The Rousting Of The Left - Radical Conservatism, Patriotic Nationalism, And The Flailing Of An Unhinged Woman

'Nazis, Fascists, right wing opportunists, anti-democratic autocrats, Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito back to roost...'  Mabel Finchley raised her voice in solidarity with fellow progressives shocked at the ultra-conservative German AfD party's resounding victory in Saxony-Anhalt.  AfD leader, Alice Weidel's call for 'repatriation' of all illegal immigrants, and a rescinding of the rights of all those who preach separatism, Sharia law, and refuse integration within the fabric of German and European society. 

'Ethnic cleansing', Mabel shouted, raising her fist in angry defiance. A return to the hellish deportation of Jews and the unwanted to concentration camps where now legitimate asylees, refugees, and seekers of a better life would be stripped, showered, gassed, and incinerated. 

As loudly and insistently as she might shout, the wave of conservatism sweeping Europe, Asia, and the America's will not only go away but will grow higher, stronger, and more extensive.  Alice Weidel is not alone, but one of many. Led by Giorgia Meloni of Italy and joined by Marine Le Pen in France, Nigel Farage in the UK, Gert Wilders in the Netherlands among others, the Right has come into its own.  After decades of EU bureaucratic demission of national sovereignty, all-encompassing calls for unlimited immigration and a multicultural Europe, these leaders have said, 'Basta!', enough failed idealism, Socialist recidivism, and absurd woke reforms. 

Japan, long an island of cultural homogeneity but fearing the intrusion of radical Islam as a hostile, invasive, viral force antithetical to Japanese history, has in the person of its new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi vowed to shut it out, expunge it from within national borders, and be done with an infectious, anti-social disease. 

Poland's leaders when asked how many immigrants they have given asylum answer, 'Zero', and the streets of Warsaw and Gdansk are witness. Homogeneously white, European, and Polish, unhesitatingly proud of Polish history, culture, and legacy.  A Catholic nationalism, a European identity, and a mistrust of diversity. 

Giorgia Meloni, President of Italy has famously said in a speech to supporters, 'I am Giorgia.  I am a woman.  I am a mother.  I am Christian, Italian and European', stating in one verse the key to the entire conservative libretto.  Enough white guilt, regrets for a colonial past, contrition for European civilization's expansionism.  We gave the world high culture, she says, while the rest of Europe limns nd lionizes those who have contributed nothing. 

Presidents Bukele of El Salvador and de la Espriella of Colombia have vigorously endorsed extra-judicial measures to return their countries to peace and security. While the Left has championed the rights of the criminal, said Bukele, we have dedicated ourselves to the rights of the majority - the men, women, and children of El Salvador who want to lead a a secure and fear-free living. 

De la Espriella has echoed the same sentiments, and both presidents have vowed to use all the power and authority of the state to eliminate crime, violence, and terrorism. 

When Mabel heard these words, and those of President Milei of Argentina who shouted, 'Afuera!' to all the sycophantic bureaucrats and welfare lords who have held the country in captivity, hostage to a faded ideal of socialistic equality, she again raised her fist; but this time wondered if she was swimming against a powerful tide, a full-lunar spectacle, a tsunami of right wing extremism. 

She had cause for concern, for the radical conservatism embraced, espoused, and promoted by Donald Trump was not a one-off, American phenomenon. It was global, universal, and growing.  Chile, Ecuador, and even Luxemburg were responding in kind. 

Not only were these countries realizing the damage, the corruption, and the viral cultural disease let in through willingly porous borders, the were waking up to the philosophical import of the moment.  Liberal western-style democracy was not the end of history as Francis Fukuyama predicted, but a right to be defended.  Complaisance, facile tolerance, and social idealism were no longer valid, irrelevant, discredited ideas in the new, hostile, aggrandizing world of radical Islam. 

Mabel was hoarse after two hours of protest outside the White House.  She and her sisters had demanded the impeachment of a war criminal, a traitor, a bigot, and a misogynist bully.  Right, justice, and social honor would prevail.  Utopia, an era of cooperation, tolerance, and inclusion was at hand if only the challenge was met with determination and resolve. 

Yet, and despite the clear, moral and ethical truths so evident in the canon of the Left and in the democratic Socialists of Europe and the world, countries were turning inward. Those who thought that Nazi National Socialism was dead and buried had another thing coming.  The inherent hatred of 'The Other', so horrifically expressed by Hitler is part and parcel of human baggage - an integral part, a seminal bit of human nature.  As much as progressives might try to tamp it down, deny it, and flush it away, there it was again. 

Mabel was discouraged, disconsolate, and depressed.  How could this be?  She had always thought that the buffoon in the White House was a one off, an American thing, a peculiar aberration with a short shelf life; but here was his radical right wing militancy writ large, a global viral infection, an apocalyptic, existential danger. 

