We Are The World - Realpolitik And The Fantasy Of Peace, Cooperation, And Good Will

Charles M'bele, longstanding President of a central African republic, sat back on the south verandah of the palace and looked out over the river, across the thousands of miles of forest to the ocean.  'Africa', he said, to a foreign visitor, 'is the future'. 

The visitor smiled, in country on a humanitarian mission and hopeful that the President would turn his attention to the starvation, pestilence, and economic misery of his people.  So far, no such luck, as M'bele had visions of a grand African renaissance, one to challenge the West and the white race for global authority. 

'We Africans', he said, 'are inheritors of Lucy's legacy', referring to the discovery of the first human being in the Olduvai Gorge, 'and we will inherit the earth'.  

He poured the visitor another glass of bonded 30 year single malt, lit a Cuban cigar, and watched the smoke drift languidly over the balcony, across the formal gardens he had fashioned after Versailles, and disappear into the mist over the river. 

M'bele had been in power since a violent coup in which his militias and South African and Israeli mercenaries toppled an elected president of the opposing party, a party of 'devilish intent, endemic corruption, and venal ambition.' 

Following his ascent to power, he built an impregnable empire assured by a loyal army, a brutal secret police, and a system of imprisonments and generous gifts which kept partisans guessing, loyalists firm, and those wavering in prison. 

'The world is in a flurry', said the President, and went on to cite the many international efforts at peace, cooperation, and reconciliation. 'Folly, hysteria, foolishness', he said, walking over to the balcony at the sound of distant gunfire. 

'Our neighbors', he commented to his concerned visitor, 'who have not learned our lessons of peace and security. 

The President was right, of course.  Dictatorships are good for one thing at least - peace and national security.  The regimes of the Duvaliers in Haiti made the country an idyll for foreign visitors.  The Olaffson was filled with writers, artists, and dancers, French restaurants served Michelin-starred meals from the harbor to Kenscoff.  Iran under the Shah was a modern day Persepolis - elegant, majestic, and safe thanks to Pahlavi and Sevak, his notorious Secret Police. 

 

The civil uprisings across the river from M’bele’s palace were the result of weak-minded, soggy, addled puppets who never learned how to rule.  'Don't worry', the President went on as heavy artillery fire was heard echoing in the forest.  'They won't come here'. 

The President picked up the phone by his side, spoke a few words, smiled, and announced that the interview was over - important business awaited him. 

Now, as much as Western democracies criticized M'bele and his authoritarian rule, his refusal to join any international agency, and his anti-democratic sense of imperial justice, he was the rule rather than the exception. 

Machiavelli writing in the 16th century understood human nature - man's ineluctable aggressiveness, territorial ambition, self-defensiveness, and survivalism.  Rather than suggest ways to a more considerate, compassionate, and unified world, he stated that peace was the result of stalemate or conquest, nothing in between.  Wars will always be fought, but should be engaged only to establish and secure national interests. 

 

The world order today is exactly as the Prince predicted.  Russia, China, and now, finally the United States are forcefully and unapologetically promoting their national interests and using every means to secure them.  Putin, Xi, and Trump are members of a new world order - a Machiavellian one where power is exercised and parity is sought.  

The force of arms, as Clausewitz famously noted, is diplomacy by other means.  The armies and arsenals of each of the three nations is impressive to say the least; but the lessons of the Cold War are resonant.  With thousands of megatons of nuclear explosives aimed at each other neither the Soviet Union nor the United States was tempted to pull the trigger. 

M'bele of course would never be invited to join this powerful triumvirate.  His nation was an impoverished, fifth-rate country with just enough mineral wealth to interest foreign donors; but he considered himself of the same ilk.

‘How do you say', he once said to a group of supporters, 'namby-pamby?' and with a guffaw and toothy smile to his attendants, he claimed his place as a member of the militant elite of the world. 

One Worlders have been around for decades, promoting international peace and harmony, demilitarization, healthy compromise, good will, and understanding. Yet they have been no more important or influential than streetcorner preachers, idealists with an abiding faith but no grounding in history, human nature, or geopolitical reality. 

