When Politics Defines, Politics Destroys - The Dehumanizing Of America

The common meme today is that America is a divided country. We are divided every which way, by race, ethnicity, gender, religion and a hundred other sub- and mini-categories. 

It is not enough to simply be - a unique, irreplaceable, irreducible being unlike any other, made up of a special complex of emotions, perceptions, humor, artistry, talent and intelligence - but some additional signature is required.  

Moreover, each category has its ascribed values, assigned by political philosophers.  Being white to some automatically signifies racism, white supremacy, and intolerance. To others in means inheritance of European civilization, heir to Greece and Rome, empire, advanced learning and creativity.  Being black indicates primeval intelligence, the wisdom of the forest, a natural supremacy derived out of tribal instincts, and native evolution since the first homo sapiens. To others it means that this native tribalism is the very cause of perennial social dysfunction in the diaspora. 

Being male or female needs distinction, disaggregation. Regardless of your genetic profile, where do you fit on the gender spectrum?  Given your family history of mixed races and ethnicities, with which do you identify? Are you black or white?

There is another, more pernicious aspects to identity - regardless of who you are, you are judged by your political allegiance. From a liberal perspective, being conservative is grounds for cancellation. No  amount of intelligence, humor, fatherhood, or faith can compensate for your insular, uncharitable, harsh and intolerant individualism. 

Eric Fox and Robert Lake first met when they were twelve, both students at a small country day school.  They liked each other, played together, roughhoused, made pizza, wandered in the woods behind the school, and tracked rabbits and raccoons deep into the Southington mountains. 

They didn't know why they liked each other, and never gave the question a second thought.  Of all the boys in the seventh grade and all the permutations possible, Eric and Robert became friends.  Was it intelligence? Both boys were at the top of the class. Playfulness? Risk? Defiance? All the above?

No one can account for friendship at that age.  There are no easy markers - excelling at mathematical reasoning, sexually adventure, high-end athletic ability, or common social graces.  At twelve, you are simply children, boys of a similar social milieu but not yet with the trappings of commitment, belief, or allegiance. 

Eric and Robert remained friends after country day school, were classmates at Lefferts, one of New England's most recognized preparatory schools, and were residents at the same Yale college. Their lives increasingly diverged - their academic and social interests were quite different, and their career paths went in opposite directions, but they saw each other in the dining hall, on the quad, and at the bookstore. 

After graduation they lost touch - military service, international travel, marriage, children; but they always considered themselves friends. 

College in those days was an apolitical time, and political identity was far from the thoughts of either boy.  If anything they were conservative at heart - both young, attractive, intelligent, and wealthy, and with the early adulthood confidence in their abilities and bright futures.  Yet a number of years later, Eric had a political awakening.  He became angered at the world's inequality, poverty, destitution and the indifference of political elites to do anything about it.  

The black man was still suffering under the yoke of white, segregationist racism, women were still second class citizens, and the country was still ruled by an Eastern urban elite. In short, Eric got religion, a liberal secular version with no less passion and true belief as the real thing. 

Robert never changed from his earlier college conservatism.  He only became more politically articulate and was able to express his foundational belief in individualism and free enterprise in political terms. 

When he and Eric met at a college reunion, Eric wanted to talk politics and was surprised that his friend held none of the same convictions that he did.  How could this be? Eric wondered.  After all they were products of the same social and academic environment.  How could his friend have been so infected, so inalterably intellectually elite, so indifferent to the plight of the many?

After a time, and an increasingly desultory friendship, Eric cancelled his friend.  Political philosophy defines and expresses worldview, he said.  It is what you are no matter what you were.  He could not conceivably be friends with someone who saw the world in such harsh, uncompromising, unsympathetic ways. 

Robert objected.  If they were friends at twelve before politics, society, and environment made any difference and only natural, spontaneous friendship was at play; and if they liked each other then for no other reason than spontaneous affection, then they should always be friends. 

Eric was adamant. There was no such thing as 'natural affinity', only environmental determinism he said, quoting Lacan and Derrida.  We, political animals now in our prime, formed by variables beyond our control but accepting them as definite, cannot revert to some faux idealism of natural law. 

This ending of a friendship for political reasons, this cancellation of a true bond, explains why progressive insistence on identity is so pernicious, denying as it does 'natural law', innocent affinity, and most of all individual character and personality. 

A black man will always be black first and foremost and will always be seen through that racial lens. Identity makes it even harder to know people for who they are - blinders on a horse, enforced vision, categorization without exit. 

