An Idyllic Marriage - No Diversity, The Happy Family Of Fifties Television Returns

'Où sont les neiges d’antan?' wrote medieval poet Francois Villon where the melting snow symbolizes the disappearance of past beauties and glories.  

 

'I am a poet' said Marnie Owens, reading  Ballade des dames du temps jadis in her richly flowered garden in a pleasant suburb of the city, 'and I want to live in the past', a lament by a woman who had lost in love more times than she could count, and for whom life in a far more romantic age might have been more congenial. 

'But I can't' she said, turning on the television to watch a rerun of Ozzie and Harriet a family sitcom of the Fifties where Ozzie Nelson, his wife and two boys led an idyllic life.  There was nothing to interfere with their schooldays, family dinners, and evenings by the fire.  There were no hostile mobs in the streets, no diversity, and only one common, shared identity. 

It was an age of innocence, a patriotic, settled time after American victory in WWII, the return of heroic soldiers and the beginning of an era of unparalleled prosperity. 

Every family was like Ozzie and Harriet's, or so it seemed.  Everybody had a home, a garden, children, and faith.  Times were good, strangers tipped their hats, neighbors looked out for children walking to school, Fourth of July was a celebration not just a three-day weekend, and the future was bright. 

There were a few unmarried people in New Brighton, the small New England town where Marnie grew up - Anton the hairdresser, business partners and roommates Edna and Zoe; old maids Hortie Brown and Mable Finch, warty old things who came out of the house only to hang the wash; and a few 'confirmed bachelors' who were normal enough, interested in women, solicitous and engaging, but simply not interested in permanence.  

These bachelors were not Casanovas or Don Juans, unmarried but always with a beautiful woman in tow, just single men who lived alone.  'If you had known Norma Carlson', said a lifelong resident of the town, 'you wouldn't be surprised that Anthony never married.  

Passersby could hear Norma shouting at her husband through the open windows, a horrible howling, a lambasting of the poor man who took the abuse and every morning went to his office at the New Brighton Bank & Trust, for duty demanded it. 

Shortly after his wife gassed herself in the garage, Herb Carlson married again to a woman who turned out to be just as hectoring and mean.   Some men simply can never be whole. 

But all in all, the town of New Brighton was as settled, happy, and forward-looking like a thousand others in post-war America, and Marnie was a pleasant, ordinary, well-adjusted child. 

As a young adult she expected to be courted and married soon after college. She had gone to one of the Seven Sisters schools, Ivy League parallels when co-education was still some time in the future.  She did well, dated, went to mixers, had the frequent weekend at Yale, and looked forward to graduation day by which time she hoped to be sporting a diamond. 

No such luck, and she watched with no little disappointment as her classmates headed for the altar, the suburbs, children, and the good life. 

Times were changing when she graduated.  Marriage, children, and the suburbs was not the be-all and end-all of a woman's existence.  One of her classmates joined IBM in the time of mainframes and the first inklings of computer facilitation, and other secured a position at a French pharmaceutical firm experimenting with new mood changing drugs. 

The less serious joined publishing firms in New York, but these were just holding pens, something to fill the hours of the day until it was time for the singles bars of the Upper East Side - meeting places for the interested and eligible. 

No dice either way.  Marnie was neither a math whiz nor a biologist, and she was far too picky to find a mate at just anyplace on Second Avenue.  She had grown up, after all, in the almost unreal idyll of New Brighton and had faithfully watched Ozzie and Harriet. 

The men at the singles bars simply weren't up to it.  They were either too full of themselves, too busy making money, or involved in too many serial affairs to make the grade. She wanted a kind man, a thoughtful man, a good man, and he was not to be found at Max's On Second. 

Nor was Marnie one of those women who took pot luck and assumed that they would reform the men they randomly picked and make them into the husbands they wished them to be. 

She was simply a woman caught in a time warp.  She couldn't believe the Fifties and its generous propriety were done and gone.  It simply wasn't possible, and so it was that after five years in New York and then five more in Washington, she was still single. 

Of course she had lovers.  Single and looking did not necessarily cancel a good time, so there was Henry from Treasury, Bob from the East Wing, and Luke, an Army Major from the Pentagon. 

