Quote of the Day (Chevy Chase, on ‘SNL’ Producer Lorne Michaels)

“Frankly, I always felt back then that I was smarter than him, that I was really the guy who got the show going, not Lorne."—Chevy Chase, writer and original “Not Ready for Prime Time” cast member, on Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels (pictured, in 1985), quoted by Susan Morrison, “Profiles: Make Him Laugh,” The New Yorker, Jan. 20, 2025

A couple of weeks ago, I finally got around to watching the docucomedy Saturday Night, about the frantic 90 minutes leading up to the premiere of SNL 50 years ago this October. The film took Hollywood’s usual liberties with the facts, but it rang true in depicting the outsized personalities associated with the show in its incarnation, particularly Chevy Chase.

Now, after Susan Morrison’s profile of the variety show’s producer for most of its history, Lorne Michaels, we know for certain that Chase was not only a jerk back then, but still is one.

I’m not going to get into here how obnoxious the actor-comedian has been over the years. (For that, see how I unloaded on him in my blog post from 11 years ago, on his 70^th birthday.)

But I will say that it hasn’t occurred to Chase that, 49 years after he left the show, early in its second season, it has done just fine without him.

The lion’s share for the credit belongs rightly to Michaels, who—his numerous idiosyncrasies and unique management style notwithstanding—launched the SNL ship and, five years after it almost foundered without him, returned to the helm and put it on its current steady course (as I discussed in this post from four years ago).

For anyone who hasn’t done so yet, I highly recommend reading Ms. Morrison’s retrospective on Michaels before watching the SNL 50^th anniversary special tomorrow night.

Oh, yes—and when Chase makes his scheduled appearance among its galaxy of stars, past and present, try not to give him the raspberry for still being such a whiny, egotistical, idiot, okay?

Flashback, February 1825: Adams Victory in Disputed Presidential Race Launches ‘Corrupt Bargain’ Charge

With none of the three major candidates winning a majority of votes in the Electoral College, the 1824 Presidential election was thrown into the House of Representatives, which awarded the office to John Quincy Adams in February 1825.

I wrote 15 years ago about Adams’ first year in the White House, while surveying his prior distinguished diplomatic career and consequential post-Presidency. But the month in which he fulfilled his ambition for the nation’s highest office was so astonishing—and such an anticipation of how current thinly sourced smear campaigns can poison the electorate—that it deserves exploration in depth.

With the popular James Monroe declining to run for a third term, the stage was set for an electoral free-for-all in 1824, featuring four candidates:

*Secretary of State Adams, the son of another President, John Adams, drew strength from the Northeast, especially New England.

*Andrew Jackson, hero of the Battle of New Orleans, looked to a base mostly confined to the West and South, with residual support in the Northeast.

*Treasury Secretary William Crawford, though the favorite of the Democratic-Republican Party establishment, had suffered a debilitating stroke before the election. Though unable to campaign, he retained support in the Deep South.

*Speaker of the House Henry Clay, who earned the least votes in the Electoral College, ended up exerting the greatest influence on the vote.

The election of 1824 was the first that used the procedures outlined in the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, which called for the House of Representatives to pick among the top three candidates in the Electoral College.

Those three turned out to be Adams, Jackson, and Crawford. Although Jackson led the Electoral College count (and, most historians contend, what would have been the popular vote), he did not have a majority. Crawford’s medical condition effectively made it a two-man race between Adams and Jackson.

Four years before, it took the Missouri Compromise to avert a civil war over slavery. Many of the sectional differences barely muzzled in that agreement were coming to the fore again.

A sense of déjà vu must have particularly gripped Adams: as in the election of 1800 (lost by his father), it would take a New York Federalist to secure the outcome.

But, while Federalist leader Alexander Hamilton had persuaded his side to vote for Thomas Jefferson rather than Aaron Burr in that earlier election on the 36^th House ballot, it took only one ballot—cast by 60-year-old aristocrat Stephen Van Rensselaer III—to settle matters in 1825.

Legend holds that, while agonizing on the House floor over whom to support, Rensselaer noticed a ballot placed in front of him reading, ADAMS. Believing this to be divinely inspired, the congressman voted accordingly.

If only matters had remained that simple…

In an early attempt at creating a unifying “team of rivals” strategy that Abraham Lincoln later used, Adams asked Crawford to remain as treasury secretary and Jackson to take over the War Department. Both declined.

The selection of the third rival, Clay, sparked enormous controversy. The President-elect knew him as a fellow diplomat in the Treaty of Ghent negotiations that ended the War of 1812, and though he didn’t particularly trust the Kentuckian or care for his drinking and gambling, he knew he was able and shared common domestic policy goals.

Adams asked Clay to become Secretary of State after his House of Representatives victory, not before (contrary to what some Websites and podcasts claim to this day).

But, because Clay had swung the vote of his state’s delegation to Adams, and the State Department had served as a steppingstone to the Presidency for all occupants of the office in the prior 25 years, an anonymous letter soon appeared in Philadelphia’s Columbian Observer charging that the two men had engaged in a “corrupt bargain.”

