Old Flames - The Totemism Of Past Girlfriends Or, Romance Dies Hard

Bob Fielding had just been left on the curb by his wife of many years.  'I've had enough', she told him through the screen door, and that was that.

Bob had never lived alone, although he made a pretense of emotional independence.  His long trips to the heart of darkness were his statements of macho self-assurance; but he was always glad to be back home to his own bed, the New York Times and coffee, a round of golf and some time off on the Bay. 

He never questioned what he wife did during his African sojourns for he took her much for granted.  She had been a devilish little coquette at Miss Porter's, and came into her own during her exploratory college years when 'Who am I?' morphed into 'Who cares?'.  A hot ticket...Queen of Tarts...The Devil In Miss Jones...but all that was left behind after two serious years of graduate school, a Madison Avenue job in publishing, and marriage to Robert Fielding, Yale graduate, World Bank economist, traveler, and man of certain sophisticated tastes. 

Bob had no doubts about his wife's fidelity, felt that she loved him as much now as when he met her, and assumed that on every return from the Dark Continent, she would be there with dinner on the table and the bed turned down. 

Nothing could be further from the truth.  For all Bob's own fidelity and honorable intentions, he was a mistake; but because of sunken costs - he, as a banker could understand that concept - Alison Jones stayed on in the marriage far longer than she should have.

Not that he was a bad husband.  God forbid she should be married to the likes of Brandon Philipps, philanderer-in-chief of Philipps, Locke & Suitland, a man without a filament of moral fiber, a sexual vagabond worth only the notable salary and interest from a private income he brought to the marriage.  Poor Polly was left to weep over her sewing night after empty, soulless, lonely nights. 

No, Bob was a good husband; but with plenty of good years ahead of her, she was not about to languish in the suburbs, tinkering with faucets and spread sheets.  She was still 'Miss Jones', a woman of agency, a tigress, a still attractive belle of the ball with no intention of wasting a drop of her remaining sexual energy.   

And so it was on that cloudy, unusually cool May afternoon that she said her goodbyes to her husband, Bob. Of course divorce proceedings would involve meeting again, but there would always be the insulating layer of lawyers, so when she said goodbye, the deal was as good as done. 

Bob had no interest in finding out where his now ex-wife had gone.  He was not one to cry over spilled milk, and he was feminized enough to never question a woman's prerogatives, so he turned to his own needs, at first licking his wounds but then ginning up the wherewithal needed to meet the brave new world. 

Of course he moped around the house for a while trying to bustle and make himself useful, but ended up in unmade sheets and take-out.  'This will not stand', he lectured himself in the bathroom mirror one Tuesday, and vowed to turn over a new leaf 

His trip to Ouagadougou would be just the thing to clear his head.  A thorny Bank issue to be resolved, money at stake, and the First Minister was to be courted always picked up his spirits, and now that the job was all he had, he put even more life into it. 

The First Minister had heard of Bob's divorce - the corridors of the World Bank always echo with juicy gossip - and he would use the information wisely.  He would treat the newly singled economist to a treat that would make any man forget his wife - a beautiful Fulani woman, one of his consorts, available at his beck and call and assure that his Bank loan would proceed without a hitch. 

Now most men would take kindly to the First Minister's offer, but although Bob thought that getting rid of all traces of his ex-wife would be a simple matter, he did not count on residuals - those nasty, niggling bits of a marriage which stay with one after divorce.  Bob didn't want Mlle. Sekou, but a partner, someone to fill his life not just his bed. 

He thanked the First Minister for his consideration and generosity, guaranteed him the approval of the next tranche of money due to him from the World Bank treasury, and assured him that his credit would always be good in Washington. 

 

Separation does many things to a man, not the least of which is a re-assessment of life and sexual ways.  After the divorce, Bob examined his life of rectitude, civil temperance, and doing the right thing and wondered if he had squandered his youth. 

Bob had not been unhappy as a married man. Marriage gave one a needed center, consolation, commiseration and last but not least, sexual intimacy.  All fairly pat and predictable but not so bad, a kind of needed architecture with familiar walls and carpets to make forays into the outside world less threatening.  He had not squandered anything.  He had willingly and happily married Alison, and their days together should not be measured by the last one when she walked out the door. 

Men in Bob's position all act in the same way. Their first step towards putting their life back together is contacting old girlfriends.  The elision into singlehood, 'dating' and the difficult search for a marital partner would be far easier with someone known, a former lover whose inner rooms had already been explored. 

Time however had not been kind to Laura Owens.  From pictures posted on social media, she was still appealing in New England socially mature way, but when he explored further, he found that she had become fat, un-comely, yenta-looking and far from the ideal woman she had been decades earlier.  

