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Nov. 9, 2022 - Dinesh D'Souza
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THE FLORIDA MODEL Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep453
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Coming up, the midterm results.
They're pouring in and, well, it hasn't been a red wave.
Probably more like some dark clouds, but dark clouds with a silver lining.
I'll explain and Debbie's going to join me.
We're going to talk about it together.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
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Guys, you might notice a change of background if you're watching the podcast as opposed to listening to it.
And I am in Florida.
Now, I'm here to speak at an event tonight.
Debbie was like, are you sure you want to go to Florida?
Isn't there a hurricane coming to Florida?
It's a tropical storm now, but who knows what it's going to become.
And, you know, Debbie's a little bit of a catastrophist.
So I'm like, I think I'll be okay.
The organizers aren't canceling the event, so I kind of have to be there.
I can't leave 400 people at a dinner without a speaker.
So I made my way last night.
To Florida and here I am in a studio in Orlando.
Debbie's actually at our home studio in Texas.
And a little bit later in the podcast, I'm going to bring her on.
We're going to talk together about some of the things that have been happening in the midterms.
Well, what a day.
What a night it was last night.
And I gotta say, it was a rough night, a bad night, kind of like this tropical storm perhaps.
Not a red wave, really.
But I would say some dark clouds in many ways, but dark clouds with some silver linings.
Now, I don't think this is something where we need to panic or we need to freak out.
But what we do need to do is take a kind of sober, undisguised look at what's happening, make sense of it, not just today, but in the days to come, and think hard about what is the way forward.
What is the right model for conservatism?
For the Republican Party.
And I think we're going to be okay.
Again, if you look at the tone of the media, it's very jubilant.
Oh, the red wave has turned out to be a dud.
It's a red mirage.
This is one of the phrases the Never Trumpers are using.
And the GOP is in serious trouble.
And there is a grain of truth to it.
I don't want to try to sugarcoat what I think was a bad result.
But on the other hand, it was a bad result that had some good parts to it.
So let's start with that.
Let's start with areas where we did pretty well.
And let's start with the simple fact that as of...
Today, tomorrow, and January, of course, which is when power shifts, the Republican Party will have the House.
So that is a very good thing.
I was obviously hoping we would have the House by a bigger margin.
It looks like it's going to be a pretty narrow margin.
Who knows? Just a handful of seats.
But having the House means that you control, and by you here I mean Kevin McCarthy, if he is elected as the Speaker, will control the committees, he will control the legislative agenda, and this means that nothing is really going to go through without Republican sign-off.
Remember that bills begin in the House.
Bills that become laws begin in the House, then they go to the Senate, then they go to the President.
So Biden, if he wants to get anything through from now on, will need to negotiate with McCarthy.
And in many ways, with regard to things that the administration is doing, the House will be alone in a position to sort of hogtie the administration.
And so that's a good thing.
What about the Senate?
Well, as of now, we don't know.
As of now, the Senate hangs in the balance.
It is possible the Democrats will retain their 50-50 majority.
And I say majority because if it is 50-50, then Kamala Harris breaks the tie.
It's possible Republicans will get to 51-50.
It's possible, although I think unlikely, that Democrats will get to 51.
But see, this is not the scenario that we were hoping for.
We were actually hoping for, I think I told Debbie before the votes started coming in, I thought if we got 51, we were doing not so well.
If we got 53, we were doing well.
And if we got 55, this would be a great night.
So you see right here that we are like at the low end of Of Republican expectations.
And of course, at this point, I will be very happy if we just take the Senate by one seat.
Because then you have the House and the Senate.
Now, you don't actually need both to block legislation.
One is sufficient. But there are things that the Senate does exclusively.
So... I don't think this is likely, but let's say, for example, there's a Supreme Court opening in the next two years.
Well, it turns out the House has nothing to do with that.
Biden makes a nomination.
It goes through the Senate.
If it's a Democratic Senate, you can virtually be assured that this nomination will go through.