As time went on, America changed, and suddenly Marnie's world was diverse.  She in all her years in New Brighton, Miss Porter's School for Girls, and her four years at Smith had never seen a black man except for the janitor in Main House.  There were no Latinos or Asians either, and her social environment was still as pristinely white as that on Ozzie and Harriet. 

Now, things were different.  Not only was the crop of eligible men meager, but half of them were gay and the other half a genetic admixture as complex as that of a Turk in whose blood ran that of Hittites, Mongols, Circassians, Bulgars, Greeks, Russians, Georgians, and Syrians. 

There was nothing wrong with this racial potpourri.  It was just that she was still a Fifties girl who wasn't concerned so much about whiteness per se, just sticking with her own kind - and that kind was becoming a rare commodity. 

In Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, the Broadway 50s musical based on Romeo and Juliet, a boy and girl from two opposing gangs, one white and the other Puerto Rican, fall in love. Anita, a friend of Maria, warns her against getting involved with someone from a different community.  She sings:

A boy like that
Who'd kill your brother
Forget that boy
And find another
One of your own kind
Stick to your own kind
A boy like that
Will give you sorrow
You'll meet another boy tomorrow
One of your own kind
Stick to your own kind

“Stick to your own kind” is her refrain. If you don’t, you’re asking for trouble.  Of course Maria does not listen, bad turns to worse, and the final scene is a melodramatic replay of the end of the star-crossed lovers.

Diversity has been heralded by progressives as the ideal society a multicultural community in which different ethnic and racial groups celebrate their own special identities than 'one nation under God'.  Yet in what society has that ever worked?  The earliest human settlements were suspicious of the other.  Tribal groups fought each other for territory, resources, and influence.  Ethnic majorities always ruled their minorities. 

Brazil is renowned for its seamless multiculturalism, yet although the white population is less than half of the country's people, it makes up most of the ruling class, the wealthy, and the privileged.  Brazil maybe multicultural, but it is a white nation.  

 

China is made up of a hundred different ethnic groups, but the ruling party insists on a singular culture without which the country cannot remain strong, economically and financially powerful.  Diversity equals divisiveness. 

So, there was nothing unusual in Marnie Owen's desire to marry a white man, live in a white suburb, and have white children.  It was shared values, a common cultural and social history, a shared legacy.  Marriage was hard enough without having to navigate tricky international waters. 

Marnie didn't want just a white husband and a white community, she wanted it to be an Ozzie and Harriet Fifties community where neighbors looked out for children, where faith was the rule not the exception, and where church dinners, chatting over the back fence, and mutual respect were the stuff of community life. 

She was lucky.  There aren't that many Ricky or David Nelsons around these days. The gene pool of such men has shrunken to almost nothing; but there he was, under a lamppost, looking up at the sky on a starry night, dreaming - or at least that is how Marnie remembered it, embellishing everything as she did with the brush of what she called 'idealistic realism'.  A restoration of the Fifties was indeed possible (reality) and to wish for it (idealism) was to create it. 

They found their idyll, lived a long and happy life within it, isolated - or at least insulated - from the diversity outside, their own Grover's Corners, Ozzie and Harriet Land. 

'Isn't it dull there?', wrote a distant California cousin; but of course she missed the point. In sadly short life, disruption - diversity- did nothing by way of enlightenment, peace, or spiritual evolution.  It only distracted and disassociated. 

'We're just fine', Marnie answered. 'Come visit us sometime'. 

Western Civilization - 'Not Diverse Enough', Shouted An American Woman From The Palace Of Versailles

Melody Tripp smiled and gave the woman next to her a big hug.  Both were protesting Donald Trump's autocratic, monarchical rule in a No Kings rally on the National Mall.  

As usual, the rally was more a jamboree than a demonstration, a happy time of camaraderie, sisterhood, and belonging, so hugs and kisses were common, the tents filled with hot coffee and croissants, and martial music was heard from the strategically deployed bank of loudspeakers.  The event organizers debated the choice of musical score with some suggesting that John Phillip Sousa was too American and too rousing, too representative of the very American exceptionalism that the crowd would protest, but it was foot-stomping and energizing. 

