Life In A Windowless Room - Jack London, Darwin, Machiavelli And The Despair Of A Political Idealist

Bob Muzelle was getting on in years, time to hang 'em up, retire, relax in a chaise longue, and go to bed early; but after decades of fighting the good fight, confronting racism, sexism, and rampant capitalist greed, beaten and bruised by Bull Connor's thugs and Donald Trump's ICE, he couldn't just pull the plug. Social justice was not just an occupation, but an ethos, a raison d'etre.  Without it he would be nothing, a shell of a man, a stick figure, a silhouette. 

'Now, Bob', said his wife Corinne, taking him in her arms and comforting him like a baby, just as she had done throughout the years. 'Isn't it time?'. 

Corinne although she loved her husband and had stood by him in all the years of cold water flats, secondhand dresses, Hamburger Helper, and junkyard overdue cars, wanted at least a few untroubled, undisturbed moments of her own. Life with Bob had not been easy, and to be quite honest, she had had quite enough of this morose, unhappy man. 

She, unlike her husband, had not aged in place; and from the leftist firebrand of the Sixties, lover of Mark Rudd and confidant of Stokely Carmichael, huddled happily with her comrades in a basement in the East Village till now she had not remained the same.  Over the years she had become more an intellectual Kinder, Kirche, Kuchen woman, satisfied with life as it is not what it should be.  In her thirties bemusement at the continued political hysteria of her husband and his friends set in - puzzlement at his dogged pursuit of salvation, his insistence on redemption, and his growing belief in Armageddon.

 

Later, still faithful to her husband, but more of a caretaker than a lover, she became restive, irritable, and angry.  She was sick and tired of traipsing through copies of The Daily Worker and back editions of The Nation and Ramparts strewn on the floor; listening to alternate radio every morning, shortwave broadcasts from Havana in the evening, and drop-ins and coffee and cigarettes in the kitchen every other day.  It was the Village again, the same conspiratorial huddles, power salutes, hugs, and promises - the lot of them straggling in after a day of protest on the Mall, ragged, beaten but deliriously happy. 

Bob was stuck in the Sixties, old ideas rattled around in his head and were written down in new manifestos.  The world outside was an even more horrible, desperate place than it had been at the beginning of his political journey. He began shouting out the front door, picking up yesterday's placards and waving them at passing cars.  He was, as Corinne had feared for some time, demented. 

'Give a liberal enough time and he will become a conservative' was the old saw that proved true again and again. Most Sixties radicals were living in the suburbs with desultory interest in politics at best.  Live and let live - not quite que sera sera but at least a calm sanguineness - was the meme around town, and the likes of Bob were increasingly regarded as old wood, better stacked and covered, dried and cured to go finally up the chimney in smoke. 

Some of these old partisans actually changed their tune. How could one not after seeing history repeat itself in the same predictable ways. The Twentieth Century - the hundred years of Stalin, Hitler, Mao Ze Tung and Pol Pot, the Rwandan genocide and tribal slaughters from Borneo to Chad - was as bloody and brutal if not more so than any period of history; and the Twenty-First was starting off to the beat of the same drums. 

 

Corinne Muzelle was one of these turncoats, although out of respect for her husband she kept her reformation under wraps.  On the sly she attended libertarian sessions at the Cato Institute, moved on to more conservative forums, and finally to political certainty.   

There is something compelling about the story of Buck, the hero of Jack London’s story The Call of the Wild, the epitome of animal determinism.  After years of being yoked to his human masters, tied and tethered in a society alien to his own, he finally escapes, and his male aggressiveness and dominance for so long stymied and subverted, emerge.  

He hears the call of the wild – an irresistible appeal to the basic, primitive, primordial nature of every animal being.  There is a completeness and perfection in the male character of Buck – he has no feminine side – and his will is male, one unmistakably virile, potent, and forceful. 

London, writing in a pre-feminist, post-Victorian era, accepted male dominance as a given – a hardwired, deeply-rooted, ineluctable force of human nature and society, so the literary allusion was not surprising.  After all, he wrote not many years after Ibsen and Strindberg had written their proto-feminist plays in which men are subjugated to female power.  

Hedda Gabler rules her weak, impotent husband and controls the destiny of her lover.  She admits, a woman created in Fredrick Nietzsche’s image, that the only validation of life in a meaningless world is the expression of pure will.  

Both London and the Scandinavians had one thing in mind - the absolute, indomitable will of human nature.  Whether cast in terms of male and female dominance or in more general Darwinian terms, the message is clear.  Unless and until the human genome is rewired and reconfigured, the territorial aggressiveness of human nature will persist.  Darwin's The Origin of Species and its central them of the survival of the fittest, has never been challenged.  In every species and subspecies of the animal kingdom the same survivalist imperative exists. 

