Marge From Accounting - How The Sexual Bar For Older Men Is Set Very, Very Low

Harry Bond worked for a mid-level law firm, not the best and certainly not la creme de la creme, but creditable and familiar to those in the business.  None of the partners went to Harvard, Yale, or Stanford  - it was more of a Florida State, Tallahassee crowd; but the firm never lacked for clients given the litigious nature of our era.   

 

Harry was a divorce lawyer, on the smarmy side of the  legal profession -  innuendoes, false claims, sorting out one scurrilous untruth from another, wallowing in the shit of miserable, hateful marriages and having to keep one's composure - but it more than paid the rent, assured better than a duplex in the suburbs and a place at good, if not top-tier college for children. 

If the truth be known, Harry's marriage was nothing to boast about except for its longevity.  Harry and Louise had been married for donkey's years, and were settled into the usual, predictable, not unpleasant but certainly humdrum routines which characterize those of most couples.  

Over the years they had moved from infrequent sex to desultory, to almost never, to sexual barrenness. For Harry's wife it was a removal of an incommodious duty - she had never been one for sexual enthusiasm and after the children were born claimed 'uncomfortability', and so transitioned to her new sexual abstinence without disappointment or remorse. 

Harry on the other hand was as sexually desirous as he ever had been - more actually, for politics and social activism had eaten most of his free time in college, and slogging billable hours until partnership had taken its toll - and a pretty girl turned his head every time.  

There was that new girl in the gym, a sylphic Japanese beauty, right out of an Edo woodcut, so elegant, so classic, so sloe-eyed and magnificent!  Or the newcomers to Washington - blonde, blue-eyed, flaxen-haired young women from Iowa and Kansas for the presidential term, delectable morsels, sweet, innocent things, as desirable as Christmas candy or lemon drops. 

Konstantin Levin, a principal character in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina lamented God's irony of having created man, an intelligent, sentient, creative, person of humor and charm, given him but a few decades on earth, and then consigned him to an eternity beneath the cold, hard ground of the steppes. 

Harry felt a worse irony - that God had created men with a lifelong, desperate interest in women, but with a very early sexual pull-by date. Most men were either unaware of the irony or ignored it, and doddered into old age with the same prune-faced hag they had married decades before and with only faint silhouette memories of sexual pleasure. 

'I must act and act now', Harry said to himself one morning after a particularly rancid-smelling night - the king-sized bed had become nowhere near wide enough for reasonable distance; but he was soon to find that intimacy with a stranger was not as easy as it was in the old days, the days of love-the-one-you're-with, the singles bar pickup days of the East Village.  At his age he was not even  given a second glance. 

Yet, he was not old, not irrelevant, and certainly not past his pull-by date.  If only there were opportunity and good measure, he might be once again in his sexually emotional prime. 

The chance came with Marge from Accounting, a young woman with a father-fixation, an oddly receded hairline, a tendency to run to fat, but with a blonde vivacity which she adopted and husbanded from Cosmo, Elle, and Vogue. 

It was this father fixation that was the trigger.  Now, Mr. Pappas was no great shakes, no entrepreneur, scion of industry, man of arts and letters, but a simple typesetter turned computer programmer.  His influence on Marge was of the simplest, most basic variety - he loved and doted on his daughter, so much so that she thought he was the lover of her dreams.  Old, nose-hairy, clotted and insignificant Artur Pappas would be her male model forever. 

And so it was that when Harry, desperate for female attention, and impatient for the sexual satisfaction that would come with successful mating, met Marge, equally on pins and needles waiting for Mr. Right, the relationship was destined for fruition, 

Martinis and oysters at the Mayflower, two Quaaludes in the taxi, a delirious night in a second story walkup in Adams Morgan, and the deal was sealed.  They were a couple - an illicit, unusually paired one, but necessary.  If either one ever bothered to think beyond the bedroom, the Piper Heidsieck and the take out, they would have known that this was an affair of unfortunate necessity and not romance. 

They grasped and clawed each other, both thanking God, both as delighted as schoolchildren with a new toy, a new teacher, or pizza for lunch.  The affair lasted for months, each lover more involved and obsessed with each other every week. The inevitability of its finale - he going back to his yellowing wife and Marge to a life of celibacy, dildoes and increasingly unsustainable fantasy - was ignored at all cost; and their weekend trysts were all the more intense and gratifying. 