Eventually, the “anonymous” Congressman emerged from the shadows to admit being the source of the allegation: George Kremer of Pennsylvania.

William Russ, Jr.’s article about the incident in the October 1940 issue of the academic journal Pennsylvania History noted not only that Kremer had “sunk into oblivion, even locally,” but that before and after his moment in the spotlight he was “obscure.” That difficulty in remembering him has only increased with time.

In 1825, Kremer, then completing his first term as a congressman, was hardly a disinterested observer, and certainly not a distinguished one. Successive stints as a storekeeper, lawyer, and two-year state legislator had done nothing to disabuse perceptions that he was a backbench time-server, a reputation not helped by his propensity for wearing a leopard-skin coat on the floor of the House. 

The topic that preoccupied Kremer in Congress–eliminating waste and abuse in government—frequently seemed like a pretext to contest initiatives that involved funding internal improvements—the policies that Clay and Adams supported and that Jackson opposed. Kremer, in fact, often anticipated many of the same arguments that MAGA supporters use today against government expenditures.

Challenged by Clay to testify and offer evidence before a congressional committee that would investigate the corruption allegations, however, Kremer backed down, saying at first, bizarrely, that he hadn’t intended to "to charge Mr. Clay with corruption," then refusing to testify on constitutional grounds, before finally crowing, after his three terms in Congress, how proud he was for his part in spreading the news about the scandal.

To be sure, backers of all four major candidates maneuvered furiously for advantage behind the scenes. But no documentary evidence has ever been produced substantiating the claims about Clay and Adams.

Moreover, despite friction between the two men in the past, even a shouting match, there could be little doubt that the House Speaker preferred Adams to Jackson—or, to put it another way, that Clay regarded Jackson as unsuited for the Presidency by virtue of his military background, hair-trigger temper, and distrust of banks.

None of that mattered to Jackson. He could have remembered that Adams, unlike Presidential aspirants like Crawford and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, had come to his defense in the Monroe Administration over his overly aggressive responses to Native American raids from Florida into Georgia.

But it was easier for him to think he’d lost because of the “corrupt bargain” than because of his incompatibility with Clay. So he not only nursed a grudge against the two men, but encouraged his supporters to regard the new administration as illegitimate—not unlike how Donald Trump convinced his followers that, all evidence to the contrary, the election of 2020 had been stolen from him at the polls.

Like his father, Adams erred in believing that he could govern above the fray, without benefit of political adherents. Jackson would not make the same mistake. (The “spoils system” is one Jacksonian legacy that Trump seems especially eager to copy in his return to the White House.)

When Adams left office four years later, defeated by the man he’d beaten previously, Jackson, he was one of the unhappiest men ever to occupy the White House.

Like his father, John Quincy Adams was so peeved by what transpired in his single term in office that he didn’t stick around for the inauguration of his successor.

Historians still regard Adams as the greatest Secretary of State in our history, and, like Jimmy Carter, he earned great respect for his post-Presidential career (see my prior blog post about his fight against the Jacksonian “gag rule” meant to squelch any opposition to slavery in Congress).

But his term in the White House was virtually unrelieved misery for him and his family, because of the stark mismatch between his lofty policy goals and miniscule political instincts. 

Quote of the Day (Jimmy Carter, on Criticism and Scrutiny of Government Officials)

“Thoughtful criticism and close scrutiny of all government officials by the press and the public are an important part of our democratic society. Now, as in the past, only the understanding and involvement of the people through full and open debate can help to avoid serious mistakes and assure the continued dignity and safety of the Nation.”—Jimmy Carter, 39^th President of the United States (1924-2024), “Farewell Address to the Nation,” Jan. 14, 1981

TV Quote of the Day (‘New Girl,’ As Jess Is Mistaken for a Blind Date)

Sam Sweeney [played by David Walton]: “Hi—are you Katie? I'm Sam from CupidMatch.”

Jess [played by Zooey Deschanel] [stunned at the sight of this handsome stranger]: “And I'm the girl from my dreams of you.”—New Girl, Season 2, Episode 2, “Katie,” original air date Sept. 25, 2012, teleplay by Elizabeth Meriwether, directed by Larry Charles

Quote of the Day (Larry Bird, on His Drive for Perfection)

“I don't know if I practiced more than anybody, but I sure practiced enough. I still wonder if somebody—somewhere—was practicing more than me.”—NBA Hall of Famer Larry Bird with Bob Ryan, Drive: The Story of My Life (1990)

The image accompanying this post, of the Boston Celtics’ Larry Bird in the 1985 NBA Playoffs Game 2 vs. the Detroit Pistons, was taken by Steve Lipofsky www.Basketballphoto.com.

