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. 

Waking Up To The End Of The World - A Worrier's Happy Life In A Movement Of Fear, A Political Saga

Maeve Barkley woke up early, for today was the day she was to get her COVID booster.  She had thought to bundle it - why not get a multiple dose of protection and be done with it? to be protected against everything and not have to worry - but she had been dissuaded by her doctor and told to wait for her flu, tetanus, shingles and pneumonia boosters. 

Thank God there were these vaccines out there, and damn the anti-vaxxers who denied them. What would the world be like without vaccines against TB and polio? Yet, and even now there are women who have chickenpox parties where children share blankies and PJ's in order to get the disease! Far worse are those mothers who are convinced that the measles vaccine causes every kind of natural disaster and refuse to have their children immunized. 

Maeve had suffered great emotional trauma during the pre-vaccine COVID epidemic years.  She scrubbed her counters with industrial strength lye and chemical disinfectant, installed air purifiers in every room, left mail and Amazon packages outside for three days after delivery, triple masked when she went out (which was almost never), and kept double the six-foot recommended social distance

She became a neighborhood vigilante and rallied others to join in a campaign to call out those who walked unmasked or too close to others.  She helped organize a children's brigade which would be deployed a la Stasi and Sevak to find and report those who disobeyed the rules. 

Maeve had been a skittish, fearful child, always worried about the weather, the scab on her knee, the nuns at St. Agnes, Mr. Allworth, the math teacher, and the woods behind her house.  She hesitated to play outdoors because of the unknown, dreaded walking through the school door, feared breaking a bone on the athletic field, feared God and his retribution for her sins which were building up faster than she could confess them, and knew for sure that she would be the first to catch whatever disease was circulating through New Brighton. 

'Perhaps she should see someone', said her mother, concerned that her daughter was becoming a neurotic mess - and she knew what that was like, still wobbly and uncertain after years of therapy and a pharmacopeia of anti-anxiety medications; but her husband dismissed the idea.  'A phase', he said. 'All children go through it, granted not with so many odd bits as Maeve, but still'; and so they decided to let things ride and see what happened. 

The phase did pass thanks to the bitchy, catty girls in her class who were merciless in their taunts, imitations, whispers, and rumors; but the foundational nature of her worries - some tightly-wound strand of DNA inherited from someone or other in her family past - was there to stay. 

However, she found a congenial, supportive, and healthy outlet for her worries, and was welcomed into the many campus organizations concerned about the plight of the black man, the warming climate, war, capitalist greed, and much more.  Her colleagues found her a most eager, responsive, and ambitious member of the group.  

She was first at the barricades, first in the phalanx marching against the police, loud and clear on the podium, and a tireless recruiter of students. 

After college and graduate school and a doctoral dissertation that was excerpted by the liberal press, Racism From Plymouth Rock To Chicago - The American Pandemic, she joined one of the premier progressive lobby groups in Washington, Scientists for Social Responsibility, and there became known as The Amazon of K Street - a fierce, tireless, club-wielding harridan for whom the evisceration of the enemy was worthy of the Comanche warriors who left the entrails and dismembered bodies of white settlers for Union soldiers to find. 

This energetic pursuit of social justice calmed her nerves - there was nothing to worry about if you were doing something about it.  She had always feared the black man.  As a child she thought of him as a weird, ghoulish, misshapen monster who lived underground like the Morlocks in The Time Machine. Although she never admitted it, her efforts to reform the ghetto were more to keep the black man in his place and not threaten her. 

 

Working for the health of the planet kept her from considering a fiery end of the world which was inevitable unless mankind rallied.  Fighting for the destruction of Wall Street allayed her fears about becoming destitute, homeless, and living on the street. 

Progressivism is, after all, a movement of worry. Progressives worry that the sky is falling, that doom is just around the corner, that horrible new viruses will escape from Chinese labs or Congolese forests and infect the world, that military adventurism will finally disassemble the architecture of peace and condemn the world to perpetual violence, that minorities will be rounded up like cattle, interned in some South Dakota gulag and summarily executed. 

Although progressives claim they are dedicated to progress and the verdant, peaceful, kind, and considerate Utopia of the future, they want nothing of the kind.  They love living in a miasma of fear, in an environment of death and destruction. 

Which is why Maeve found a home there.  It was a very congenial place with camaraderie, fellowship, and community.  They all hated and feared together, shared stories of pillage and desperation, theories of conservative insurrection, rumors of coups, military takeover, unholy alliances with vicious dictators; and at the end of the day walked out the door happy, confirmed, and satisfied. 

Causes are far more engaging that stoicism or Darwinian theory - the essence of American conservatives who believe that there is no such thing as progress, only change caused by the perennial struggle between the weak and the strong.  Acceptance of this certitude provides both the political and emotional reserve necessary to survive and prosper.  

 

No one on the National Mall demonstrating for climate action really cares about a few degrees of change.  Warmer winters would actually be nice; but the cavalcade, the jamboree, the whole sold-out rock concert of purpose and joy is why they are there. Living in a que sera, sera world would be cold and empty. Protest confers identity, and joint protest - political camaraderie - cannot be matched for a truly human experience, one which conservatives can never know. 

COVID took Maeve by surprise.  Suddenly fear and loathing took a very personal form.  She was no longer in the progressive camp of universal hate, but in her own childhood cocoon.  All the years of political expression which had tamped down and quieted her natural tendency to worry suddenly disappeared into the distant past.  They held no salience, no anodyne to the real, horrifying fear of suffocating in a hospital bed, gasping for her last breath as COVID took another victim. 

