Electric Cars And Hybrid Sex - Life In Our Precious, Fairyland Age

Jan Bossey was well into his sexual transition, feeling a bit dodgy and off his feed at time, but the hormones had kicked in nicely and that springtime, feminine feel that he had long been waiting for had finally arrived.  He put on his Easter bonnet - yes, he knew it was too early, but he simply felt like it, and his new self gave in far more easily to whim and fancy than his old self had. 

When he was a Senior Vice President at a major consulting firm on the Route 128 tech corridor, he had been decisive in his attitude, peremptory and unforgiving in his management, and absolutely determined and goal-oriented in his life.  He was a feared supervisor not because of the harsh punishment meted out to laggards, but because of his stature.  There was no one in the firm with more intelligence and resolve than Jan Bossey.

It was a complete surprise when it was learned that he was unhappy in this premier macho role and had opted to transition.  During initial psychological counselling his feelings about femininity were probed, and while he was not exactly asked to pick from a Chinese menu of options, it amounted to that.  Like everything else in modern genderism, there was a spectrum, ranging from tough Bernal Heights flannel and jackboots tough girls to sweet, frilly, pretty things and everything in between.  Of course, the counselor noted, gender transition was not yet an exact science, no bulls eyes, only approximations.

Jan, feeling if one was in this thing, then one had to be all in, he opted for the frilly end of the gamut.   His mother, like him a romantic and vaudevillian at heart, looked like Toulouse Lautrec’s Jane Avril, all feather boas, black stockings, petticoats, and dancing shoes. 

 “I feel pretty, no matter what anyone says, especially your father”, she said to young Jan who was always her most attentive audience, sitting on the plush dressing room divan waiting for his mother to emerge.  All that anticipation and delight when she finally threw open the door and danced before him had taken hold at a very early age; and despite the many years of suppressing it and becoming an ur-macho Simon Legree, it never went away.  So the choice of the girly-girl persona was easy enough.

Yet, as he proceeded in his transition, he felt that there was something wrong – a niggling sense of incompleteness and dissatisfaction.  He was stuck between second and third gears, he thought on his last trip up and down the Strip in his hemi Dodge Charger.  This too will pass, advised his transition counselor.  One does not simply pull out all that nasty male stuff in one go.  Soon enough he would see the changes he was expecting, and today, the day she donned his Easter bonnet and headed for St. Maurice’s church to flirt with the men talking golf with Father Brophy, the change was secure.

Or almost.  As much as the counselor told him to dismiss his persistent, recurrent dreams of pursuit and penetration, he was always a man in them.  What was this all about?  Despite his current demission and removal from the psychiatric pantheon, Freud’s insights could not be totally dismissed.  Psychiatry was not all behaviorism and drugs, but the psychological potpourri of genes, hormones, childhood, and their weird dynamics.  

If he was chasing women in his dreams, it had to mean something.  Perhaps ‘that nasty male stuff’ his counselor referred to was not just a flimsy thing easy to extract, but something more permanent and resistant to the daily doses of progesterone injected every day.

This middle state, this inconclusive, changeable period of neither here nor there was not unpleasant at all, for what man or woman could feel both male and female?  The very pleasant calm before the storm, the final explosive burst of pure sexuality at the end of the transition process.

Jan had always liked cars, and the Dodge hemi was but the last in a line of muscle cars he had had ever since he turned eighteen.  There was that reconditioned 65 Corvette; the 64 GTO, 389, Hurst three-on-the-floor transmission, racing tuned double carb beast; the chopped and channeled Camaro which tipped out at 150 without so much as a groan or a shimmy.  

He went to car shows and admired the cars he could never afford – Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Maseratis.  He liked to hang around body shops, garages, and racetracks.  He bought a TR-3 for $500 dollars back in the day, took it to Lime Rock and raced in the short track at the foothills of the Berkshires, did his own tune ups, lubes, and brake jobs.  Cars and men were one.