Eric spent his years a social justice warrior, a progressive's progressive, an indefatigable reformist until, surprisingly, he changed direction.  There is an old adage - give a liberal enough time and he will always become conservative - that has always held true.  Life and its circumstances have a way of intruding on true belief, and maybe the world is what conservatives have always believed - a Darwinian, competitive territorial enterprise.,

 

That might have been what turned Eric around; but more likely in his later years the boy returned - or rather had never gone away but was only waiting for the right moment to reappear. Eric was back, reverted to essentials, 'givens' as he used to call them in his Ayn Rand days, and he called his friend, Robert. 

A gift of old age, Robert said, one of the few.  Facing the end of one's life, politics no matter how securely held, is not all that important; and it is definitely not the defining quality that determines friendship. 

Both men are much more limited than in years past, and a whole continent now divides them, each on a different coast; but the friendship is anew, and both men thank God for it. 

Memoir Of A White Slave - Years In A Berber Tent Made Her The Perfect American Wife

Mary Putnam was raised in privilege, descendant of the earliest settlers of the New World, builders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, devout Puritans who went on to found the New Haven plantations and important religious settlements in New Jersey.

Isaiah Putnam had been a member of the Davenport expedition, organized in response to what had become according to him 'a flaccid, errant and false expression of Protestant faith'.

One of Yale's colleges is named 'Davenport' after the New England cleric who in addition to settling the lands along Long Island Sound, constructing an important harbor, and making profitable and equally beneficial compacts with the Wampanoags, founded one of the British colony's first institutions of higher learning.

 

Isaiah Putnam was instrumental in all of these initiatives, and passed on this historic legacy to his many children and grandchildren.  Mary Putnam was the last in this storied American line, and proud of it.  She was devotedly patriotic to her heritage, America, and the white European race to which the new republic owed a significant debt. 

Mary was educated well - Miss Porter's and Smith College - and was about to marry a descendant of another important New England family, the Cabots, when she decided that she needed 'space to roam' and settled on a trip through North Africa. 

She had always been fascinated by the nomadic Berber tribes of the region - the essence and epitome of medieval chivalry, a stolid warrior mentality, and a survivalist instinct which enabled them to live for generations far from civilization. 

Warned of Berber/Moorish barbarity - the French were never multiculturally oriented and had always divided the world into civilized and uncivilized, and the Berbers were definitely in the crudest, most elemental category - she was told to stay close to home, but she disregarded this advice, and set off into the Mauritanian desert with little more than an adventurous spirit, considerable naïveté, and a virtuous sense of something better than the confining, limited life she was leading. 

She travelled truck routes at first, no more than appearing and disappearing tracks in the Saharan sands, accompanying half-breeds hauling canned fish, detergent, and beer to remote village shops on the route to Algeria.  She had no plan, no program, no itinerary, so intent was she to let life be and let the desert unfold. 

It was at one of the truck route's most isolated stops that she met a group of Berber nomads whose resources had run low and who, despite their suspicion of foreign influence, had been forced to stop and barter for grain. 

The leader of the troupe, Aderfi Amirzagh was what Mary had always imagined as a Berber prince - tall, elegant, with a marvelously beautiful Semitic face, Islamic beard, and dressed in flowing white robes. 'Come with us', he said, beckoning to the young white woman.  'We will show you the desert'. 

How could this chivalric, proud, beautiful man pose any threat, any danger? And without a second thought, she agreed and rode off with Aderfi and his nomadic brothers.

It wasn't long, of course, until she was invited into Aderfi's tent for tea and conversation, both of which led to proposals and sexual intimacy.

Mary did not refuse or reject these overtures.  This would be her moment in the Arabian Nights, chosen from a harem of dark-eyed beauties to be the consort of the prince. 

She was not disappointed.  Anointed with fragrant oils and in the demi-darkness of wicked lamps, she was taken by her prince in a way she had never been taken before.  It was remarkable, unexpected, a delight she had never expected but always hoped for. 

The caravan went on through the desert along the old trade routes from the Malian salt mines to the Phoenician coast, a long, slow journey by night and early morning and evening, meals of ground millet, camel fat, and roasted goat. 

There was a traditional brotherly camaraderie among those in the troupe, an extension of the generosity and sharing respected in the larger Berber community; and it wasn't long before she had lovers other than her prince who visited her in her tent at night. She submitted willingly, not because of any interest, but out of a sense of belonging.  In Berber society women were owned by men, obliged to do their bidding, cook meals, bear and care for children and be otherwise unseen, and she felt to be one of them. 

