When Bob Porter Poisoned The Parsons' Dog - The Myth Of Neighborliness

University Park is a leafy, well-to-do neighborhood of Washington DC, home to lawyers, professors, non-profit executives, and mid-level government officials.  It is uniformly progressive - American flags are a no-no, rainbow flags and Hate Has No Home Here Signs are on every other lawn - and during COVID it mobilized a vigilante committee to call out and report mask and distance offenders. 

Children were enlisted in a Stasi-like secret service, taught by their parents to shout j'accuse at anyone not wearing a mask and then to spread the alarm that so-and-so was a Typhoid Mary.

There was really no cause for alarm, however, since the community was in lockstep - to a man they believed that COVID was The Big One. They stayed at home at the first sign of a sniffle, scrubbed their counters with industrial strength cleansers, installed air purifiers, had food delivered, and isolated mail for three days before bringing it indoors. 

The neighborhood was shocked when Donald Trump won the 2024 election.  They were sure Kamala Harris and her message of diversity would win the day, so when the returns came it, they were disconsolate, despondent, and fearful.  From that moment on Trump hatred went viral, neighbors consoled neighbors, busses were organized to take them to the National Mall to protest, and the entire community was as unified as never before in political solidarity. 

So it was with some surprise that the Parsons’ dog dropped dead on their doorstep. Fluffy had always been a healthy, hearty animal with boundless energy and enthusiasm, so his premature end was a surprise and cause for suspicion.  Of course, given the closeness of the neighborhood no foul play was initially suspected but rumors have a way of taking over reason, and the Parsons were convinced that the people across the street had done the unthinkable. 

Now, the dog was a royal pain in the ass, barking at every passing car, howling at night, snapping and yapping at squirrels.  He barked from the moment the lights went on in the Parsons' kitchen till the last nightlight was turned off.  He was a barking machine, an unstoppable, loud, annoying nuisance. 

When the across-the-street neighbors came over to ask the Parsons if something might be done about their dog, Marfa Parsons politely explained that Fluffy was simply experiencing readjustment pains.  He really was a lovely dog, quite friendly especially with children, and there was really nothing they could to.  Once he became more accustomed to his new home and the residents around it, he would quiet down. 

The dog, however, was a barker - a fouled up cross breed Schnauzer, Terrier, and Shepherd.  The bloody animal had barking hardwired into its genes and could no sooner 'quiet down' than sit at the table.  For weeks, months the dog barked until its vocal chords were frayed and by evening it could only utter muted, raspy sounds; but by the next morning it was on the front porch barking at every moving thing in sight. 

Again the across-the-street neighbor paid Marfa a visit, but this time was more insistent.  There were rules of civility and neighborliness she said as well as local ordinances; and the Parsons would do well to heed both. 

'Well, if that doesn't take the cake', said Marfa Parsons in a huff, and reported the episode to her husband, a lawyer whose brain began to sift and filter cases of nuisance suits.

The barking went on for another two or three months at which time the dog died. ‘It was them', said Marfa. 'It has to be.  Who else would do such a thing?' 

Of course the accused neighbors denied it, taking great offence at being accused of breaking the unspoken civil code of the neighborhood. 'Do an autopsy', Bob Porter shouted, knowing full well that the Parsons would never agree to have Fluffy cut open and give their children nightmares for years; for of course he poisoned the dog and did the neighborhood a favor by doing it. 

'What happened to that Parsons dog'? everyone within earshot said, thankful that they had been given a reprieve; but the Parsons were not going quietly and so what is commonplace even in well-ordered, considerate neighborhoods, began. 

A tit for tat, increasingly vandalizing affair - petunias trampled, tires deflated, car windows soaped, trash strewn in the gutter, and so on. It actually almost came to blows when Bob Porter and Frank Parsons squared off in the middle of the street but both thought better of it.  A tussle in lawyer-heavy University Park would be not just male bravado but assault and battery. 

So the Parsons decided on rumor and innuendo.  'Did you know that the Porters poisoned Fluffy?' Marfa told all her friends, the mothers of her children's schoolmates, the postman, the garbage men, and passersby. It worked and before long the Porters were pariahs, dunned out of the babysitting coop, the PTA, and the ANC3 council. 

This spawned counter rumors - also true - that Frank Parsons spent his Thursday evenings not at the bowling alley but in Adams Morgan with Betty from Accounting and that Marfa Parsons was no shrinking violet herself. 

Luckily for everyone the storm blew itself out, the Parsons got a new non-barking dog, a Basenji-Shih Tzu mix, two canine breeds that cannot bark. The cross breeding did something to the torso and legs, so this miserable animal waddled and rocked and couldn't fetch or chase. 

