The Love Life Of An Idealist - Looking For Mr. Right While Doing Good, A Thankless Task

Vicki Bates was well on into middle age but had lost neither her political idealism nor desire to find Mr. Right. Both were somehow conflated - her desire for a more perfect world and a perfect mate were born of the same optimism. The world could indeed become a more verdant, peaceful, and congenial place if only we put our backs into it; and a man who treated her as an equal, loved her for her intelligence, her spirit, and her character simply had to be out there somewhere 

Now, Vicki was no raving beauty nor ever had been.  She tried her best for a svelte figure but always fell off the wagon for cheesecake and chocolate truffles.  She did what she could to tame her wild hair - some stray, unwanted gene had been passed on through the Alvarez side of the family, too much Dominican and not enough German-Irish - and spent a fortune on makeup and facelifts; but to no avail.  She felt as doughy in the wrong places as ever. 

Men are willing to see the real woman but only if access to her is through beauty - a hard lesson for any plain and ordinary woman, but particularly difficult for a progressive idealist like Vicki.  The world would never become a better place if these bullying, misogynist notions persisted. 

There was chatter in the office about how to find a man - surprising since it was an era of identity, feminism, and female authority and a professional cadre of university-educated women - but persistent nevertheless.  The West Wing of the National Gallery was a particularly good place to meet the right kind of man as was the Renwick Gallery - both had a particular knowledgeable cachet and a quiet appeal. 

 

Her alumnae club was of no use - Wellesley was still an all-women's college - and her political clubs and associations were disappointing.  As much as she hated to admit it, progressivism simply did not attract the best, brightest, and beautiful.   Every day from her lunch hour sojourn in Lafayette Park, she watched with secret envy the cavalcade of young, blonde blue-eyed women and tall, chisel-jawed, confident men come and go from the White House. 

While she appreciated her male colleagues' political sympathies, to a man they were inept at love - or even the fundamentals of courtship.  They bumbled and bungled, got lost in the weeds of climate change and civil rights when all she wanted was a kind word or more importantly some seductive interest. 

Time was marching on, she was not getting any younger, and her pull-by date was fast approaching.  Women have a narrow window for sexual allure and she was bumping up against it.  Before long she would be a silhouette, unremarked, unnoticed, and left sitting on the curb.  'I must act', she said. 

Political activism was an anodyne for her anxiousness - an acceptable Zoloft taken regularly to distract her from her growing frustration.  She was present at every No Kings protest in the Washington area, joining her colleagues from Richmond to Delaware in the happy jubilee celebrations of unity and purpose. She marched in picket lines in front of the White House protesting America's military adventurism, and stood among a thousand women on the National Mall demanding abortion rights. 

Yet each one of these ventures were unsatisfying.  For all the camaraderie, solidarity, and righteousness, they produced nothing, meant nothing except to those in the ranks, and were at best empty affairs. They were fillers, temporary emotional expressions which were far from her core.  As much as she hated to say it, she wanted to be loved - or more crudely, she wanted to be fucked. 

Of course men being what they are, bulldogs and rubes when it comes to courtship, she could have rolled over for any one of them to satisfy the itch at least. 

Each progressive issue had its own following, and the men all seemed to be of the same ilk. The women's rights men were uxorious, timid, and deferential but the thought of Bob Muzelle, a sagging, morose, whimpering 'Is it OK if I kiss you' charade of manhood made her want to retch.

The climate men were either dour, depressed, and angry; or were hysterical Chicken Littles.  The socialists were rabbinical, the ethnic rights advocates were short and perturbed, and the internationalists cartoonish Utopians.  

It seemed as though each corner of the progressive canon had its own identity, a kind of showy calling card of belonging.  There was no such fol-de-rol for the conservative men with Wall Street incomes and two homes.  Conservatives were mainline, old guard, and sexually literate - exactly what Vicki was looking for but couldn't manage to cross Pennsylvania Avenue. 

'What about a gigolo?', suggested a friend. Surprised that there were still such things and not really believing there were, she laughed.  What an idea! But then again she had seen The Roman Spring Of Mrs. Stone and American Gigolo. Why not? Cole Porter wrote a song about it

I should like you all to know,
I'm a famous gigolo.
And of lavender, my nature's got just a dash in it.
As I'm slightly undersexed,
You will always find me next
To some dowager who's wealthy rather than passionate.
Go to one of those night club places
And you'll find me stretching my braces
Pushing ladies with lifted faces 'round the floor.
But I must confess to you
There are moments when I'm blue.
And I ask myself whatever I do it for.

Vicki was nonplussed.  What was she thinking? What self-respecting woman ever resorted to that? How tacky, how distasteful, how...well, simply not done. 

