Romance In A Time Of Misery - A Story Of Sex, Love And The Taming Of A Liberal Woman

Amanda Phillips was a simple woman of simple tastes and modest expectations.  She had grown up in a small New England town, daughter of a homemaker and a pharmacist, good Catholic, choir girl, good student, and aspiring citizen. 

That is what New Brighton did.  It was the model of propriety, rectitude, and good manners. Men still tipped their hats to women and opened doors for them, mothers happily and willingly took care of their husbands and their homes, and neighbors were helpful and considerate. 

Some thought that Thornton Wilder had New Brighton in mind when he wrote Our Town; and while the play had a dark message about life, the characters were much like those in Amanda's home town. 

 

Mrs. Eddy next door, for example, watched out for the Phillips children, brought angel food cake to Emma Phillips on Saturdays, and her husband helped Jack Phillips shovel snow from the driveway after bad storms. 

The town had its rumors - Irma Swanson's suicide, John Baxter's fugue to Paraguay to meet his Guarani lover, the 'incident at Chestnut Hill Park', an affair best left alone, and the arrest of a city alderman who 'had one hand in the till and the other hand up the skirt of the receptionist' - but all in all New Brighton was a good place to live, worship, and work. 

 

Amanda spent two years at Central Connecticut State College before it became a university and when it was still a teachers' college.  Her family intended her to become an elementary school teacher and she followed their advice and counsel.  Until one day she woke up dissatisfied, disappointed with and discouraged by her ordinary, common, and uninspiring life. 

It could have been the times.  Despite the insularity of New Brighton, the social revolution taking place everywhere else in the country could not but help but influence the town. Or perhaps it was sexual maturity and a growing sense of her femaleness and erotic desire; or the surprising fragility of her parents' marriage, itself a product of the age.  She heard late night arguments in their bedroom over her mother's frustration, immobility, and desperate desire for independence. 

In any case, Amanda became increasingly restive, told her parents that she was going to quit CCSC and go to New York to find herself and her fortune. 

Mr. and Mrs. Phillips were just as happy to have their now adult daughter out from underfoot - the decks needed to be clear for running in these difficult times - and wished her well.

New York was a far cry from New Brighton, but the young Phillips girl had her wits about her and enough savvy to negotiate the pitfalls of a young ingenue in the big city.  In fact she found the city exciting, demanding, and perfectly matched to her mood and expectations.

It was a heady time, a time of coffee shops, intellectual debate, revolutionary thinking, and liberal vision.  Life was now an open field, vistas in all directions, and room to roam. 

 

She enrolled in NYU, took courses on Hegel and Marx, found places of intellectual opening and collegiality, and her life trajectory now seemed clear.  Her life as a committed progressive began. 

Her personal life was just as fulfilled.  She had many sexual partners, travelled with them cross-country and stayed in Haight-Ashbury and a cabin in the Humboldt County woods and with each adventure became more and more convinced of the rightness and righteousness of her journey. 

However, the doors to her inner rooms, as she put it, remained closed.  None of her lovers had the patience to go beyond political philosophy, but she enjoyed her immersion in the heady social freedom of the times to explore who she really was. Love was absent in an otherwise full and complete life. 

She, like most of her New York friends grew out of rebellion and channeled her progressive energies into more substantial and productive work.  Too limited in education to follow a career in law and pursue a radical agenda in the courtroom, and too rooted in progressive ideology to pursue one in business, she turned to non-profit advocacy and joined the mainstream of liberal activism. 

Over the years there was no progressive cause that she didn't embrace - women's rights, the fate of the black man, the environment, world peace. So committed, involved, and passionate was she about the causes she fought for, that she lost the perspective that she once had.  If there was one thing about the Grover's Corners and New Brighton it was foundation - the importance of social and personal compassion and the inclusion of others in one's life and liberty.  

Now she had become embittered, angry, and annoyed at the ignorance of conservatives who refused to acknowledge the problems faced by the country and the world at large.  They were hidebound in the false security of wealth and privilege or so trapped in a working class prejudice that their obduracy and unwillingness to open their eyes was maddening. 

It is hard to love anything, let alone anyone within this zeitgeist of hate, resentment, and suspicion; and so that one important piece of the puzzle remained missing.  There was no room for wine and roses when the problems facing humanity were existential. 