Cooperative units - those social idylls singled out by internationalists - exist only to increase strength, a solidarity not of a higher philosophical order but out of military advantage.  Cooperation is a tool of survival.  Allies join together in cooperation against a mutual enemy; compromise offers a temporary hiatus to war.  Clausewitz was right - war is but another means of diplomacy. 

Machiavelli was the first to understand the hardwired nature of human activity and apply it to politics.  He saw nothing unusual or abhorrent about war.  War was only wrong when it was waged improperly, under unfavorable circumstances or at the wrong time and place. 

Although Corinne was not an intellectual and had read neither Clausewitz or Machiavelli, she understood London and Ibsen.  She identified with Hedda Gabler, an amoral, willful actor in a Nietzschean drama.  Hilde Wangel and Rebekka West, Ibsen's women whose only ambition was dominance, control and the expression of pure will were no different; nor were Shakespeare's Richard III, Tamora, Lady Macbeth, or Dionyza.  

It was increasingly hard for Corrine to disassociate her husband, Bob, from the ethos of a progressivism which denied human nature, the indisputable persistent, characteristic human violence of the past and the present, competition, and countervailing force and remained insistent on progress through faith, love, and charity. 

Bob was an ineffectual, increasingly unhinged Don Quixote tilting at windmills - a man out of touch, addled by his own inverted intensity, demented by inchoate passion. 

Where was the man she married?  Or had she even married a man?

Jack London was right.  The Wild will always be wild and the untamed and unintimidated will always dominate.  The only peace and accommodation occurs when to equally matched and armed adversaries stand off - tooth-and-claw in the tundra or the Cold War. 

Political evolution takes its toll.  Corinne could no longer look at Bob with the same patient, understanding eyes.  He was a fool, a dupe, a man reveling in his ignorance and own brand of received wisdom.  He lived in rooms without windows. 

The jig was up, and sunken costs meant less and less.  It was time for Corinne to move on.  The few years she might have left would not be spent moping, crying over spilled milk, seeing bogeymen in every dark corner, howling at the moon like a rabid wolf.  

A Woman's Place, Where Exactly Is That? - Nancy Potter's Journey From Nymphet To Kitchen To Call Girl And Back

Whore or Saint? Women, caught between social and biological imperatives and natural sexual desire, try both and, confident of their ability to sort right from wrong, good from bad, decide who they are.  

Nancy Potter was no different except that she was a nymphet, Vladimir Nabokov's creation of a young girl, precocious beyond her years, aware of her sexual allure and sexual destiny, and determined to explore every inner room of a demanding nature that she didn't choose but which was nevertheless hers. 

She experimented early on.  She was no more than eight or nine when she asked Bobby Vale to join her in the woods.  The boy, barely out of emotional diapers, clueless about everything except Legos, Pokémon, and basketball, and still very much a mamma's boy, stood there dumbfounded as Nancy pulled down his pants.  

The squirrels chattering in the trees knew more about what was happening than he, but as deaf and dumb as he was about sex, he had an inkling that what Nancy was doing was not right, in a class by itself, and reserved only for adults.

Nancy was a tigress in middle school and a vixen in high school, but only at her small liberal arts college in the Midwest did she change direction. While no one ever thought that devilish Nancy would sail a different tack, she turned out to be a whiz at numbers.  Not just 1+1 kinds of numbers but negative numbers, imaginary numbers, number series, and number theory.  For four years she was more interested in solving Fermat's theorem than removing her drawers.  

This early adventurism, said Harvard Professor of Psychobiology Adam Brookings, is not atypical of the prematurely sexual female, nor is its temporary hibernation:

Nabokov was on to something, writing as he did of the nymphet, a pre-pubescent girl of primal sexuality.  There are such girls, endowed with an extra-sensory ability fine tuned for sexual adventure and gratification.  These girls, in the shadows because of a persistent sexual obscurantism, are women from the day they are born; women born to mate early and often.

The particularly highly-evolved woman is multi-dimensional, trading, diverting, but always returning to form.  Such sexually urgent females are rare but permanent fixtures on the asymptotes of the bell curve.

What Professor Brookings did not say was that the trajectory of such complex women can include regression, a pulling in of sexual antenna and deploying other, more traditional sensors of womanhood. 

And so it was that Nancy turned ingenue, sexual innocent, woman of virtue, fidelity, and hearth-and-home desires. The third phase of her sexual history had begun.  She married and married well; but for her, now the very image of a fertile, reproductive, full-bodied woman, social status was unimportant.  

It was the giving birth, the ultimate expression of femaleness and femininity that mattered.  The sexual act, always enjoyed, became indescribably passionate for it was the means to reproduction.  That in itself was destiny. 