When it was over, she gave a sigh of relief and turned once again to political activism.  Donald Trump was in office, and the elision from personal fear to universal fear was smooth.  All her juices began running clear. She felt good in the morning, ready to meet the day.  There was so much wrong with the world and Trump was making it worse. 

'Worries can be happiness' wrote a well-known social psychologist. 'No one is happier, more joyful, more full of life than the person who lives in a world of doom, death, and destruction, and who feels he is doing something about it'. 

Synchronicity In Marriage - Fidelity, Love, Respect, Sharing Until The Clocks Are Set Back

Brent Fielding hated changing the clocks every Spring and Fall.  The new thermostat required a password and two-step security, the stove he had bought for the kitchen remodeling required almost as much, and the wall clock which never kept good time in the first place, required a step ladder to reach.  Resetting the clock on his new car was cloaked in mystery, hidden in a maze, and the missing piece of a thousand-piece puzzle. 

 

Yet it was at these two times of year that he reassessed his marriage - the resetting, the strange changes in light and shadow, the disassociated feeling, all were signifiers, indicators.  

Brent and his wife Barbery had been married for forty years. Their marriage had survived infidelities, family disputes, and the usual gamut of slights, willfulness, and indifference. They loved each other or at least knew that they would be adrift if one of them died. They had settled into a comfortable routine like most older married couples, but their relationship was a very active one within it.  They never tired of each other, and when one of them had gone out to a class or a meeting, the other felt an emptiness in the house.

As Brent grew older, more and more he began to notice patterns and outlines where before he saw substance.  He noticed how perfectly he and his wife could anticipate their movements so that they never got in each other’s way.  

Not in the small kitchen, nor in the narrow hallway, nor in and out the doors.  He could trace their flows and if he had drawn them, there would have been no straight lines; and if he could have animated them, they would have more resembled a choreographed pas de deux than polite leeway.  

He knew from his wife’s first footfall that she was descending the stairs so he waited until she came down before he went up to his office. He understood her morning routine of coffee, yoghurt, New York Times so well, that never once did it ever interfere with his tea, texts, or chopping the  celery for soup.  They moved through the kitchen with practiced movements, but not not without grace.

The substance of things seemed to matter less than their outlines and their forms.  He noticed how pictures were framed, how the rooms of the house were arranged and built.  He noticed angles and shadows, the lines of phone and light cords, the silhouettes of trees and the shape of phones and sinks.

Brent found that once he started to be aware of his obsession with shape, form, and outline, he could not stop himself from seeing only the thumb hole in the scissors, the composition of the Giotto fresco, the repeating circles of clock, trivet, and ashtray; the disappearing lines of phone cords; the delineation of dried berry stems.  His office was no longer one of color, memories, and texture; but only outlines.

At the same time he came to appreciate his life with his wife more than he ever had. This focus on intersecting patterns or balletic approach gave it new meaning.  If he could emotionally prosper in a routine without substance but only outline, then the relationship was indeed an important one without which he could not survive.

Marriage had always been a matter of synchronicity, a balletic dance, an intimacy born of appreciation of the subtlety of paired movement that only matures after many years of dancing.  Now that elision had become routine - there were no new patterns, unusual pirouettes or steps, and if there had been, he would have been concerned.  

In his younger years such disruptions in synchronicity might have meant a lover, a tryst, a new emotional algorithm which he did not understand.  Now interruptions in the perfect choreography might mean the onset of dementia, or a final release of age-old, well-hidden frustrations. 

Now it wasn't so much changing patterns, but adjustments to time, and the resetting of the clocks which heralded them.  Neither one had talked about the disappearance of patterns, the eventual solitary life that one of them would have to lead, a life without Swan Lake, and worse, a life leading to the end of time itself. 

'We all die alone', Tolstoy wrote in his novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and like Ivan few of us are prepared for the solitude, the fear, the uncertainty, and the final disassociation with everything around us.  No grieving relatives, no solemn prayers of priest or rabbi, no familiar music can allay this terror of the end, the unexperienced future. 

Time is relative said Einstein in his famous disquisitions on matter and energy; but even outside the world of physics we know this.  Old people feel time is rushing by, suddenly it's Sunday again, didn't I just water the plants...While young people feel time moving painfully slowly - dragging hours of anticipation, excitement.  

Which was why the resetting of the clocks made Brent anxious.  He was manipulating time - didn't we get an extra hour of life every Fall?

Of course not, and even if we did, wouldn't that upset God's plan? 

Einstein said that if a spaceship travelled at close to the speed of light time would slow, and that compared to those left behind on earth, passengers would remain young.  Returning to base they would find everyone they knew dead, gone, and buried.  Slowing time meant accelerating it, neither one a good idea. 

A few years ago there was a partial solar eclipse in Washington, and Brent went down to the Georgetown waterfront where there was a clear, unobstructed view of the sky over the Potomac.  When the eclipse was at its zenith - again the sun was only partially obscured - the ambient light changed, the birds stopped singing, the picnickers on the park lawn spoke more quietly, more softly.  The world was at a strange, unaccustomed moment.  Life was always a matter of sunup, sundown at regular, predictable times and this threw that all off.  It was unsettling. 

The eclipse stayed with him for days, and he remembered it especially at the resetting of the clocks.  Both were small, unusual interruptions in familiar patterns and as such could not be ignored. 

At both events, his life of physical patterns - the pas de deux, the intersecting lines, the shadows that we make that come and go - and his timely routine were upset.  He could only think of place without both.  No patterns, no time. 

'I love you', he said to his wife, very unusual for him a very undemonstrative person, but fitting somehow at this particular moment. 

So far, so good. Mens sana in corpore sano but for how much longer?  Suddenly that didn't matter now that he had put fractals, shadows, lines and clocks away.