Epiphanies happen unexpectedly - that is what they are, sudden aha! experiences that come without warning, and so it was that she met the man of her dreams in a K Street bar.  All of the subliminal, long immured, but powerfully romantic feelings that had remained behind closed doors for so many years came to the fore. 

 

At first she hated her feminized, independent, willful self for even entertaining such feelings, but simply could not help herself.  She fell head over heels in love with Trevor Cabot, Republican, conservative, lawyer and developer. 

Patrick McGrath in his book Asylum writes of the spontaneous, uncontrollable sexual desire of a young married woman for a patient at the maximum security hospital for the criminally insane where her husband is Deputy Superintendent. There was no question of propriety or caution involved.  Like Amanda, too much unrequited emotional need had built up and there was no question of for once and for all releasing it. 

McGrath's Stella simply could not help herself, and even awareness of her lover's violent, psychopathic past could deter her. She abandoned all reason, all caution, all responsibility to her husband and young son and pursed a disastrous relationship with Edgar Stark. 

Women, said McGrath, are creatures of vast, inexhaustible resources of sexual desire, passion, and need; and under the right circumstances and with the right partner, they are expressed and cannot be reversed. Men, he went on to say, are much more limited and circumspect in their desires.  Perhaps because they have always been the pursuer, the privileged, and the dominant sex, they have fewer such emotional reserves; but in any case it is women who fall the hardest, who succumb despite every measure of social discipline. 

Stella was so impossibly in love with Stark that she risked her life and despite the reemergence of his deadly psychopathic side never lost her desire for him. 

McGrath could have written just as easily about Amanda Phillips who from the very first came under the thrall, the spell, the control of Trevor Cabot.  All reserve was abandoned, and despite everything - his radical conservatism and his socially dismissive and arrogant political posture against which she had fought for decades - she couldn't resist.  He was inimitably attractive, confident, sexually mature, and irresistibly charming. 

In her calmer moments, she thought of her mother who had warned her against such men.  They had only only one thing on their mind and all women should beware.  In fact Trevor was a caricature of the cad, the Casanova,  and the Lothario her mother had described, and she had to smile at both the image and the reality.  Neither mattered.  She knew that she could not do without him. 

It is not surprising that her political advocacy waned as her sexual desire increased.  There was clearly no room for both in such an intense physical and emotional relationship; but it was more than her liberalism being shunted aside to make room for the more immediate passion she was feeling. The sexual desire somehow dismantled the architecture of her political belief. 

If this individual, highly personalized, intense, independent relationship was so completely satisfying, then wasn't individualism itself more valuable than communitarianism?  And if such irrevocable intimacy erased everything outside it, of what value was that pedestrian, predictable world she had spent so many years trying to change?

The relationship between Stella and Stark ended and ended badly - he off into his own febrile, insane world and she desperately depressed, still hopelessly in love with him and unable to live without him.  The affair between Amanda and Trevor ended less dramatically and existentially; but the transformation in her had been ineradicable.  The world looked different after the affair, as clear as before but the obverse of what she had seen. 

Love - usually the obfuscator of reality - was a cleansing agent, and gone were her former dreams of utopia and a new, compassionate, verdant, and peaceful world.  She had been tamed as completely as Kate had been by Petruchio in Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew.  In both cases the taming had not been enslavement but freedom to choose once the fetters of the inhibiting past had been removed. 

Amanda was finally a happy woman. 

Donald Trump's Arch, Ballroom, Garden Of American Heroes - The Left Falls For The Most Brilliant Con Since Snake Oil

Speaking with NPR's Steve Inskeep, comedian and political commentator Bill Maher noted how news organizations such as NPR were falling for Trump's ploy to create "distractions" for the media to report on and discuss rather than the bigger issues.

Maher labeled the President's proposed 250-foot-tall Victory Arch as 'meaningless'.  He told Inskeep, 'These are things I don't care about.  This is his genius in getting you to care about..'

When Inskeep, incredulous, asked, 'So, I shouldn't care about that arch or whatever?', Maher replied, 'Fuck no.  Absolutely not.  Not the arch, not the reflecting pool, not the ballroom [not the Garden of American Heroes].  This is all meaningless stuff.  Steve Bannon famously said, 'The way we win is we flood the zone with shit, and you're eating the shit.  You don't have to'. 