Quote of the Day (Virginia Woolf, on a London Winter in Early Evening)

“The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful. We are not then taunted as in the summer by the longing for shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields. The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s own room.” —English novelist-essayist Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), “Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” in The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays (1942)

Quote of the Day (Marcel Proust, on ‘Memory’s Pictures’)

“How paradoxical it is to seek in reality memory's pictures, which must always lack the charm that comes to them from memory itself and from their not being perceived by the senses. The reality that I had known no longer existed….The places that we have known do not belong only to the world of space in which we locate them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the remembrance of a certain image is but regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.”—French novelist Marcel Proust (1870-1922), Swann’s Way (Vol. 1 of In Search of Lost Time), translated by C.K. Moncrieff (1913)

Quote of the Day (Charles Lamb, on ‘The Only True Time’)

“I have indeed lived nominally fifty years, but deduct out of them the hours which I have lived to other people, and not to myself, and you will find me still a young fellow. For that is the only true Time, which a man can properly call his own—that which he has all to himself; the rest, though in some sense he may be said to live it, is other people's Time, not his.”—English essayist, critic, poet, and playwright Charles Lamb (1775-1834), “The Superannuated Man,” in Charles Lamb's Essays (1900)

I first encountered Charles Lamb—born 250 years ago today in London—through the children’s book Tales From Shakespeare, written with his older sister Mary. I wasn’t too impressed with it—and, consequently, him—at the time.

Then I found out that, like his friend William Hazlitt (whose picture of him accompanies this post), he was a talented practitioner of the personal essay—in a sense, the creative ancestor of bloggers like me.

Friends delighted in Lamb’s conversation, and it’s certainly the case that, with a few exceptions, what you see is what you get with him: a droll writer who liked to poke fun at himself, often using pseudonyms (including one for himself: “Elia,” taken from the last name of an Italian friend and fellow clerk).

I highlighted the quote above because, even with the vast changes in business and society that have taken place since the Romantic Era when Lamb wrote, the issues he raised in “The Superannuated Man”—working in a job that doesn’t always satisfy one’s deepest needs, and the proper use of time when employment comes to a definitive end—are ones that aging baby boomers like me are increasingly facing.

Lamb confronted these concerns himself because, family poverty forced him, at age 14, to quit school and start working as a clerk, his principal occupation until, 36 years later, he took his firm’s generous pension offer and retired.

Only a decade remained to the writer before his death. Much of that time was darkened by the growing mental instability of Mary, who had been under his care for three decades following her fit of temporary insanity that led her to fatally stab the Lambs’ mother and wound their father.

Lamb’s life underscores the predicament that so many writers who never achieve strong sales deal with: doing what you must versus what you want. We should all confront these challenges with the same perseverance, equanimity, and grace that Lamb summoned for so long.

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Office,’ on Dunder Mifflin’s ‘Best Manager’)

 

Chris O'Keefe, board member and former congressman [played by Chris Ellis] [after listening to Dunder Mifflin's Michael Scott bloviate]: “He's the best manager? Where's the off button on this moron?” — The Office, Season 6, Episode 11, “Shareholder Meeting,” original air date Nov. 19, 2009, teleplay by Justin Spitzer, directed by Charles McDougall

Like just about everyone who reads this post, I had, over my long professional career, many moments when I (silently) doubted a manager's ability with as much vehemence as O’Keefe.

Lately, I have wished that the “off button” could be pressed on another person in charge, who now has considerably more authority than Michael Scott ever had. But it looks like that won’t happen for a while yet—if it ever will.

Quote of the Day (Charina Chou, James Manyika, and Hartmut Neven, on the Promise and Peril of Quantum Computing)

“Like other new and powerful technologies, quantum computing [which uses quantum states of subatomic particles to store information and solve complex problems faster than on classical computers] holds enormous promise, and it also introduces significant new risks. In addition to large-scale data theft, economic disruption, and intelligence breaches, quantum computers could be used for malicious purposes such as stimulating and synthesizing chemical weapons or optimizing the flight trajectories of a swarm of drones. As with AI, the possibility of misuse or abuse raises critical questions about who should control the technology and how to mitigate the threats. Policymakers will need to determine how to maximize economic and societal gains while minimizing the dangers. Finding the best ways to achieve this balance will require a rigorous debate within civil society and an understanding by the public of the technology’s potential gains and harms. There are multiple futures for a world with quantum computers. The best one would see liberal democracies leading both the technology's development and its collective management. A worse one would have the United States and its international partners, through inaction or insufficient actions, cede dominance of the new technology to China and other autocratic countries.”— Charina Chou, James Manyika, and Hartmut Neven, “The Race to Lead the Quantum Future,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2025 issue

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Book of Isaiah, As the Prophet’s Lips Are Anointed With Fire)

“I said, ‘Woe is me, I am doomed!
For I am a man of unclean lips,
living among a people of unclean lips;
yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!’
Then one of the seraphim flew to me,
holding an ember that he had taken with tongs from the altar.
 
He touched my mouth with it, and said,
‘See, now that this has touched your lips,
your wickedness is removed, your sin purged.’
 
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying,
‘Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?’
‘Here I am,’ I said; ‘send me!’"—Isaiah 6:5-8
 
The image accompanying this post, Isaiah’s Lips Anointed with Fire, was created in 1772 by the American-born English artist Benjamin West (1738-1820), one of a series of paintings commissioned by King George III to decorate a chapel at Windsor Castle.

