric — and is central to Donald J. Trump’s message....
The notion that Donald Trump could benefit from the same forces that gave the Leave proponents a majority in Britain should sound an alarm for the Democratic Party in the United States. Millions of American voters, like the Leave supporters, are understandably angry and frustrated by the economic forces that are destroying the middle class.
What are these people supposed to do? How could Hillary Clinton possibly "wake up" into a believable new response?
"... wherein Jefferson accused Adams of being a hermaphrodite and Adams responded by [spreading rumors] that Jefferson died, so Adams would be the only viable candidate. He was counting on news to travel slow! That, weirdly, gives me hope."
Dowd's column is mostly about Hillary's unlikability and Trump's wily fighting style. I'll just quote this, because it made me laugh (and it's arguably genitalia-related):
Trump speculated at his rally that Hillary might share sensitive information with her aide Huma Abedin who might share it with her husband, saying: “I know Anthony Weiner. I don’t want him knowing anything. And I never, ever want him to tweet me.”
So, of course, Weiner tweated [sic] immediately and incoherently: “Wait, is he talking to me. I’ll hit that guy with so many rights, he’ll be begging for a left.”
Anyway... did Jefferson say Adams was a hermaphrodite? I found this:
Jefferson's camp accused President Adams of having a "hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman."
In return, Adams' men called Vice President Jefferson "a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father."
"He may be the most threatening and frightening and menacing presidential candidate in modern life, and yet, in person he's almost soothing.... If onstage he calls people names, more privately he has only good, embracing things to say about almost everybody. (For most public people I know, it is the opposite.) He loves everybody. Genuinely seems to love everybody — at least everybody who's rich and successful (he doesn't really talk about anyone who isn't). Expressing love for everybody, for most of us, would clearly seem to be an act. But with Trump, it's the name-calling and bluster that might be the act. I offer that there are quite a number of people in New York, some we know in common, who are puzzled that the generous, eager-to-be-liked and liking-everyone-in-return Donald has morphed into a snarling and reactionary public enemy, at least a liberal enemy. This, I suggest, might be a source of the continuing dialectic — or to some, wishful thinking — that he does not necessarily believe what he says."
Also interesting: Trump has a refrigerator in his Beverly Hills home that has nothing in it but bottled water and pints of Haagen Dazs... and Trump eats a whole pint of vanilla at 11 p.m. and tells Wolff not to put his water bottle on the fabric ottoman.
So when I called Dr. Damasio, who teaches at the University of Southern California, I worried that he might strike down my humanistic observations with unflinching scientific objectivity. He didn’t — he hates the phrase ["I feel like"] as much as I do. He called it “bad usage” and “a sign of laziness in thinking,” not because it acknowledges the presence of emotion, but because it is an imprecise hedge that conceals more than it reveals. “It doesn’t follow that because you have doubts, or because something is tempered by a gut feeling, that you cannot make those distinctions as clear as possible,” he said.
ADDED: I'm not sure why Worthen limited her discussion to the phrase "I feel like..." rather than "I feel...." "I feel like" feels different from, feels like something different from "I feel." See what I mean? The "like" suggests approximation and simile. The speaker seems to be dramatizing his internal landscape. You don't even need the "feel." You can just say — as the kids these day do — "I'm like...." The idea is: This is me, here, having this experience. Watch me enact it.
But "I feel..." — without the "like" — could casually substitute for "I think." It's verbiage, stalling for time, perhaps setting up an honest revelation of the thought process and conceding, accurately, that it hasn't been carefully worked out. It can suggest a willingness to accept new information and to accommodate what the other person feels. Maybe we could combine our intuitions and get somewhere in this process of figuring out what's the best policy or which candidate to vote for.
And conversation isn't just about finding answers to various pesky questions. The highest value of conversation is intrinsic, human beings in a relationship. To say "I feel" can be to offer access into that intimacy. Can be. If the other person is saying "That's just how I feel," the signal is: I don't want to do this intimacy with you.
The problem isn't the word "feel" itself, but the particular feelings, expressed in context.
I saved the screen at the top of Yik Yak here in Madison last night.
IN THE COMMENTS: HoodlumDoodlum said:
Reddit has a thread with that joke from April 2015... the thread appears to be jokes by teenagers. There are Google hits from May and June 2015, too. Step up ya joke takin' game, WI kids.
Thanks. I should have checked. Yik Yak around here is full of jokes. I guess I wanted to believe that scenario took place around here. By the way, I downloaded Yik Yak after I read that it was full of horrible racist and sexist things. I never see that here. I see, in addition to jokes, people who are trying to get up the nerve to talk to somebody they like, concern about doing well in school, and expressions of joy at having seen a dog.
"I’m over trying to find the ‘adorable’ way to state my opinion and still be likable. Fuck that."
Wrote the actress Jennifer Lawrence, trying to analyze why she hasn't received what seems to be comparable pay with male stars. She seems to admit that she doesn't drive a hard bargain...
“I failed as a negotiator because I gave up early,” she wrote. “I didn’t want to keep fighting over millions of dollars that, frankly, due to two franchises, I don’t need.”
... but she attributes her bad deal-making to the effect of the overall culture on women, the desire to be likable and not too demanding. You have to read through to the subtext here. Obviously, Jennifer Lawrence doesn't personally negotiate her deals. She's speaking as if she does to create pressure that her agents will use as they drive deals. Presumably, studios don't want the little people in the dark thinking of them as discriminating against women, and they may be willing to throw some money into that PR, even when they have the option of choosing another actress — a younger, prettier actress who'll do what you do and more and for even less, which is how you got your roles in the first place, remember?
AND: What about the invisible problem of male actors who never even get started because old, familiar actors keep getting the parts?
Blogged 2 days ago, here. One of the participants in the conversation — my ex-husband RLC — sends his list of lyrics:
Everything dies baby that's a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.
Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty
And meet me tonight in Atlantic City.
Uh oh! This list begins tellingly. It was only last month that I was saying: "I can't stand Bruce Springsteen, and much as I dislike the Weekly Standard's bellyaching, it's not as bad as listening to Bruce straining histrionically."
Back to Richard's list:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
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