The Sleepless Nights Of Lucy Galt - The Hellish Life Of A Displaced Woman Of Privilege

Lucy Galt lived in a well-to-do suburban neighborhood of Washington, DC.  Twenty minutes to the White House with no traffic she was fond of saying. Just because she had moved out of the maelstrom, the downtown K Street jungle of lawfare in political insiders, did not mean that she had abandoned her commitment to the cause.  It was just time to move, the city was unresponsive to her needs, the children needed light and air, and her husband, now able to work at home, wanted a place near the bike trails of Catoctin. 

 

Yet it did seem like abandonment.  The suburbs had always meant sedation, sameness, sedentarism, and a loosening of political ties. 

She had been born and brought up in the suburbs, John Cheever country of Fairfield County, Connecticut, one of the wealthiest counties in the land. easy commuting distance to New York but where large waterfront properties were the norm and an atmosphere of wealthy indolence, family legacy, and absentee Wall Street financiers prevailed.  An ideal place to live, to sail, to entertain and still be part of the cosmopolitan life of the city. 

Now, the Washington suburbs were a number of steps down from the tony, privileged existence she enjoyed as a child.  There were some - McClain, Potomac, and Great Falls which approximated Fairfield's wealthy cachet, but they were all new money.  Athletes, land developers, sports franchise owners, and speculators in bitcoin and offshore investments were resident there, not the Cabots, Lodges, Putnams, and Potters of Anglo-American colonial and post-Revolutionary history. 

Some of the Greenwich cachet was tainted by the behavior of Jeffrey Skilling and his cohorts who made and lost billions of other people's money in the Enron scandal.  The Skillings were a proper Fairfield family - private schools, large but tasteful manor on the Sound, contributions to the best charities - but it was all a charade, a fraud, a con; and when their dealings were exposed it not only sent Skilling and his cohorts to jail but besmirched the whole community which in the past had been homogeneously proper. 

In any case, Skilling or no Skilling, the Connecticut suburbs of New York were high-toned, sophisticated, and immured within walls of old wealth while the wealthy Maryland and Virginia suburbs were overdone - McMansions, four-car garages, and electronic fencing. 

Lucy Galt lived in Bethesda, a near-in Maryland suburb whose only distinction was proximity to downtown Washington.  Everything about the city was middle-brow, ordinary, and predictably suburban. Montgomery County was classically liberal except in its outskirts where workers - low-level federal bureaucrats,  middle managers, and skilled laborers - tended Republican. 

Lucy was a hodge-podge - child of privilege and wealth, sensitized to social reform in college, passionate activist for every cause in the progressive canon, and urbanite turned suburban matron. 

It was this last that galled and kept her up at nights. Mediocrity - she never in her wildest dreams ever thought that she would live on a cul-de-sac of bureaucrats and housewives.  There wasn't an ounce of sophistication in the community, not one iota of distinction, not a drop of scintillation or even scandal. 

 Bethesda to her was like Lewis's Gopher Prairie, the town on the vast Minnesota open spaces that Carrie Kennicott tried to civilize.  One would think that a near-in suburb of the Nation's Capital would be alive with political debate, intellectual give-and-take, and high-class amateur theatre, but nothing doing.  It was a clone of Gopher Prairie. 

 

Life and age have ways of trimming one's sails, lowering expectations, and conforming to community standards.  One is pulled in by mediocrity, a kind of soporific which after a while dulls the senses and gives way to a feeling of contentment. 

Lucy, perhaps because of her varied, often conflicted background, saw this coming and said she would never give in to that suburban homeliness and intellectual torpor.  Moreover she saw the near-in suburbs as fertile grounds for mobilizing dissent and turning it into aggressive political activism. 

Yet whereas in her youthful days on Dupont Circle - not exactly the East Village but still a potpourri of gays, tough girls, incensed blacks, and Jewish inheritors of their grandparents' liberalism - she felt a heady sense of can-do justice, out in no man's land she was starting from zero.  The women in her cohort were like her, middle age, wealthy individuals of good schooling, liberal intentions, but with a political diffidence which was hard to overcome. 

Progressivism reached out broadly, and while its heart still beat in the East Village, the Upper West Side, Bernal Heights, the Castro, and Cambridge, its reach extended to the complaisantly supportive. Men and women who supported all the items in the progressive shopping cart - climate change, the black man, transgenders, immigration, and the redistribution of wealth - but who did so through financial contributions and vote.  Passive supporters at best, but at least a starting point for Lucy's community organization. 