That will then be very bad because we now have a clear 5-4 and kind of a 6-3 majority, so it will then go to a 5-4 majority, but in some respects we can't even always count on those five votes, so we'll lose the court.
So these are very consequential decisions that are coming out of the midterms.
And we're waiting to see if Adam Laxalt will beat Cortez Masto in Nevada.
We're also waiting to see if Blake Masters can pull it out against Mark Kelly in Arizona.
And it seems like Senate control hangs on the result of those two races.
And, of course, the runoff in Georgia, the very likely runoff in Georgia between Herschel Walker and Raphael Warnock.
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But now, I'm continuing my discussion of the results of the midterms.
Now, we don't have All the results.
And in Arizona, for example, we're waiting to see a very close race, at least close so far, between Carrie Lake for the governorship and Katie Hobbs.
Katie Hobbs has been leading throughout, and there are some people commenting in the media, social media, like, wow, Katie Hobbs is going to pull this off.
Even they seem a little surprised.
Carrie Lake was ahead in the polls.
I don't think that is a done deal.
We're going to watch closely to see.
I'm very hopeful that Carrie Lake will pull it out.
And that's an important race, I mean, personally for me, because of Carrie Lake's embrace of the movie 2000 Mules, and also by the fact that I think she represents the future of the GOP. She has a marvelous ability to communicate.
Her effectiveness in dealing with the media, I mean, I think is second to none.
In that regard, she's in a way even better than DeSantis, even better than Trump.
So we'll see what happens.
That is a race we're kind of waiting on, and I'll be commenting on it as we get the results.
Let me talk about some of the races that we do know about.
Unfortunately, in the sort of races that I thought we might have a good chance, the wins were not our way.
We would need a red wave to have these wins in And so, for example, Washington State.
Tiffany Smiley lost to Patty Murray.
I think had there been a real red wave, she would have won that race in New Hampshire.
Don Bolduc, he lost, and he lost pretty decisively.
This was not a loss by one or two points.
Maggie Hassan. So we have an interesting phenomenon here, which is different than we saw in 2020, and even in 2016, which is the polls.
Overstated how well the Republicans would do.
I don't mean the polls were, quote, biased, but what I mean is the polls predicted incorrectly that Republicans would do better.
These were races that looked to be neck-to-neck, looked like Bolduc and Tiffany Smiley had a real chance, and yet when you look at the numbers, this was a pretty clean win for the Democrats in those areas.
Let me talk a little bit about the Federman race with Oz.
I mean, this is a little bit hard to swallow, I gotta say.
And Federman is just a ridiculous individual.
And the idea that the state of Pennsylvania would vote for this guy...
Is surprising to many people.
I mean, at some level, I guess, looking at it in a different light, you've got to say that Federman's a kind of a genius.
I mean, this is like a guy who should be in the Special Olympics who enters the regular Olympics and wins.
I mean, a guy with one leg who sort of wins the race.
This is unbelievable.
How do you pull this off?
What kind of campaign did he run?
Was it simply that Pennsylvania would not stomach Dr.
Oz? Was he... Was Dr.
Oz too weird and too far out there that they were like, Fetterman, you know, he might be retarded, but he's normal.
He's a normal guy. He wears big, you know, pants that come down below his knees and he looks like he doesn't know what's going on.
And many of us are like that.
So you know what? This is a guy we can identify with.
He's a regular guy. He's going to speak for regular people.
The remarkable thing with Fetterman is that not only did he beat us, and beat us pretty decisively, but he did better than Biden.
Now, that's not saying a whole lot, because with Biden, you've got another guy who's a little clueless, another guy who's not all there.
So with Fetterman and Biden, we seem to be getting a new sort of democratic model of the guy, the demented guy who still nevertheless somehow manages to win an election.
So that was, I think, a surprise.
Because although I thought, look, I was never a fan of Oz.
I was at the Trump rally going back to Pennsylvania.
This was right after 2000 Mules came out.
And, of course, Trump comes out.
The rally goes crazy.
I came out. The rain was pouring down.