A good rap score would be more like it, said others, more in tune with the multiculturalism of America in danger because of regal maniac in the Oval Office.  Yet it was dismissed because its pumping, driving, African rhythms were so personal and uninhibited that they discouraged the kind of solidarity required of such an event. 

The whole idea of music was dropped, and the loudspeakers simply carried the voices of the many speakers who, one after another, denounced the megalomaniac in the Oval Office. 'Can you hear me, King Donald?', shouted one, yelling at the White House less than a mile away.  Richard Nixon could hear the anti-war protests from the South Lawn White House balcony.  The chants so upset him that he sent Haldeman and Ehrlichman with Presidential orders to 'Hose the motherfuckers'. 

LBJ couldn't sleep because of the all-night protests where the chant, 'Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?' echoed through the West Wing despite triple-paned glass. 

In any case Melody was happy to be there on the Mall with her sisters-in-arms, demonstrating their belief in the American Republic and sending a strong message to the President that they would not tolerate any anti-democratic intent. 

The No Kings rallies consolidated liberal hate for Donald Trump, his singular moves to take down the architecture of representative government, and his deployment of federal troops to round up, detain, and incarcerate legitimate asylees in gulags in North Dakota.  

He was no different than dictator Nayib Bukele of El Salvador who with extra-judicial power locked up thousands of alleged MS-13 gang members depriving them of their rights and subjecting them to prisons worse than Soviet labor camps. 

As importantly, although not an overt feature of the No Kings rallies was the absolute, convinced, irremediable belief that Western civilization was responsible for the world's ills.  Pope Urban II sent legions of European soldiers to kill what he called 'the unholy occupiers of Jerusalem' but were simply brown and black religious pilgrims anxious to settle what they considered their land. 

In the era of Western colonialism, European kings conquered Africa, subjected black men and women to torture, humiliation, and permanent suffering while they raped and pillaged the land.  The slave trade, the most heinously inhuman commercial enterprise in history, was an outgrowth of this colonialism, and remains to this day the legacy of a predatory, immoral, and devilish society. 

Despite anything else Europeans did, their civilization should never be forgiven for their enslavement of the black man, their exploitation of a whole continent, and their imperial ambitions to rule the world.  The No Kings rally was also a protest on the continued pre-eminence of Western culture, the most insidious the world has ever known. 

The cry of Melody Trott from the manicured gardens of the Palace of Versailles, 'Not diverse enough' was heard from the middle of a group of American tourists gathered to experience the magnificence of the Palace - there to visit the Hall of Mirrors, the formal dining room, the ballroom, and the royal chambers. The shout was shocking, although not a surprise to many who had hoped to rid themselves from the persistent liberal hammering heard every day in America. 

What galled Melody and her sisters was not only that European civilization was a predatory evil, but that every single European who was raised on a pedestal was male, and mostly white to boot.  Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Louis XIV, Leonardo, Socrates, Sophocles, Michelangelo, Einstein, Bach, Mozart and a thousand others were nothing less than cultural puppets of a state which deliberately and punishingly kept the brown and black peoples of the world down.  Without the specter of colonialism, racism, and slavery, these so-called geniuses would never have been recognized, and in their place would have been a multicultural genius cluster. 

The historical ignorance, the willing suspension of logic, reason, and objectivity, and the blind distortion of political judgement in Melody and the American progressive Left is unparalleled.  Western civilization is the foundation for American culture, religion, enterprise, art, science, and letters.  Its influence did not begin with the Enlightenment, that philosophical movement at the heart of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights but centuries before. 

European civilization was dominant since Ancient Greece and Rome.  The Renaissance was a unique flowering of European culture and set the standard for high culture.  Each American owes a debt to Europe. 

'Not the black man', argued Melody who she said has suffered and continues to suffer under the yoke of white, patriarchal, Europeanism. 

Hardly, for black Africa when the first Europeans arrived was a Paleolithic, primitive society.  While these white settlers could not do as much there as they could in the far more developed Asian cultures whose civilized history dated back thousands of years, they at least opened the continent to new ideas, modes of governance, administration, and law.   

The fact that Africa descended back into tribalism and  forest primitivism after independence is beside the point.  The European colonizers always had a civilizing mission.  Black Americans cannot be excluded from the positive influence of Europe. 

