Gen Z on the Job

 One hears tell of the antics of Gen Z from time to time. Those who have the unenviable task of managing that generation in the workplace are invariably pessimistic about their futures. One hates to say it, but if an entire generation is filled with dysfunctional losers, our country is in some serious trouble.

If you are musing about the revival of American industry, you need also consider that we might not have the human capital to effect the recovery.

The New York Post reports the bad news:

Gen Z employees are entitled, too easily offended, lazy and generally unprepared for the workplace — according to their bosses.

The dismal assessment of workers born between 1996 and 2010 comes in a poll of 966 business leaders across the country taken last month by the online education magazine Intelligent.com.

The survey found 75% of execs felt most of the recent college grads they hired were unsuccessful — and 60% said at least some of them had to be fired.

Dare we mention that this represents a colossal failure. Educators have failed children, and, dare we say, parents who are taking their cues from psychologists are also failing. Whatever they think they are teaching, their charges end up being fundamentally dysfunctional.

About 17% of leaders believe Gen Z, who range in age from their teens to about 28, is often “too difficult” to manage, and 39% said they have poor communication skills.

Jessen James, an international entrepreneur, business mentor and speaker, said some Gen Zers struggle to articulate themselves, don’t look you in the eye, and don’t project their voices.

“They lack charisma and personality skills,” he told The Post, adding, “I don’t feel they are in tune with what it takes to impress others.”

One wonders how much of these problems derive from a culture of DEI, where hiring and promotion have less to do with ability, less to do with hard work, and more to do with extraneous factors. If such is the case, young people have been trained to see that good conduct and hard work is not rewarded.

Psychologically, the younger generation is weak and ineffectual, prone to meltdowns and to emotional self-indulgence.

James has seen what he calls “snowflakeism” — some Gen Zers “crumbling” under even a little pressure.

“It’s almost like you have to walk on eggshells around them, being super sensitive when managing them, in case you offend them, upset them, or push them too far,” he said.

Some twentysomethings have even brought a parent with them to job interviews for support.

The first rule of adult behavior: don’t bring your mother to a job interview!

Let’s see. A generation that was brought up on therapeutically correct principles is filled with people who have mental health problems. Could it be that making therapy a way of life is not very therapeutic.

Now, corporate environments have tried to adapt to the new cohort:

Corporate environments and office culture have relaxed in recent years, Nguyen noted, and are viewed differently between generations.

But even with a more laid back office environment, recent college grads don’t dress professionally and don’t use “appropriate” language for work, 19% of those surveyed said.

For those who think that perhaps managers are misperceiving the behaviors of their Gen Z staff, the Post continues:

While some of the beliefs are subjective, others are not, he said, like being on time.

About 20% of respondents said Gen Zers are often late to work, and 15% said they frequently hand assignments in late.

The younger generation is also more likely to use up their sick days than their older colleagues, recent studies have found.

So, managers consider Gen Z to be chronically immature. They have been trying to teach them better social skills and better work habits.

But many bosses are trying to tame the immature hires, even mandating “office etiquette training.”

Fifty-four percent of the company leaders surveyed said they offer the training and many mandate it for new hires — and a quarter of them specifically require it for Gen Z recruits.

Nearly 80% of companies surveyed reported placing at least some of the disappointing hires on “performance improvement plans.”

At the least, they all have high self-esteem.

As for how you develop better work habits, if all else fails consult with me, via StuartSchneiderman@gmail.com. I will be happy to coach you through the process.

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Shakespeare and Psychoanalysis

Get ready for yet another rescue mission. Two distinguished thinkers, the child psychologist Adam Phillips and the literature professor Steven Greenblatt have joined forces in order to rescue Freud.

Clearly the Viennese neurologist needs some serious rescuing. Once a philosopher king of considerable standing, Freud’s work has largely been superseded by recent therapies. But, then again, as the authors point out, Freud never really considered that his dangerous method would work to cure anyone of much of anything.

One might argue, as I certainly would, that Freud’s theorizing represents a series of efforts to explain why his ideas did not work in practice. He eventually arrives at the notion of the death drive, which means that people are so totally driven to destruction that they cannot possibly get well. It feels a bit like Kant’s crooked timber of humanity.

