Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary - The Taming Of A Shrewish Woman

Mary Potter had always been a difficult child.  Her parents, always trying to look on the good side, repeated Longfellow's famous poem:

There was a little girl,

            Who had a little curl,

Right in the middle of her forehead.

            When she was good,

            She was very good indeed,

But when she was bad she was horrid.

 

It wasn't that the little girl had a mean streak, something hateful and malicious.  It was just that she was  obstinate.  One day she sat on the bottom of the stairs screaming at the top of her lungs, finding the demand to go to her room wrong and insulting.

She howled and howled until her face was a red fireball, her blouse wet with spit, snot, and tears. Anguished, misunderstood, put upon, and as angry as a wolverine, she finally turned, ran up the stairs to her room. 

Everything was quiet.  The maelstrom was no more.  The tempest had played itself out, and when Mr. and Mrs. Potter went up to her room to offer their love and consolation, they saw her on the floor, slowly ripping the pages out of a first edition Robert Louis Stevenson A Child's Garden of Verses, a precious book put on her bedside table to be read to her every night.  A special book, a meaningful book, poems about innocence, fragrance, and simply beauty - now in shreds on the floor, ripped to pieces by the horrid Mary. 

 

She couldn't have been more than two, and her tantrums had always been dismissed as 'the terrible twos', but this was in a different category altogether.  A two-year-old's tantrums are wild, incontrollable, inchoate affairs without focus, determination, or purpose. They are personal cyclones of anger; but this act of deliberate, conscionable, purposeful, directed rage was adult in nature.  The little Potter girl was composed of something unexpectedly well beyond her age. 

At the same time, Mary was a very loving, considerate little girl.  It was just 'umbrage' as her father called it, a hyper-sensitive sense of personal affront, and righteousness that set her off. Put to bed before she was tired was an affront, an intrusion.  How could they know what was going on in her body, her circadian rhythms, her biological clock?  Didn't they know that forcing her to drink milk with her vinegary salad churned her stomach, acid and alkali mixing in a witch's brew?  Layering her up against the cold, stuffing her like a rag doll, sending her to school like an Eskimo girl all bound up in fur and sealskin was demeaning.

'I hope she grows out of it' said Marfa Potter to her ever-patient husband, 'or she will have a tough time in life.'

Mrs. Potter knew that the world was filled with abutments, barricades, and impassable chasms - she herself had faced every manner of adversity in a man's world and had to learn how to evade, avoid, and negotiate her way around them.  Frontal attack was no way for a woman to succeed, and although the new age in which her daughter was growing up was far more accommodating to women, a shrewish one would still have a hard time. 

Mary met her match in Sister Marie Joseph, her Catechism teacher.  These were the days long after the black-habited, rosary bead clacking, scary nuns of her mother's generation, but Sister Marie Joseph had lost none of spinsterish, child annoyance of the previous generation. Children were necessary to God's Creation, penitential trials to all parents, and destined to grow up as godless adults unless discipline and irrevocable faith were instilled in them at a very early age. 

'Don't you dare talk like that to me', Sister Marie Joseph said to Mary Potter six inches from her face, towering over her in the front row of the Catechism room, almost spitting at this vile, presumptuous, unpleasant girl beneath her. 

Mary squirmed and fidgeted at the nun's twisted, maniacal face.  She had met her match, and after that episode was as perfectly composed and respectful as all the other students in the class. 

To assume that Mary had learned her lesson would be a gross underestimation of the natural belligerence and self-righteousness of the girl - a character trait that came neither from mother or father, had been bestowed upon her by some quirk in the genetic chain of family history.  'My Great Aunt Betty was considered a shrewish woman', Marfa Potter said. 'There's no accounting for the twists and turns of ancestry.'

Cold comfort Arthur Potter thought.  Whatever strands of the old lady's DNA got tangled up with his daughter's genes were there for keeps, so no point in delving into bygones.  Mary was the here and now, a handful, and unless they somehow managed to rein her in, the awaiting world would be no picnic. 