'Genius'; but without the credulous Left with its now ingrained assumption that everything Donald Trump does is maliciously wrong, the con would never work.  P.T. Barnum famously said that 'A sucker is born every minute' and the carny barker, the con, the snake oil salesman will always have easy pickin's, and Trump has been a master for playing the Left like fools. 

The apoplexy of the Left is entirely of Trump's doing. He plays them like a violin.  He knows every note, every phrasing, every adagio and pianissimo, every clash of the cymbals that will drive them mad, send them into a St. Vitus' dance of epileptic fever.  He knows that for all the things he is hated for, it is this - his bad taste, his bourgeois love of oversized yachts, arm candy, glitz and glamour, image, mansions, sequins, and tinsel.  And knowingt hat, he rubs it in.  

Not just an arch, but gigantic, overwhelming, monumental one; not just a ballroom but a faux Baroque, Rococo, impossibly overdone one, as far from 18th century, old Anglo-Saxon, Founding Fathers simplicity and English reserve as can be.  Not just a field celebrating American heroes but a Disneyland, a theme park, a riotous display of Hollywood-style patriotism. 

While the Left flounders and sputters with hate, unable to articulate a single coherent policy or program, obsessed with these deliberate shibboleths, swallowing every last bait thrown to them hook, line, and sinker, Trump goes about his business.  Destroying Iran's nuclear capacity and degrading their military, government, and infrastructure; assuring that Hamas will never again threaten Israel; closing the southern border and deporting illegal aliens; reducing the size of government and eliminating the bureaucracy; freeing the private sector from punitive taxes and legal restrictions; dismantling the fallacious and divisive concepts of DEI (Diversity Equity Inclusion) and the gender spectrum. 

This President is the most radically transformative in recent American history, and all that the Democrats have in their armory is Trump Hate - an inarticulate, choking, garbled response that has no resonance, no appeal, no appeal except to those who already have bought the fantasy. 

Donald Trump is the first real American president.  The Founding Fathers were not representative of the American people, the peasantry.  They were patrician English, aristocrats, intellectuals, philosophers, and thinkers and the country was lucky to have them framing the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. 

Trump is a man of the people, as lowbrow, bourgeois, and tasteless as the rest of America.  He is the president of Walmart, Arby's, professional wrestling, NASCAR, bass boats and gun racks, not Camelot, Pablo Casals, Chippendale, Townsend, and Robert Frost. 

Whereas John Kennedy, a shanty, lace-curtain Irish, son of a bootlegger and Nazi sympathizer, and faux aristocrat entertained la creme de la creme, the literati, the sophisticated, and the high-toned and sold the country on his Downton Abbey manorial cast; Donald Trump goes to the bottom - the real America, the raw, unschooled, ragged lovers of glitz, image, and fortune - and promises them a real American dream. 

Trump, a man who has amassed a fortune in the most competitive, lawless, aggressive, intimidating environment in America - New York real estate - is undaunted by Democrat attempts to remove him from office.  The many frivolous, politically engineered, absurd law suits against him have all been dismissed.  For Trump these legal assaults were no more than flies to be shooed away.  The Left's claims of racism, homophobia, and misogyny were swatted away, given no attention.  He was not a survivor, but a victor; and in this, his second term, he is letting his tormenters have it. 

There has never been a more savvy, astute, calculatingly brilliant politician than Donald Trump, and he came lately to politics.  When he ran for President it was a lark, an expression of that same braggadocio and outlandish self-confidence which made him millions; so when he took office he was not about to 'act presidential' as his critics insisted.  He had no idea what that was, and in fact no one in America did - except that it was some myth confected by the Left to conform to their faux progressivism. 

Acting presidential was simply being president, and Trump was that in spades. He learned the ropes during his first term and then came out blazing in his second.  The Left never knew what hit them.  From the first week of his second term he sent his bulldozers down Independence Avenue to raze the bureaucracy, sent federal agents out to round up illegal aliens, and began to dismantle each and every one of the preposterous programs and policies put in place by the progressive tool, Joe Biden. 