What was he thinking?  She had three adult children, an early Teamster retiree as a husband, a home – of all places – in Mantoloking, home to ‘Jersey Girls’ and Mafiosi from Newark, and an interest in ‘gardening,, self-help, and autism’.  Needless to say, he never called, wrote, messengered, or texted.



The aborted search and the discouraging discovery of a woman transformed, through Bob off the trail, and Alison returned to his thoughts with a vengeance. The problem wasn't with her leaving or her recurring memories, but with the past and reconciling it with the present.  

He was past-due on sexual attractiveness.  Although men his age routinely had lovers thirty years their junior, they had come to these affairs knowledgeably.  Women, whether young or old, are attracted to maturity, sexual confidence, financial security, and maleness – the savoir faire of an older man – but Bob had none of these.  His only hope was pairing with a woman of his own age,  someone like himself who had made wrong early choices, realized too late that it was time to change, and had to settle for what she had agreed to. 

There were such things as bright beginnings; but where to look?  In his day there were singles bars, library reading rooms, and alumni seminars; but virtual dating – more controlled, more efficient, and more cost-effective – had taken over.  How could he possibly navigate this new electronic universe; and would the output be worth the input?

So, he continued to mine the alumni resources as far back as country day school.  He had heard that Nancy Boothby – his eighth grade love - had moved to California; and that had possibilities; not like resettling in Iowa or Nebraska, and might signal a sexual and emotional freedom that had lasted since the Sixties; but she had died of breast cancer many years earlier.

There was Belinda Dandy who was from solid Chicago stock – the Dandy family had built a paper empire to rival Scott – and Belinda had hoped that Bob would marry her and join Daddy in running the company; but rumors were that she had married an Italian and was living on the Riviera – or a Mexican with a Cancun villa; or a Serbian with holdings throughout the Adriatic and the Black Sea. Bob saw that he had no hope in this company of international gentlemen, chose not to renew contact with Belinda, and closed the book on her, Smith College, and weekends at the Taft.

After two years of this, Bob realized that his old captain’s license was no longer valid.  Navigating these new sexual waters but so dying for sexual encounter with another human being that he might look the other way in the morning was not an easy task.  So much had happened over the decades since he and Alison were married that he felt that he no longer even had a toehold in the market. 

Of course there were women as sexually dépaysée as he was – adrift in sexual waters, hoping for a familiar buoy, but grasping more than getting purchase – but where were they? Finding the right woman would be like finding a needle in a haystack unless the gods intervened; and pray he did for divine guidance  if not resolution, to no avail.  He was as alone and lonely as he had ever been. 

He continued to mine the Internet for old loves, even marginal ones like Lacy Birnbaum whom he had taken to the Lefferts prom and who had been laughed at because of her gimp and misunderstood because her father had short-changed customers at his clothing store and in a very Republican town campaigned on behalf of ‘the little man’.

Resignation to old men’s bathrobes and Chinese take-out was on his horizon because it already had happened to many men of his age.  Watch out, he told himself, but with no words of self-encouragement.

The list of old girlfriends had dwindled to nothing.  They either had died, persisted in bad marriages, were divorced and living on generous personal incomes, or were resigned like him to incidental contact.

It would be nice to report that Bob eventually found his soulmate; but he did not.  He was simply too inflexible, too fixated on ideas and principle, and too stubborn to give an inch.  There were plenty of women who would gladly have had a fling with him, married or not, but he was too sexually inept.  He had never had to rely on clues and suggestion – if progressivism is anything, it is not subtle; things are either right or wrong - so he was lost with women who react first on instinct and intuition, and only second on fact.

There are no particular lessons in this story.  Marriages are doubtful things but with remarkable shelf life.  Most people get married, either put up with it or end it. A few are happy and a very few murder their spouses - Turkish soap operas are particularly good at that - but all in all it is one of those things that one does and finds out the consequences when it is too late. Fortunately there are few George and Marthas Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf affairs;  and thank God there are very few Goneril and Regans around to murder their husbands, but marriage is usually not a pretty thing to watch.  

Bergman's Scenes from A Marriage is perhaps the closest to reality - a tough-going slog - and Anna Karenina is a great proto-feminist story.  There are thousands of marriage stories, one overlaid on every other, so there's a lot of experience out there. 

Bob was just one of many who fit into a classic subcategory - Looking For Old Flames which have died out. 