Katherine is the main character in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, and in the first scenes of the play is indeed a shrew – so much so that even her father has given up on her as a vixen and unmarriageable harridan. She meets Petruchio, a worldly, sophisticated man who has tired of the complaisant, dutiful, uninteresting world of Italian aristocracy, and is tamed by him.  Thanks to him, her anger, hostility, and misanthropy - provoked by an abusive father and jealous sister - are mitigated and then disappeared. 

Kate is at first put off by Petruchio’s advances.  What are his intentions?  Why has he not, like all other men, been repelled by her? What deceptive, selfish motives are behind his interest? At the same time, she realizes that Petruchio is the man she has hoped to find – one who can see beyond her defenses; a man who is unintimidated, as strong as she as sexually confident as she is passionate.

The marriage is one of perfect symmetry.  She, now having left her shrewishness behind, loves Petruchio without hesitation or restraint.  He is her rescuer, her savior from a life of hard-bitten, resentful spinsterhood.  He is what men should be – strong, confident, male, and yet understanding of women. 

At the end of the play Kate confesses her love for Petruchio and the necessarily dutiful obedience she owes to him:

A woman moved is like a fountain troubled,
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty,
And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty
Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign, one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labor both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe

Thousands of feminist critics have taken this soliloquy as an outdated, primitive, prehistoric statement of female complaisance; but Shakespeare intended nothing of the kind.  He in fact anticipated D.H. Lawrence. Both writers knew that dominance and submission are interchangeable, and that the best marriages are those in which there is perfect symmetry.  Either the man or the woman can be dominant or submissive.  It is the complementarity which counts. 

And so it was with Mary Potter who angrily bulldozed her way through school, university, and the law which was, not surprisingly the right profession for such a confrontational, unbowed and uncowed woman.  She won every case she defended and became Washington's go-to attorney for the most difficult cases.  She became known - behind her back of course - as The Harridan Of Superior Court, a well-deserved although harsh description. 

Men kept her at arms length, and few even attempted to approach her. Those that did limped away, licking their wounds warning others.  She was as hostile and threatening a women as anyone had seen, in or out of the legal profession. 

Until she met Mr. Right, an unintimidated, confident, independent man who, like Petruchio, saw in Mary something prized, unique, and desirable.  He, again like Petruchio, saw beyond the Sturm und Drang, bullying overlordship to what he knew was a very accommodating woman. 

Now, of course Taming of the Shrew is a romantic fantasy - such strikingly unusual and satisfying love affairs do not exist in real life - but that between Mary Potter and her Prince Charming disproved the fantasy and proved Shakespeare and Lawrence right. Epiphanic coming together of arbitrary souls, sexual mutuality, and ying-yang complementarity is not confabulation. 

In an environment of very ordinary, unexciting, depressing marital affairs, the relationship between Mary Potter and her man was unique.  

'I knew she would turn out all right ', said her father when she brought her lover home to meet the parents.  The same girl, the same Mary, but without all the vixenish, beleaguering anger she had had as a child.  Tamed indeed, thought Mr. Potter, and better off for it. 

Ethnic Slurs - A Historical Look At Powerful Motivations To Succeed

 For anyone who grew up even a few decades ago, it is hard to understand how Americans' skins have become so thin - how insults, innuendos, slights, and insinuating remarks have become such causes célèbres.  Bullying was par for the course on school playgrounds, an element of maturing; a learning process whereby the weak in their defeat learned about the enemy and the middling figured out how to evade, negotiate, compromise, or avoid.

Taunts were expected – racial and ethnic slurs and remarks about disability were common currency, the labeling of ‘other’, the natural signifiers of difference and threat to the community  No one was animated by hatred.  There was no hostility towards Jews, Poles, or Italians.  They, after all, were the furriers, druggists, and clothiers of our communities; those who worked lathes and presses or cut hair, paved streets, or cut hair.

At the same time, it was assumed that in an America still honoring self-improvement, individualism and enterprise,  foreigners would quickly and surely become economic and social players.  It wasn’t long before ‘No Irish Need Apply’ became ‘Only Irish Need Apply’.  Irish Americans quickly figured out the system and within a generation or two ran Boston, Philadelphia, and New York .