American progressives are no different, challenging the Machiavellian Trump to stop his military incursions and withdrawal from international consortia and join hands with allies in a common front of good intentions.  NATO, the G7, the EU colloquies on transatlantic cooperation, the United Nations General Assembly, says Trump, are all hopelessly weak, flaccid, indeterminate organizations, taking up space and taxpayer dollars. 

Diplomacy, a la Clausewitz, is showing off American military might and defying any country to challenge it.  Former President Truman authorized the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to send a message to the Soviet Union. Look what we've got, and we're not afraid to use it. 

'Harry Truman, my kind of man', said M'bele, a student of American history who knew that with the election of Donald Trump, Truman was back.  

Of course, M'bele could have reached back a lot farther in history to conclude what he did.  The Hundred Years War, The War of the Roses, the countless bloody conflicts in the rest of Europe, China, Persia, Turkey, Japan; the tribal conflicts throughout Africa, the civil strife, uprisings, revolutions, and beheadings par for the course for millennia were evidence enough of the permanence of territorial conflict and the irrelevance of conversation. 

'I am a man of peace', he said, and he was correct as far as that goes.  For decades under his authoritarian rule, no shots had been fired in anger or revolt.  Of course in the early days after the coup, he was merciless in his search-and-destroy missions, burning entire villages suspected of disloyalty, beheading dissidents and impaling their heads on spikes leading in and out of questionable towns; but once security was established, peace reigned. 

Africa is the mirror of the political environment of the developed world.  Big Men, authoritarian dictators rule on all points of the compass.  All have loyal armies, insatiable secret police, and arsenals full and ready for deployment.  Whether internal or external, any threat to power must be met with overwhelming force. 

The progressive Left in Europe is on the run.  Their accommodating, politically naive policies have led to millions of unwanted, illegal immigrants who vow to Islamize the continent, an erosion of traditional European, Christian, Greco-Roman values, and impending chaos.   The Right is resurgent in Italy, France, Britain, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Poland and Hungary among others.  A reemergence of nationalism and regional identity. 

'Stay for the parade', M'bele told another foreign visitor.  'You will like it'. 

The parade in honor of the thirtieth year of M'bele's rule will match anything the Soviet Union managed on May Day, he said. 'Tanks, artillery, ranks of disciplined soldiers, martial music, and triumph!' 

The visitor of course demurred.  He was as anxious to get out of the country as quickly as he could, such a nasty, horrible place; but he smiled graciously, accepted a generous present from the President, was escorted to the airport by a phalanx of armored limousines, helped on the plane by welcoming airline staff, and never returned. 

Sex And The Liberal Woman - Rutting, Pillow Talk, And Other Irrelevancies In A Desperately Serious World

Bennington Pease (Bennie) grew up like every other well-heeled, privileged girl - cotillions, Christmas balls, country club dances, the occasional flirtation in class, and  summer vacations on the Vineyard with the likes of Parker Harrington and Cabot Phillips, boys from Groton and St. Paul's on their way to Yale. 

Sexual interest, desire, and promise was part of the package. Bennie would be married soon after Wellesley or perhaps after a year or two after Harvard, probably to one of the boys she grew up with on the North Shore.  They would move to New York, probably on the East Side, have three children, two homes, three cars, and the vibrant social life that only Manhattan can offer. 

'The best laid plans of mice and men'  the old saw that always seems right around the corner would never apply to Bennie, for such is the essence of privilege - there is little that can either shake its roots or move it from its assigned path. Yet, it did, and somewhere between Junior and Senior years her head was turned. The life she had taken for granted might not be all-inclusively right.  Her patrician forbears, as historically relevant as she knew them to be, came under harsh scrutiny from the emerging liberal Left in academia. 

The Putnams, her direct ancestors, had been among the first English settlers in the New World, went on to establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and with John Davenport built the new conservative Puritan settlement of New Haven.   