As antithetical as this was to the liberal, Christian, European traditions in which she had been brought up, she had incorporated so much of the progressive philosophy that stressed cultural relativity and value that she accepted her new sexual role as valid and unchallenged. 

Looked at from afar, far more independently and dispassionately and through an objective lens, Mary had become a white slave, tethered and bound, a commodity to be shared, traded, and bought and sold. 

Aderfi's troupe encountered another from the oasis of Ouazatte, the affiliated  tribe of al-Aksam and negotiated a trade - the white woman for five camels, a goat, and privileged access to the well at Aman. 

Mary had never expected such a journey, such an immersion in a foreign culture, let alone a slave-owning, misogynistic one such as that of her guardians; but in her innocence and naivete she was complaisant and willing. 

After many such barters, trades, and sales, her troupe ran into the French Foreign Legion, whose lieutenant freed her from captivity, lined up the Tuareg insurgents who had been her captors, and summarily executed them, leaving their corpses to dry and be picked over by carrion birds. 

Returned to America, she felt at a loss.  How could she possibly return to a life in the suburbs, married to and cared for by an accountant, a junior partner, or an investor?  She looked at the subdivision of Fairlawn, New Jersey where Bryce Caitlin, Executive Vice President of Farnworth, Prentice, & Billings intended to move after they were married and was dumbfounded at the nightmarish awfulness of the place. 

Yet she agreed to marry, such was her now well-understood lot in life.  The Berbers had taught her obedience, dutiful obligation, and acceptance; and the lesson remained.  It mattered not whom she married, as long as she was taken care of -  a woman's life, thanks to her weakness, her fertility and her unique reproductive ability, was unidimensional.  All the rest - law partner, anesthesiologist, professor, vice-president - was irrelevant, a confabulated fiction, a progressive fantasy. 

There was only one part of the bargain that could not be abrogated - being taken by a male positivist, a man confident of his authority, command, and sexual potency.  Whether a Tuareg, Bedouin, Arab desert trader, or Wall Street investor, the contract was the same. 

Bryce Caitlin failed on all accounts.  He was the epitome of The New Age man, a considerate, demurring, kind and considerate soul, and so it was that Mary, inheritor of white privilege, Anglo-Saxon honor, and Christian womanhood went back to the desert. 

Bryce and his like were not men but imitations, caricatures, cartoon images.  Male complaisance, feminism, latter day autonomy and feminist chutzpah were chimeras, faux news, irrelevancies. 

Nothing was heard from Mary Putnam after she disappeared into the Sahara, although rumors flew.

No one ever grasped the real reason for her disappearance into desert obscurity.  Few men or women would ever understand how a well-brought up woman of prominence would ever choose a lif among savages, but Mary understood and would never go back.

Donald Trump's Magical Mystery Tour - Hoopla And Confetti, Tears And Flapdoodle

The American Left has never understood Donald Trump and probably never will. From the moment he arrived on the political stage until now, they have been befuddled, gobsmacked, dismayed, and horrified. How could this vaudevillian, this Borscht Belt tummler, this imposter, this fool, this grandmaster of deceit ever have been elected?

 

Twice, they say, they had nominated a true savior - women of weight and substance, import, intelligence and good will - and twice they had been roundly defeated by this circus clown, a man with no depth, a bourgeois nappy, a...

There could be no words to describe the feeling of bilious, vile hatred for the man.  Not only were the hopes of America sent packing, but the interim years of the Biden Administration - four years of fundamental, revolutionary changes for the good - had had no impact.  The idiot was returned to office and was now ruling with a vengeance. 

After so many years of lawfare, screeching howls of misogyny, racism, homophobia and innate bigotry - none of which stuck and only served to add coal to the fire of an already vindictive president - the man was not only still in office but running roughshod over them. 

Wails of misery, torment, and agony were heard up and down Pennsylvania Avenue as liberals forced themselves to walk past the White House, to watch the parade of beautiful blonde young things coming and going, not a black face among them; to hear the blaring horns of triumph playing in the Rose Garden, to see the silhouettes of this unholy cabal of white supremacists strutting from East Wing to West Wing. 

 

'What hath God wrought?', said Bob Muzelle, reverting to his Biblical training never forgotten after years of secularism.  He caught himself too late.  His oath had been uttered and heard by his confreres. However, the man in the Oval Office was indeed an apostasy, a visitation, an unholiness, something deserving of righteous Old Testament wrath. 