This Day in Film History (Jack Lemmon, ‘America’s Everyman,’ Born)

Feb. 8, 1925— Jack Lemmon came by his flair for the dramatic right from the start, when his flamboyant mother—"Tallulah Bankhead on a road show"—gave birth to her actor son while in an elevator in Newton, Mass.

His mother never had another child after that experience, he chuckled in later years.

Audiences saw themselves in Lemmon to such an extent that a documentary on his career was called “American’s Everyman.”

But it was his intelligence, intense preparation, improvisational skills, and ability to get along with directors with different working methods that made him a favorite with colleagues as well as audiences, leading to eight Academy Award nominations—and two victories—to go along with two Emmys, Kennedy Center honors, and a lifetime achievement award from the American Film Institute.

I remember when I read the news of his death back in 2001 and feeling stupefied that this actor I had watched since childhood would no longer be making any films. What impressed me especially about his career was how well he moved from primarily comic parts (Mister Roberts, Some Like It Hot) to dramatic ones (Save the Tiger, The China Syndrome). Among today’s actors, I think that only Tom Hanks has handled such a transition so adroitly.

Two films that I saw as pivotal in Lemmon’s career change came in the early Sixties.

With The Apartment (1960), Billy Wilder called on him to make several head-spinning changes from hilarity to near-tragedy, most notably when his drunken Chuck Baxter does the cha-cha as he tosses his jacket onto his bed—only to do a terrified double-take when he realizes that the co-worker he adores is passed out there after swallowing sleeping pills.

Two years later, in Days of Wine and Roses, the humor and charm that Lemmon endows PR man Joe Clay is critical to keeping the audience’s sympathy as he cajoles his wife into taking drinks so he won’t be alone—a decision with leads them on a downward spiral that threatens their marriage and lives.

The actor threw himself so thoroughly into the role that, when Clay experiences the DT’s while in a straitjacket, crew members had to shake the actor to snap him out of his hysterics.

In the 1970s, he made something of a specialty of the middle-aged man at bay—what critic Judith Crist termed a "harassed man — outflanked, outranked and outmaneuvered"—in films like The Out-of-Towners, The Prisoner of Second Avenue, The China Syndrome, and the film that won him his Best Actor Oscar, Save the Tiger.

Some more bits of trivia about Lemmon:

*While deeply affected by what he learned about alcoholism in Days of Wine and Roses, it took him another 20 years before he could quit drinking for good.

*Though he readily admitted, in this 1989 “Desert Island Disk” interview, to never learning to read music, he was an accomplished, self-taught pianist who demonstrated his talent in 10 of his 60 films, as noted in Fred Wasser’s 2011 NPR report.

*Wilder and Lemmon made seven films together, including the director’s last, Buddy Buddy (1981).

*He was often cast with Walter Matthau and even directed him in Kotch (1971).

Quote of the Day (Ward Just, on a Brutal Midcentury Chicago Winter)

“The winter of the year my father carried a gun for his own protection was the coldest on record in Chicago. The winter went on and on, blizzard following blizzard, each day gray with a fierce arctic wind. The canyons of the Loop were deserted, empty as any wasteland, the lake an unquiet pile of ice beyond. Trains failed, water pipes cracked, all northern Illinois was locked in, the air as brittle as a razorblade.”—American novelist and journalist Ward Just (1935-2019), An Unfinished Season (2004)

I came across this passage while hearing the news that a winter storm was coming toward the Northeast, where I live. The description was reassuring to me, in the sense that, even with more snow than we have gotten so far this winter, it’s not remotely like what Chicago has received in the past.

According to the National Weather Service, the coldest winter in Chicago history was 1903-04. However, I wonder if Just took a slight bit of proverbial poetic license in setting this in the McCarthy period in the early 1950s, the better to convey a sense of menace? (The lake is “unquiet,” the air like “a razorblade,” and there's that gun carried by the narrator’s father sticking out in the first sentence of the novel.)

(The accompanying image of Ward Just was taken Sept. 5, 2015 by slowking4.)

TV Quote of the Day (‘The Big Bang Theory,’ As Sheldon Says the Wrong Thing Again)

Sandy [played by Yeardley Smith]: “So, Mister Cooper, you're looking for a job.”

Dr. Sheldon Cooper [played by Jim Parsons]: “A menial job. Like yours.”