Musk Derangement Syndrome - Spite, Jealousy And Envy, The Ethos Of Hatred

Elon Musk has just made a flying car to go along with Space X, his company leading the world in rocketry, space exploration, and the next generation of planetary exploration.  Within a generation data centers requiring no special cooling and solar powered will be on the moon. Mars colonization is well within the realm of possibility.

 

Musk's Boring Company with sites in Las Vegas, Austin, Nashville, Dubai, and other developing sites was founded to reduce urban traffic by creating underground transportation systems.  The Las Vegas Loop includes 68 miles of approved tunnels and over 100 planned stations. 

Musk's Neuralink’s brain-computer interface (BCI) is a tiny, fully implantable chip that reads neural signals and translates them into commands, enabling people with severe paralysis or neurological conditions to control devices with their thoughts 

Tesla was one of the first electric cars to be produced commercially and is now the market leader.  Musk and his Tesla enterprise featuring well-designed, powerful, and efficient vehicles influenced the whole move towards electric transportation 

Musk's purchase of Twitter, now 'X' was instrumental in rolling back the arbitrary, invasive censorship of free speech of the previous owners and a disturbing trend in social media, and as such set a new standard for open discourse. 

And this man is reviled.  Hated by the Left, vilified as Donald Trump's Rasputin.  Musk is a member, say progressives, of a cabal of white, male billionaire oligarchs out to control the American economy, become the de facto political rulers of the nation, and eventually take it over by establishing a new capitalist caliphate. 

His captaincy of DOGE, the Trump-initiated government department to reduce and eliminate useless, costly, and unnecessary bureaucracy, was described by the Left, as an assault on democracy, and his elimination of USAID, the government foreign assistance agency, was responsible for untold millions of child deaths. 

False allegations, sour grapes on a monumental scale - nothing less than supreme envy, a virulent ad hominem hatred worse than any of the worst racist smears the Left uses to discredit, demean, and destroy.  

As a garnish to Trump hatred, they have added Diversity Equity Inclusion, a fictitious, dangerous, and destructive program to dismiss and denigrate the traditional values of talent, ambition, competition, hard work, creativity, and intelligence and replace them with superficiality - racial, ethnic, and gender identity replaced foundational values and, progressives said, would usher in a new world of equality. 

They have, throughout the ten years of Donald Trump's political rise, offered nothing substantive, nothing even resembling a platform, not one single constructive proposition to further American interests and the welfare if its people. 

Nothing about structural reform, economic opportunity, enterprise-favorable legislation, energy self-sufficiency, or private sector job creation. Just homilies, nostrums, and fanciful idealism. 

This bilious hatred, this deep-seated, horrific animus, this apoplectic desire to destroy is the social expression of one of the Deadly Sins - envy.  Progressives have made their reputation on the basis of criticism, loathing, and resentment.  Professor Richards Deming of Yale, a socio-biologist who holds dual chairs, one at the Department of Psychiatric Medicine, and the other at the Department of Socio-Biology, wrote this in The American Journal of Forensic Medicine (Vol. 21, pps 42-47)

Envy is not one of the Seven Deadly Sins for nothing, for it is at the heart of many of personality's worst psychiatric disorders.  It fuels hatred and unfounded spite  It generates falsity, improbable allegations, rumor, innuendo, and lies.  It is irrepressible in those whose moral architecture is missing a few struts and I-beams.  It is inevitable in a society based on enterprise, competition, and survival of the fittest.  The weak will always envy the strong, then hate them for oppression, ignorance, insensitivity, and worse. 

Envy has a social dimension, for it is one of the most infections and viral of the Deadly Sins.  Those who envy-hate a public figure, such as witnessed today with the American Left's virulent hatred of Donald Trump, share the feeling among themselves, and in so doing allow it to pick up steam, add other falsehoods, damning allegations, and bald inventions.  Before long an entire sub-sector of the electorate envies and hates the President without knowing why. 

 

This envy-hate now includes Elon Musk - again, in the classic ways described by Prof. Deming, without foundation until it becomes a bolus of political hysteria. 

The Left has always chosen to disregard history.  In their campaign to promote progressivism, or progress towards a more verdant, compassionate, peaceful world, they have ignored the ten millennia of human history.  Ever since the first human settlements, human nature - aggressive, self-interested, self-defensive, territorial, and irrepressible - has ruled.  Wars, civil and tribal conflict, palace coups, village murders, regional violence, and hegemonic acquisitions have been common. 

Yet, progressives say, those historical facts are nothing but aberrations from a nature truer than the the one embedded in human DNA - a higher nature, one of spiritual calling, a secularly divine one.  Forget the past and look only to the future, they urge. 