The Mafia, perhaps the most powerful and influential organization of civil society since the partisans of radical Republicanism during Reconstruction, was quintessentially American.  Its communitarian, hard-knuckled, authoritarian, and generous neighborhood rule after only a few decades of struggle, expressed the best of the Republic.

In a generation the Jews of the Lower East Side, rag-pickers, pushcart-sellers, and money-lenders camet o rule New York and Hollywood.

‘Kike, guinea, wop, mick, hunky, spic’– these were epithets that rolled off the backs of early American immigrants who had known real prejudice and discrimination in their home countries.  Names and verbal slander were nothing compared to pogroms, camps, and abject poverty.

Assimilation – attainment of the American Dream – was the goal of these new immigrants.  They had no interest in retaining let along celebrating their diversity.  Italian Americans who escaped the ghettos of Wooster Square or Mulberry Street wanted no part of San Gennaro, the Cosa Nostra, arranged marriages, and Sicilian honore and vengeance.  Irish Americans were ashamed of their drunken, brawling stereotype, and yearned like all immigrants to become American, cultured, and calm.

Although Irish, Italians, and Jews quickly rose up from the slums of New York, New Haven, and Boston on their own merits – ambition, enterprise, intelligence, family, and an indomitable will to full the prophecy of their immigration – ethnic slurs sped the journey.   There is nothing like the anger, hostility, and resentment provoked by insult and stereotype to steel the will of American newcomers and add even more fuel to the assimilative fire.

A young doctor in New Brighton, Connecticut, a first generation Italian and the first of his family to earn a college degree and an internship at an important regional hospital, knew that the row to social inclusion – the goal of all immigrants – would be a hard one to hoe. 

The old families of Colonial America  and their descendants who lived in New Brighton’s West End,  the industrialists whose enterprise helped win the Civil War and WWI were unforgiving in their pride of family, heritage, and particular Anglo-Saxon privilege.  While some were confident enough of their patrimony and position to consider dispassionately the arrival of non-WASPs, many were far less generous.  The doctor and his Italian colleagues were kept out of the Country Club, never invited to social clubs, and considered hairy, garlic-smelling brutes.

In their view the ‘guineas’ of Madison Street were uncultured nouveau riche who had no sense of place or propriety regardless of professional degree or civic pride.

In their view the Poles belonged in menial jobs in the industries they had built or as maids to clean their floors.  The Jews were meant to rise no farther than haberdashers, furriers, jewelers, and pharmacists.  The Irish, a universally brawling and drunken lot would – and should – never leave the firehouse, the police station, or ward politics.  Polacks, kikes, and micks they were and always would be.

The families of these marginalized ethnic communities saw things quite differently indeed.  Every slight, every neglect, every epithet, every dismissal of their abilities, talents, and culture was  a call to arms.  Yet they chose no confrontational battles – attacking the ruling class for its elitism, sybaritic living off of inherited wealth, unfounded privilege, and discriminatory behavior.  They knew absolutely that the way to full integration into American society was success.

Stone-breaking Italian construction workers became small-scale contractors at quarries, cement works, and building firms; and eventually owned them.   Low-level Irish municipal workers – police, fire, education – quickly rose to political power despite ‘No Irish Need Apply’.  The Kennedys of Boston were not an exception, but the rule.  East Coast cities were soon ruled by Irish politicians whose only competitors were the powerful, often extra-legal operations of Italians.

Jewish jewelers and clothes merchants in New Brighton saw a brighter future in big cities, and transferred their centuries-old experience in retail and finance to Seventh Avenue and Burbank.

The point is only this – hardship, discrimination, and life on the edges of society only hardened the resolve of these new Americans.  The desire for assimilation and full integration was never dimmed by ignorant and arrogant assumptions of ethnic worth.  It became a matter of pride.  When ability, talent and pride are combined, the trajectory to the top is assured.

So what is to be made of today’s culture of victimhood? Of safe spaces and protection against perceived insult, bullying, and dismissive attitudes?