Perhaps most importantly - and a knockout blow to the Left - was his aggressive stance on illegal immigration.  Biden had deliberately let tens of millions of illegal aliens into the country to distort the electoral districting, i.e. turning red districts blue after censuses which counted illegal residents; and Democrats have refused voter ID to assure that those let in could vote for their party.  In the most callously transparent, hypocritical justification, they said it was to assure that black people who haven't the means, ability, or intelligence to get an ID, they are fighting for unrestricted access to the polling booth. 

So while Trump aggravates the Left and throws them into paroxysms of hate with his arches and ballrooms, he goes about the serious business of governance and restoration of political polity. Never a president like him. 

What Exactly Defines Place ? - And Why Are Cultural Consistency And Tradition Such Rallying Cries?

Harper Lent was a longtime resident of Martha's Vineyard, once a whaling capital of New England and now the summer resort of the wealthy.  There are year-round residents on the island, many descendants of those who developed the island as an ideal place for a second home - beautiful beaches, marshes, uplands; cooling winds and temperatures never approaching the stifling heat of the mainland, and isolation. 

 

The tourists and day-trippers who vacation on Cape Cod never make it across the water from Falmouth to Gay Head. There are no large developments, only one or two golf courses, and the island has remained much as it has been for the last hundred years. 

This conservatism, this determination to keep the Vineyard unchanged does not come without a militant community effort.  Mainland money is only a few miles offshore and the demand for land, property, and the status of one of the East Coast's premier summer vacation spots rises with each passing year. 

'I summer on the Vineyard' has always been the sign of wealth, privilege, and taste.  Preserving the exclusivity of the island's residents and the pristine, historic nature of the place itself has become a cause celebre - a defiance some even say channels the spirit of Roncesvalles, where Charlemagne fought the Saracen invaders and kept France and Europe Christian. 

France has always called itself La Fille Ainee de l'Eglise - the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church.  Its high culture, its universal Christianity, its preeminence in literature and the arts are models for the rest of Europe which owes it a debt for keeping the region free from the barbarians of Africa. 

France, Europe, and Martha's Vineyard have recently come under pressure to open their doors.  Culture is a fluid, fungible thing, always changing, always in flux and never permanent.  Critics say that those who insist on preserving a privileged past in a rapidly changing world reflect not a rational conservatism, but a a racist xenophobia. 

However the assault on traditional Western, European, and Christian values have come under precipitous assault from immigrants from Africa and the Middle East who want no part of that colonial past and seek their place in a new, diverse home. Roncesvalles was  only a temporary victory for Europe.

However, after almost a decade of open borders and unlimited illegal immigration, the nations of Europe have finally resisted and asserted claims that the old Europe - Christian, Western, infused with the very originating principles of democracy, liberalism, and freedom established in Ancient Greece millennia ago - must be preserved at all costs.  

Conservative leaders in France, England, the Netherlands, Germany and the countries of Eastern Europe have stated unequivocally that illegal immigration must stop and those in the country who entered without authority must be deported. 

Giorgia Meloni, President of Italy said it best. 'My name is Giorgia.  I am a woman.  I am a mother. I am Christian.  I am Italian, and I am a European!', defying the wokism of cultural relativity, secularism, and radical feminism.  An Italy which is no longer the home of the Vatican, the Roman Empire, the Medicis, Michelangelo, and Puccini is no longer Italy.  If left unchecked unwanted Muslim immigrants will turn the country into the Third World morass from which they have come. 

Harper Lent saw himself as an American Giorgia Meloni if not Charlemagne. The Vineyard must not become a garish, uncivilized, boorish place of those without reserve. If the doors to the island are opened, golf courses, mansions, and all the trappings that Jewish money can buy will be universal. 

Yes, as much as he hated to admit it - Harper had prided himself on his embrace of liberal diversity - the Jewish developers of New York most definitely had their eye on the island, and with their characteristic unconcern for anything but money, would be the first to ignore tradition and cultural eminence and invade the island without a second thought. 

When pressed he could not explain why preservation of the island was so necessary and important. Wasn't his objection to change simply because he liked the island his way and not another? And wasn't his defiance no more than the same xenophobia that characterized Europe and its resistance to inevitable demographic and cultural changes?  A stubborn refusal to tolerate 'the other'? 

Was there something sacrosanct about old wood, framed, weathered shingled, modest homes - classically unpretentious New England old money? Was there something innately good and right about a harbor with small sloops, a downtown without chain stores and nothing bigger than a wood-floored hardware store?