At the same time, the cultural and intellectual influence of Europe has missed the African diaspora. There are no black men in the genius cluster of Musk, Page, Ellison, Brin, Zuckerberg, and Bezos.  African Americans are disfavored because of slavery, the forest tribalism of the homeland, and the white liberal insistence on diversity and identity. Minorities are encouraged to shed whatever vestiges of European civilization they might still have and become 'their own people'.  Thus deprived of the greatness of historical Europe, they remain without an ethos, an intellectual, moral, and ethical center. The discrimination, in the guise of inclusion, continues. 

Melody came back from France delighted, for at the end of her visit the riots broke out - thousands of brown and black men, predominantly Muslim and Middle Eastern or North African in origin, ethos, culture, and allegiance stormed the streets of Paris and other cities and wreaked havoc - firebombing, looting, mayhem. 

'The end of white European civilization', she said, 'and about time'. 

Yet this 'suicidal empathy' is encouraging an Arabo-African Islamic culture which is still Stone Age in mentality, ethos, and civility.  The legacy of Socrates, the Caesars and the Sun King will be erased, dismissed, and defiled.  What will replace it is a new Dark Ages. 

The rot of progressivism worsens and the thoughtless, faux idealism of 'social reformers' and 'social justice warriors' increases.  It is an age of ignorance, historical revisionism, and harsh, unthinking political radicalism. 

'A great trip', said Melody, back in her quiet suburban Washington neighborhood, preparing for the next important demonstration on the Mall.  She felt energized, refreshed, newly committed to her life of positive change and good, especially when she thought of the ogre in the White House. 

Love And Other Mishaps - A Badgering, Hopeless Affair And The Case For Promiscuity And Eugenics

The idea of romantic love is relatively new, dating back to the 14th century.  Petrarch’s sonnets to his love, Laura, expressed new sentiments of longing, desire, loss, and emotional beauty.  The Age of Chivalry was born, women were no longer considered just mates contracted to produce children and extend the family line.  The were now to be revered, sought-after for their charms and allure, and kept for their own sake.

The Apostle Paul was notorious in his views on marriage.

Are you free from a wife? Do not seek a wife…those who marry will experience distress in this life, and I would spare you that (Corinthians 7:27-28) 

Of course Paul was not necessarily misogynistic.  He understood how difficult marriage was and how hard it was for a man to keep his mind on God when he had a wife to deal with. The notion of celibacy was given a boost thanks to Paul.  Since he was speaking in spiritual terms – i.e. ideals rather than practicalities – he ignored the economic necessities of marriage.  All well and good, Paul, new Christians in Corinth or Ephesus might have said; but celibacy for us means penury.

“I would spare you that” certainly resonates in the mind of many married people who realize what a fine kettle of fish they have ended up in; and most wish that they were once again footloose and fancy-free. Romantic love fades quickly, and as routine settles in, husbands and wives ask, “Why did I do that?”

Abel Ferrara's film Welcome To New York is a fictionalized account of the French banker and politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a notorious libertine who when caught in flagrante delicto with a harem of prostitutes and was accused of pandering, he asked how was he to know they were hookers. 'All women look alike with their clothes off'

Ferrara's story is not a bio-pic nor political cautionary tale, but an account or an unashamed philanderer who refuses to be put in the cage of conventional morality.  He is neither proud of nor guilty about his infidelities or sexual appetites.  It is who I am, he says, a self-described libertine whose supposed immorality is other people’s problem, not his.

The film is especially interesting because it is an indictment of today’s increasingly Puritanical American culture.   Sex in the name of civil protections and women’s rights has been legalized, sanitized, and nearly considered off-limits unless it is between two consenting, married adults.   Sex for the Strauss-Kahn character was necessary and absolute.  

As in the case of most older men, sex with younger women is their only hope of retaining the potency and vitality of their youth.  Although sexual conquest is enough for most men, The Strauss-Kahn character could not stop there.   It was the sex act in all its twisted diversity that mattered.  And what was wrong with that?