Sandy: “Why, thank you for noticing. I'm Menial Employee of the Month.” — The Big Bang Theory, Season 3, Episode 14, “The Einstein Approximation,” original air date Feb. 1, 2010, teleplay by Steven Molaro and Eric Kaplan, directed by Mark Cendrowski

Quote of the Day (Hermann Hesse, on Music, ‘A Continual Consolation’)

“It has been a continual consolation to me and a justification for all life that there is music in the world, that one can at times be deeply moved by rhythms and pervaded by harmonies. Oh, music! A melody occurs to you; you sing it silently, inwardly only; you steep your being in it; it takes possession of all your strength and emotions, and during the time it lives in you, it effaces all that is fortuitous, evil, coarse and sad in you; it brings the world into harmony with you, it makes burdens light and gives wings to the benumbed! The melody of a folk song can do all that. And first of all the harmony! For each pleasing harmony of clearly combined notes, perhaps in one chord, charms and delights the spirit, and the feeling is intensified with each additional note; it can at times fill the heart with joy and make it tremble with bliss as no other sensual pleasure can do.” — Swiss Nobel Prize-winning novelist Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), Gertrude (1910), translated by Hilda Rosner

Quote of the Day (Nicholas Christakis, on COVID-19 Vaccines)

“We were also lucky that highly effective and safe mRNA vaccines emerged so quickly. Covid was the first pandemic in history to feature the development of such a powerful vaccine while the pathogen was still at its outset. The efforts to make a vaccine could just as easily have resulted in abject failure or a very long delay, as with previous vaccine programs. A much higher mortality rate without vaccines would likely have resulted in greater consensus not just for lockdowns and mask mandates but perhaps even for military intervention, as imagined in the movie ‘Contagion.’”— Greek-American sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis, “Four Years Later, Covid Isn’t Done With Us,” The Wall Street Journal, Mar. 9-10, 2024

Five years ago today, a San Jose, Calif., resident became the first COVID-19 death on US soil, though this would not be confirmed until the results of an autopsy were released two months later.

As bad as the scourge of COVID has been in the US—not just to lives lost but also to our psyches, economy, and politics—it would, as Christakis has noted, have been infinitely worse without a vaccine developed so quickly.

Now, despite some pointed questioning and trepidation, the Republican majority on the Senate Finance Committee unanimously approved the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary, making it more likely that he will be confirmed by the full Senate. 

That vote would put in charge of our nation’s health system not just an opponent of vaccine mandates, but an outright skeptic who in May 2021 petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to revoke authorization for COVID vaccines, according to a New York Times report published last week.

The vote also comes when U.S. epidemiologists have been anxiously watching an outbreak of avian flu. 

A prior RFK Jr. statement—that he would pause infectious disease research for “about eight years”—does little to ease concern that he would act quickly to contain a potential future pandemic or would fund medical research that would, like the COVID vaccines, help turn the tide against any avian flu disaster—or indeed, any pandemic that might develop in the future.

If that were to occur, Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill will have an especially great deal to answer for in meekly kowtowing to Donald Trump’s demand that this nominee—like his other unqualified, even dangerous, Cabinet picks—be approved. Among the consequences would be the kind of nightmare scenario outlined above by Christakis.

In the period following World War II, the United States built a consensus for a public-health system that would not be buffeted by the winds of politics. Like so much else in the last decade, that support has become just another casualty in the culture wars. 

The insidious advancement of COVID-19 from pandemic to endemic, and the rise of RFK Jr. to such an important position of authority, are visible signs of how a virus in the body politic is rendering Americans physically sick, too.

(For more information on the challenges that presumptive HHS head Kennedy will face, I urge you to read Amy Baxter’s report this week for PharmaVoice.)

(The image of Nicholas Christakis that accompanies this post was taken by Paul Schnaittacher.)

Quote of the Day (Carson McCullers, on ‘The Most Fatal Thing a Man Can Do’)

“The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.”—American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet Carson McCullers (1917-1967), The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1941)

This Day in Literary History (Death of Psychological Thriller Author Patricia Highsmith)

 

Feb. 4, 1995— Patricia Highsmith, whose psychological thrillers achieved greater sales, critical acclaim, and understanding in Europe than in her native United States, died at age 74 of leukemia in Locarno, Switzerland.

Since her death 30 years ago, however, a virtual cottage industry about her work has sprung up in the U.S., with at least three biographies, and numerous reprints of her books, appearing.

Whatever fame Highsmith gained at home derived from two novels adapted into classic films by Alfred Hitchcock (Strangers on a Train, 1951) and Anthony Minghella (The Talented Mr. Ripley, 1999). Her pigeonholing as a “crime writer” annoyed her because it said nothing about her profound probing of the human heart.

Beneath the placid surface of American life, discontents, even demons, lurked in her fiction. Many of her intimates agree that Highsmith shared many of these—indeed, if she didn’t have writing as an outlet where she could vent these, she feared that she might go insane.

Outsiders, misfits, manipulators, sociopaths—an entire psychological spectrum can be described in Highsmith’s work. On a podcast I listened to today, one of her later friends said she didn’t doubt that Highsmith herself existed on the autistic spectrum.

More specifically, some see the writer as being a high-functioning case of Asperger’s Syndrome. She possessed many unusual traits, including a terrible sense of direction, hypersensitivity to sound and touching, clumsiness, and depression.

Even before she struggled with alcoholism for much of her adult life, Highsmith had to cope with the revelation that her mother tried unsuccessfully to abort her when she was only four years old.