The crowd went wild.
And then Oz came out.
Very tepid applause and some boos.
And I mean, this was at the very beginning.
So why would you want to bring forward a candidate from the beginning that does not excite the base at all?
And the base is like, huh?
So the only thing really going for us, I mean, of course, there was his fame as a kind of culture figure and a TV star.
And then it was the sort of the fact that he was ordained by Trump.
And here we have to take seriously Mitch McConnell's warning.
Remember, Mitch McConnell said that this midterm is going to come down to the quality of the candidates.
And I think McConnell was specifically referring to Herschel Walker.
He's specifically referring to Dr.
Oz. And, you know, it's not that these are unaccomplished men.
Herschel Walker is a big star in many ways.
He's got a magnificent career.
He's a man of accomplishment.
So is Oz. By the way, so is Blake Masters in Arizona.
But I think the question that McConnell was raising, and maybe I was a little hard on McConnell at the time, was Are these guys good as candidates?
It's one thing to say some guy's accomplished, but in the case of Herschel Walker, you can have an accomplished guy who has, you know, some skeletons in his closet or a checkered background who's not properly vetted.
And the point is, do you really want that guy to be running statewide when you know there is a, you know, a piranha media that's going to try to bring out everything, that's going to ignore the sins of Warnock, focus on the sins of Walker, Focus on criticizing Oz, doing their best to prop up Fetterman, doing their best to conceal Fetterman's mental problems.
So in this environment, it appears that the Republican sort of room for error is extremely small.
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Debbie and I were just joking a moment ago that since I'm in Florida with a hurricane coming, should I pretend to be buffeted by high winds as I continue to do my commentary?
We were laughing about an episode in which one of these weathermen, who was obviously kind of a drama queen, was acting as if this is an earlier hurricane.
It was flinging him from left to right.
He could barely keep his balance.
And then if you look in the back, you can see some people walking and a kid on a bike.
And they all seemed to be perfectly stable.
So clearly this was an exaggerated account of what the weather was like.
Well, in any event, let's turn back to our...
Reflections, early reflections, or kind of initial reflections on what happened in the midterms.
Look, I mean, I have a real mixture of emotions.
I have a certain sense of trepidation because I'm asking myself, hey, have we lost our country?
Is it the case that the American people don't share our values?
I mean, that is a possibility.
I don't think it is actually, in the end, the possibility that I'm going to go with.
But it's worth putting on the table.
Because at some level, you've got to say, well, don't the voters know that we are in an environment of...
High inflation, high prices, unstable foreign policy, an open border, rising crime rates.
Well, people do know these things, and we know they know because of Biden's approval ratings.
And so this is what makes the midterm result all the more difficult to comprehend and all the more reason why we should not look away from it or play any kind of a game of pretend.
Why? Because although we are going to hold the House We might even hold the Senate.
That's a maybe. And under normal circumstances, you might go, well, that's not bad.
We are advanced.
We are moving forward.
We're blocking their advance.
So our troops are moving ahead.
This was not a setback in that sense, but it was a setback against expectations.
Because given the Biden wreckage, given his low popularity, given the fact that in the midterm, it is known, it is a kind of political truism that in the midterm, the party out of power wins seats. So put all that together, the natural wind, if you will, blowing in our direction in the midterm, add to it the one catastrophe on top of the other produced by Biden.
I mean, this is not exactly an exemplary regime.
The result has to be seen as very bad.
Now, a big silver lining was Hispanics, and Debbie and I will talk about that.
Hispanics coming in at 38 to 40 percent for the GOP. That is something with long-term consequences.
I mention it. I'll pick it up in my discussion with Debbie.
The other thing to notice is that there's a Florida model that DeSantis represents.
DeSantis is Although, in some corners of the media, they're going, well, you know, this shows that the MAGA wing of the party is finished, and DeSantis represents the establishment.
That is just nonsense.
That's not the case. We're actually talking about which MAGA wing of the Republican Party.
In other words, are we talking about the Trump wing?