Mrs. Elizabeth Longworth, owner of the private club 'with men's and women's best interests in mind', had predominantly male clients drawn from the movers and shakers of Washington.  She was known for her discretion, her tact, her absolute secrecy, and her beautiful women.  A night with one of Elizabeth's girls was worth the price, an unforgettable evening of courtship, a five-star dinner cooked by La Lion d'Or's chef Pierre de Valmont, and the penthouse suite at the Mayflower. 

Mrs. Longworth also serviced women - matrons from Georgetown's finest salons, ladies from Miami Beach, and dowagers from Park Avenue and Beacon Hill.  The scenario was of course different, more formal, more properly conservative, more romantic and indelibly sweet; but it provided the same product with sophisticated. 

It all seemed so Republican, Vicki thought.  Imagine me! She of all people, known for her support of women, longtime feminist, indomitable soldier for the independence, freedom, and sexual liberty of her sisters, in paid sexual company.  It was not only unthinkable for her as a well-brought up woman, one still in her prime, but as a devoted progressive. 

Yet there was shabby, clueless Bob Muzelle, a toadying sexual simpleton reminding her of the penury of daring-do in the progressive ranks.  No Chris Hemsworths among them, no trysts and idylls, just ponderous, pouchy, doughy men who wanted to do good. 

'Where have I been?' she asked herself, 'when the answer was as plain as the nose on my face'; and in one fell swoop she crossed the aisle, casting her lot in with the Great Gatsby crowd with nary a second thought.  It couldn't happen overnight of course, elision from progressive partisan to conservative, but flying one's true colors made all the difference in the world - not American flags and MAGA hats, but a makeover with Monsieur de Gramont, a Palm Beach forward look, and a bubbliness that charmed and won over her newfound suitors. 

'I'm a new woman', Vicki said happily to a friend; and indeed she did seem happy, satisfied, and fulfilled.  Perhaps not yet loved for herself by a lover who roamed her inner rooms but very close to it. 

The non-profit lot, the ones east of Florida Avenue, the homely, raggedy Ann women who plugged away at global warming or migrant farm workers were gone from view, left far back in the rearview mirror.  She had saved herself, opened new doors and simply loved the occasion of sin. 

Wars Are For Winning - Iran And The New Calculus Of American Will

With the current war in Iran, Donald Trump has left moral exceptionalism behind.  Wars are for winning, and in the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman who did not hesitate to use overwhelming military force to defeat the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese, the American President has not hesitated to eliminate the leaders of the Iranian theocracy, to destroy Iran's offensive and defense military capacity, and to reduce its energy, power, and transportation infrastructure to rubble. 

America is now in a struggle with an enemy which shares the brutality of Genghis Khan and operates under a moral system which is antithetical to ours.  The creation of an Islamic caliphate, one in which strict Koranic and Sharia Law are established, practiced, and enforced, is the only goal.  

Like the West’s medieval Crusades, the march of Islamic militancy is in the honor of God, the establishment of His kingdom.  Of course secular and venal interests will always be important and the fights of Iran, al-Qaeda, ISIS, al-Shabab, and others have territorial and economic interests driving them as well; but the struggle is fought for higher ends.

For these terrorist regimes, the death of civilians, therefore, has no relevance since the ends of battle are religious and spiritual.  The ends justify the means far more than any secular struggle. What Americans consider heinous crimes – blowing up school buses, crowded markets, and residential neighborhoods – have no moral implication per se.  They are only necessary measures to assure the final and ultimate moral end.

In this war with Iran, the United States' ally is Israel, the  only country that has understood the dangerous, aggressive militancy of Islam, and they fight with the same moral rectitude and purpose as their radical Islamic opponents.  They will brook absolutely no threat to the Jewish homeland, and civilian Palestinian and Iranian deaths are the price the enemy must pay for its aggression and permanent hostility.  The Israelis know that they are fighting an enemy who uses a territorial imperative – a Palestinian state and the creation of an Islamic caliphate – only as pretext for the annihilation of Israel, the ridding of Arab lands of the infidel, and in preparation for universal Islamic rule.

Israel's stand with the United States in its war against Iran is an extension of this existential faith.  Iran, sponsor of Middle East terrorism, intent on building a nuclear bomb and the missiles to deliver it, and an implacable hatred of Israel and the West, must be destroyed before it is too late.  In a matter of months, not years, the regime could build enough missiles and drones to deter any counter attack and to indiscriminately attack, threaten, and cause instability in the Gulf states.  The time for determined military action in a war to annihilate the theocratic regime and completely neutralize its military capacity is now. 

Radical Islam is expansionist by expressed design and Koranic sanction,  Israel is only self-protective but defiantly so. Radical Islam is not simply another culture to be respected and understood for its principles, traditions and history.  It is the enemy to be defeated if not annihilated.

Within a historical context, war has been a permanent feature of human society since the Paleolithic.  An expression of a violent, territorial, aggressive, self-interested human nature, it will always exist and the only way to stop the natural aggressive intents of individuals, countries, regions, and religions is to do so with force.