Even though her collected fiction is considerable—22 novels and eight short-story collections—it’s remarkable how certain themes and motifs reappear obsessively:

*fractured or swapped entities;

*murder;

*madness;

*pairs who bring out depths of evil in each other;

*malignant mothers; and

*guilt.

Just as her characters traffic in aliases, Highsmith resorted to pseudonyms. The most famous, “Claire Morgan,” was adopted for the initial publication of her 1952 celebration of lesbian love, The Price of Salt.  

She used others in letters to the editor that were printed in the Herald-Tribune, where she fulminated against Catholics, neighbors, Frenchmen in general and their bureaucrats in particular—and, most problematically, Jews.

Her characters are frequently doubles and alter egos. More chillingly, her narratives feature complicit characters and readers.

Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, With a Terrifying Churchyard Scene)

“ ‘Hold your noise!’ cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. ‘Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!’

“A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.”—English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), Great Expectations (1861)

The other day, while in a coffee shop, I picked up a copy of the Dickens classic and opened it to its second page, with the above passage. Wow!

The description grabs you by the scruff of the neck, not unlike the convict who appears out of nowhere and terrifies young Pip. You can imagine the terror of this orphan who just wants to mourn the family members buried here.

You’re fully expecting a crime story, but this is a novel in which things are not what they seem, and so it is here. Right after the threat in the dialogue, and that sentence about the “fearful man,” we are bombarded with verbs that suggest the vulnerability of this convict named Magwitch: “soaked,” “smothered,” “lamed,” “cut,” “stung,” and “torn.”

It’s no wonder that so much of Dickens’ work has been adapted for film and TV: any director worth his salt has an unforgettable picture to work with here.

(The image accompanying this post comes from David Lean’s magnificent 1946 adaptation of the Dickens novel, with Finlay Currie as Magwitch and Tony Wager as young Pip.)

Quote of the Day (Carl Safina, on February, ‘The Deepest, Sparest Part of Winter’)

“To animals whose food stopped breeding last summer, February makes no promises. For those of us accustomed to supermarket shelves that endlessly get restocked, it may seem like news to remind ourselves that winter is a race against time in a season getting hungrier. February becomes the deepest, sparest part of winter.

“But lengthening days mean the sky is about to draw a deep breath.”—American ecologist, nature writer—and MacArthur “genius” Fellow—Dr. Carl Safina, The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World (2011)

I took the accompanying image four years ago this month in Overpeck County Park, a few miles from where I live in Bergen County, NJ.

TV Quote of the Day (‘Succession,’ on Why Its Very Rich Family Is Different From You and Me)

Shiv Roy [played by Sarah Snook] [to a threatening ATN anchor Mark Ravenhead]: “The thing about us [is] we don't get embarrassed.” —Succession, Season 3, Episode 4, “Lion in the Meadow,” original air date Nov 7, 2021, teleplay by Jesse Armstrong, Jon Brown, and Jamie Carragher, directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini

That is the key to the oligarchy, folks. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of their "vast carelessness," but he might just as well have added, "and shamelessness."

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Therese of Lisieux, on ‘The God of Peace and of Love’)

“Remember…that this sweet Jesus is there in the Tabernacle expressly for you and you alone. Remember that He burns with the desire to enter your heart. Do not listen to Satan. Laugh him to scorn, and go without fear to receive Jesus, the God of peace and of love.”— French Carmelite nun St. Therese of Lisieux (1873-1897), Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of Saint Therese of Lisieux (1898)

Quote of the Day (‘Sully’ Sullenberger, on What We Overlook About Flying)

“We have gotten so used to the convenience and safety of flying that we tend to overlook two things. First, flying is a relatively new human endeavor. Second, people forget that what we’re really doing, ultimately, is pushing an aluminum or a composite tube through the upper reaches of the troposphere or the lower regions of the stratosphere at 80 percent of the speed of sound in a hostile environment—and we must return it safely to the surface every single time. If it were easy, anybody—everybody—could do it.”—Retired Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, hero pilot of US Airways Flight 1549, interviewed by Megan Gambino, “Q and A: Capt. Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger,” Smithsonian, November 2010

Captain Sullenberger’s comment over 14 years ago is useful to keep in mind following the terrible airline collision near Ronald Reagan Airport this past Wednesday. Piloting, as he notes, is not easy. 

What is easy, evidently, is for someone in a high government position to speculate on the causes of the disaster (i.e., DEI and the prior Presidential administration) not only before an investigation began, but even before the black boxes had been recovered to that point.

“Premature” is the most polite adjective to apply to that speculation. I will leave it to others to supply a more blunt, and accurate, one.

(The image accompanying this post of “Sully” was taken on Jan. 24, 2009, a few days after he successfully ditched Flight 1549 into the Hudson River with no loss of life.)