Are we talking about, does DeSantis represent...
DeSantis came to power in the sort of wake of Trump.
DeSantis is a Trumpster.
Now, he's not Trump. There are differences between DeSantis and Trump, and this is something we're going to have to look at very carefully.
One of the criticisms, and this criticism, by the way, not coming merely from the left, it's really coming also from the right, from Republicans, from our own side, and not just necessarily from RINOs or the Republican establishment.
The question becomes, does Trump have...
Weaknesses, in this case, in recognizing who should be on his side, in recognizing who he should appoint to positions.
Notice that when Trump was president, a number of these people stabbed him in the back.
Didn't he know? Why did he appoint Christopher Wray to the FBI? Why didn't he fire Comey?
And then when Trump picks candidates, why would you pick a guy like Oz?
Why would you pick a guy like Herschel Walker if it is the case that there is all this stuff that people need to know about him?
So these are all the critiques of Trump that are out there.
I think we have to look at them.
And we have to consider that DeSantis has strengths, which is that here is a guy who I think has the Trumpian spirit, has a MAGA vision, but is extremely disciplined.
Now, he doesn't have Trump's charisma.
He's the kind of guy who, he doesn't have that animal magnetism where he walks in the room and all heads turn to DeSantis.
Carrie Lake has more charisma than DeSantis.
So DeSantis is methodical.
He's matter-of-fact, but he's very effective in dealing with the media.
I'm looking at the sort of betting odds.
These are the people who put money on what's going to happen in 2024.
And I see that in the betting odds, and this of course is to be expected, let's remember this is like one day after the midterms, the DeSantis line has now moved to the top.
Trump is now in the middle and Biden is at the bottom.
So in other words, the betting money is that if you were to have the election today, or if you were to put money in what's going to happen in two years, more people are betting that DeSantis will make it across the finish line than Trump.
And interestingly, more people are betting that Republicans will win the presidency over the Democrats.
That is over Biden if Biden chooses to run again.
All of this needs to be fleshed out a lot more.
This is really just my initial take on this.
And when we come back, Debbie's going to join me.
We're going to talk together about where we go from here.
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That number again, 800-246-8751 or go to I'm back and this time joined by Debbie, but not side by side.
That's our usual posture where we sit in the same studio and we are able to chat kind of back and forth.
But as I mentioned, Debbie is at home base.
I am in Orlando, and so we're actually doing this by remote.
It's kind of funny, honey, to see you.
You're on the screen. I'm sure you can see me on the screen.
It's kind of like we're both on some TV channel, and we're talking that way.
Now, I've got to say, and this goes back to 2016, 2020...
We have a slightly different temperament or disposition.
It's probably fair to say that I am in general more optimistic, more hopeful.
I tend to think that things will come out okay.
You tend to look at the doubt side, the dark side, and you expect it.
Yes. You once told me that you think it's a little bit of a psychological protection because then you're not disappointed.
You know, it's almost like you saw it coming, and so it softens the blow.
Talk a little bit first about this, if you will, and then let's apply that to your reaction to the midterms as we know them so far.
Yeah. Well, a good example of this optimism versus pessimism is the fact that when you...
Yesterday, I saw that Nicole was forming into a tropical storm.
And then I've been watching the weather forecast nonstop.
It's going to become Hurricane Nicole today.
And here you go.
You're flying into Orlando.
I text you and I go, honey, they're going to close the airport in Orlando.
You cannot go.
And you're like, honey, I'm already on the plane.
So I'm like, oh my goodness, you're going to witness your first hurricane.
So I was already kind of, you know, the catastrophist there.
So yes, it applies to politics as well, as you know, in 2020.
I mean, honey, before you turn to the midterms, one thing that really makes me laugh is the fact that you actually have an app on your phone where you monitor catastrophic events, including earthquakes, all over the world. And so they're not even things you need to worry about, but you're like...
Honey, take a look. There's a huge earthquake in Guam.
Honey, take a look. There's a sea quake off the Tasmanian coast.