The fault does not lie with Freud and does not lie with his theories. It lies in human nature.

You might have guessed that I have not read the book. I have, however, spent a considerable amount of time with both psychoanalysis and Shakespeare.

I read a review written by one Anna Ballan for the Hedgehog Review, and I find myself agreeing with her sense that the book is largely a theoretical muddle.

Even if psychoanalysis does not cure, serious thinkers consider that literature, that is, Greek tragedy, does.

It is not an accident that Freud read human psychology into the Sophoclean version of the Oedipus story. And we recall that Aristotle explained that tragedy produces a catharsis, an emotional cleanse.

Is this the kind of therapy that Freud was offering? Does it represent a second chance at God only knows what?

To clarify matters, Aristotle argued that tragedy produces a sense of dread, as you identify with the tragic hero and believe that his inevitable downfall can also be yours. But then, you recognize at another moment that you have misidentified and are not going to suffer his fate. You then feel pity for him and feel a sense of relief.

This represents an emotional catharsis, and if you would like to think that it represents a good feeling, the one thing it does not do is to show you what you should do to improve how you function in the world. At best, you have learned not to consider yourself a tragic hero or to dread your fate.

Rather than blame it on some self-destructive instinct, we would do better to understand that Freud made a fundamental mistake in thinking that life was a Greek tragedy.

Life is not a Greek tragedy. You will not be finding any real advantage to thinking that it is. Cleansing your emotions will not improve your ability to play the game of life. It does not really suit the notion of second chances. As it happens, the notion of second chances animates the Phillips and Greenblatt opus.

That Freud was full of himself, like a tragic hero, seems easy to grasp.

Now, art creates alternative realities. The authors suggest that art gives us the chance to recover what has been lost. It is a second chance. Apparently, they believe that psychoanalysis is about recovering your lost childhood. It is no longer Sophocles; it is Proust.

Dare I say that this does not make a lot of sense. Consider this possibility. Take a real event, not a fiction. Take the student protests that filled Tiananmen Square in May and June of 1989. Without tormenting ourselves inordinately about the actions taken by Chinese leaders back then, let us imagine that you were to ask why they did not simply allow the student protests to peter out. Why did they think it necessary to intervene with tanks and snipers?

We will happily ignore all of the other problems that these protests were producing in China. And we will remark that the nation’s leaders had been there and done that before. Deng Xiaoping especially had seen student protests in Tiananmen Square turn into a cultural revolution that had just about destroyed the nation.

And let us imagine, without doing too much historical research, that when the student protests broke out in the 1960s, leaders of the Politburo, including Deng himself, chose to do nothing, to let them peter out.

Ask yourself how that one worked out? 

It might well have appeared to the Chinese leadership in 1989 that another Cultural Revolution was in the offing. And perhaps they believed that they were being given a second chance, to get right this time what they got wrong the last time. That meant, they did not want to repeat the same error and let the movement take its course, but that they had to crush it before it crushed them.

To take the question of second chances in Shakespearean terms, in something that I assume the authors wrote about, Hamlet is a fine example of someone who gets a second chance to do what he ought to have done the first time. But, then again, are we certain that he ought to have done it?

After failing to murder his uncle when said uncle was praying, Hamlet struck out in a fury at someone who was hiding behind an arras in his mother’s chamber. It turned out to be Polonius, but the prince did not miss his second chance.

Finally, Hamlet did murder his uncle, not when he had a second chance but when he was dying himself. It was his last chance.

Unfortunately, it is not really about second or third chances. Hamlet’s problem is quite simple-- how does he know that his father was really his father. His uncle, upon taking the throne, names him as heir. Why did his supposed father not do the same, unless there was some doubt about whether he was really his father.

Of course, we are here in the realm of action, not of emotion or feeling.

Apparently, the authors believe that therapy must involve recovering the past, having a second chance at childhood. This feels, to say the least, like a good way to avoid current responsibilities in favor of wallowing in nostalgia. 

Do you really think that this kind of indulgence is going to make you a better chess player or a better marketing executive? Surely, it will make you a very good psychoanalytic patient and will console you as you see that you are not getting any better.