Quote of the Day (Washington Irving, With a Colonial New Yorker Anticipating the Presidential Executive Order)

“No sooner had this bustling little man [Governor Wilhelmus Kieft, or “William the Testy”] been blown by a whiff of fortune into the seat of government, than he called together his council, and delivered a very animated speech on the affairs of the province…. [E]verybody knows what a glorious opportunity a governor, a president, or even an emperor has of drubbing his enemies in his speeches, messages, and bulletins, where he has the talk all on his own side…[H]e at length came to the less important part of his speech, the situation of the province; and here he soon worked himself into a fearful rage against the Yankees, whom he compared to the Gauls who desolated Rome, and the Goths and Vandals who overran the fairest plains of Europe—nor did he forget to mention, in terms of adequate opprobrium, the insolence with which they had encroached upon the territories of New Netherlands, and the unparalleled audacity with which they had commenced the town of New-Plymouth, and planted the onion patches of Weathersfield under the very walls of Fort Good Hope. Having thus artfully wrought up his tale of terror to a climax, he assumed a self-satisfied look, and declared, with a nod of knowing import, that he had taken measures to put a final stop to these encroachments—that he had been obliged to have recourse to a dreadful engine of warfare, lately invented, awful in its effects, but authorized by direful necessity. In a word, he was resolved to conquer the Yankees—by proclamation.”— American fiction writer, biographer and diplomat Washington Irving (1783-1859), A Knickerbocker's History of New York (1809)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Yes, Minister,’ on ‘A Basic Rule of Government’)

Sir Humphrey Appleby [played by Nigel Hawthorne]: “A basic rule of government is never look into anything you don't have to and never set up an inquiry unless you know in advance what its findings will be.”—Yes, Minister, Season 3, Episode 6, “The Whisky Priest,” original air date Dec. 16, 1982, teleplay by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, directed by Peter Whitmore

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Maria Faustina Kowalska, on Mercy)

“All grace flows from mercy, and the last hour abounds with mercy for us. Let no one doubt concerning the goodness of God; even if a person's sins were as dark as night, God's mercy is stronger than our misery. One thing alone is necessary: that the sinner set ajar the door of his heart, be it ever so little, to let in a ray of God's merciful grace, and then God will do the rest.”— Polish Catholic religious sister and mystic St. Maria Faustina Kowalska (1905-1938), Divine Mercy in My Soul: The Diary of St. Maria Faustina Kowalska (1981)

It's funny, how the Gospels talk continually of mercy, and the men and women that Christianity has honored over the years do likewise. Yet so many who hear the words on Sunday refuse to apply it in any way in their lives the rest of the week.

Case in point: The leader whom The Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde urged, in the Washington Prayer Service at the inaugural events, to display compassion for undocumented immigrants and the LGBTQ showed not mercy but his own thin skin. It was a ghastly sight.

Look at this YouTube clip of the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, DC last week. Does her dulcet, pleading tone seem remotely “nasty”?

Does she strike you as “not compelling or smart” (unlike, presumably, her annoyed listener, who once bragged about being “a very stable genius”)? Me neither.

It is rich, this demand that she apologize coming from Donald Trump—who, in his 50 years in the spotlight, has been known to say he was sorry only once, and that when he was in danger of losing the 2016 election following his gleeful comments about groping women on the leaked “Access Hollywood” tape.

Contrast Trump with Mike Pence when a cast member of the Broadway musical Hamilton read a statement saying "We, sir, are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us."

What, you don’t remember what Pence said? Neither did I, so I had to look it up. The then-Veep said he wasn’t offended by the message and that even the boos he endured from audience members didn’t bother him, because they were “what freedom sounds like.”

On the other hand, Trump’s digital thermonuclear thunderclap has set off predictable responses from his followers. 

Congressman Mike Collins of Georgia has even tweeted that Bishop Budde “should be added to the deportation list.” 

On Facebook, an “I’m with her” meme got people I’ve known for years acting most unsocially with each other on the social media platform. 

And Budde has been bombarded with death wishes from people who call themselves Christians.

Judging from the President’s response after he withdrew a security detail from Dr. Anthony Fauci (“Certainly I would not take responsibility”), I don’t anticipate pangs of remorse to fill Trump’s heart about the bishop’s well-being.

I also didn’t presume Trump would act like anything but a kindergarten crybaby when Budde implored him to treat with mercy America’s new marginalized. But I expected more from the nation’s other religious leaders, including, I’m sorry to say, so many in my own Roman Catholic Church.

I’m looking at you, Timothy Cardinal Dolan. I’m disappointed, but not surprised, by your lack of moral backbone.

At the inauguration, the head of New York’s archdiocese asked God to “give our leader wisdom, for he is your servant aware of his own weakness and brevity of life.”

Sorry, but there has been nothing in “our leader,” before his inauguration or in the week and a half since, that remotely suggests he’s “aware of his own weakness.” In fact, one of his favorite putdowns of opponents is that they’re “weak.”

More comically, Cardinal Dolan told Maria Bartiromo before the inauguration that he had talks with Trump “in the past where he’s pretty blunt about, you know, he can’t say that he was raised as a, as a very zealous Christian, but he takes his Christian faith seriously.”

This mealy-mouthed, selective see-no-evil act reached its nadir twice since 2016, involving the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in Midtown Manhattan, a charity event once notable for Presidential candidates in both parties taking a break from political warfare to make comically self-deprecating remarks.