On that very Sunday when he went out in his Easter finery, he noticed a number of hybrid cars in the church parking lot.  Now what were they? he asked permitting himself a moment of doubt.  Of course he knew what they were – little underpowered four-wheelers designed to save energy, to turn on and off, gas and electricity, and designed to get you there without much fanfare.  It was the idea of a hybrid that piqued his now highly sensitive metaphysical interest – something, like him in his current transitionary stage, that was neither this nor that, neither here nor there.

He had never had much patience for Teslas until Elon Musk’s designers made one that would go 0-60 in under two seconds and was one of the fastest production cars on the market.  Musk never got on this neither fish nor foul hybrid bandwagon.  He went all in for electric, and he would make Tesla the peer of the fastest Ferrari on the road.  A macho car despite its batteries and plug-ins.

The hybrids were delicate little nothings that flipped on an off, never made a fuss, and were nothing but shows of environmental purpose for the leafy neighborhoods of Northwest Washington.

So wasn’t he a hybrid? A neither here nor there male/female?  There was no technique for scraping all the XY chromosomes from his DNA and replacing them with double X’s.  Not like sparkplugs or alternators.   He would be an XY male for the rest of his life, like it or not, Easter bonnets notwithstanding. 

But doesn't nature trump nurture in these behavioral days?  It was what you believed you were not what you actually were that counted, that made a difference.  If you truly believed that you were a woman, and that the belief could be augmented by a shot or two of female hormones, then you were a woman, no questions asked.

Yet the hybrid image stayed with Jan and he couldn’t shake it.  He was becoming what he never intended to be – a she-man, he-woman, a sexual hybrid.

The hybrid cars and Freudian dreams put the brakes, so to speak, on Jan’s transition.  He could wear an Easter bonnet whenever he wanted with all his equipment intact, or revert to Dodge Charger hemis; retake the fifth floor of his old firm and rule the roost like he once did, or join the secretarial pool.  

The transgender, gender fluidity advocates had a point.  Sexual expression was a matter of preference, so go with your personal flow. Where Jan got off the bus was denying genetic determinism.  As many frilly dresses as he might wear, no matter how many high heels, handbags, perfume, and eyeliner were his, he would always be Jan Bossey, tough guy.

He went overboard on the return – full beard, heavy drinking, Harley Hog in the garage – but soon settled back into his own particular maleness.  A few friends asked where he had been for the past year or so, but he demurred – family business, personal affairs and that sort of answer – but soon enough that hiatus had been completely, absolutely forgotten.

Suffrage, Feminism, Female Agency - Fertility Gives Way To Secular Obsession, Lessons From The Lindsay Clancy Trial

The women shouting for Lindsay Clancy's acquittal, absolving her from the responsibility of murdering her three children because of 'mitigating circumstances' displayed cracks in the feminine ideal.  Somehow the movement for equal rights, shattering the glass ceiling, full and free access to all that modern America had to offer had gone off the rails. The murder trial - Clancy had readily admitted to killing the little ones - had turned into a sad caricature.

There was no way said liberal women, that this woman, beleaguered and besieged by a patriarchal, abusive husband, chained to motherhood and deprived of even the basics of a liberated life, should be convicted.  If anything, she was understandably disturbed, upset, and indeed mentally ill because of the punitive treatment meted out by her typically misogynist man. 

One juror - a man - refused to buckle to this progressive hysteria, held his ground, and insisted that she was guilty of first degree murder.  She had researched strangling on the web, found a suitable errand for her husband that would take him out of the house until she had done the deed, and had planned the whole thing.  

The children had to be rid of, exterminated, eliminated from life.  To rule anything but premeditated murder would itself be a crime, a capitulation to febrile politically correct nonsense, a travesty of justice, and an unholy, immoral act. 

Marcia Griffin was on the fence when it came to the trial.  She had been married twice to fools and ignoramuses and to this day she damned herself for being so credulous and naive.  How could she not have known?  How had she been so shamed and cowed by an abusive father, watched him demean and dismantle very shred of dignity of her mother, that she jumped at the opportunity of loving a good man? Hah! How stupid and hopelessly romantic.  