Where to start? Since everything happened chez soi in the suburbs, particularly for older residents - restaurants, bars, and clubs were for the up-and-comers - she thought to arrange informal gatherings around local art.  She would invite artists from the area who had never been given the attention they deserved.  The sessions would both champion these amateur artists and provide a forum for discussing the issues of the day illustrated by the artists' work. 

Felicity Ballard was Lucy's first choice, for her art - somewhat tortured black-and-white landscapes inspired by Anselm Kiefer but which had a less imposing and more approachable scenarios. These tableaux, she said, represented the state of the American union today, one in disorder and disarray thanks to the current regime - a racist, misogynist, greedy capitalist pseudo-monarchy which threated world peace and community. 

The paintings themselves were nothing to speak of, spontaneous undirected spatterings of paint a la Jackson Pollock which had nothing of his power, mystery and complexity; but Felicity was proud of them and saw things that no one else did.  

 

None of this mattered to Lucy, for the purpose of the gatherings was to discuss politics and begin the process of consolidated action for social reform. 

The group was respectful, courteous, and kind in their comments.  They had no idea what they were seeing or what was in the mind of the artist.  As unschooled as they were, viewers saw nothing but spattered paint, thicker in some areas, lighter in others; but all combined to produce a 5'x5' montage of wasted energy. 

'Lovely', said Amanda Evens who had eagerly raised her hand to be the first to comment in the question-and-answer session. 'I love the composition, and the color pattering'.  She sounded like the old Fifties tv dance programs where clueless dancers asked how they liked the music, could only come up with, 'I liked the beat'.  

The rest of the group, feeling obligated to congratulate the artist followed suit with aphoristic nothings, far from the penetrating social commentary that Lucy had hoped for. 

A local poet, Pamela Muldaur, read her poem 'On a Spring Day' celebrating the coming new age of complementarity, love, and community spirit - verses which hearkened back to the poet's old hippy Woodstock days but which in the interim had lost their verve, their relevance, and their reference. 

Bill Barton, the local artist known nor his wedding ice sculptures and an admirer of glass-blower Dale Chihuly brought in a soft plastic configuration in honor of Dolly Parton, meant to be adulatory and satirical in one go but which failed on both counts and ended up little more than a big doggie toy. 

Lucy was disconsolate and angry.  She couldn't believe the facile ignorance of the people she had numbered as her friends.  The doltish comments, the fawning, the yawning impatience to get to the hors d'oeuvres and Chardonnay were overwhelming. 

She gave it one or two more tries - this community organizational effort - and decided to toss the frills and get right down to brass tacks, but the group showed desultory interest in political issues at best, and turned every issue into some homespun, treacly anecdote. 

Although the the outside, objective observer, these seances were laughable, pitiful reunions of the same self-satisfied burghers Lewis found in his rural Minnesota towns, Lucy Galt was horrified, beaten, and discouraged.  She was tormented by her inabilities, her total lack of charisma, allure, and conviction. 

It wasn't her, she convinced herself, but that age-old, stereotypical notion of the suburbs as America's wasteland.  There was only so much you could do in an vacuous, bleak, soulless place.

She longed for her old life - not the activist one on Dupont Circle as a Senior Advocate at Scientists for Social Responsibility but the one in Greenwich where one knew who one was and never questioned it; where social change was to be avoided not embraced, and where family, legacy, heritage, privilege and the wealth that accompanied them was the ordre du jour. 

As old as she was, her family welcomed her back.  Her membership at Piping Rock was summarily renewed, invitations to all the upscale charity events assured, and life on the Vineyard, St. Bart's and Gstaad restored. 

A cautionary tale perhaps - don't go too far from home which is, after all, where the heart is. 

Our Age Of Mediocrity - But Hasn't Society Always Been Mediocre With Excellence Only An Outlier?

Millie Francis always considered herself  hors-série, someone unique, special, to be reckoned with.  She felt that her life had meant something to others if not society at large.  She had always done the right thing, taken the road less travelled, excelled in her profession, and gathered around her a coterie of the best and the brightest. 

No one would have dared call her ordinary, pedestrian, one of many; but in fact she was as mediocre as they come, a woman with no particular talent, genius, creativity, or recognizable virtue.  She had raised two children of rectitude but limited promise, had married her childhood sweetheart, a man of capability but no vision, and had folded into the prescriptive and predictable community of a modestly wealthy Washington suburb. 