December-May marriages have been limned for centuries - the rejuvenating, transforming, existential love of an older man for a younger woman is the stuff of dreams, legend, and psychology 

In fact Harry's physician when discussing the affair and its ultimate end asked him whether he was ready. 

'For what?', said the besotted, live-forever patient.  'Coming down from such a love affair is worse than heroin', said the doctor. 

The literature was filled with accounts of suicidal depression.  The end of the affair for older men signifies finality; and worse, the end of the reliving of the glories of the past. The older man is easily seduced into thinking that this idyll will last forever, that he has indeed found the Fountain of Youth. 

'It's almost worse than if you never had it', said the doctor'. The combined pain of the burial of youth, the finality of one's last love, and the irreducible return to a dour, unpleasant reality is too much for many men.  'Be careful what you wish for'. 

Duplicity, infidelity, and faithlessness are easily forgiven by women in one's elder years - too many sunken costs, too much history, too much too lose to make a fuss about men behaving badly - but there will always be a price to pay.  Infidelity always comes with strings. 

In the waning months of the affair with Marge from Accounting, Harry wondered if he could trade up. Now that a line had been crossed and he was on his own, why not Bettina from the Front Office, a Paraguayan beauty? Or Usha, Palestinian queen of the Seventh Floor?

But the variables of The Perfect Storm which had come together so felicitously with Marge, were not guaranteed to be universally operative, and after his first sallies in these women's directions, he had to face facts.  

So, the affair with Marge from Accounting ended, Harry once again became a considerate if not dutiful husband, and he looked forward to his remaining years with grim fortitude. 

The Coleman Silk character in Phillip Roth's The Human Stain', an older man in an affair with a much younger woman, far out of his social class, says to a critic, 'Granted, she's not my first love, and granted she's not my best love; but she is certainly my last love. Doesn't that count for something?'

Of course it does. The Coleman Silk character is murdered because of his affair, but Harry only soldiers on in a soggy, barely palatable but necessary marriage.  Ah, the ways of the heart. 

The Feral Catfight In Washington - Power Doesn't Corrupt Absolutely, It Just Makes Women Ugly

'Toss the whole lot of them'. said one voter after watching clips of the President's State of the Union address and the feral antics of Congresswomen Tlaib and Omar, two hysterical women trying to shout the President down, howling, unhinged animals baying at the man at the podium. 

These women were not the only ones in the voter's sights. The memory of Kamala Harris. former Democrat candidate for President, who went on rabid rampage to try to discredit Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanagh, or the howling banshees Jasmine Crockett, Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi, and Premila Jayapal, all of whom flap around squawking like chickens in a henhouse. demanding absolute attention.  These women are insufferable bullies, bellowing, deformed, gaping caricatures of political irresponsibility. 

 

The Congressional hearings where members of the Trump Administration are obligated to sit before Congressional panels to answer questions about their performance in office.  The Democrat members of these committees take these opportunities to do everything to disparage, humiliate, bully, and dismember those sitting before them.  All sense of civility, respect, or reasonable inquiry is left at the door, as these wolverines attack. 

For the first time in recent memory, administration officials have fought back, refusing to sit quietly, smile, and toady up to their interrogators. Each one - Bondi, Patel, Hesgeth, Bessent, Homan, and Gabbard have returned fire, incensing those on the dais used to deference, polite accommodation, and complaisance. 

It is easy to get elected from a district where voters don't know any better. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got elected because she was the rice-and-beans candidate, a Puerto Rican woman who promised Park Avenue living to constituents who lived in South Bronx projects, a jamboree of white hatred, trash-and-burn promises, island jive, and some hot chick sexual allure thrown in.  'Una chica con salsa' was all the barrio needed to know to elect a woman whom Sen. John Kennedy (LA) says is the reason there are directions on a shampoo bottle.  

Now, every American knows that the farther down the electoral chain you go, the worse it gets.  Municipal politics are a joke - walkin' around money, nepotism, fraud, incompetence, and venality.  State legislatures are one step removed from the bottom of the barrel but their transparently arrogant misuse of power and money-driven excesses are legion.  Congress is not far away.  It doesn't take much to pander, promise, and speak in happy nostrums to get elected and stay elected. 

The path to visibility and public responsibility has been a long one for women. Not so long ago in the post-war years of the Fifties, women were still homemakers, mothers, hostesses, and volunteers; and only in the Sixties when American society went through a civil revolution and women's rights were championed and abilities recognized, were women finally given their due. 