Yes, Harper Fleming was dashing and virile, charitable and attentive and seemingly kind and caring; but it didn't take long for him to sidle up to the women in his office, the tarts on K Street, and the dames in his corporate boardroom. Marcia thought she was marrying the anti-father when in fact, Skinner, Maslow, and Freud being directly on target, she instead took wedding vows with her father,  Harrison P Griffin himself. 

The second time around should be a charm, but husband number two turned out to be a wheezy wheedler, a randy follower who claimed he knew women but that was just part of his treacly liberalism.  He gave her more space than No. 1, but was so objectionable and totally, completely clueless about femaleness, femininity, and womanhood that she couldn't stand one more painful, numbing hour with him. 

That was Part I of her Lindsay Clancy dilemma. Part II was her hidden desire to have children, many of them, to fulfill the only real reason women were created in the first place, fertility and reproduction.  Of course in today's progressive political environment in which she made her home, she could never even hint at what would be considered treasonous notions, but there there they were, niggling, insistent, thoughts that wouldn't retreat.  

So as much as she agreed with the millions of set-upon women who felt that Lindsay was simply acting out a justified reaction to male subjugation and the prison of motherhood, she could not deny that the woman had snuffed out the life that she had given - that only she, a woman, could give. Murder was one thing, unacceptable, heinous, criminal, and immoral; but when committed against the very flesh and blood that a woman created, carried, and delivered was in a hell reserved for only the most evil. 

The trial which had become a viral, social media caricature of modern politics - liberal vs conservative philosophy - for Marcia it was far more than that. It forced the hidden conundrum - fertility or agency - out into the open, forced her to wonder why she had resisted motherhood so adamantly and ferociously, why she had reviled God's creation. 

 

At the same time Marcia thought of Freud who was quite generous to the mature, intelligent women of his day who simply and austerely chose either single womanhood or a life unencumbered by children. 

He wrote about Aimee Herzog, wife of Austrian financier Henrik Herzog.  Mrs. Herzog was the center of Viennese society, had charmed Freud with her wit, intelligence, and social grace.  She led a life which suggested a new age of female agency, a pre-feminist who admired mothers, children, and childbirth, but who abjured the idea for herself. 

There was room enough in the universe for both kinds of women, surely, so why was it that she was so upset by the subterranean urgings of motherhood?  A lifelong progressive, espouser of every cause in the liberal canon, she froze at the idea of abortion.  

Her colleagues had become cavalier about it.  The fetus was no more than a clot of unwanted phlegm, an irritation, and intrusion to be rid of. And yet the fetus had a beating heart and could feel pain.  Even if one did not grant identity to the unborn child, it was a potential soul and scraping it summarily out of the womb was depriving a life of being. 

So how were these howling hyenas calling for the head of the male juror who resisted their hectoring, bullying, and abuse representative of the modern woman?  Something had gone wrong between suffrage and today.  Something had gotten twisted beyond recognition when women defended the likes of Lindsay Clancy and her heinously conceived and executed execution of her children?

These same progressive colleagues laughed at the stay-at-home moms of the country, the homemakers, caretakers, wives, women content with their calling - the only calling which distinguished them from men.  

Worse, progressive women were questioning the very nature of womanhood.  Wasn't gender self-identified and one could choose from any one of a hundred choices up and down the fluid gender spectrum? How were men, castrated, injected, twisted and deformed into horrible caricatures of women, ever considered women?

When the suffragettes of the early Twentieth Century demanded the right to vote, they only wanted electoral equality and with it the ancillary rights of property, ownership, and wealth. They were vilified, abhorred and rejected, but they were right.  Fertility and agency could exist simultaneously.  No one said that electoral power eliminated the nature of a woman to reproduce. 

In today's culture of identity there is no such thing as a national ethos, a universal moral code to which everyone subscribes.  Race, gender, and ethnicity trump obedience to and respect for commandments of right behavior.  A woman is simply one of many identities, and within that one fungible category, she can subdivide, reconfigure, and reform.  In so doing she has lost both fertility and agency. 