Until Trump, as he so often does, made a shambles of the dinner in his first election bid with a cascade of insults that provoked boos from many in the audience, then delivered another disgraceful performance last autumn.

Nobody could have blamed Cardinal Dolan if he had pulled the tablecloth out from under Trump either time. Instead, he uttered not the slightest word of disapproval, not even an earnest request to leave any spiteful remarks at the door.

The fallout was bad enough to make you wonder if the Smith Dinner had outlived its purpose by devolving into an irredeemable fat-cat forum.

Cardinal Dolan was never shy about criticizing Joe Biden about abortion or the influx of migrants, to name a few issues. But when has he disagreed with Trump about anything?

What is the Cardinal afraid of? The fury of Trump, or the cooled ardor of well-heeled conservative Catholics in the archdiocese?

Silence about Trump’s bullying, of both Budde and those she championed, is by no means universal in the Catholic Church. In fact, a local parish priest, in a sermon I heard earlier this week, indicated, correctly, that there was nothing contrary to Catholic teaching in what she said.

But it matters enormously when the leading Catholic cleric in the world’s media capital fails to defend a fellow person of the cloth who is guilty of nothing but reminding the new President and his followers of the biblical admonition, “Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” (Exodus 22:21)

Leave aside (though you shouldn’t) the verse noting that “as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me.” (Matthew 25:40)

By resorting to another one of his social media tantrums, against a cleric that the mass of Americans hadn’t even heard of before this, Trump was engaging in the same sort of dangerous petulance shown when King Henry II of England screamed, “What miserable drones and traitors have I nurtured and promoted in my household who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric!” (Or, as shortened by posterity: “Will someone rid me of this meddlesome priest?”)

That didn’t end well in Canterbury Cathedral for St. Thomas Becket.

What President before Trump has ever demanded an apology from a religious leader? What President before him has ever misbehaved in the way that led biblical prophets like Daniel, Elijah, Isaiah, and Jeremiah to risk the wrath of their rulers by calling them to account?

Bishop Budde would have been well within her rights to quote Nathan’s denunciation of King David to Trump: “Why did you despise the word of the Lord by doing what is evil in his eyes?” (2 Samuel 12: 9)

Yet she never said a word about how he has broken his marriage vows multiple times, stiffed his company’s creditors, ruined investors, steered government meetings and business to his own properties, ridiculed a reporter with disabilities, mocked the looks of an opposing candidate’s wife, used sensitive information for blackmail and for charitable donations for his own purposes, excused dictators responsible for the deaths of thousands, and promised retribution (now in progress) for anyone who opposed him.

She only asked him to use what he saw as God’s providential rescue of his life after last year’s assassination attempt on behalf of the people who need mercy the most.

Contrary to the charge in his post-sermon tweet that she had “brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way," it was he who meanly dragged the “world of politics” into the church with the opportunistic adoption of right-to-life beliefs he had never held before entering the GOP primaries nine years ago, and by entangling so many in the Christian Nationalism movement in his January 6 plotting.

And it was not Budde who promoted division in a nation that one of Trump’s GOP predecessors, Ronald Reagan, likened to the biblical “city on a hill. 

Look, I get that people, whatever their leanings, don’t want to hear continually about politics from the pulpit. Neither do I, if for no other reason than that there’s no spiritual component to ensuring basic government functions like picking up garbage and delivering the mail.

But this week’s 80^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz reminds us that some political issues are inherently moral; that lasting dishonor accrues to any nation that stigmatizes outsiders; and that the road to the death camps began with seeing others as less than human before proceeding to seizing them in their homes.

I fear that, by not protesting the President’s attempt at winning through intimidation against another spiritual leader, Cardinal Dolan is doing more than simply encouraging an already rampant cynicism among the young about organized religion that, as New York Times opinion writer Jessica Grose recently noted, is “contributing to a more disconnected, careless and cruel society.”

I worry that the Cardinal is silently consenting to outright religious intolerance spurred on by a capricious, vindictive leader who recognizes no limits on his impulses or appetites.

 Already, Trump has taken heart from Dolan’s muted trumpet on behalf of the threatened. A mild statement from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops condemning some of the President’s executive orders relating to immigration elicited a faux-sorrowful insinuation from Vice President J.D. Vance that the Church was more concerned about “their bottom line” than humanitarian concerns. 

The smear—surely cleared in advance with Trump—was so weaselly and egregious that it couldn’t by shrugged off by Dolan, who rightly called the remarks “nasty” and “scurrilous.” (Even in this instance, the Cardinal couldn’t bring himself to blame the truculent corner man who directed the hit below the belt.)

The prelate could have justifiably applied the same adjectives to Trump’s diatribe against Budde.

History will relegate him to the shadows reserved for the timid and temporizing, while it will hail Bishop Budde as following the example of St. Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons:

“If we lived in a state where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us saintly. But since we see that avarice, anger, pride, and stupidity commonly profit far beyond charity, modesty, justice, and thought, perhaps we must stand fast a little—even at the risk of being heroes.”