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Saturday Miscellany

First, was the great debate rigged? After all, it was conducted by Democratic Party partisans, at a network whose manager of news operations is a personal friend of Kamala, and where one of the two so-called journalists was a sorority sister of Kamala.

Now, Mark Penn, whose words have more credence since he is anything but a MAGA Republican, offers this, via Collin Rugg:

JUST IN: Former top Clinton adviser calls for an internal probe of ABC for rigging the debate against Trump. Former adviser to Bill & Hillary Clinton Mark Penn says ABC needs to launch an investigation to search for an effort of "rigging the outcome" of the debate. "I actually think they should do a full internal investigation, hire an outside law firm. I don't know how much of this was planned in advance," Penn said to @jsolomonReports. "I don't know what they told the Harris campaign." "I think the day after, suspicion here is really quite high, and I think a review of all their internal texts and emails really should be done by an independent party to find out to what extent they were planning on, in effect, you know, fact-checking just one candidate and in effect, rigging the outcome of this debate." "I think the situation demands nothing less than that."

Second, on the other side, the simple fact that Kamala could not answer the first question that David Muir asked her, namely, whether the nation was better off now than it was four years ago.

Third, everyone has noticed that Donald Trump was angry throughout the debate. No one seems to have noticed that Kamala was monumentally rude. She was making faces when Trump spoke. It was designed to get him riled up, but in truth it showed a very serious lack of decorum. It was theatrical and offensive. As several people have noticed, you do not negotiate with world leaders by making faces to insult them.

This does not mean that Trump knew how to deal with it. He did not.

Then again, the last time Kamala was sent to negotiate a foreign policy, in Munich, with the Russian army massing on the border of Ukraine, she failed miserably. Three days after Munich the Russian army entered Ukraine.

Fourth, meanwhile the mayor of Springfield, Ohio has denied that people in his city are eating cats and dogs. And yet, a woman in Canton, Ohio, nearly two hundred miles from Springfield, was filmed eating a cat, with fur on her lips.

In the meantime, I have been somewhat surprised that, what with all the talk about eating cats-- which does happen in some cultures-- no one has remarked that there is another word for cats, a word that has a more risque connotation. Naturally, I will spare you the mention of the specific word, because it would sorely offend the local feminists, but I am sure you can guess what it is.

Fifth, pets aside, the influx of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio has produced a spike in automobile accidents.

The New York Post reports:

Forget about the ducks and geese allegedly disappearing from public parks. In this beleaguered city, residents say the biggest problem, by far, is that wild-driving Haitian migrants — unfamiliar with US road laws — are turning the streets into combat zones.

And the result can be deadly. The family of Springfield grandma Kathy Heaton experienced this firsthand on Dec. 1 — a day after her 71st birthday — when a Haitian migrant ran her down while she was collecting her garbage cans.

And the driver got off scot-free.

Sixth, we were assured, by none other than David Muir, that violent crime has been decreasing under the Biden presidency.

It is not true. The New York Post reports on the most recent numbers, from the government:

Violent crime has increased under the Harris-Biden administration, according to data from the Department of Justice published Friday — belying ABC News debate moderator David Muir’s correction of Donald Trump during his showdown with Kamala Harris Tuesday night.

The DOJ’s survey from the Bureau of Justice statistics is self-reported instances of violent crime over the last six months — meaning that it includes crimes that may not have been reported to police.

The annual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) showed total instances of reported violent crime — including rape, robbery and aggravated assault — is up from 5.6 per 1,000 in 2020 to 8.7 per 1,000 in 2023.

The highest recent rate of violent crime was in 2022, when the survey tracked 9.8 instances per 1,000 people over the age of 12.

The rate of rape increased from 1.2 per 1,000 in 2020 to 1.7 in 2023, while robbery went from 1.6 per 1,000 in 2020 to 2.6 per 1,000 in 2023, and aggravated assault rose from 2.9 per 1,000 in 2020 to 4.5 per 1,000 in 2023.

It looks like we need to fact check the fact checkers.

Seventh, DefiantLs Twitter account offers this high concept summary of the current presidential election:

I read this somewhere and couldn't be more true If Trump was going to destroy America, he would have done it in his first term. If Kamala Harris was going to help America, she would have done at least something these past 3.5 years.