As much as Marcia listened to the blandishments of her colleagues, their pleas for understanding the female condition that Lindsay Clancy represented, their demands for lockstep solidarity in the matter of rejecting male patriarchy and privilege, and their insistence on the irrelevance of motherhood, she remained unconvinced.  The woman had murdered three innocent children, killed them one by one as each watched. 

For Marcia it was too late for husband No. 3, too late for fertility, for children and for motherhood.  She would have to stand on the sidelines and watch, regret her own ignorance, lack of will, and submission to the outrageously deformed canon of the Left.  

There was nowhere for her to turn.  She could no longer abide progressivism and the sanctimony of her liberal friends - the Clancy case slammed the door shut on them - and she had been far too public about her endorsement of the canon she now despised to be looked at as only an operative, a spy, a mole in the conservative camp.

It didn't have to end this way, but she did not have the willpower of the one male juror who stood his ground at the Clancy trial to resist the cant and doctrinaire bullying of her colleagues.

Hers is a sad story.  Now old, without children, with no comforting political camaraderie, no future, no man, and only regrets for a past unrealized she passed out of sight, lamentably out of mind, and eventually away. 

The Vanity Of Leaving Something Behind - The Jolly 'I Did That' Yale Reunion

Augustus Spillane stood on the podium before the Class of 19__, now old men giving their last hurrah, and intoned, 'Climate change...Existential threat or the nonsense of fools'.  Here he paused for effect, for everyone in the audience knew that he had been the head of one of the most influential environmental organizations and the United States' special envoy to the Conference on Global Environmental Rights. 

Gusty Spillane was a true blue social justice warrior on an international scale, a man of agency. 

Spillane was also a prick, and had been every since his Yale days.  He and his Opus Dei classmates considered themselves the intellectual center of the class, far more impressive in intellect, intelligence, ironic wit, and social stature than even Skull and Bones, Yale's most prestigious secret society of which both Presidents Bush were members.  

Gusty had curried favor with those assumed to be members - Peter Cabot of the Boston Cabots, Arthur Davenport of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and founder of New Haven, and Fitch Longworth of Salem and Newport, colonial entrepreneur, trader, and owner of a fleet of ships plying the Three Cornered Trade. 

Nothing doing.  Skull and Bones never once considered Gusty's interest, thought him far from the patrician, old Anglo-Saxon family history required for membership.  Gusty was an arriviste, a pompous comer who thought that just because he had read Summa Theologica, he was somehow Skull and Bones material. 

Gusty took offence.  Who were these privileged toffs who had never had an original thought in their heads, vacuous, airy nothings?  

But the sting of rejection hurt and lasted throughout Yale.  He and his Catholic buddies, Chuck Moakley and Dean Farmer, huddled conspiratorially in a corner of the Trumbull College dining room and debated Aquinas and Augustine. 

They were 'douche bags', public school bursary boys who if not seen hunched together at a dining room table were behind the steam trays paying off their debt to Yale.  This double whammy - public school and need-based scholarship - was bad enough, but there they were in plain sight to all, white aprons and gloves, dishing out Salisbury steak to the private school, old monied idiots admitted to Yale on the basis of family legacy. 

Now as in the case of many poor boys who have made it to the first rung of success - Presidents Nixon and Clinton were motivated by their straitened circumstances and fought all the harder to work their way up the ladder - Gusty took the dismissiveness, sniffy scorn, and outright rejection at Yale and made it work for him.  He would show those assholes. 

It didn't take Gusty long out of Yale and the University of Michigan graduate school to join in the civil rights movement of the day.  He was a frontliner, an advocate for the black man par excellence, and an inveterate hatred for the white, privileged grandees of the South who cannily and easily restored slavery by calling it something else.  The tenant farming system instituted during the arch-punitive period of Reconstruction was nothing but slavery plus a few pennies spent at the company store.  