But transformation is not an easy, smooth process. At first women thought that to succeed in a man's world, they had to behave like men but even more so. Therefore in the early years of accession, men were targets of an overdue vendetta, an emasculating, man-eating juggernaut of women in the boardroom. 

As time went on, women realized that they could be in touch with their feminine side and be the office versions of the kind mother - acting with discipline, love, and understanding - but the business world no matter in what era it operates has no patience for commiserating dalliance.  Women found a balance, their own niche and gender neutral but gender aware management. 

Except in legislative, electoral politics where the arrogation of bullying authority is de rigeur, the accepted way, the only way to show your party's colors at seminal moments.  There is plenty of pushing and shoving done in the corridors of power, but there is nothing like the Congressional hearing to strut your stuff, to show the country at large what you are made of, the stuff of leadership and command. 

The perfect storm of arrogant, uniformed, base leadership as epitomized by AOC, Omar, Tlaib, Crockett, and others is caused by three factors - first you come from a safe district and one that doesn't know shit from Shinola, one in which if you are as predictable as the sunrise in your racial and ethnic promises, you will get elected.  Second, politics does not demand intelligence nor never has.  It has always been an affair of posturing, promise, and a silver tongue.  No one expects rocket science from a Congresswoman. 

 

Third if you happen to be a woman of color, you are a protected species.  Any criticism can be taken as racist and uncalled for.  Last but not least there are some women who have never made the elision from homemaker to social prominence, and they are stuck in that first phase of nasty, misandrous, vengeful ignorance. 

So the burlesque side show of The Squad (progressive Congressional women of color) and The View, a cabal of women deliberately honed to maximum cunt bitchiness, are not surprising.  These women both in the halls of Congress and on their airwaves are examples of what the Sixties, years of progressivism, and gender-racial-ethnic entitlement have produced. 

So when the two poster-girls of the progressive movement, Omar and Tlaib - were shown on screen at the State of the Union speech, Tlaib with froglike maw open so wide you could see down her gullet, the blush was off the bloom of the rose.  They had been outed as idiots. 

Oh, yes, well there are plenty of men behaving badly Schiff and Blumenthal are two of the most unhinged, entitled, Washington politicos around; but there seems to be nothing unleashed on the public like these completely untethered banshees. 

Kamala Harris was bad enough, all garbled and incoherent, banging on about being a woman of color and that her time had come but since nothing else was in that pretty little head of hers, most voters thought she was a joke and roundly defeated her. 

But now?  This stable of uppity, crowing, insurmountably charmless women is simply too much, over the top even for a political party which has run on vituperative hate for a decade and which has shown no signs of temperance. 

Every dog has his day, and these women will soon fade from public view.  They have already become caricatures, pilloried on social media, lambasted in the serious press for their wild, ranting, bull riding. They might still have hopes for higher office, but even the tone deaf, stone-stupid voter has begun to see through their circus charade. 

Trump has brought to the White House attractive women who stand their ground - far cry from the ugly, hysterical women who attack them - and the country can see the best despite the worst.  After their showing at the State of the Union, the days of Omar and Tlaib are surely numbered, and the country will give a big collective sigh of relief. 

'Wherever People Are Rich Together' - The Great Gatsby, Jeffrey Epstein, And The American Dream

 

They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.

This was what Nick Carroway, narrator and central character of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, The Great Gatsby said about Daisy and Tom Buchanan. 

The Buchanans were the idle rich - homes on Long Island, unimaginable wealth, and the status and privilege that it provides.  Yet, 'they were careless people, Tom and Daisy'.

They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

 

Nick is fascinated with Daisy - she shines like silver, her smile is bright, 'her voice sounds like money'. At the same time he is repelled by her insincerity and facile composure.  He is attracted to her but repelled by her.  'I am the only honest person I know'. says Nick in the story's introduction, and because of that, despite his recognition of Daisy's unusual beauty, affability, and charm, cannot help criticize her. 

At the end of the novel, his doubts are justified.  Despite her renewed love affair with Gatsby, his selfless act of responsibility (taking the blame for the car accident which killed Mabel Wilson), Daisy and her husband leave for Europe without a sign, call, or gesture of recognition of Gatsby's death.  They are, as Nick said, going off where people are rich together and leaving mess they created to be picked up by others. 

Gatsby is a self-made man, a millionaire, a man without Tom and Daisy's culture and class, but desperate to show off his success.  He, too, is wealthy beyond the reach of most people and more than the equal of people like Tom only whose inherited wealth has given him the stage. 