However after a decade of childbearing, childrearing, and sexual fidelity, the quieted, banked sexual energies returned with renewed urgency.  The years of motherhood and dutiful second fiddle were over and she was on her own once again. 

 

The string of lovers was little more than irrelevant strands, threads come loose, bothersome irritants.  Like Portia in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, she entertained her male suitors, dismissing each in turn.  They were a pompous, self-absorbed, immature, ignorant lot, and she toyed with them, played with their hopelessly infantile assumptions, and finally settled for the pick of the litter, the importuning Bassanio. 

Nancy would be damned if she settled for a Bassanio or any other of his kind, at least not before she stepped out a bit, exposed that inexplicable sexuality within, and took as many lovers as possible - not for marriage but for the simple, pure feeling of being sought after, desirable, and irresistible. 

Belle de Nuit is a film about a woman like Nancy Potter - an aristocratic woman whose ordinary upper middle class  married French life was nothing more than a purgatory of good intentions.  Lovers are no anodyne to the desperation and the sexual desuetude of marriage, and she becomes a call girl.

Nancy was equally disaffected with the life for which she had been programmed and was following.  She, like Belle de Nuit would become available to all and would revel in the anonymity and the pure femaleness of her enterprise. 

She became once again her own woman with a growing reputation for sexual versatility. She was the primus inter pares of Washington call girls.

This uninhibited, anonymous, sex was what she always had wanted - the ultimate sexual freedom, the defining exercise of free will.

The Belle de Nuit syndrome is but a temporary phase in the sexual life of the pre-pubescent sex queen - an exuberant excess, correct, and an inextinguishable validation of womanhood.  Once a woman has passed through that defining period, she can return to anything more ordinary.

In Nancy's case it was Kinder, Kirche, Kuchen. There was nothing more satisfying after an interlude of uncompromising sex than returning to her farm family in Iowa - the family which had dismissed and ignored her during her fugue but who welcomed her back at its end.

She was Mrs. Tyler Blanding of Ames, mother of four, marvelous cook, wife, and choir leader of the First Methodist Church of Christ.  After a personal Hejira as defining, powerful, and transformative as Muhammed's crusade from Mecca to Spain, she settled down.  The sexual genie had finally been satisfied. 

Infected! The Quarantine Of Ideas - A Windowless Gulag Of Identity And Censure

Rene Arguello  was born and raised in a poor family in rural Florida, a mixture of Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban.  His first name, Rene, was given to him by his father who admired the Haitian patriot Rene Dessalines, comrade of Toussaint Louverture, leader of the revolution which led to the country's independence from France to become the first black republic in the Americas and a beacon of democracy and freedom in the world. 

 

Juan Arguello knew something about oppression.  He left Cuba during the worst years of the Batista regime, an autocratic rule that mirrored that of the Shah of Iran or Louis XVI - a presumption of glory, longevity, and admiration by the people, an arrogance which led all three to their revolutionary downfall. 

Juan taught his young son the lessons of freedom, pride and dignity, and the rewarding struggle for political independence, individual freedom, and personal honor.  Juan was as serious and ambitious for his son as the Jews of the old Lower East Side or the Chinese below Houston Street had been. He insisted on hard work, academic success, and a patriotism bred out of the love for his adopted country. 

The Arguello family was poor but never destitute.  Juan easily found work as an agricultural laborer in central Florida and more remunerative employment in one of the many cigar-rolling factories in Tampa.  Ironic, perhaps, thought Juan, working in an occupation as Cuban as he could imagine.  In fact the smell of cigars - the raw tobacco, the smoke from the puros smoked by the gerente, and the unmistakable scent of prime tobacco drying in the sheds of Macana.  

The irony was even more obvious when his son won a scholarship to Lefferts, a New England prep school located in the heart of tobacco country.  Connecticut broad-leaf tobacco was used for the outer wrapping of Cuban, Dominican, and Nicaraguan cigars and gave the product a special, unique draw and character. 

Those days were pre-diversity ones, and Rene was admitted not because of his race but his academic record, his extra-curricular activities, his obvious intelligence, and his neat, proper appearance.  His heritage, although distinctly Caribbean, carried the genes of Spanish grandees, French expatriates, and American adventurers.  He looked fully American. 

Things changed at the small Midwest college where, thanks to the prestigious Thomas Hooker award, a full scholarship prize named after the founder of Connecticut for citizenship and personal honor, he matriculated. Alford College at the time, the early Seventies, had shed all of its farm ethos and had been radicalized just like its sister colleges in the East. 

The reforms of Dean Bradley Clark which opened the college to all not just the sons and daughters of well-heeled burghers, landowners, and agricultural grandees which had been the core of its student body since its founding, the period was one of civil disobedience, student occupations, and the beginning of 'diversity'. 