Eighth, at one crucial moment in the debate Donald Trump declared that Kamala was in favor of sex change operations for illegal migrants.

The left nearly went berserk. It was such a stupid idea that everyone assumed that he was making it up. Funny thing, he was not making it up. She approved of the policy in a questionnaire offered by the ACLU in 2019.

Nellie Bowles reports for the Free Press:

One interesting turn is that some of the wackiest progressive policies, policies that Kamala Harris heartily endorsed in a more exciting era, now come across as crazy and bizarre to even ask about. When Trump said that Kamala Harris “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison,” he was saying something that is quite literally true (here’s the CNN story on that exact position of hers). But it sounds crazy. And Kamala reacted as if it was crazy (“What is he talking about?” she said, smiling toward the audience). 

Trans aliens became a meme with BuzzFeed’s headline: “Donald Trump Might Have Said One Of The Most Baffling Things Of His Career In The Debate, And The Internet Is Having A Field Day.” But. . . but. . . she did support that! No, the media says now; no, she did not. Here’s the stately New Yorker with their political analysis of the debate: “His line about how the Vice-President ‘wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison’ was pretty memorable, too. What the hell was he talking about?” We have all been normal moderates all this time, silly goose. What are you even talking about? <Hides the incarcerated and medically transitioned illegal aliens under the bed>

So, serious media outlets were fooled, for not accepting how radical sister Kamala really is. And for not fact checking.

Ninth, extra credit for Gov. Tim Walz for having coined the Freudian slip of the week. It does not require interpretation. He said:

As a young prostitutor, Kamala Harris talked about going in that courtroom for the first time….

Tenth, nuclear energy might very well be our future. The problem is, our academic institutions are not producing anywhere near enough nuclear engineers to do the job.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Demand for nuclear energy is rising fast. Whether there are enough new recruits to keep the industry humming is another question.

Between 2012 and 2022, the number of students graduating with bachelor’s degrees in nuclear engineering in the U.S. fell by 25%, according to the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, with the class of 2022 seeing only 454 students graduate with a degree in the field. 

At the same time, the nuclear industry is facing a maturing workforce, with 17% of workers in the industry over the age of 55 and 60% aged between 30 and 54, according to the 2024 U.S. Energy and Employment report. The report also highlighted that 23% of workers were aged under 30, compared with 29% for other energy workers. 

Eleventh, some people are not at all disturbed by the fact that the moderators at the presidential debate did not fact check Kamala Harris.

To which, Joe Concha has replied, with a list of the lies that Harris was trafficking.

Harris said Trump supports Project 2025 (he denounced it)

Harris said Trump wants a national abortion ban (he doesn't)

Harris said Trump wants to ban IVF (quite the opposite) 

Harris claimed Trump warned of a bloodbath if not elected (talking about the auto industry and EV mandates) 

Biden-Harris inherited a bad economy (GDP 4.1%, Inflation 1.4% in Jan 2021 as economy was recovering from the pandemic)

Harris said in 2020 she supports fracking (no transcript of her saying that)

Harris said she'll never take away your guns (she's on video in 2020 advocating a gun confiscation program)

She said there's no American soldiers in war zones (we had troops killed in the Red Sea by Iranian proxies this year).

She said the Trump tax cuts only helped the wealthy (not true). 

She repeated the Charlottesville very fine people hoax (debunked by Snopes and others)

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Odelia's Case Fiction Concludes

Now, the conclusion to Odelia’s case fiction. The first two parts were published on the past two Fridays.

Three months into treatment, one day the name Titus popped out of Odelia’s mouth. As soon as he heard it Percival’s mind began flashing yellow warning lights. The savvy coach had long suspected that he could intuit a significant relationship merely be hearing a client pronounce a name. When he heard the name Titus, he imagined that she was in danger. 

Odelia saw Percival’s expression and noted that Titus was merely a friend. He was not her type, but she enjoyed talking about opera with him. She was somewhat taken aback by Percival’s anxiety, but she considered this friendship a sign of moral progress.

Odelia and Titus had literally bumped into each other during the intermission of Otello. Both were thrilled with the singing but were somewhat critical of the ponderous production. His opening line had been: “It’s better if you close your eyes.” 