Of course it was Mabel and her cabal of besotted social reformers who had missed the boat, had not seen the rocks and rapids in the river, who had assumed smooth sailing to the promised land.  They who had assumed that there was no turning back from the new Eden, were hitting unexpected and strong headwinds. There were no free passes for onward passage. 

Now, Bob Finchley, Mabel's husband was growing very tired of mac n' cheese, Costco chicken, and Hong Fat take-out.  Not that a woman's place had to be exclusively in the home, but at least some showing up was not unreasonable. 

Mabel, however, displaced wifely duties in favor of national if not global priorities. What was a pot roast compared to the likely ethnic cleansing of America?  Only if she and others like her demanded moral clarity and the conviction to act upon it, could she rest. 

Bob was increasingly concerned that his wife was going 'round the bend, was losing her marbles, and was heading into a wolfish, horrible world of dementia.  There she was one day when he came home from work, New York Times in one hand and a cleaver in the other, standing as catatonic as a statue in front of the Viking stove with all five burners flaming at high heat, immovable and gone way past the bend in the road and into a never-never land of dementia praecox. 

Women it seems are more given to febrile political animism than men. Perhaps menopause, unrequited love, desperateness for recognition, overeager promising fathers....Whatever the cause, women have thrown over Kinder, Kuchen, Kirche for liberal political engagement.  Hearth and home are secondary for the liberated woman and even more so for the politically sensitized one.  Mabel was caught between a modern Scylla and Charybdis - a woman, a mother, and a wife on the one hand, but avowed, till-death-do-us-part social activist on the other. 

Bob was able to calm the woman down, but it was impossible to keep her from NPR, BBC, Le Monde and  Frankfurter Zeitung; and so it was that the went completely off the rails. It was an insignificant and incidental new item that did the trick, committed her to St. Elizbeth's for a long haul, leaving husband and children disconsolate but secretly delighted that this Madwoman of Chaillot viz Bethesda, Maryland was out of sight, out of mind. 

Food As Metaphor - When Fodder Becomes Haute Cuisine

Barbery Blalock was a self-described foodie, although she abjured that term, a moniker put on her and people like her by those who never got past meat and potatoes and who considered reductions as small plate size, presentation as fol-de-rol, foraging Neanderthal, and multiple courses a waste of time.  No, Barbery was not a 'foodie', but a woman who had grown out of home-cooking and graduated into a new world of sensory delight. 

She conceived of dinner as one would any creation, one which required talent, art, practicality, and patience.  She would never simply throw something together, pull leftovers from the back of the refrigerator, reheat sauces, and recycle roasts.  It was a matter of pride to concoct something with 'a touch', an element of personal intimacy, a dish which tempted, satisfied, and was remembered. 

She had the kitchen remodeled to accommodate her new attention to cuisine - a five-burner Viking stove with convection oven, high-resolution temperature displays, ergonomic controls, and spotlighting; a center-island workspace, easy access to refrigerator, stove, and spice rack; track lighting, French copper saucepans, seasoned iron skillets, and cutlery imported directly from Dehillerin in Paris. 

The kitchen was 'bright and lovely', a place to live not just to work, and she appointed it with vases, food-themed art, and fanciful sculptures.  The music was carefully curated, changed according to mood and menu - Bach seemed to go with fish - and the ambient temperature calibrated for vigor and comfort. 

It is a tribute to the genius of  Julia Child, Alice Waters, and Jacques Pepin that this embrace of haute cuisine has become so universal.  Even farm families, used only to meat loaf and mashed potatoes have come around and begun to foray outside familiar, hand-me-down traditions.  Of course it is not so easy to go from pot roast to boeuf bourguignon, and Mrs. Clancy who deserved better, at least tried, but couldn't make heads or tails out of the thick, nasty mess that was supposed to be the jewel in the crown of French cooking. 

Barbery hated to feel superior, but excellence comes at a price, and she had not spent thousands on a remodeled kitchen, years learning appellations, vinicultural regions, the difference between a northern and southern Rhone vintage; and eating at the best restaurants in San Francisco for nothing.  

She even made a pilgrimage to Redzepi's Noma restaurant in Copenhagen.  Redzepi is famous for his foraging, and dinners are comprised exclusively from the flora and fauna he has harvested from local marshlands, estuaries, streams, and fields.   He was Japanese in his minimalism, but clearly European in culinary spirit.  His dishes were not only delicious with tastes and textures never before experienced, but exquisite in preparation - mini-tableaux of artistry and inspired design. 