The source of Gatsby's wealth is only surmised - his association with Meyer Wolfsheim, a gambler who fixed the 1919 World Series suggests bootlegging or something far more sinister.  His parties at his Long Island estate were renowned - they were jamborees of wealth and privilege, insubstantial and capricious, thousands coming without invitation to eat and drink at his expense, and none of them coming to his funeral. 

They were also 'people being rich together' but nothing of the Buchanans' sort, only lowbrow parties for people with highbrow aspirations. Those who attended Gatsby's parties were just as careless about what they left behind as the Buchanan crowd. 

Fitzgerald understands the American fascination with money and its display, either the reserved, aristocratic Chippendale and old silver Buchanans, or the bourgeois excesses of Gatsby.  He is far more critical of the entitled rich - the Buchanans - than the nouveau riche, Gatsby, for America is all about striving for more.  Gatsby doesn't know any better - he has no idea how his world differs from Daisy's and how a marriage between them, despite the simple, innocent romance of previous years is impossible. 

'You're better than the rest of them, all put together', Nick says to Gatsby despite the fact that he has admitted that Gatsby stands for everything he hates.  There is room, even in a gangster, for friendship, admiration, and love. 

Jeffrey Epstein's parties were no different than Gatsby's - they were showy, glitzy, low-brow affairs which attracted the self-made, people like Bill Clinton, born and raised in trailer parks with the same aspirations as Gatsby. Clinton writes in his memoir about how he knew he was destined for greatness and set to work on achieving it at a very young age, chauffeur to Arkansas political royalty.  Every one on Epstein's list were of the same ilk - bourgeois to the core, lovers of wealth, glamour, and all the perks of wealth. 

They were not just Americans - the great Gatsby-esque parties of youthful beauty, abandon, excess, and secure privilege were irresistible.  There was something about being rich together that had an ineluctable allure.

The guests at Epstein's parties were not the rich of Tom and Daisy - old money, New England, Wall Street, industrial turn-of-the-century private incomes- and had no interest in being rich together like them, all leather and fine tailoring, paintings by Gainsborough, furniture by Townsend, the Yale Fence Club, Park Avenue and Southampton. They wanted to be rich together like Gatsby's guests, a 'look what I've got' cavalcade of new money and earned and bought influence. 

Epstein's list is long. It seems like everyone who was anyone visited him on his island.  It wasn't enough to be rich alone.  It was the collective wealth, the universal wealth, and the same heady bourgeois desire to spend and be seen spending.  Whatever happened at Epstein's parties was kosher.  How could such an assemblage of wealthy, ambitious men of influence and power do anything wrong? There was an unspoken but mutually agreed upon ethos - if the likes of Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton, Larry Summers and others like them were there, ethnics, morals, or proper behavior were never questioned. 

The Epstein parties were not only the rich being rich together, but scenes of opportunity - the crass bottom of the American dream. There were chances for all kinds of intimacy - business deals could be begun or concluded, sexual affairs arranged or consummated, political friendships cemented.  Sub kucch milta hai -  everything is possible - the old Indian aphorism in a society where rules don't always apply, was never more pertinent than in Jeffrey Epstein's jamborees. 

Still, it is amazing that Epstein and Ghislaine were able to attract so many of the world's rich and famous to their island.  These were not quiet little dinners on a terrace in St. Bart's overlooking the Caribbean, nor elegant soirees, nor black tie affairs with cello and orchestra.  These were indeed worthy of The Great Gatsby - grandiose, opulent, caviar affairs where anything goes. 

Epstein understood the dynamics of association like no one else.  He was a genius at event planning, a master of great and grand ceremonies, who stood top hat and tails at the center of a three ring circus.  One man and one man alone - Jeffrey Epstein - stood at the center of this ambitious, hungry crowd, and gave them each what they wanted.

In the highly-charged, often chaotic political atmosphere following revelations of Epstein's party excesses and the serious crimes committed, critics have overlooked the social dynamics of the situation.  These parties were remarkable and unique for their drawing power, their immediate sense of camaraderie, their uncanny tapping into male egos, and a brilliant understanding of how and why people group together. 

Much has been written about individuals, their guilt by association or their direct involvement in Epstein's criminal activities; but little about the parties themselves - the enabling environment for abandonment of common sense let alone morals.  There is a lesson in the parties, an explanation of not why rich people do rich things together but how they can stray so far from center once there.