Odelia conversed easily with this dapper rogue, who sported a bizarre Southern accent. They chatted amiably and then returned to their seats. Odelia was pleased with herself for having had a brief conversation and for not being tempted to take it much further. She did not bother to mention it to Percival.’

Two weeks later Odelia was attending a benefit dinner for patrons of the Met, when, suddenly, Titus eased himself into the empty chair beside her. Mildly shocked by his presence, she expressed a bittersweet surprise when she recognized who it was. Titus began expounding about his love of opera and Odelia was impressed by his fine sensibility. The more she listened the more she was intrigued by this emigre Texan.

In a world of go-getters Titus was a man of leisure. Heir to an oil fortune he disposed of seemingly unlimited resources and had dedicated himself to enjoying life. Awash in friends whom he wined and dined with typically Texas bravado, he had seduced and abandoned a myriad of young beauties. He knew how to please women and Odelia was quickly mesmerized by his charm.

Eventually, Titus invited her to a pre-Rigoletto dinner and she quickly accepted. Of course, his remarks oozed superficiality but Odelia was too charmed to notice. The more he kept a sage distance from her the more she wanted him to touch her. He never expressed any romantic interest, but she felt increasingly disarmed. His presence seemed to transform her into a school girl, and she began dreaming of herself ensconced in a garden of delights with her ever-attentive Titus. She was enraptured. She was too embarrassed to explain it all to Percival. 

Odelia was not unconscious of the danger she was facing. She decided to work it out at successive LA meetings. There a fellow addict warned her sternly: “If this man asks you to walk naked across the stage of the Met, you will do it without thinking.” Her sponsor Gwynn understood well the power of temptation, and saw Odelia turning into a glob of jelly. Gwynn felt obliged to warn Odelia about this clear and present danger, and reminded her that falling in love would be like falling off a cliff.

For his part Percival found the prohibitions excessive, but he knew that few women could consign themselves to a life without love. He feared that he had released her from the tyranny of her father’s dictates to offer her up as a sacrifice to some lothario. 

So Percival proposed an exercise. “Let us imagine,” he said, that you become romantically involved with titus. What are the possible outcomes? Will you run off to Tahiti to collect fallen coconuts or will you continue your work with your father’s company?Unfortunately, his past history suggests that after he scores a conquest he disappears into the long good night.”

He should have kept these thoughts to himself. As she listened to him, Odelia was becoming increasingly enraged. She blurted out: “You are trying to control me. You want to normalize me, to teach me to settle for domestic servitude. I know what I feel and I am not going to deny my feelings. I am going to do what I want as I want, and if you don’t like it, I will happily go elsewhere.”

Percival apologized and decided to let it all work itself out. There is no harm in being cautious, especially for someone who is ready to throw caution to the proverbial winds. 

By good fortune, he soon had a powerful ally, Odelia’s mother. This woman was delighted to have been developing a relationship with her daughter. The women had been having lunch and going shopping, on various occasions. 

Still, Odelia’s mother understood that expressions of disapproval might well cause her daughter to become incautious. So she devised a plan. She would provide her daughter with another eligible suitor. So she arranged a chance encounter between her daughter and her friend Hermione’s son, Clarence.

One day when Odelia was negotiating the cost of replacing copper pipes in a building on John Street, her cell phone rang. When she answered she heard her mother’s voice in something of a panic. She was supposed to throw a cocktail party that evening to raise money for Meals on Wheels. But, she was feeling unwell. Could Odelia come over to set up the party and perhaps act as co-hostess. 

As a rule Odelia never attended such functions. She found her parents’ friends tedious and was too busy to indulge such frivolity. But she could hardly refuse an urgent request from a mother who had recently become a good friend.

So, Hermione also invited her son to come to the party. Perhaps the two young people would meet by chance. It was hard to imagine a more transparent ploy, but times were difficult and their children were not to be trusted to their own devices.

So, the party was proceeding apace when Hermione marched through the door with her nondescript son, Clarence, the cotton exchange lawyer.

Odelia felt a wave of genuine disinterest wash through her spirit. Clearly, he was not her type. He seemed more drawn to charts and graphs than to human beings. Odelia decided that she could at least be polite.