The change that Lent for so long had resisted was already underway. The current generation of Altons for example, the last in the line of residents of the island since whaling days and icons of propriety, culture, and modest wealth, led complex off-island lives.  

They had homes in Palm Beach and St. Bart's, full lives in New York and Miami and no more use for an old New England home in need of repair and without the modern amenities to which they had become accustomed.  They sold to the highest bidder - a New York developer who saw the property as an ideal place for a mixed used enterprise.  

These younger islanders saw nothing sacred about the Vineyard.  It was a pleasant summer home, a retreat from the pressures and responsibilities of the city, but no Eden, no anointed place that should retain its special character forever.  

Although the community fought both the Altons and the developer, both were within their Constitutional rights, and the only weapon in the community's meager armory was zoning law.  That, too however, was based on rather tendentious legal principle, and would not stand up in court.  Furthermore as more and more oldline families' children were anxious to sell, and even longtime, conservative residents were tempted by the windfall of 'New York' money, such lawfare defenses were even less tenable.

Harper Lent had been very comfortable on the Vineyard.  Place mattered, for it was the locus of memory, history, and culture. Nothing shocked or abused his sense of ownership and propriety. If the island changed and became more like every other place in America with its malls, mega-gyms, McMansions, and box stores, his life, his perspective, his personal zeitgeist and ethos would all be threatened.  

In short, his resistance to change was simply a self-interested desire for self-preservation; which of course is what extreme nationalism and xenophobia are. Both are considered noble enterprises by their supporters, but a losing battle.  In a free market society nothing can resist the forces of supply and demand.  Try as one might, change is inevitable. 

It all depends on the change, of course.  The Biden Administration calculatingly opened the borders to tens of millions of illegal aliens who will force changes in electoral districts, ensuring Democrat majorities; and because of progressives' fierce opposition to voter ID laws, the chances of significant electoral pluralities will be certain. Because of this venal, baldly political move, in time the traditional, white, middle class culture of America will disappear.

This unexpected and unwanted influx has sharpened the social divide, and millions of Americans have come to hate all immigrants as tools of the political opposition and willing recipients of its welfare.

If immigration happens logically and according to supply and demand, no one would care or notice if America became more 'diverse'.  If moderate Muslims were to enter Europe legally and were willing to assimilate into the prevailing culture, there would be no objection.  It has been the venality of the policy, the bald, transparent political agenda that has angered citizens. 

With a gradual transformation of the Vineyard, Harper's children - if unlike the Altons they chose to stay on the island - would never notice how it was no longer the same place settled by their families a century ago; and although that legacy would always be a part of their heritage, they would not need to fight for its survival as their father had. 

Gradualness, however, is a non-starter in today's aggressively contentious and demanding world.  The assault on Harper Lent and his old time, weathered neighbors, will continue quickly, abruptly, and painfully. 

Essentially there is no real reason to keep the Vineyard the way it has been. To be sure, it will no longer be the cute, old-fashioned, old New England place that certain tourists prefer, but it will attract another type of visitor; and it will not be up to subjective arbiters of cultural value like Harper Lent to decide who belongs. 

Place in a dynamically changing world of free market economics is irrelevant.  The world of the latter part of the 21st century will be virtual, mediated, and unfettered by such ancient and old-fashioned notions of belonging to a plot of land.  Artificial Intelligence and virtual reality will enable the recreation of indistinguishable worlds created at the click of a mouse or a simple voice command. 

Harper Lent is one of the last remaining members of the Old School where parentage, legacy, heritage, and cultural belonging matter.  They will fight with their last breath against the invasion of their idyll; but idyll is all the Vineyard is, and gradually that fantasy will fade away and disappear. 

Fighting for one's turf - one's familiar place, recognizable culture, social compatibility, and links to an acutely remembered past - will also be a thing of the past, an irrelevancy, a piece of ancient history. 

One can feel sorry for Harper Lent.  Because he has invested so much in place, his Eden, the Vineyard, taking it way will affect his soul, his identity.  As such, he will look upon his unrecognizable surroundings with regret.  He is too old to be a survivor, to take the next ferry to the mainland, to untether, release, and be free from the moorings which have kept him in his heavily confected, ideal, fictitious world.