Sharp edges, moral imperfections, and stubborn sexuality are all universally condemned in American progressives’ desire to reform the world.   Great statesmen– JFK, FDR, LBJ, MLK, Thomas Jefferson, and many others – are now judged more for their personal rectitude than their political leadership.  Jefferson’s sex life with slaves; Martin Luther King’s Lothario lifestyle, Roosevelt’s longtime mistress; Clinton’s dalliance with an intern are now judged alongside of war and peace, social reform, justice, and equality.

An African man's day is not complete without sex - a woman in the bush, behind the cowshed, on a straw tick, standing under a light post. Sex is a male birthright, and nary a thought is ever given to reserving it for marriage.  Africa is a sexual jamboree, a field day, 

Randall Thompson did not consider himself promiscuous any more than Strauss-Kahn did.   He preferred 'libertine', Don Juan, Casanova, Lothario and men who found eternal delight in women, the pursuit, the conquest, the returned affection, even the tearful, clinging goodbyes. Their many women formed a pastiche, a composite portrait, a virtual tableau of beauty, charm, and allure. 

He was a virtual African and a man of the diaspora.  Marriage was a corral, a holding pen for sheep bound for slaughter, a penitentiary, an infirmary, an imposition; and he wanted no part of it. 

He hit his stride in the full bore of American neo-Puritanism, MeToo, No Means No feminism - a revisionist era of Victorian propriety mixed with a female idolatrous promiscuity. A woman was to be treated like a virgin of the court but encouraged to look and act like a trollop of the street. 

Randall understood women from the most virginal, preserved for the best and the brightest, to the Belles du Jour, housewives by day, courtesans by nigh, to the outright trollops of Southeast.  They were all the same, each with different clothes, a different attitude and particular desire.  They may be the products of doting fathers like Peyton Lofton of Lay Me Down In Darkness who spend all their young lives looking for/hating Daddy, instinctively and uniquely sexual like Connie Chatterley or Madame Bovary, or fey, frustrated old maids like Hepzibah Pyncheon but they were all women. 

The current sexual meme is that there is no such thing as universal, consistent, predicable femininity.  Any such categorization is a product of male-centric machismo; but Randall knew differently.  There was indeed a feminine, female innate character which when understood was for sale. 

All of which is to say that when the female biome has been deconstructed and understood, then the sexual field is open.  If a man has the key to unlocking a woman's heart, then the rooms within are his to explore, 

Feminist cant, Victorian propriety, and modern MeToo female guardianship mean nothing if female desire has not changed, and that the same self-interested, territorial claims continue. What is the difference between Clytemnestra, desirous, ambitious, sexually demanding Queen of Thebes and Mary from Accounting?  Nothing, and Randall understood the universal feminine being. 

Feminists disparage and dismiss the Casanovas of today. They are nothing but simian retard incarnations who do not understand the fineness of women and never will; but it is they who are out to lunch, so caught up in the politics of gender that they have lost  perspective. Times change but human nature - and in this case, female nature - does not. 

Men like Randall Thompson have it all, and only because of insight.  Men who cannot see past women as men otherly configured are bound to lose, the ones passed over in the Darwinian survival of the fittest.  They are the ones who embrace feminine power and authority and at the same time renege the masculine, men who capitulate when women are still their for the asking.

For every one Randall Thompson there are a hundred dutiful husbands in tow, the incarcerated, the used, and the supernumerary. 

Hail to the Chief!

Marriage? The institution is here to stay although subject to revision.  Whatever the new configuration, the new architecture, it will still remain.  What other legally binding, protective, sheltering institution is there for women?

Men like Randall, free spirts, Lords of the Plain, have no use for such things. They will have babies by ten women and will pass on the creative, the beautiful gene

The first twenty of Shakespeare's Sonnets are written to the poet's young man, and called The Procreative Sonnets urge him to have children and populate the world with the best, the most beautiful, and the brightest. 

Eugenics? Perhaps, but who can quibble with the notion of genetic superiority? The preeminence of he most beautiful, the most intelligent, and the most talented. 

When society has a Randall Thompson, the last thing it should want to do is to collapse him into a monogamous marriage.  What could be more counterproductive. 

No, promiscuity is a good thing.  Yes, there are far too many Baby Mommas and far too many undesirable children born;. but throwing out the baby with the bathwater is always a bad idea.  

Let the Casanovas have their day.  If not offsetting than at least modelling.