Clarence felt otherwise. Within minutes of being introduced to Odelia, Clarence was smitten. His eyes were aglow with longing, almost as though he had never seen a woman before. This started making Odelia uncomfortable. Being courteous to her mother’s friend’s son was going to require no small expenditure of effort. On a couple of occasions she tried to extricate herself from his boring conversation, only to find that he was following her around like a drooling puppy dog. When, at the end of the evening,  Clarence asked for her phone number, she felt obliged to hand it over.

Percival listened attentively to this story, and was thinking that Clarence would, at the least, quickly lose interest and dump her. And he considered that the young man obviously had very little experience with women, something that he did not consider a flaw.

Odelia was not impressed. She came back at him, explaining that she had recently had her first kiss with Titus, and that the feeling was close to divine.

Four months of consultations had yielded a crisis. Percival was almost out of ideas. So, he tried something else. He pointed out that the man who played a woman’s feelings with the greatest skill, who drives her to the height of ecstasy, who makes her feel thoroughly desired, is likely a Don Juan, someone who cares very little for her. Odelia was being set up for a fall, and not merely for falling in love.

The problem is going to be, he continued, that Titus is a social parasite. He does nothing. He has accomplished nothing of consequence. When Odelia introduces him to the men she associated with in her business, they will see it immediately and treat him with haughty disdain. And that is before he starts feeling threatened by his wife’s accomplishments. 

Odelia was having none of it. She was tired of the Puritanism of the LA movement and was not going to ignore the murmurings in her loins because someone had told her that it might be dangerous.

So, Percival was almost out of arguments. He saw that he was not going to dissuade his client, so he asked her to give poor hapless Clarence a chance also. No harm would be done by having a dinner date with him, 

Percival believed in balance, especially in emotional balance. He dreaded the possibility that Odelia would find herself facing a choice between Titus and nothing. And he was thinking that Titus would most assuredly disappoint, while Clarence might surprise her.

Then Odelia accepted an invitation to have dinner with Titus, at his apartment, with him cooking. The course of the evening was clear and Odelia accepted willingly. There’s only so much deprivation a girl can  tolerate.

Percival was frankly anxious. A man like Titus would have been avid before his ultimate conquest, only to become withdrawn and sullen in the aftermath. 

As expected Odelia arrived at her next consultation aglow. Her enthusiasm for her romantic evening with Titus was, to put it mildly, excessive. Everything was magical. They had fallen into each other’s arms, torn each other’s clothes off and had made love twice before they started on dinner. She felt that they were enacting the opera about Tristan and Isolde.

It sounded very good, but the ever cynical Percival remarked that Tristan and Isolde did not have a happy ending. To which Odelia took offense, reasonably.

When Odelia returned home her telephone rang. It was the hapless Clarence, calling to confirm their date for the evening. This made Odelia recall that she had actually agreed to this new way to waste time. And yet, unlike many members of her generation, she had a rank aversion to last minute cancellations, so she caught a quick nap, and sang her way through a shower imagining that Titus was there with her.

And yet, she half expected that she would be meeting Titus at the Ocean Grill and was more than slightly disappointed to see Clarence. She did not know what to say, but she recalled Percival’s advice, to the effect that the man had succeeded at his work and therefore must have something interesting to say.

By the time they had emptied their first bottle of Montrachet, Odelia found herself engaged in an animated conversation about their mothers. Not the most prepossessing subject, but Clarence was showing a liveliness, a sardonic sense of humor that she would never have expected. She found herself laughing at his jokes and was pleased with herself for having turned the evening into something that was anything but boring.

In the meantime Odelia was becoming more and more distracted at work. Her father noticed and was not especially happy about it. He found his dream crashing around him. Perhaps his daughter would find something other than real estate to occupy her mind.

So, he concocted another, not entirely unreasonable plan. He could take his company public, sell enough of his own shares to finance a foundation and install Odelia as its chief executive. Somehow or other he saw that real estate was not entirely his daughter’s strong suit.