Oh, yeah. A tsunami. I'm like, what kind of...
A tsunami in Sumatra.
A tsunami. Yes, that is true.
I love weather phenomenon, and I also...
It fits with my personality because I'm always looking for something that's major.
But with these hurricanes, someone was saying, oh my gosh, there's so many hurricanes.
Well, ever since I was a kid living in South Texas, I've witnessed many hurricanes and they've been bad.
So for me, it's not about the weather changing or anything like that.
It's cyclical.
Sometimes we get really bad ones, sometimes not so bad, but I've lived through many hurricanes.
So, yeah. Okay, as a pessimist, let's start by me asking you, what do you think was encouraging that you saw coming out of yesterday's results?
So, the encouraging thing was the fact that Florida turned Rubio red.
Okay. Yeah, I get it.
Absolutely. Yes, that was phenomenal.
I was extremely happy to see that Dade County turned red.
When you were talking about the Latino vote, Ron DeSantis won 57% of the Latino vote.
That is a solid vote for a candidate from Latinos.
It's a big swath of the electorate in his reelection because he got a lot more votes.
DeSantis gained among non-Cuban voters.
He won 55% of the Puerto Rican vote.
That had voted for him in 2018, only 34%.
And then among the other Latinos, and I was a little bit surprised that they threw in the Venezuelans with the Mexicans and the Colombians and other Latin Americans.
He only won 50% of the vote.
I would have thought Venezuelans would have voted more like Cubans, but I see that we have a long way to go when it comes to educating the people that have moved from South America, from socialist countries into America, because they do not understand the signs.
In other words, in Venezuela, a lot of people tell me that it happened like a tsunami.
They weren't expecting it.
They never thought that it would become socialist.
And then, you know, the voters were fooled by the socialists, right?
They were fooled by Hugo Chavez.
And I think that that is the same case here.
Because the Democrats have the media, Hispanics tend to believe what they hear.
And because they think that voting for a Democrat is voting for, quote-unquote, democracy, they don't understand what they're voting for.
They don't see the signs, right?
So it's my job, it's our job to educate these people as to what exactly they're voting for, what ideology, in fact, they are voting for.
And I know for a fact that when they moved from Venezuela, and I've talked to many Venezuelans, They don't want socialism.
They reject socialism.
So we have to make a better case that the Democrats stand for socialism and the Republicans stand for freedom.
We have to be able to do that.
Let's pause. When we come back, we'll pick it right up.
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I'm back with Debbie and when we left off, Debbie was talking about the fact that we need to communicate better.
We need to communicate better to South Americans and Venezuelans for sure.
Well, we need to communicate better to Mexican Americans, and we need to communicate better to the American people.
So, I think one thing it's fair to say is that in the midterms, Republicans ran in the expectation that, essentially, pointing to the failures of Biden was sufficient.
Hey, look at crime.
Hey, look at the border.
Hey, look at what you're paying for gas.
And the idea was, he's a bad guy.
We're not going to say anything about ourselves.
We're not Biden.
That's our stance. And this was the Republican kind of message going into the midterms.
Sure, Kevin McCarthy put out a commitment to America, but after he did that, it was almost like it was a one-day event.
No one talked about it ever since.
And so Republicans presented themselves really just as nothing more than the opposite of Biden.
But it looks like as we go toward 2024, we're going to have to have a different approach.
But honey, let's talk a little bit about the...
I mean, you mentioned the Venezuelans and the Cubans.
But of course, in Texas, we deal more with Mexican-Americans.
Your mom is Mexican-American.
Let's talk about some of the South Texas races because I think that Republicans overall appear to have gotten 38 to 40 percent of the Hispanic vote overall.
And that's huge because that bodes very well for Florida, for Texas.
It actually begins to shift the politics of California if it stretches over there.
Let's talk about, I mean, we were disappointed, of course, that Mayra Flores lost.
There was a kind of troika, Mayra Flores, Cassie Garcia, Monica de la Cruz, but we didn't lose all three of those races.