It is easy for those who grew up in an age of ethnic ambition, enterprise, and will to laugh at what seems to be an over-protected, hyper-sensitive generation which is having a tough time growing up.  We wonder where the thin skin came from.  Did they create a generation of coddled, protected, entitled young people? Is it their fault?  Has society been so influenced by progressive ‘inclusivity’ and entitlement that the old principles of survival of the fittest, good old American competition no longer apply?

What is very clear is that we are coming to the end of a socio-political cycle.  Conservative Republicanism as now embodied in the presidency of Donald Trump has no patience for any of the above.  Entitlement of any stripe is discouraged, and the combative survivalist ethos of the social, economic, and political marketplaces is back.   No purchase will be given to those who can – like our Italian, Irish, Jewish, and Polish forbears – rise and prosper.  Compassion will be afforded to those who cannot, and only to them.

Progressives look back at the laissez-faire early Twentieth Century as a barbaric era which has been displaced by a more tolerant and considerate one; and therefore see the rise of Donald Trump’s nationalist populism as a dangerous throwback to a more primitive age.

Nothing of the sort.  The Trump revolution is simply a cleansing of  the progressive Augean stables – ridding governance of its worst idealistic and patronizing policies and programs.  Populism means individual responsibility.  No free rides, no mollycoddling, no self-absorbed righteous entitlement.  The role of government is to encourage and facilitate opportunity within a framework of individualism, not to provide a protective shell into which is infused public resources.

The days of older ethnic slurs are over. Rarely does one hear ‘guinea, wop, hunky, polack, kike’ because Italians, Slovaks, Poles, and Jews have completed their entry into the mainstream.  One still hears the N-word and unpleasant references to Latinos because the integration of African Americans and Hispanics is far from complete.  Once they too have joined the mainstream, such discriminatory epithets will be things of the past.  Economics as always rules.

Those of us with old ethnic identities and whose will to succeed was only steeled and energized because of discrimination cannot help but be partisans of this new conservative ethos of ‘competitive tolerance’. 

‘Grow up’ may be  too harsh and dismissive to characterize our feelings; and we prefer to couch our objections in more historical terms.  Such is the prerogative and perhaps the failing of older generations; but we can’t help it. 

So, “Grow up!”

Regime Change - What America Has Wanted In Every War, But Now Dithers In Iran

The war against Germany with its panzers, blitzkriegs, storm troopers and hegemonic intentions was really about regime change, getting rid of the genocidal, expansionist maniac Hitler. It was the Nazis with their torchlight parades, Gestapo, concentration camps, and intimidating Anschluss across Europe that were the problem.  Not Germany the country, the historical entity, the national unit in the center of the continent but Adolph Hitler, monomaniacal dictator, international brute, and threat to world polity. 

The war in Korea, a sorry case of too little too late, was a war of which Clausewitz and Machiavelli would never have approved. It was a war of petty pace and hesitation, a war America should never got into, but if it had, it should have used all the force at its command to defeat the enemy. Regime change to get rid of the Communist government which like all Communist governments had vowed to bury us. 

General MacArthur wanted real regime change - to destroy the far more dangerous, territorial, and politically ambitious state, China.  Cross the Yalu River, he said, and get rid of the Red Menace once and for all.  We have the arms, the bombs, and a heroic, courageous, well-trained military.  Strike while the iron is hot. 

Yet President Truman hesitated then acted, removing MacArthur from command, and sending a message to China that a negotiated peace might be in the offing. 

Ever since the Russian Revolution in 1917, Soviet intentions have been clear.  Like Islam,  Communism was destined to become a world caliphate.  Winston Churchill warned of the menace immediately after the Soviets marched into Berlin at the close of WWII, and successive American presidents built up their forces during the Cold War.  Churchill, like MacArthur wanted regime change - rid the world of the Communist government and remove the hateful ideology behind it before it caused trouble. 

In Vietnam, the United States fought North Vietnam and its Communist leader, Ho Chi Minh, a man like Hitler and Stalin who despite his claims of nationalism wanted to spread his ideology throughout Southeast Asia.  As a result of what the West saw as his regional ambitions, American strategists named it The Domino Theory.  Unless the regime in Hanoi was removed and Communism expunged from the politburo, it would spread to Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and beyond. 