How could there have been such a disconnect between self-image and reality, so wide a gap between what is and what was supposed?  Parents, perhaps, who in the interests of promoting the cause of women led Millie to believe that she was one of a kind, a woman that no glass ceiling could hold and that every boardroom would welcome. No pinafores and princess costumes for Millie who was sent off to violin lessons and drama school, who was taught poise and confidence, and who was treated as one in a million. 

As a result she was a stuck-up little girl that no one could stand - the one whose hand always shot up first in English class, the one simpering around Mr. Steege, the math teacher begging him for analysis not praise, sniffing and huffing at her classmates who thought she was a pinched and ugly faux prima donna. 

Better to be overconfident that a whimperingly shy wallflower, said her parents who had gotten wind of their daughter's unpopularity. What disturbed them even more was her report cards which were decidedly mediocre, middle of the class and never varying year by year.  

At some point her unique intelligence would express itself and she would rise to the top; but by the end of sixth grade, then middle school, and finally high school she was as mired in the middle as ever before they wondered if all her presumptions of superiority were just Sturm und Drang. 

The problem, however, might not have been with Millie herself but society in general.  Wasn't America a middle class, middle brow, middle of the road country?  While it had its remarkable men, they were outliers.  Just how many Rockefellers, Carnegies, Vanderbilts, or Musks, Huangs, Pages, and Brins could there possibly be in Walmart Nation? 

The former Fashion Editor of the New York Times, Vanessa Friedman, wrote an article about mediocrity and how we seem to be mired in it.  Everywhere she looked, she saw nothing but reruns and cultural retreads in art, fashion, and literature.

That feeling of browsing your Kindle, or standing in your local Barnes & Noble, faced with yet more young adult trilogies about dystopias and tough-girl heroines, or soft-porn-for-grown-ups trilogies (or just trilogies, period), and thinking, “What is there to read?” The new mediocre.

That harrumph when you peruse the movie listings and find yourself choosing between comic-book-hero action films and old-guy action films — unless you want to go way, way across town to the one surviving and obscure art-house cinema that values conversation over abs? The new mediocre.

But is she right? Are the 2000’s any more mediocre than any other decade?  The Roaring Twenties were great for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s crowd, John D. Rockefeller, and J. Paul Getty, but have never been characterized as the efflorescence of American culture. 

The Forties had classics like Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, The Great Dictator, and Citizen Kane. Fashion in the 40s was classic, European-American in grace, simplicity, and elegance. The Fifties, although characterized by a general social conservatism are also  remembered for Abstract Expressionism, and the paintings of Pollock, Kline, Motherwell, and Rothko were anything but ordinary. 

The Sixties produced a dramatic shift in cultural, social, and political values. The Sixties were by no means quiet, but just as mediocre as any decade.  Demographers point out that the young, post-war generation was as large as any in history.  America was a nation of young, adolescent idealists who all embraced a particular ethos.

'Love the One You're With', communalism, and rejection of capitalist excess were adopted by millions.  There was no particular creativity at Woodstock, marches on the Mall, solidarity against the war in Vietnam.  It was just groupthink, a kind of Orwellian herd. 

The Seventies produced some great Hollywood movies. Apocalypse Now, The Godfather I and II, Nashville, Chinatown were Academy Award winners. The Eighties were not so much creative than an era of aggressive energy after the lassitude and disappointments of the Seventies.  “It is morning in America”, said Ronald Reagan, ushering in an era of neo-laissez-faire capitalism.

Yet culture like everything else follows the precepts of the bell curve - there will be clusters of unusually smart, creative, and innovative at one end and inconsequentially dumb at the other.  The rest of society will fall under the great, high curve - ordinary, mediocre, capable of reacting not acting, happy in security and reasonable health, and totally unremarkable.  Ninety percent of the American population is an off-the-rack, uninspiring, dutiful, law-abiding and thuddingly dull.  

Perhaps now in the age of Artificial Intelligence, virtuality, and recombinant DNA, the age of mediocrity is past.  We are on the cusp of the post-human generation where anything is possible.  Mediocrity can be filtered out, expunged from our genes, tossed aside forever.  

The cracking of the genetic code will take creation out of the hands of God.  Any one of us will be able to select the offspring we want from an archive of DNA strands from Marilyn Monroe, Einstein, and Michael Jordan.  Scientists will be able to weed out the bad genes of cancer and schizophrenia and replace them with high intelligence, visual acuity, and sensual sensitivity.

Virtual reality is only just beginning, and within a few decades complete mind-computer interface will be possible.  We will not be confined to the ‘real’ world but will be able to wander in a virtual world of our own making.