When pressed for reasons for this bilious hatred, Bob could only sputter. 'He...this man...this...', he managed without finishing his thought.  It was not only that the question itself was maddening, suggesting there still needed to be justification for liberal criticism, but that the animus within had grown to such proportions that it was unutterable. 

The President had secured the borders, cleared the decks of useless, wasteful government bureaucrats, clotured all debate on the insanity of gender choice, bombed the Iranian nuclear facility to smithereens, rid the Caribbean of a Communist dictator, assisted Israel in its existential time of need, and freed private enterprise from imprisoning taxation, laws, and regulations.   America was regaining status in the world, leading a conservative revolution in Europe, and expressing Machiavellian will and resolve. 

And yet and still, the Left could only shout, 'Racist!' louder and louder with more passion and insistence as though the turning up the volume and shaking like trees in a storm could make a difference.  The Left had nothing in the armory.  Its gunracks, shelves, repositories, hangars, and missile silos were empty.  Gone were the halcyon progressive days of Lafollette, Brandeis, and Gompers, men of principle and intellectual fiber. All that was left of the movement were hollow bellows. 

Meanwhile conservatives were jumping with joy. Finally and at long last, their voices were being heard and finally a real American president, a man like them, was in office.  Trump was indeed middle-brow, a bourgeois man of yachts, mansions, glitz, glamour, and arm candy. The new White House ballroom, the revamped Kennedy Center, the parties, the formal events, the whole atmosphere was all what Americans wanted, what they liked, and what they aspired to. 

 

Yes, his policies mattered and the dismantling of the presumptuous social agenda of the Left was long overdue, but it was his persona which mattered most.  He was a man after their own hearts. 

'But how could they?', asked Bob, still immured within his own progressive redoubt.  So convinced was he of the absolute righteousness of the supremacy of the black man, the essentiality of the gender spectrum, the profound philosophical wisdom of socialism, and the dangers of the warming climate, that anything else was errant, foolhardy, absurd nonsense. 

Conservatives couldn't wait for the latest off-the-cuff remarks from the President, his Borscht Belt, Grossinger's one-liners, his outrageous impressions, his zero tolerance for stupidity, his braggadocio, hilarity, and effusiveness. 

They also loved his machismo - no idle threats, no posturing, no vain saber-rattling.  He just went in and bombed the shit out of Iran's nuclear bunkers, sent a commando unit to capture and remove Maduro and sent warships to the four corners of the globe.  

They admired their man's 'So, sue me' response to the threats of his opponents.  He had earned his chops on the mean real estate streets of New York and nothing intimidated him.  He was willing to go for the jugular at the slightest intimation, play the hardest hardball imaginable, and never lose a wink of sleep because of it. 

 

Donald Trump should be a mystery to no one, and his magical mystery tour - a roundhouse assault on bad government, intellectual chicanery, and liberal idiocy complete with bassoons, banners, festoons, and marching bands - should be no surprise. The fact that America has never had a president like this is no excuse for ignorance.

'What next?', said Bob. 'What possibly could come next?', but that agonizing thought was the halcyon cry of Trump supporters who couldn't wait to see what new, marvelously ingenious initiative would come out of the White House. 

Of course for Bob and his colleagues, it really didn't matter what came next, for they were already instinctively prepared to oppose it, to damn it, and to dismiss it. The solidarity of absolute belief is a thing of wonder.  No reason, no logic, no reflection, no historical context, no philosophical thought can penetrate the perimeter.  Everything is settled science for the progressive.  It is an a priori world of first principles.

For the conservative, life is as it comes. A priori has no meaning or relevance whatsoever.  Life is a perennial wheel of fortune whose only axis is human nature - and that hasn't changed since man came down from the trees.  In the conservative zeitgeist there are no surprises, only delight in seeing what life has next in store. 

'Oh, my God', Bob moaned, again belying his secularism, but the oath was out of his mouth before he knew it.  Things couldn't possibly get any worse, but they did. Every day was a new assault on universal values, goodness, and right behavior. 

Ironically at that very moment a parade crossed in front of his perch in Lafayette Square in front of the White House - phalanx after phalanx of blonde, blue-eyed young women, twirling batons, marching proudly to drums and cymbals, heads held high, breasts thrust forward, all smiling. The rear guard carried American flags, oversized pictures of Trump and placards saying, 'MORE TO COME!'

It was the magical mystery tour parading right before his eyes. The gall of the man! The very idea...but again Bob's voice trailed off in the March wind.  He didn't get it and never would.