Wars have never been fought with moral restraint - force must be met with force and peace results either when an attacking force is defeated or their is a military standoff.  The Cold War was such a standoff, and the Pax Romana was one of complete Roman control. 

Tolstoy wrote of Napoleon's Franco-Russian war and the famous Battle of Borodino, but Russians were always at war. In the 18th century alone Russia fought Poland, the Turks, the Swedes, and the Persians at least once. 

The rest of Europe was no different.  England alone fought the Hundred Years’ War, the Eighty Years’ War, the War of the Roses; and constant wars against the Dutch, Spanish, French, Scottish, Irish, and Portuguese.  England was racked by twenty-five bloody civil wars between 1088 and 1746.  Minor skirmishes, internal conflicts, palace revolts and rebellions are not even counted.

Before the Battle of Agincourt described in Shakespeare’s Henry V, the king visits his troops in disguise to gauge the mood of the enlisted men.  They tell him that the king has brought them to France to fight a war based on his own dubious claims and that although it is their duty to die for him and for England, they are unhappy that they will perish for such a cause.

Since WWII wars have been fought fought as much as with soldiers’ safety in mind than in victory. The defeat of the enemy – Iraqi, Afghani, or Vietnamese -  has been conditional on limited American casualties.  Battlefield generals have always calculated personnel losses when defining military strategy.  If too many men were lost, then the battle would be lost.  

Marcus Aurelius fighting his last wars against the restive German tribes did indeed calculate risks to the cavalry and to his infantry, but was not making moral decisions, only practical ones.  American generals on the contrary very much consider the moral implications of G.I. deaths.

The wars of the early and mid-20th century and those before were also only marginally concerned with civilian populations, unlike today when ‘collateral damage’ is always to be avoided and risk to non-combatants carefully calculated.  American persistent but recent moral rectitude and sense of democratizing mission demands such calculations.

It was most definitely not so during World War II when we firebombed Dresden and Tokyo and dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – all deliberate attempts to incinerate civilian populations.  The only relevant objective was the defeat of the Nazis and the Japanese.  Any other consideration was irrelevant.

In the Vietnam War, perhaps because American leaders were never really convinced of the rightness of their cause, a special emphasis was placed on ‘winning the hearts and minds’ of Vietnamese civilians.  This effort was designed to both show American beneficence and generosity and to gain local allies.  As history has shown, this idealistic notion never worked, nor ever had a chance of working.  

The Vietnamese showed themselves to be a brutal, implacable enemy which had only one thought in mind – defeating the Americans by killing them.  Ho Chi Minh of course understood the psychology of war and knew how to rattle American forces through the uncertainty and unpredictability of attacks, by quickly removing their dead, and by the placement of landmines; and he understood American history and current political opinion and knew that we would get tired of war.  Yet he was determined and unstoppable in his fight to kill and remove.

Times have changed.  America has finally accepted the ineluctable realities of human nature, war, and the endless conflicts over domain, territory, resources, and hegemonic control.  The calculus has not shifted to one applicable throughout history.  Wars will always occur and they are for winning - not ro compromise, not conciliation, not negotiation or commiseration

As an expression of this newfound, historical imperative, Donald Trump has joined the new geopolitical triumvirate - Russia, China, and America, all countries with the implacable will of dominance, control, and socio-cultural influence.  The triad are not partners but adversaries, but in their competitive will are unlikely to fight each other.  America's war in Iran is as much about showing China and Russia that the old American contingencies are gone.  

America is back. 

Tennessee Williams, Baby Doll And Pure Sexuality - The Indefinable Sexual Allure Of The Select Few

De Joan Merchant was born and raised in a dry spit of land in the middle of Eddy Lafourche a cypress tangle of alligators, swamp rats, and cottonmouths where her father dredged, fished, trapped and netted every live thing that lived in that backwater.  Every morning after cornpone, fatback, and coffee he set out into the swamp to check his trap line.  If he was lucky he might come upon a panther, raccoon, or opossum, but usually came back with a haul of catfish and a water snake or two. 

Alvin Merchant often wondered why he stayed put, waterlogged and penurious in this forgotten place, but his family had always lived in or near the swamp, denizens of it no different than crocodiles, alligators, and black bears. It might have been different if his children had been restive, anxious for New Orleans or Charleston; but they seemed to take to the watery life. De Joan was a good helper, a real trooper, and Alvin relied on her for her sharp eyes, willingness to work, and good spirit. 

The Merchant place was not the only cabin in the woods and were not alone in the swamp. Other families clustered on the land, built a church and a school, ferried goods to and from the swamp, and lived a happy though meager existence.  The residents were not bothered by taxes, limits, or revenuers and in a way lived in a forgotten idyll. 