Taken together – recombinant DNA and virtual reality – represent fundamental, structural change in human nature.  We will soon no longer resemble any human generation before us. If this is not an explosion of creativity and the end of mediocrity, then what is?

There will be no one ‘mired in mediocrity’. We will live in the worlds of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Tennessee Williams, Faulkner, Vermeer, Bacon, and Kiefer and know nothing of mediocrity. Not only will the greatest works of art, literature, film, and thought be instantly available, but we will be in them along side Marlon Brando and Marlene Dietrich. 

On a scale of mediocrity, there are three classes in America – the well-bred, well–educated, and affluent for whom historical culture will never be boring and is never mediocre; the creative geniuses of Silicon Valley, bio-engineering, genetics, and IT; and the rest of the consuming public.

High culture – excellence – has always been the preserve of the wealthy and high-born. The Church alone with its bottomless treasury commissioned some the greatest art works of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The nobility has always supported the arts and appreciated the results.  T

The courts of kings were rich in high learning, music, fashion, and artistry. Private wealth built Florence, Venice, and Paris. The Roman nobility taught according to the educational precepts of Cato the Elder studied philosophy, mathematics, science, and literature – elements thought to be necessary for the future leaders of the Empire.  Wealth generates culture and then purchases and enjoys it.

In the post-human generation in which excellence, creativity, innovation, taste and high culture will be at the fingertips of all, not just the privilege, mediocrity will disappear.  

Well, if that ain't whistlin' Dixie, nothing is. These same Walmart shoppers will search the now limitless, seamlessly brain-interfaced web for just the same dreck that they have in the real world.  Mediocrity is the stabilizing force of human society.  The middle class, middle brow demographic middle is what holds society together, gives it a moral foundation unpolluted by outrageous ideas and values. Genetics, that wonderful mechanism so aptly described by Darwin, will assure that most of us will always be mediocre. 

Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary - The Taming Of A Shrewish Woman

Mary Potter had always been a difficult child.  Her parents, always trying to look on the good side, repeated Longfellow's famous poem:

There was a little girl,

            Who had a little curl,

Right in the middle of her forehead.

            When she was good,

            She was very good indeed,

But when she was bad she was horrid.

 

It wasn't that the little girl had a mean streak, something hateful and malicious.  It was just that she was  obstinate.  One day she sat on the bottom of the stairs screaming at the top of her lungs, finding the demand to go to her room wrong and insulting.

She howled and howled until her face was a red fireball, her blouse wet with spit, snot, and tears. Anguished, misunderstood, put upon, and as angry as a wolverine, she finally turned, ran up the stairs to her room. 

Everything was quiet.  The maelstrom was no more.  The tempest had played itself out, and when Mr. and Mrs. Potter went up to her room to offer their love and consolation, they saw her on the floor, slowly ripping the pages out of a first edition Robert Louis Stevenson A Child's Garden of Verses, a precious book put on her bedside table to be read to her every night.  A special book, a meaningful book, poems about innocence, fragrance, and simply beauty - now in shreds on the floor, ripped to pieces by the horrid Mary. 

 

She couldn't have been more than two, and her tantrums had always been dismissed as 'the terrible twos', but this was in a different category altogether.  A two-year-old's tantrums are wild, incontrollable, inchoate affairs without focus, determination, or purpose. They are personal cyclones of anger; but this act of deliberate, conscionable, purposeful, directed rage was adult in nature.  The little Potter girl was composed of something unexpectedly well beyond her age. 

At the same time, Mary was a very loving, considerate little girl.  It was just 'umbrage' as her father called it, a hyper-sensitive sense of personal affront, and righteousness that set her off. Put to bed before she was tired was an affront, an intrusion.  How could they know what was going on in her body, her circadian rhythms, her biological clock?  Didn't they know that forcing her to drink milk with her vinegary salad churned her stomach, acid and alkali mixing in a witch's brew?  Layering her up against the cold, stuffing her like a rag doll, sending her to school like an Eskimo girl all bound up in fur and sealskin was demeaning.

'I hope she grows out of it' said Marfa Potter to her ever-patient husband, 'or she will have a tough time in life.'

Mrs. Potter knew that the world was filled with abutments, barricades, and impassable chasms - she herself had faced every manner of adversity in a man's world and had to learn how to evade, avoid, and negotiate her way around them.  Frontal attack was no way for a woman to succeed, and although the new age in which her daughter was growing up was far more accommodating to women, a shrewish one would still have a hard time. 