Yes. No, Monica de la Cruz, she won her race.
80,000 votes versus 67,000 votes for Michelle Vallejo, the Democrat.
So she definitely made some headway there and very, very happy about that.
But with Mayra Flores, I think we should encourage Mayra to maybe run again in 24 because, you know, she really only came within 10,000 votes of Vicente Gonzalez.
That is huge in the valley.
What people don't understand is that in the Valley, the Democrats have been an institution for over 150 years.
So the fact that Republicans are even competitive, as competitive as they have been, is huge.
Obviously, we still need to, you know, get it over the top.
And again, I think it comes to education because we have to make the case that faith, family, and freedom are the three things that Republicans can bring to the table in the valley.
As you know, every time we go to the valley, I grew up in the valley from the age of 10.
I saw the poorness of the valley.
When I came from Venezuela, I went to the valley and I thought that I had entered a third world country.
Well, you know, at the age of 56, going back to the valley, it still looks like a third world country.
So we've got to educate the people in the valley and let them know that, you know what, there is a better system down here.
You do not have to keep voting Democrat just because your dad or We're good to go.
Janie Lopez, she beat the Democrat by quite a bit.
She got 69% of the vote versus 30% of the vote, which is huge.
So the Valley, you know, I want to say that it may not have been a red tsunami, but it was definitely a little bit of a red wave down there because, again, you know, Myra didn't lose by that much.
And so there is hope.
Again, I think that just educating the people in the Valley about what they're voting for and why they should vote Republican is a really important thing.
And I think we need to make sure that in the next two years, that is our mantra, honey.
I mean, these changes don't occur in one election or even in two election cycles.
If you look at large changes in American politics, let's look, for example, at blacks who used to vote for the Republican Party in the era of Lincoln all the way till the New Deal.
Blacks began to move over, but it took about three elections before they were solidly in the Democratic camp.
Now the depression, of course, was the accelerator of that event.
When you and I would talk to Ray Gonzalez, who was the previous candidate running as a Republican, basically Ray was running 40-60.
So the Democrat would beat him without campaigning by 20 points.
And that gives you the complexion of what the Valley is really like and what Myra was up against.
She was in a Biden plus 14 or 15 district and she still comes really close.
And that tells me that the, this is sort of like one of those, it's a wave that's gathering strength and what we want to do is nourish it.
Look, if the Republican Party is the party of the working class, if it's the party of increasingly of black men, if it's the party of Hispanics, there's a solid majority there.
Also, Republican ideas and conservative ideas of upward mobility, economic opportunity, a strong and yet prudent foreign policy, Maintaining law and order, standing up for cultural decency and against woke craziness.
This is not a losing agenda, but it's an agenda that has to be articulately presented.
It has to come with a policy agenda.
These are the things that we're actually going to do.
And so while last night was discouraging, not what we had hoped for, for sure, not the red wave that we would have been celebrating, nevertheless, it's a cautionary note that It means we gotta think harder, we need to work smarter, and long term, we're gonna be okay. Hello, I'm Mike Lindell, and I'm excited to announce my original MySlippers are back in stock.
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Guys, it's always good to have a, well, I won't say a diversion from politics.
What I mean is an enlargement of perspective.
We've been really focused in this podcast on the midterms.
We're going to be analyzing those probably for several days, but I don't want to subtract from my ongoing discussion of the Russian writer Mikhail Zoshenko.
Let's remember that Zoshenko's work is relevant to politics in that he's writing sketches and stories about Soviet socialism.
And hey, we might be headed, we are headed it seems in some ways, in that direction.
Now, the story I want to talk about, one of his, actually his most famous, his most popular stories in Soviet Russia, is called The Story of My Illness.
And it begins in kind of a strange way.
Zoshenko basically says, you know, I was asked recently by a magazine, and he names the magazine Crotokil, We're good to go.
And he goes, well, you know, I could write the usual article with a lot of pontifications and a lot of analysis, but he said, I decided to sort of write a comic sketch instead.