Yet the charm, the simple allure of a quiet, natural life began to fade once De Joan reached early adolescence.  Most girls mature slowly, evenly, progressively into womanhood, but it all came at once to the Merchant girl who found herself in full womanhood before she was out of he fifth grade. As remarkably she was fully aware of her sexuality, that particular female potency that comes to very few at such a young age. 

She toyed with the boys of her age, a sexually diffident lot, attracted older ones who sniffed out a female in heat as sharply s a black bear, and had sex with Harper Ward, wholesaler and landowner from Lanier who visited Eddy Lafourche in the Spring and Fall. 'Come visit me', said Harper, and one day De Joan took the outboard through the swamp to the bayou and to the small own of Lanier. 

Tennessee Williams wrote about Baby Doll Meighan in his screenplay for Baby Doll and she could have been De Joan Merchant.  'A voluptuous girl under twenty, on a bed, the covers thrown off' is Williams' opening liner notes. She is simple and uneducated, but with a languor and irresistible feline sexuality no man can refuse. 

 

Williams was fascinated with sex and sexuality, perhaps best expressed in A Streetcar Named Desire. Stanley is a sex object, the male version of Baby Doll - a simple, man with a primitive virility - a sexual allure which overcomes notions of class, intelligence, or sophistication.  He for Williams is male sexuality, undiluted, unrestrained, and unaffected by opprobrium or dissent. 'We've had this date with each other since the beginning', he tells Blanche.  Stanley's pure machismo and Blanche's matching sexual desire make sex inevitable.  There is an ineluctable potency to the attraction, a pre-human, animal need; something beyond debate or consideration. 

Baby Doll is the feminine version of Stanley - sexually desirous, infinitely desirable, and irresistible to all men.  She represents the purest, unadulterated female sexuality.  There is only the sexual urge, the desire to be taken, the irrepressible need for sexual satisfaction.  

Like Baby Doll, De Joan Merchant had no idea what drove her to Lanier and into the bed of Harper Ward except for his intent. Some men are like that, wrote Williams, incapable of restraint, invulnerable, and driven only by desire for women.  Blanche calls Stanley a brute, barely evolved from the apes, an evolutionary throwback, a primitive; and she is right. He is more animal than human, a proto-male, an unstoppable sexual desire. 

So it was not surprising that De Joan motored her launch out of the swamp to Ward's bed.  She could smell him five miles off through the twists and turns in the swamp, past the nests of water moccasins, the burrows of voles, and fox lairs, through the cypress roots, the narrows where moss and wild lilie.  s clogged her way, out to open water and the bayou to tie up at the Ward dock. 

Vaccaro, Baby Doll's lover wants her as a woman but also as the instrument of vendetta.  Her husband has burned down Vaccaro's cotton mill, and taking his wife was the ultimate vengeance.  The play is one of deliberate, canny, practiced seduction highlighting another one of Williams' frequent themes - sex has its consequences, usually ignored because of the nature of sexual desire.  Yet Baby Doll is powerless, so aroused by male pursuit is she. 

 

'Saint or sinner' has been the male take on femininity since the beginning, and the most adept women have blended the two into an irresistible, indistinguishable mix; but the Baby Dolls and De Joan Merchants of the world - and their Stanley Kowalski male counterparts - are far less devious and complex.  They are throwbacks, sexual creations alone, primitive in nature only but expressively mature in their understanding of their desire and its effect on others. 

Woody Allen, an admirer of Tennessee Williams created a Baby Doll-De Joan character in his movie Match Point.  In a cafe scene, the future lover of the Scarlett Johannsen character says 'You realize the effect you have on men, don't you'.  She replies, 'No one has asked for their money back'.  

She is irresistible in a Baby Doll way - soft, pliable, welcoming, infinitely desirable - and her lover cannot stay away. 

Most women are circumspect in their desire.  They are looking for a proper mate; and most men may dally with insignificant women, they have their eyes on the prize.  The very few do not deny that part of their nature which makes them indelibly male or female, accept that it is what defines them, determines them, and completes their design. 

Vladimir Nabokov in his novel Lolita creates what he calls a nymphet, a young girl with a preternatural sexuality- a sexuality that describes and motivates her more than anything else; and in parallel creates an older man who cannot resist her - a man with the same indefinable male desire as that of Stanley, a desire which becomes an obsession. 

D.H. Lawrence in Lady Chatterley's Lover creates the same scenario but with a more oblique obsession. The two lovers want 'sexual mutuality', that coming together which Lawrence considers epiphanic.  Sex is not only on everyone's mind, it is the be-all and end-all of human experience. 

Baby Dolls rarely end up well.  Baby Doll Meighan is used by Vaccaro, De Joan Merchant was passed from lover to lover and ended up back in Eddy Lafourche catching swamp rats, catfish, and beavers; but this does not deny the principle - they were Darwinian prizes.