Her husband pitched in on occasion, but it was clear that Barbery wanted no static in the kitchen.  Composition, preparation, and presentation all took concentration and intense creativity, so as generous as his willingness to help might be, his presence would simply grate. 

The kitchen was like a shrine, so perfectly placed and aligned were the gleaming pots and pans, the array of spices, the suspended cutlery, and the votive lighting, and every evening as she entered it ready to prepare the meal she felt an almost religious feeling.  There, preparing organic, locally-produced, humanely treated, and carefully husbanded products she felt that she was respectful, dutiful, and proper.  She was doing the right thing and making it something special in God's eyes. 

Ironically, Barbery's husband was one of these meat-and-potatoes kind of guys - a man who grew up in a simple household of hardworking parents, a father who went to work, travelled, and brought home the bacon, and a mother who dutifully took care of hearth and home, and who was happy to have a hearty meal at the end of the day. 

As much as he encouraged his wife in her new interest in food and very much enjoyed the results, he became increasingly concerned as her interest became a preoccupation and then an obsession.  Food after all was no more than fodder for human beings, necessary for life, a staple of existence without which existence would not be possible, but no more.

Of course he understood how modern, commercial American culture had a way of gussying things up.  The simple toys of his childhood were long gone, Christmas was now a festival not a devotion, and cars were showpieces not transportation.  

Yet everything has limits, and when he saw his wife becoming Baroque if not Rococo in her creations, and becoming desperate and frustrated when the intricate confections she attempted went out of kilter. The kitchen was eating up all her time and energy.  The house suffered, the children suffered, and her job suffered. She was headed around the bend and something had to be done to prevent her from going over the railing.  

'Honey, let's do take out tonight', he said one evening before she set to work in the kitchen.  She looked at him vacantly, nonplussed, and disoriented.  What? Take out? How could he even consider such an option when she had spent the better part of the morning thinking how to spice the coulis with a sprig of thyme without overwhelming the purity of the fresh raspberries and then ticking off in her mind the steps to making the perfect veal a la Normande. 

Professor Harlan Kuhn of the Duke Medical School, Head of the Department of Psychiatry wrote the following about what he called  The Psychosis of the Kitchen - When Nouvelle Cuisine Becomes Obsession

Food is fodder after all, a package of nutrients to enable life; but when it becomes more than a delivery vehicle for calories, protein, vitamins, and minerals, it risks dislocation of effort.  Today's well-educated, well-off, entitled Americans catching wind of haute cuisine and feeling it fill their sails are at risk.  While food enterprise - making something out of nothing - is as laudable as raising kicking a ball to an art, it can infect and maim the mind and distort judgment.  The 'foodie' can become neurotically obsessed and then, if one is not watchful, psychotic

 

When Barbery's husband saw his wife standing catatonic but trembling over a trimmed and tied veal roast, holding a sprig of fresh rosemary in one hand and a cleaver in the other, he knew something was wrong.  The bend in the road had been turned and there might be no safe return. 

Of course the case of Barbery Blalock might seem exaggerated and even invented, but upon consultation Professor Kuhn said, 'Nothing of the sort.  Mrs. Blalock is a classic case of 'sentient disruption', not unusual by any means, not inevitable, and certainly avoidable'. 

Her husband managed to take her out of the kitchen as stiff as a statue, holding knife and spring like scepter and dove of peace, into the living room where she waited, facing the wall until the ambulance came. 

The good news is that with drugs, electro-shock, and therapy she recovered enough to return home.  Her husband, advised by hospital psychiatrists to dismantle the kitchen and replace it with something more modest and 'down home' did so and welcomed Barbery back to what he hoped would be a less tenuous, more normal life. 'Good luck', said Professor Kuhn no stranger to psychiatric recidivism. 

A Real Life Barbie - How A Ditzy Blonde Made It Big In America, The Land Of Opportunity

Belinda Parsons' mother always dressed her up like JonBenet Ramsey, a cute little thing fashioned after a twenty-year old.  A bit weird, thought the Parsons' neighbors who at first thought the little girl was a dwarf, so perfectly fashioned as an adult was she; then they shook their heads in disgust and dismay at such deformity, giving the child a faux precocity and robbing her of innocence. 

'Creepy, that's what it is', said Irma Carlson who took in washing from the rich families of the West End, and whose two little girls were proper, well-brought up Lutherans, respectful and wholly children. 'That's what money will do'. 

But that was just sour grapes. The peculiar adulation of little Belinda had nothing to do with money. It had more to do with Mrs. Parsons, daughter of a shipping clerk and seamstress, who by chance alone married higher up into the social register.  Albert Parsons, a Yale man who crewed for the team, helped win the Henley Regatta, and was a big man on campus, did the right thing when Estella Parsons got pregnant. 