He says, now, the comic sketch I'm about to give you, he says, is sort of taken from real reports, but it's imaginary.
In other words, I'm going to talk about an imaginary hospital, and I'm going to describe some imaginary events that happened there.
So right away we have to ask, well, why is Zoshenko engaging in this bizarre narrative device?
Normally, if you have a short story, you just get into the story.
You want to make a comic sketch?
Do it. After all, he's a writer of fiction, so he doesn't have to tell you this is an imaginary hospital.
I think what Zoshenko is doing here is he's basically...
He's creating a very clever narrative device of pretending to be a kind of a journalist while at the same time protecting himself.
He's actually going to describe real things that go on in Soviet hospitals.
But see, he knows that there could be a knock on his door.
Hey, Zoshenko, why are you making Soviet socialism look bad?
Why are you exposing our hospitals as inefficient and horrible?
And then he would say, oh, wait a minute.
I've told you right up front in the story, this is an imaginary comic depiction.
So I'm really just letting my imagination run wild.
So we see here Zoshenko.
Let's remember, this is a guy writing under Soviet control.
This is a guy who can go to jail for one of these stories.
Let's remember, Alexander Solzhenitsyn served eight years for making some negative remarks about Stalin.
And we are talking here about the Lenin era, which was then followed, of course, By the Stalin era.
So, let's dive into this story, which begins, frankly speaking, I would prefer to be ill at home.
So, here's Zabshanko starting off by telling us, you know what, I had to go to the hospital, I went to the hospital, But things didn't work out too well.
I probably should have just stayed home.
So the whole message of the story is right there in the first sentence.
You know what's coming.
You know you're going to get a really almost a horrific depiction.
But in comics, touches of life in a Soviet hospital.
Then he says, they took me to the hospital with typhoid fever.
He says, I was really suffering.
Now, Zoshenko writes a lot about his illnesses.
You get the impression he was a little bit of a hypochondriac.
He's always got some pain, something he's dealing with.
So here he's dealing with typhoid fever.
But when he gets to the hospital, he comes across a sign that is on the side of the hospital.
Drop off your corpses from 3 to 4.
From 3 o'clock to 4 o'clock.
So the hospital has a sign.
There's kind of a large bin or bucket.
And apparently if you have dead bodies, you can't bring them at any time.
It's got to be between 3 and 4.
Drop them off in the bucket right here.
So right away you know you're dealing with a hospital that is nuts.
And then Zoshenko goes, I don't know how the other patients felt about it, but I jumped right to my feet when I read that sign.
And he goes, I was already running a temperature, so I had to kind of feel my head to make sure I wasn't kind of getting worse.
And... And then he says, he goes up to the guy in the hospital and he says, hey, listen, why do you put up signs like this?
This does not make the patients feel good.
Is this really a good idea?
Patients don't find it attractive to read such things.
And the guy behind the counter goes, listen, you're a patient.
The patients we get, they can hardly walk.
They have high fever.
He goes, sometimes there's like steam coming out of their mouth.
He goes, this is not a time for them to be making criticisms of us.
These are people who need something.
We're able to provide it. So, in other words, what he's basically saying is, listen...
You can criticize later.
You're here to be helped.
And so he goes, listen, you need to get checked in.
And so a big large woman appears who then tells Zoshenko, all right, it's time to get you washed up.
Let's go to the bathtub.
And when we come back, we'll follow the adventures of the narrator.
Kind of it's Zoshenko, sick with typhoid fever, now heading inside the Soviet hospital to have a wash.
I'm continuing my discussion of Mikhail Zoshenko's story, the story of my illness.
He's in the hospital, he's being taken to a bathtub, and he's about to plunge into the bathtub when he noticed some kind of motion in the water And a woman emerges out of the bathtub.
She's in the bathtub already.
She's supposedly getting a bath.
And he turns to the nurse and he goes, what the heck?
What's going on? There's somebody already in the bathtub.
And the woman goes, don't pay any attention to her.
She's been here for a while. She gets in and out of the bathtub.