Gusty's hatred was visceral, a playing out of all the resentment and spite he felt for the Northern grandees who had made his life so miserable. This virulent animus gave him energy and a kind of ignorant courage, first to get beaten by Bull Connor's axe handles, bitten by his dogs, and set upon by his cracker mob.  He cared less about the fate of the Negro and more about venting his anger against white powers that be. 

 

From there, like most of his brothers-in-arms, he drifted from one progressive cause to another and somehow landed in the midst of the embryonic environmental movement.  This was a movement which relied on objectivity - historical data from sailing ships, temperature readings from the Humboldt current and Gulf Stream, and measurements of polar ice - and had a missionary zeal that other causes did not.  Climate change - then known as global warming - was an afterthought, a fanciful notion cooked up by zealots. 

Americans jacked up their air conditioners in the summer and their heat in the winter without a thought to the extra carbon emissions they were causing.  Global warming was simply a rousting issue for social activists, and when Gusty tried to convince others of the importance of immediate action, he was dismissed as convincingly as he was at Yale. 

More coal for the boiler. Gusty worked up a head of steam thanks to this mindless indifference, and was unstoppable, a whirling dervish of righteous fervor.  As he gained recognition within the movement, he was heard more and more at conferences, seminars, and protests challenging his supporters to do more, to join the army of the Left, soldiers in the crusade against human ignorance and darkness. 

So by the time Gusty stood before his classmates at their reunion, he was well-known as the world's environmentalist, the man to see, the person who more than anyone brought the reality of climate change before the people.  

Of course by this time the issue of global warming had faded from view in light of the wars in Ukraine and Iran, the resurgence of Russia and the preeminence of China; and especially considering new data from the polar ice caps and coastal areas of both the Pacific and Atlantic which showed, if anything, global cooling.  

Evidence from bio-geographers at Harvard who studied climate data from fossil records of the Pleistocene and after was particularly damning to the cause.  Cyclical climate change was the norm, not the exception, and the world was simply in one of these warming cycles which no amount of man-made influence could affect significantly. 

Nevertheless, despite the increasing evidence that the whole climate change thing was a fanciful invention, a mystical illusion fueled by Armageddon-like secular primitivism, and a total hoax, Gusty stood before his class and hammered on about incinerating croplands, the return of tropical disease, the inundating waters of the world's oceans, and the miasmic doom of an overheated world. 

Gusty, tired and spent - after all a man of his age could not be expected to gin up the energy of a young man - sat down to polite applause while the next speaker mounted the podium.  It could have been any issue - race, gender, ethnicity, corporate greed, immigration, or internationalism - for Gusty was not paying attention.  He had been the keynote speaker for a reason.  Global warming was an ineradicable threat!

The thing of it all was that each speaker was as addled by his cause and his achievements as Gusty.  One after another they intoned the obvious - old scores never settled - and went on to tick off line items on their resumes.  'When I was President of...when I visited Ndjamena last...As the Prime Minister said to me...', on and on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. 

Now, one would think that these men, perhaps in the last decade or even last few years of their lives, would be thinking of the vast unknown, and preoccupied with it.  What was coming surely should be more important than what was or what had been; but no, they banged on as though there were no tomorrow.  The record of the past had to be recalled, consolidated, properly archived, and revered. 'I did that' each man said over and over again.

Tolstoy wrote about death and dying in his novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a story about a man who realizes almost too late that his marvelously confected life, his brilliant architecture of living means absolutely nothing as he faces his end, eternity. 

It was easy for Ivan to content in his secure, well-ordered world while he was healthy, for then there was nothing but endless tomorrows before him, pleasant days and nights of respect, admiration, and camaraderie.  When the death sentence was passed and as he went through the various stages of denial, accommodation, and reluctant acceptance, he still clung on to the accomplishments of the past; and only at the very last did he come to his senses.  'Ah, death' he says, finally resolved and accepting. 

I wonder if Gusty Spillane will have an Ivan Ilyich moment.  It certainly didn't look like it would come any time soon as the old man banged on about the Albanian delegation and the new axis of environmental reform.

 'I did that'. Gusty said and believed that that would be enough.