Mary met her match in Sister Marie Joseph, her Catechism teacher.  These were the days long after the black-habited, rosary bead clacking, scary nuns of her mother's generation, but Sister Marie Joseph had lost none of spinsterish, child annoyance of the previous generation. Children were necessary to God's Creation, penitential trials to all parents, and destined to grow up as godless adults unless discipline and irrevocable faith were instilled in them at a very early age. 

'Don't you dare talk like that to me', Sister Marie Joseph said to Mary Potter six inches from her face, towering over her in the front row of the Catechism room, almost spitting at this vile, presumptuous, unpleasant girl beneath her. 

Mary squirmed and fidgeted at the nun's twisted, maniacal face.  She had met her match, and after that episode was as perfectly composed and respectful as all the other students in the class. 

To assume that Mary had learned her lesson would be a gross underestimation of the natural belligerence and self-righteousness of the girl - a character trait that came neither from mother or father, had been bestowed upon her by some quirk in the genetic chain of family history.  'My Great Aunt Betty was considered a shrewish woman', Marfa Potter said. 'There's no accounting for the twists and turns of ancestry.'

Cold comfort Arthur Potter thought.  Whatever strands of the old lady's DNA got tangled up with his daughter's genes were there for keeps, so no point in delving into bygones.  Mary was the here and now, a handful, and unless they somehow managed to rein her in, the awaiting world would be no picnic. 

Katherine is the main character in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, and in the first scenes of the play is indeed a shrew – so much so that even her father has given up on her as a vixen and unmarriageable harridan. She meets Petruchio, a worldly, sophisticated man who has tired of the complaisant, dutiful, uninteresting world of Italian aristocracy, and is tamed by him.  Thanks to him, her anger, hostility, and misanthropy - provoked by an abusive father and jealous sister - are mitigated and then disappeared. 

Kate is at first put off by Petruchio’s advances.  What are his intentions?  Why has he not, like all other men, been repelled by her? What deceptive, selfish motives are behind his interest? At the same time, she realizes that Petruchio is the man she has hoped to find – one who can see beyond her defenses; a man who is unintimidated, as strong as she as sexually confident as she is passionate.

The marriage is one of perfect symmetry.  She, now having left her shrewishness behind, loves Petruchio without hesitation or restraint.  He is her rescuer, her savior from a life of hard-bitten, resentful spinsterhood.  He is what men should be – strong, confident, male, and yet understanding of women. 

At the end of the play Kate confesses her love for Petruchio and the necessarily dutiful obedience she owes to him:

A woman moved is like a fountain troubled,
Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty,
And while it is so, none so dry or thirsty
Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it.
Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign, one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labor both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe

Thousands of feminist critics have taken this soliloquy as an outdated, primitive, prehistoric statement of female complaisance; but Shakespeare intended nothing of the kind.  He in fact anticipated D.H. Lawrence. Both writers knew that dominance and submission are interchangeable, and that the best marriages are those in which there is perfect symmetry.  Either the man or the woman can be dominant or submissive.  It is the complementarity which counts. 

And so it was with Mary Potter who angrily bulldozed her way through school, university, and the law which was, not surprisingly the right profession for such a confrontational, unbowed and uncowed woman.  She won every case she defended and became Washington's go-to attorney for the most difficult cases.  She became known - behind her back of course - as The Harridan Of Superior Court, a well-deserved although harsh description. 

Men kept her at arms length, and few even attempted to approach her. Those that did limped away, licking their wounds warning others.  She was as hostile and threatening a women as anyone had seen, in or out of the legal profession. 

Until she met Mr. Right, an unintimidated, confident, independent man who, like Petruchio, saw in Mary something prized, unique, and desirable.  He, again like Petruchio, saw beyond the Sturm und Drang, bullying overlordship to what he knew was a very accommodating woman. 

Now, of course Taming of the Shrew is a romantic fantasy - such strikingly unusual and satisfying love affairs do not exist in real life - but that between Mary Potter and her Prince Charming disproved the fantasy and proved Shakespeare and Lawrence right. Epiphanic coming together of arbitrary souls, sexual mutuality, and ying-yang complementarity is not confabulation. 

In an environment of very ordinary, unexciting, depressing marital affairs, the relationship between Mary Potter and her man was unique.  

'I knew she would turn out all right ', said her father when she brought her lover home to meet the parents.  The same girl, the same Mary, but without all the vixenish, beleaguering anger she had had as a child.  Tamed indeed, thought Mr. Potter, and better off for it.