Up and down Blanding Place there were incidents.  Herb Archer told his neighbors to move their car back of their property line 'for their own protection'.  An old tree in the front yard might lose a limb in a storm and fall on their car.  The tree however was as solid as the Charter Oak, so for the windy neighbor the car had become an obsession which caused no end of bumper-car antics. 

The people next to the Parsons objected to them parking in front of their house.  'It's a public street', said the already suspicious and on-alert Marfa to which the neighbor slammed out the door and backed her car into the Parsons's Porsche. 

Spite fences gave Long Fence a boost in corporate revenues.  Lagging for years in University Park which was uninterested in boundary lines, the company, after the various spats in the neighborhood, began to put up fences left and right - not simple white picket fences, but stockade fences, ten feet tall, wooden barricades up and down both sides of the house. 

Before long, University Park, formerly a congenial politically uniform, neighborly place had turned into a snipped and bitten one.  Children walking to school were told to keep to themselves and speak to no one.  No cups of sugar were exchanged, no kind words were spoken to the elderly, and worst of all, all but armed guards were put around dug-out parking spaces. 

In the space of a few years not a scintilla of the old neighborliness remained.  Cynics said that it just reverted to normal - territorialism and self-interest was the human rule, not the exception - while die-hard optimists thought that once the bad apples had left for other stomping grounds, the neighborhood would once again become Washington's model community. 

Human nature being what it is - as the man said, territorial and self-interested - and hardwired into the human genome, the new crop of University Park residents were likely to ne no different than those they replaced. 

Marfa Parsons moved to a condo in a Bethesda high-rise - that way she would have no territorial disputes with neighbors and would rarely see the people in 327 or 325 - but of course no building is completely soundproof and the smell of garlic never stays put, so she had to put up with nuisance and assholes. 

Manifest Destiny Redux - Thomas Jefferson And Donald Trump's International Expansionism

Manifest destiny was the expansionist belief in 19th-century America that American settlers were destined to expand westward across the continent and that this belief was both obvious ("manifest") and certain ("destiny"). The belief is rooted in American exceptionalism, romantic nationalism, implying the inevitable spread of republicanism and the American Way.  According to historian William Earl Weeks, there were three basic tenets behind the concept:

• The assumption of the unique moral virtue of the United States.
• The assertion of its mission to redeem the world by the spread of republican government and more generally the "American way of life".
• The faith in the nation's divinely ordained destiny to succeed in this mission.

Thomas Jefferson played a crucial role in the early stages of Manifest Destiny through the Louisiana Purchase and his vision of westward expansion which laid the groundwork for the United States territorial expansion. 

Jefferson sponsored and promoted the famous Lewis and Clark expedition on a maiden voyage to map out, plat, and claim the vast lands recently bought from France in the Louisiana Purchase. The enterprise was central to the development of the new American lands, for it provided the framework for the titling and private ownership of land, on the basis of which new landowners could borrow money to improve it. 

The United States has never veered far from this founding principle.  Throughout its history it has claimed territorial rights over sovereign lands and used military force to secure it.  The Mexican wars were meant to push Spain back from its own territorial designs on the Southwest, the American War against Spanish Main Philippines was a conflict that arose after the Spanish-American War.  The United States which had defeated Spain in the war, sought to assume control of the Philippines, a colony which had been under Spanish rule for over 300 years. 

The American invasion of Cuba in the Bay of Pigs operation, the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, the compacts made with the Pinochet regime in Argentina and the colonels in Brazil were outright attempts to exert American hegemonic influence in the hemisphere. 

Under George W. Bush and the Neocons, American exceptionalism was the policy meme, and US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were expression of it. American-style democracy was, in Francis Fukuyama's words, the end of history, and spreading it among the newly liberated Soviet states and elsewhere was America's calling and duty. 

'I am Manifest Destiny', said Donald Trump in a speech before the American Foreign Policy Institute in February of this year (2026) and he made it quite clear that he was invoking the spirit of Jefferson in his bold nationalism.  

There is no way that the Americas, long continents in America's orbit, ambit and geopolitical interest can be allowed retreat into socialism, a political philosophy antithetical to American values and one on which corrupt governments have pillaged, raped, tortured, and deceived the people they were to serve.

America will not stand by idly and let Cuba continue to deprive its citizens of their natural rights, consign them to more years of destitution and poverty; nor did it remain on the sidelines while the venal, corrupt, and vile regime of the dictator Nicolas Maduro ran Venezuela into the ground. 

We will stand with Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, El Salvador and other countries whose leaders are visionary men, determined to return the country to free elections, free markets and free enterprise. 