Most Yale men would have given her a few hundred dollars, a train ticket to Montreal, and the address of a good abortionist, but Albert was different. One of the few men of honor on campus - or a doofus, depending on your point of view.  

Life with one of New England's first families should have been enough to cure Estella of her kitschy tastes.  Money usually does that when it comes to clothes, comportment, and accent; but Estella simply couldn't give up her love of soap operas, princess outfits, sequins, and ballet shoes, and of course Barbie.  There was something appealing about all that pink and rose, that fixed smile, that perfect figure that said, 'America !' every time she looked at any one of fifty dolls she had collected and now was anxious to introduce to her daughter.

 

Estella couldn't wait for her daughter to grow big enough to wear the princess costume that she had worn as a child. Of course it wasn't as ornate, glittery, and marvelous as the ones today, but she longed to see her daughter 'coming out'. 

Estella of course felt sorry for the parents of JonBenet Ramsey - who, by the way might have been the killers of their daughter, but until that was proved, they deserved her sympathy - and sorry for the little girl probably abused and left in a dumpster in Ohio or someplace like that; but she couldn't help be taken by the premature beauty of the little girl, whose appearance was so enhanced by an attentive mother.  How precious! How charming! How absolutely inviting!

There was no way that Belinda could develop any other way than into what has been offensively called 'a ditzy blonde'.  

Now, blondes have an automatic ten percent advantage over other women, such is the allure of the precipitously declining demographic of blonde, blue-eyed women in America.  The rainbow coalition, diversity, equity, and inclusion have mixed genes up to such a degree that a woman was lucky to come out streaked and uneven; but Belinda was a pure blonde with blue eyes to match, and given her girly-girl Barbie upbringing, she knew exactly how to attract men.  As corny as it sounds, batting her eyelashes, wetting her lips, and tossing her magnificent hair when an attractive boy approached her was irresistible.

Despite her father's attempts to give the girl some intellectual discipline and to widen her academic horizons, Belinda was diffident to his entreaties at best. She had been gifted with an extraordinary gift, the beauty of a nymph, and she would be a fool not to use every ounce of its telling, appealing nature. 

Had social psychologists had a go at Belinda, delving into the character of such an endowed girl who seemed to eschew any serious interests, they would have been perplexed, for Belinda was not a dumb blonde. As a matter of fact she was hovering up near the Einstein range of intelligence.

These scientists perhaps because of their inflated view of their own intelligence assumed that high mental capacity would always out, would trump superficiality, would dismiss frippery and a tinselly outlook, and would emerge finally as a mathematician, logician, or composer. 

What they overlooked was what one critic had called 'the great American Zeitglitz', a universal love affair with the showy, lowbrow, sequin-and-star fabulism. Las Vegas was the heart and soul of America not Beacon Hill, Park Avenue, or Shawnee Mission.  Soap operas, runways, line dancers, Hollywood and cheap dime-store romantic novels. 

Many are the sophisticated New York matrons with the latest novel of romance writer, Alicia Fox under their pillows.  Elegant, trim, highly educated patrons of the arts, doyennes of the most impressive literary salons in the city, these women could not help sneaking in a few pages to find out if Lance really loved Suzanna. 

 

And down the social phylogenetic scale the romance went, down and down to South Carolina trailers and cramped four-family quarters in Pismo Beach. 

This is all by way of saying that smart women like Belinda Parsons could be heady with brains and still tempted by cheap thrills and lovey-dovey romance. 

Belinda, however, had more to her than most.  She learned at an early age that her intelligence plus her blonde, seductive beauty were a potent mix.  Men, dupes for love beauty and pilloried for their bullying misunderstanding of women and bested by them (viz Shakespeare's Rosalind, Viola, and Portia), would always be fools to be had. 

Belinda didn't need school larnin', Kant, Kierkegaard, or Sartre, to make her way in the world. Always a step shy of the femme fatale, clearly film noir in inspiration but far more openly ambitious than those women, Belinda always got what she wanted. 

 

A stint in Hollywood, cabarets in Los Angeles, and clubs in South Beach were the training ground where she perfected her talents; and before long she was on a First Class seat to Washington, DC, the protege of one of the most powerful men in Congress who fell for her just as hard and fast as the thousand others she left in her trail. 

'My wonderful, beautiful Barbie', said her mother when Belinda returned home to Chillicothe, proud as pudding at her daughter's remarkable success.  She for a while thought she might have overdone the JonBenet Ramsey/Barbie thing, but saw how right she was.  

For the rest of us, America, what a great country!  As cheap, lowbrow, and trailer trashy as you can find anywhere, but oh, those diamonds in the rough, those blonde women who can work wonders.