In the meantime the relationship with Titus was undergoing wild gyrations. Unsurprisingly. The couple was experiencing occasional moments of ecstatic bliss, balanced by times when titus was simply unavailable. Titus was a dream lover, but, otherwise, he was notably inconstant. For a man whose time was entirely his own, he was often busy and preoccupied. Sometimes he would flood her with amorous emails and flowers. At other times he would forget to contact her for days on end. They found wonderful activities to share, but increasingly they had less and less to say to each other. Titus was disengaged with life in the big city, and this was not to Odelia’s liking.

In the meantime Odelia had met Titus’s sister and brother-in-law, visiting New York on a shopping expedition. While she liked them well enough she felt mildly alienated from them. In brief, they were not her kind of people. Worse yet, they were wanting to have their brother relocate to Texas, a prospect that sent chills up Odelia’ spine.

The ever-zealous Clarence was never in the game. Odelia went on several dates with him, and she noticed that he was more comfortable with her. He was more self-confident, almost charming, more garrulous and even amusing. But then, when he found out about Titus, his ardor dampened considerably. He decided to fold his hand and to withdraw from the fray. 

How well did Odelia survive her inevitable break up from Titus? Better than might be expected. If it counts for anything, her emotional turmoil did not produce another nervous breakdown. And, strangely enough, having her mother’s support sustained her in this time of trouble.

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What Happened to Tucker Carlson?

I have, on a couple of occasions, drawn your attention to Tucker Carlson’s regrettable interview with a Nazi apologist named Daryl Cooper. Considering how many followers Carlson has, Republican candidates will be having a problem deciding whether or not to associate with him. 

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal editorial page offered its judgment about Carlson and Cooper. Considering that its views were the same as mine, I am happy to pass them along to you.

Of course, it is not merely that Carlson invited Cooper to expound on his podcast. Carlson vouched for Cooper as a popular historian. 

The Journal explained:

Mr. Carlson presented Mr. Cooper to his millions of Twitter followers as an “honest popular historian,” but he’s closer to a crackpot.

What does Cooper argue?

Mr. Cooper claims Churchill is the real villain of World War II because he opposed Adolf Hitler’s march through Europe. He also offered Mr. Carlson’s audience a novel theory about the Nazi slaughter of six million European Jews, which he attributes to an unfortunate miscalculation.

The Nazis “launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners . . . . They went in with no plan for that and just threw these people into camps,” Mr. Cooper said. As a result, “millions of people ended up dead there.”

Yes, the Waffen-SS officers didn’t know what to do with all those people with yellow Stars of David they had rounded up. So they settled on putting them on railroad cars and sending them off to the gas chamber. That was some dilemma Himmler and Eichmann faced. This is Holocaust rationalization, if not denial, and no commentator should give it air time.

True enough and fair enough. No serious commentator should give it air time.

Now Carlson has been defending himself on the grounds that he likes to give space to unpopular ideas. And yet, we are not dealing with an unpopular idea. But this is Holocaust rationalization, and it is not merely unpopular. It is dangerous, the Journal suggests, because the young and the naive might believe it.

And, besides. The American and the international political left has recently been embracing anti-Israeli anti-Semitism. 

It’s all the more worrisome given the outbreak of antisemitism on the American left. Anti-Israel protesters, including some in Congress, are trucking in slogans that treat Jews as oppressors and call for the destruction of the Jewish state. The Nazis also believed and promoted anti-Jewish conspiracies. American conservatives should be a bulwark against this ethnic hatred.

Now Carlson is complaining that he is being canceled. To which the Journal responds that people are rebutting his ideas, not canceling him.

For example:

It’s also a strange conservatism that runs Churchill out of its pantheon. As the Churchill biographer and historian Andrew Roberts has explained, blaming him because Britain went to war after Hitler invaded Poland gets the history egregiously wrong. Churchill wasn’t even Prime Minister yet and Britain had a defense pact with Warsaw. Churchill is one of the great leaders in Western democratic history.

And finally, to echo a point I have made:

But JD Vance and Donald Trump should be aware that the more Mr. Carlson traffics in nutty falsehoods, the more they will be asked about their association. Voters will make their decisions for many reasons, but one of them will be the political company they keep.

The issue is currently lying dormant. But, most assuredly it will come up in the course of the campaign. It will most especially come up if JD Vance sits down for an interview with Tucker Carlson.

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