America will not stop in its own backyard, said the President.  China will not be allowed to range free to exploit African countries, control the mining of rare earths, oil, and gas.  Africa, while not in America's direct geographical orbit is within its geopolitical one. 

Progressives have cried foul.  The President is turning America into a neocolonialist power no different from those European empires which exploited black and brown people, ransacked Africa and Asia of its natural resources and turned them into subservient lackeys.  Donald Trump may say he is promoting the cause of freedom, but his only interest is dominant control. 

'I am indeed', replied the President in a speech to the Hoover Institute.  'I make no bones about my intentions.  Why should billions of people suffer under communism, socialism, and brutal dictatorships when America is there to help? 

'And yes', he went on, 'in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson and Manifest Destiny, I want American access to the world's resources without restriction.  Just as settlers from Ohio and Pennsylvania moved westward in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark and laid claim to the fertile lands of the prairies and beyond,  Americans have the right to the world's oil, minerals, and rare earths.  There are no limits or boundaries to international commerce.'

 

As part of this renewed doctrine of American geopolitical expansionism, the President has isolated what he has called 'the nexus of possibility' a triumvirate of geopolitical power, all in competition for power, territory, and resources but honest brokers in their Machiavellian intentions. 

Russia, China, and the United States - finally and at long last - have understood the nature of political adversity, and in so doing have made the battle lines unequivocally clear.  Of course Russia and China will try to expand their spheres of geopolitical influence and now so will the United States.  All will be above board, a clear, defiant contest of wills. 

There will be no negotiations, no Neville Chamberlain 'Peace in Our Time' capitulations, no Biden era Utopian, One World idealism.  Each of the three powers of the triumvirate will be acting on willful purpose to extend and expand its power and influence and in so doing control the world's resources. 

American progressives, steeped in this Chamberlain-esque compromise and craven idealism, march in protest - the Hamas, Venezuela, and Iran wars are nothing but bald neo-colonial adventurism and display Donald Trump's arrogance, dismissiveness, and autocracy.  America's F-16s over Tehran, Gaza, and Caracas are there only to bully, intimidate, and destroy. 

The President did not answer these charges, too pitifully naive and self-serving to deserve a reply, but said in a speech to the DAR in Washington:

We are patriots all, defenders of freedom, liberators, and pioneers of Manifest Destiny.  The world has changed, reverted to history's old ways of survival, conquest and spoils.  I invoke Genghis Khan when I convene my Cabinet to discuss our foreign policy, a man of iron will, unshakeable purpose, and vast geopolitical vision.  Thanks to him and his Mongol-Turkic armies, the Mongol Empire spread from Europe to the Far East. 

Again the Left raised its voice in protest.  'We are on the cusp of a new, verdant, harmonious, peaceful world order', said Bob Muzelle, a leader in the peace movement since the days of the Cold War, 'on the verge of diversity, inclusivity, and equity on an international scale, and we shall not be denied.'

His voice trailed off in the March wind, down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the White House, and in ever more faint echoes down the National Mall.  It was a feeble, desperate plea to return to an age of idealism which never existed.  The United States has always been a nation of Wild West justice, Robber Baron enterprise, and Harry S Truman brass balls, and the new Manifest Destiny is right in line. 

Love And Other Incidentals - How Sex With Younger Women Fuels Men In A Dog-Eat-Dog World

Love is a balm, spread it liberally and it will magically relieve angst and anomie and remove the desperation that the world is becoming unhinged, unaligned with sense and sensibility, and nothing but chasms, sinkholes, and emotional crevasses.  Yes, love the anodyne, the miracle-worker, the fountain of youth, the lucky charm. 

So thought Henrik Baylor many months into a December-May affair, an early Christmas, toys and bikes and baseball gloves under the tree, the smell of quince pies, pine needles, and turkey roasting in the oven. 

He had met Annette Browning at the Town & Country bar of the Mayflower Hotel, the grandest grande dame in Washington, a Victorian place of class and opportunity, a meeting place, a confessional place where policy is discussed and where affairs begin.

'I'll have another', said Henrik, one of Bill the Bartender's spot-on martinis, Stoli with just a breath of Vermouth, two olives in a fluted crystal glass.  Drinking at the Mayflower was not just an alcoholic routine, it was a ritual, a precedent, and the first step to trysts and confidences. 

Annette was a young lawyer at Parker & Fiske, one of K Street's premier firms, the go-to defender for white collar crimes, famous for its literary, high-toned rhetoric masking a wolverine viciousness.  They rarely lost a case and their lawyers had that brain surgeon machismo, so when Annette was hired they were breaking the mold, but the young woman was known for her steely, uncompromising will - a man in woman's clothing, one of the boys. 