And so it is that a priori judgements become the new rationality.  The tautology rules.  Elon Musk is evil because he does evil.  We are doing good because what we are doing is good, etc.  There is no need for comparative analysis, logical exegesis, hard to come by conclusions. 

Progressives in their febrile idealism are as gullible and credulous as those in a fundamentalist Southern Baptist church who shout Hallelujah! and see Jesus Christ come down from the rafters to take them into his arms. 

There is no need to look at Elon Musk's many remarkable accomplishments - a genius that beggars the imagination, a once in a thousand lifetimes genius.  His net worth is enough to consign him to the inner circle of hell, for any billionaire must have made his fortune disreputably on the backs of the poor.  His destruction of USAID, an agency doing good, saving lives, reducing misery and alleviating misfortune is witness to his innate evil.  He ipso facto, a priori, and QED evil. 

Again, Prof. Deming:

'Envy-Hate', for we must call this new psychiatric syndrome for what it is - a combination of two of the most virulently distorted human psychological expressions - lives without logic and is sustained and strengthened by fervor alone.  That is, no additional information about the subject of this Envy-Hate is necessary.  The case is always closed early on with the first infection of the virus.  Once irrational, irreconcilable envy and hate have taken hold of one's psyche, not only is there no turning back, but the illness progresses, gets worse.  One is doomed to a life of animus, hate, jealousy and psychological misery

Luckily there is no stopping Elon Musk and his remarkable genius.  The man will go on to revolutionize the American economy, have a singular impact on the configuration and future of American society, and will be recorded as even more important than the industrialists of the early Twentieth Century - Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan, men who singlehandedly brought America out of an agrarian age into one of industrial preeminence. 

 

This time there is more at stake.  The post-human generation, one of seamless mind-computer interface, and limitless genetic reconfiguration is within a generation; and Elon Musk and the other men in his genius cluster - Huang, Page, Ellison, and others - are accelerating its coming.

Would we like to be like Elon Musk? Beautiful wives, lovers, and many children with all of them; the wealthiest man on the planet with the ear of every world leader, close adviser to the President of the United States, popular hero, cultural icon, and an intellectual Genghis Khan?

Of course we would, and so would each and every one of the haters, men and women fueled by nothing but viral animus. Sideliners, insignificant whiners, political, economic and financial ciphers. 

It's the Musk era, get over it. 

Diversity At Work - An African American Develops A Flying Car, The Genius Of Elon Musk

Elon Musk, an African American born and raised in South Africa, naturalized in the United States, and now an American citizen, is responsible for some of the Twenty-First Century's most important inventions and technological advances.  

 

He was first to develop an electric car, his Space X is revolutionizing space travel and opening exploration and development of the moon and Mars, he has developed technology to return sight to the blind, is engineering futuristic ways of underground rapid transit, has advised the President of the United States on the future of Artificial Intelligence, and as a principled conservative has championed free speech and free enterprise. 

Yet, he is vilified by the Left.  In the most blatant, absurd, and indefinable accusation, progressives are claiming that because he is a multi-billionaire, he is ipso facto a Robber Baron, a predatory capitalist, an anti-social anarchist, and the leader of a cabal of like-minded oligarchs out to wrest control from the people and concentrate it in their hands. 

He, Huang, Page, Ellison and others are out to dismantle the architecture of democracy and create an autocratic state of which they will be the politburo. 

Musk and his colleagues are inheritors of the great  industrialists of the early Twentieth Century - Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan who revolutionized the American economy and in so doing turned a simple agrarian society into an industrial powerhouse.  

Musk et al are doing the same thing for the country, accelerating its economic preeminence, and preparing the world for the first post-human generation. 

When the human genome has become completely understood, genetic engineering can create a new race of human beings more resistant to disease, climatic variations, and other environmental hazards. A race more adept, able, and intelligent to control the world around them and which can reach formerly impossible levels of being. 

Once complete interface between mind and machine has been achieved - that is when the electronic circuits of the brain are connected to the AI-facilitated ones of the computer - human experience will instantaneously become complete virtual, allowing the individual to roam through an unimaginable cyberspace of his own creation. 

Engineers, currently working on a mind-machine interface will soon be able to seamlessly and completely link the human mind with the electronic circuitry of the computer thus creating a purely virtual world in which individuals will be able to instantaneously have access to all the world’s information, images, and experiences; to manipulate them at will,  and to create worlds of their own choosing. 

Artificial Intelligence, now just an important, revolutionary interface with human agents, will soon be completely integrated within the human brain.  Virtuality will not simply change the means of perception; it will define a completely new way of thinking - an unlimited, unimpeded, infinite intellectual and sentient world. 