George W. Bush declared victory when the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled in Baghdad.  The United States assumed it had effected a regime change, and now Iraq would join the commonwealth of peaceful democratic nations.  No such luck.  Removal of Hussein simply removed the sworn enemy of far more radical Islamist movements. 

The Taliban in Afghanistan were a nefarious, radical Islamist, poppy-growing regime that threatened the region and like North Vietnam was intent on spreading its theocratic nationalism far and wide.  The regime must be overthrown and a peaceful, democratic one should replace it.  Again, no dice.  Regime change is not easy when the enemy has popular and international support, is well dug in and financed. 

The United States for decades has tried to topple the Communist Castro regime in Cuba.  Not only was it an ally of Russia and a depot for Soviet missiles aimed at the US, but is was ambitiously aggressive in spreading its noxious ideology through the region.  The Castros would not be content until Communism reigned throughout the Caribbean, Central and South America. It has been over sixty years and the Communists are still in power. 

Similarly, the US has tried mightily to rid the world of the Communist Kim family of North Korea, a permanent, persistent threat to America's staunch ally in the south and the rest of North Asia. There could be no accommodation with dictators, and the Kims must go, Korea unified in one peaceful, democratic nation. Again, fat chance.  The Kims have ruled North Korea with an iron had for decades and will continue to do so. 

When the opportunity arose to rid the region, America's backyard, Donald Trump acted and effected regime change in Venezuela.  Dictator Maduro was gone, the oil was ours, and the threat of aggressive socialism erased. 

Now we come to Iran where the American war started off with the clear intention of regime change, and within a few days of the first bombing the Ayatollah was killed, and the son of the former Iranian shah announced his willingness to return and to return his beloved country to a monarchist democracy.  Yet this particular regime was unlike the others the US had encountered.  

It was in principle led by its theocratic mullahs, but the real power and authority lay with the Republican Guards a force like the Viet Cong which were paramilitary, well-armed, and dispersed throughout the nation.  Regime change would involve getting rid of them, and that turned out to be impossible. 

So President Trump, faced with harsh reality and the knowledge that instituting regime change in Iran was not going to be easy if not impossible, stated that the war was not about regime change.  However, since all wars are about that, he could not come up with a viable objective.  What would constitute victory?  He had no answer. 

Yet he, his war room generals, the CIA, Israel and Mossad all knew that there was only one end to the conflict - the removal of the Islamic, expansionist, genocidal regime and replacing it with a secular government which willingly fit within the non-aggressive, democratic international union.  There was no room in the Middle East for a theocratic regime, especially a radical Islamic one which has vowed to establish by force of arms a Muslim caliphate. 

Now that the war has been engaged, the US cannot simply declare victory and leave.  Iran is still strong enough to do its will in the Strait of Hormuz and send missiles and drones across the region.  American bombing has not removed the regime, i.e., the IGRC, the Republican Guards, nor is it likely; so the US has turned to financial and economic sanctions to...what? Effect regime change?  

Punitive financial pressures against Russia in retaliation for its invasion of Ukraine have had no effect whatsoever and both Russia and China, seeing the defeat and humiliation of the US in their geopolitical interest, continue to give arms and money to the mullahs and the Guards. 

Regime change was always the American objective in Iran, and everyone in Washington looked forward to have the Iranian Prince Pahlavi sitting in the imperial palace in Tehran; now America will have to keep up the pressure and see what happens. 

Clausewitz is turning over in his grave at such a dithering, confused, illogical strategy of war.  If there was no clear path to victory - regime change and total American occupation - then why begin the war in the first place?

The war goes on inconclusively, and meanwhile Iran's allies who need Persian oil and an ally in the Middle East keep providing it with the arms, financial resources, and materiel they need to keep the Americans at bay.  It is an unwinnable, not just because the US has no definition of victory, but because it has sorely misjudged Iran's resilience. 

Like the war in Ukraine we are in it for the long haul.