You just basically get in with her.
And so this guy goes, no, no, no.
I'm not going to join her in the bathtub.
What kind of an operation are you running here?
And then the nurse turns to the medical assistant and goes, this is a very unpleasant patient that we have here with us.
He's always complaining.
Nothing is good enough for him.
He doesn't like the sign.
He won't join this woman in the bath.
And then the other guy goes, listen, we are always better off when patients come to us and they're already unconscious.
Why? Because they can't speak.
They can't complain. We can do whatever we want to them and we're not going to be hearing from them.
And then the woman speaks out loud and she goes, take me out of the water.
And so, the woman finally gets out, this guy gets in, but after he comes out, he's then moved to another room, and he's waiting for the doctor, a doctor who supposedly never comes, and slowly he's losing consciousness.
He kind of essentially zones out.
And three days later, he wakes up.
Three days later, he wakes up. He's evidently been in some kind of unconscious state, maybe even a coma.
And he looks at the nurse and he goes, what's going on?
And she goes, man, you have nine lives.
She goes, a lot of people in your condition, they basically die.
But, you know, you've made it.
And that really shows that you're like a cat.
And she says, so you're going to recover from this illness, she goes, but of course I can't speak for other illnesses you may catch from other patients in the hospital.
So in other words, the hospital is overcrowded, lots of other people have problems.
And so the nurse is telling him, look, we've gotten you through this one.
Actually, think about it. They've given him no medicine, no treatment.
He's just basically been there three days.
He's better. But the nurse is like, who knows what else you may catch?
And sure enough, he catches whooping cough.
And the nurse goes, I believe you got this infection from the next wing over.
That's our children's section.
And she goes, sometimes we use the same trays to serve food in this room that we do over there.
So probably you've been eating off of a plate from a child who has whooping cough.
And this is kind of why you came down with it.
And so basically, the patient goes, all right, I've had enough of this.
I need to get out of here.
I need to go home.
And so he makes his way home and he's hoping his wife will see him and be extremely excited that he's returned.
But his wife says this, she goes, you know, I'm a little surprised to see you.
We thought you had died.
So... The wife apparently kind of knows what these hospitals are all about.
And he goes, how did you come to that conclusion that I died?
And the wife goes, well, we actually got an announcement from the hospital which basically said, on receiving this notice, please appear at this appointed time with the body of your husband.
So evidently, either because the hospital is so bad that this happens all the time, or because they're so inefficient that somehow, in error, they have sent a notice to the wife basically saying, bring your husband's body.
And let's remember, don't just bring your husband's body at any time.
Let's remember the sign from the beginning of the story, bring your husband's body between certain designated hours and drop the guy off.
And then the narrator goes on, my wife apparently called the hospital and found out that it was a horrible mistake with the bookkeeping department.
Somebody else, he goes, it was somebody else who kicked the bucket, but they had gotten him mixed up with me.
And again, the colloquiality of that, there was somebody else who kicked the bucket.
This is very much the Zoshenko style.
He's not writing a kind of treatise.
He's not even writing in the kind of high style.
If you read other Soviet writers from the kind of delicacy of Chekhov or Pasternak, Maxim Gorky, Solzhenitsyn...
These are people of sort of, you can see, cultivated literary style, and they take great pride in their elaborate, and you may say kind of almost the high style.
Here it's the low style, and of course the low style very appropriate to comedy.
And so the story concludes with Zoshenko saying, look, you know, this is horrible.
And he says, even though I was better, I didn't have my whooping cough anymore.
So he has gotten over his original ailment and the ailment he caught at the hospital.
He goes, just the whole episode has now left me with hypertension.
So he now has hypertension just because, well, I guess it's a kind of PTSD from what he has been through in the hospital.
And he goes, his wife goes...
Well, you have hypertension.
Maybe you should go to the hospital.
And he goes, no, that's the one place I'm not going.
He goes, I just changed my mind and I didn't go.
And he goes, and this is how the story ends.
And now when I get sick, I stay home.
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