She never lost a beat and did the firm proud, a honey bear in Lanvin and Armani, a gorgeous woman as smart as they come.  All the lawyers admired her but kept their personal distance.  Annette was intimidating, demanding in a way which suggested conquest in bed as well as the courtroom. 

Henrik knew none of this when he asked the attractive young woman sitting next to him at the bar of the Town & Country.  He was just a middle aged man striking out for new territory, long tethered in a dogtrot of a marriage, not exactly unhappy but not happy either, and realizing that the clock was ticking and he had nothing to lose, he decided to stray.

The Town & Country was known for its atmosphere - not its ambience so much as pheromones in the air. There had to be something floating free that heightened sexual sensibilities, offered promise and opportunity, and lubricated the machinery of love. 

December-May affairs on the surface suggest sugar daddies, gold-diggers, sexual opportunists, and hungry vixens; but this is far from the truth.  There is something particularly alluring about a mature, successful, handsome man that is irresistible to young women.  Older men will understand them; they will love them for who they are; they will look past the glamour and sexual appeal and discover the inner woman. 

The middle aged man sees youth, a reprieve from aging, a confirmation of his lasting virility.  A younger woman's love confers identity, transfers youth, and offers release from years of life with old parchment.

The affair began that night fueled by Bill's martinis, the pheromone-filled air of the Town & Country, the devil-may-care ferocity of Henrik, and the months-long celibacy of an intimidating woman. 

It was perfect, an easy meant-for-each-other sexual and emotional elision. It was what they both had been waiting for, hoping for, and increasingly worried that would never happen. 

There are always daddies and their little girls in such affairs.  Annette loved her father, his favorite, his special, his delight; and consciously or unconsciously she hoped she would find and marry someone like him.  Henrik loved his daughter Lucia, delighted at her charm, her enthusiasm, and her coquettish good humor. 

This is not so say that the affair was solely predicated upon these Freudian factors.  It was far from that, and was a Lawrentian equilibrium, two individuals who found equipoise and sexual equilibrium in the relationship. 

Now, sex for most is routine, at best limited to a pre-marital concourse, romantic love followed by predictably; for others it is conquest, and for still others it is dominance and submission. 

For the very few - the willful, Nietzschean few - a December-May affair adds octane to the already potent male desire for battle, conquest, and reward. 

Henry Kissinger, former Secretary or State under Richard Nixon famously said that power is the greatest aphrodisiac - men's sex drive is heightened and women are increasingly drawn to them.  

This however is only the tip of the iceberg, a pedestrian matter, an issue of sexual attractiveness; but in the case of men like Henrik Baylor, already the Genghis Khan of the courtroom, it made him invincible with a status, allure, and confidence only imagined by others. 

Sex with Annette conferred virility - the street variety, the take-no-prisoners, vandalizing, unleashing of pure male power.  He felt superhuman, indomitable. 

Now, as an older man who has been in such a revitalizing, energizing, unforgettable affair, the letdown is worse than coming down from heroin.  To have one's sexual life tail off, dwindle, and recede is one thing.  To have had it in a blaze of glory and then to lose it is insufferable.  Suddenly old age returns. There is nothing left.  Looking in the mirror the lover no longer sees a graying, dashing Errol Flynn, but a bagof bones, a lined, saggy, jowly old man. 

Henrik saw the end of the affair coming, tried to put it off, but the wisdom, patience, attention and loving insights of Daddy had run their course, and Annette grew restive and confined.  After she left, Henrik was disconsolate and dispirited.  His swagger disappeared, his appearance flagged, and he began to lose trials

With heroin there is always another fix; but with this unique, equally exhilarating hit, there is no re-upping.  It is too late, younger women look the other way or simply do not see the older man. 

Henrik was not only finished as lover but as an Ubermensch.  He felt deflated, flaccid, and empty.  How could this be? he wondered.  He hadn't changed from the superman he had been with Annette to now, and yet he felt supernumerary, unneeded.  Early detritus, a bit of unnecessary clutter. 

'Better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all', was the old adage, totally inappropriate for the likes of Henrik Baylor for whom the end of a young-old affair meant a life of quiet desperation and nothing more.  The love he had with Annette became his benchmark, his touchstone, and everything was measured against it - it became an obsession, a reminder of mortality; and he couldn't shake it. 

He never got over it but accommodated nevertheless.  He retired early - what was the point of working? - and lived a comfortable life in South Florida.  Gradually thoughts of his grandchildren edged out Annette, but only for brief moments.