Rene grew out his hair Afro-style - the white colonial genes were recessive in that category - and he became the darling of the radical student body.  He got religion, a passionate conviction to racial and ethnic justice and he, because of his heritage, became the poster boy for campus revolt. 

He was detained on a number of occasions by the campus police - he was concerned enough about his future to avoid the protests that spilled out into the streets and were subject to municipal police authority - and earned his bars legitimately if not heroically.  He majored in Latin American studies, wrote his senior thesis on the revolutionary struggles of Haiti and Cuba, and had enough academic currency to be accepted to law school.  

His career was set.  He would focus on civil law, especially cases of racial discrimination, and would join government in one of the new specialized agencies overseeing the many new programs designed to prevent racial obstruction and to promote minority integration.  

It is here that the real story of Rene Arguello begins.  Something happened to him in his late thirties which changed him from a committed social justice advocate to a true believer - the cause of the black man was not just one of social inclusion but of righteousness and retribution.  It wasn't enough to open doors for easier admission, nor to challenge each and every insult to his racial integrity. Rene had to see to it that the black man was raised to the top of the pinnacle of the human pyramid.  He felt not only the weight of the law but his own personal racial destiny - an imperative, ineluctable demand to right America's direction. 

To do so was not only to promote the black man and other oppressed racial and ethnic minorities, but to launch a frontal attack on the oppressor himself- the white man, the colonial master, the overseer, the brutal racial dictator, the implacably racist, immoral, reprobate.  It wasn't long before hatred displaced reason entirely. 

The sociologist and longtime observer of the American political scene, Hamilton College Professor Emeritus Arnold Frampton, wrote this in an article to The American Journal of Sociology

True belief is a viral infection, invading the cellular structure of reason and good judgment and turning the believer into an automaton of received wisdom.  Once infected the true believer, like the zombies of Night of the Living Dead or Invasion of the Body Snatchers is compelled to infect others until the world is completely overtaken.  

There is no reason, no objectivity, no rational thought possible once the virus has taken hold.  Today's progressives are like body snatchers, an invasive species propelled by nothing less than some kind of inner compulsion bred of rapidly accelerating intellectual erosion. 

 

One would have thought that Rene, brought up with such moral rectitude in an environment of positivism and hope, would have become a reasonable advocate for legitimately-needed change and not the rabid, bilious hater he had become.  Professor Frampton weighed in:

True belief is insidiously compromising.  It not only crowds out reason and rational conclusions, it pushes consideration and generosity aside until there is no room for anything but virulent, increasingly violent, excoriating hatred.  There is only so much space within the human psyche, a space which is easily filled up with meanness and ignorance. 

Rene began to look at everyone through the lens of race, gender, and ethnicity; and based on what he saw he either accepted or summarily dismissed, cancelled, and removed.  There was no opinion, consideration, or judgment which could sway him from the progressive canon.  

Any criticism of the black man - the persistent dysfunction of the inner city, the disproportionate rates of violent crime and incarceration, the abysmally low rates of academic performance, the lack of social cohesion - was met with accusations of racism. 

To use Prof. Frampton's words, the 'insidious viral invasion' of true belief infected every aspect of Rene's vision.  Received wisdom became canon, ex cathedra Biblical truth.  The climate was warming due to man's ignorance.  The newly-cited evidence that Antarctic was gaining ice and that the north polar cap was not losing it, that earth temperatures had shown no more than normal geological fluctuations was dismissed out of hand.  Gender choice was not preference but biological reality. 

'Eventually the virus kills the host', said Prof. Frampton. 'The true believer lives incarcerated within his ever narrowing gulag of ignorance until eventually he rots and dies'. 

True belief, however, is still alive and well, so its disappearance is not around the corner; but the epidemic is slowing.  More and more Americans see the naked emperor with his clothes off - there is no there there, the apocalyptic visions are no more than Chicken Little, sky is falling, fantasy. 

As for Rene? His rabidness is taking its toll.  He is emotionally drained and intellectually weary. However often he might shuffle, hoist himself with difficulty from the sofa, forget his medication, or wander about thinking it's Tuesday, he still worships at the altar, does his ablutions and says his prayers for the coming of Utopia. 

 'Not on my watch', he mumbles as he gets out of bed in the morning, not quite sure what that watch is, but steady as she goes. 

A sad story? A tragedy? Only an apocryphal warning.  'Pull up on the reins, Bobby Boy, or you'll find yourself in Blodgett's Creek', he remembers Tom Mix saying to his young nephew on the matinee screen at the Strand theatre in Tampa.  'Now, why did I think of that?' Rene asked himself.