Genetically engineered human beings, living in a perfectly virtual world where physical reality is meaningless and irrelevant, will be of a new race, a post-human race.

Ours will be the last recognizable, old-fashioned human generation – a human race unchanged since the emergence of homo sapiens 200,000 years ago.  Soon genetic engineering and symbiotic interface with the computer will alter this living fossil and render it recognizable only to paleontologists who will look upon it as today’s scientists look at Neanderthals, apes, and dinosaurs.  Slow, progressive Darwinian evolution will be a thing of the past.  Radical, immediate, revolutionary change will be the new algorithm.

As importantly, 'The Genie Out Of The Bottle' reality assures that there is no turning back.  No matter how much naysayers, Chicken Little The Sky Is Falling worriers, obstructionists, religious fundamentalists, and political fanatics may howl at the moon, this post-human generation will come.  There is no way to stop recombinant DNA engineering, mind-computer electronic symbiosis, and Artificial Intelligence. 

There has been a hysterical outpouring at the arrival of every new technology - the automobile, the phone, the electric light the computer, the smartphone, nuclear energy - and today's hysteria about AI, virtual reality, and genetic engineering is no different.  However as in all cases of technological advances there is no turning back. 

The American Left has made its name as The Party Of No.  America is not a land of limitless opportunity, intellectual brilliance, ambition, insight, and competitive energy, say progressives, but a hateful, acquisitive, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, rabid place of inequality.

Elon Musk and his cabal of billionaires embody all of these traits and represent a throwback to the unprincipled past of raw individualism, laissez-faire capitalism, and anti-communal greed. 

Theories like this hearken back to the International Jewish Conspiracy or The Trilateral Commission, absurdly nonsensical unfounded assumptions of corporate and social evil, creations of hopelessly uninformed, credulous minds. 

These sentiments are hysterical because they have no foundation.  These men alone have created tens of thousands of jobs, jettisoned America into a revolutionary future, one which promises rewards for everyone far greater than ever before imagined.  They, other than commonly held sentiments of enterprise and patriotism, do not form an insurrectionist group bent on world domination. 

When conservative commentators have ironically noted that the Left's premier program of Diversity Equity Inclusion has worked wonders - men like Elon Musk have risen to the top of the American socio-economic pyramid and have shown the world just what individuals of African origin can contribute - progressives shout 'racism'.  America has always favored white men, and once again is showing its true colors. 

However, in so doing those commentators and their many supporters are pointing out the fallacy of the progressive racial agenda.  Africans despite decades of independence and every incentive and opportunity for rapid development have done nothing, and are mired in underdevelopment, corruption, poverty, and economic indolence.  During the same period South Korea, China, and India have become world economic powers. 

The old shibboleth of colonialism has long crumbled. This is no longer an excuse for such miasmic mismanagement and endemic corruption.  The progressive myths of the sentience, natural intelligence, forest-bred environmentalism, tribalism's communalism no longer have any credibility. 

Slavery, Jim Crow, and segregation are similar shibboleths which are no longer excuses for the bottom-rung academic, intellectual, social status of the black American population.  As much as liberals may limn the praises of inner city street culture, it is dysfunctional.  

If a policy of individualism, opportunity, talent, ambition, desire, and competitive spirit had taken the place of the one of entitlement, identity, racial politics, and white guilt, the situation in America would be quite different. A race-blind American culture of success determined by talent, ability, and enterprise might well be multi-racial and diverse.   

So the ironic statements about Musk, the African American genius, might well serve to expose the hypocrisy, myopia, and febrile fantasies of the progressive Left. 

Meanwhile, these same progressives are calling Donald Trump 'Racist' for calling out the anti-white pogroms of South Africa and Zimbabwe whose governments have deliberately expelled white farmers, resulting in the complete failure of agriculture, and the downward spiral of economics and finance.  Those whites who have chosen to remain in South Africa are subject to continuous racial hostility in an attempt to force them to leave. 

Donald Trump has welcomed these white Africans to the United States and has been roundly criticized for it.  Yet his welcome is yet another unveiling of progressive reverse racism - a hard and fast animus against white European-origin Americans as legatees of slavery, colonialism, and cultural assassination. 

White European-Americans have a lot to be proud of, for their forbears created Western civilization - arts, letters, literature, philosophy, science, music, and more while Africa and its diaspora have contributed little. 

It is not racist to be legitimately proud of your own culture - the whole progressive ideal - but when white Europeans express such historical patriotism, they are vilified.  

Citing Elon Musk as a great African American should be a wake-up call to the ideologically fanatical Left, and show Americans the true nature of 'diversity equity inclusion'