   

The other side or the family, the Potters, were judges at the Salem trials, influential clerics, respected thinkers, and perhaps most importantly, investors in the burgeoning transatlantic trade.  As shipbuilders, owners, and investors, the Potters made a fortune and built Boston as a worthy competitor to New York. 

So Bennie was shocked when told by her liberal classmates that this all meant nothing and that these men were responsible for the concentration of wealth that distorted the very fundamental principles of the new Republic, were the patriarchal fathers of generations of insular, white privileged males, and their investments were instrumental in perpetuating slavery (The Three Cornered Trade, the slave routes from which the Putnams had profited), propagating an ethos of aristocratic Louis XVI - Marie Antoinette 'let them eat cake' royalty, and creating a cabal of wealthy subterfuge. 

Bennie's weakness - that was the only explanation offered by her family - led her astray and before she graduated she had turned against family, legacy, and tradition, and had become one of 'them', the pious, Left. 

One would have thought that her life of discipline, enforced rectitude, and an unshakeable code of honor would have made her strong.  On the contrary, her life was so predicted, so constructed, so inviolable that she was never was allowed to think on her own; so when she was forced to rely on her wits, her intelligence, and her logic, she could not and was easily and quickly subsumed within The Movement. 

Now, the liberal woman of today is not Eleanor Roosevelt, a woman of honor and patrician pride who espoused her husband's social liberalism and spoke out in favor of labor, the working man, and the irrevocable principles of popular democracy. 

 

She is a harridan, a succubus, a vixenish howler for revolutionary change.  No gentle, compromised, accommodating change, but absolute, immediate, and brutal reform.  The black man is no longer the subject of Uncle Tom Martin Luther King's righteous cause, but the new American, the inheritor of forest wisdom and environmental insight to be raised to the top of the pinnacle of society. The disappearance and death of the white race should be accelerated to make room for black power. 

Heterosexuality, a legacy of a medieval reproductive past should also be expunged from American society to be replaced by a myriad of genders, a cornucopia of sexual choices, and halcyon years of sexual liberation.  The capitalist system, responsible for racial oppression and climate Armageddon, must be dismantled and replaced by socialism, a generous, compassionate, inclusive form of government. 

Given this agenda and its existential importance, liberal women have no time for anything less than serious pursuits.  Moreover, the privileged white lifestyle of conservatives - blonde, vacuous, ignoramuses more interested in mousse and Potomac mansions than social justice - is itself anathema.  Not only do liberal women have no time for St. Tropez or Cannes, they see the vapid lifestyle as counter-revolutionary, signifying the hopeless emptiness of the bourgeoisie. 

Sex for the conservative is nothing but wanton pleasure, trysts amidst darkness, self-gratifying pleasure while others were struggling to survive.  Sexual orgasm is nothing more than the bourgeois sentiment, the sought -after Holy Grail of political turpitude.  Camaraderie, fellowship, comrades in arms, solidarity, communalism, and bonding are the only sensible, reasonable, and logical relationships in a troubled world. 

Not only that but the liberal woman is conflicted about her own sexuality, challenged as she was to rid herself of the outmoded, antediluvian heterosexuality, to be liberated, and invested in the new sexuality of the day.  

For heterosexual woman, this is truly a conundrum.  The whole idea of likker-licenses, S&M street fairs, dildo buggering, and pussy cum is revolting, yet these new liberal phalanxes are not deterred, and in basement apartments everywhere, they put up with clit-pierces and tongue studs, fingering, and faux orgasms in a show of political solidarity. 

Most demurred - better speak out in favor of the gender spectrum than wallow in it - so sex in liberal quarters was a bottom drawer issue. 

Bennie, however had always been a woman with a strong heterosexual desire. She never considered Biblical injunction, biological imperative, family values, or other such covers for her native instincts.  She simply wanted to be taken, penetrated, and released - and not by some plastic robotic insert held by a big-titted, overweight bull dyke.

And what was this political conflation all about ?  Who said that sexual inclusivity had to be the menu du jour?  Who ever came up with the idea in the first place?  How in God's name did a tiny, outlying demographic become the zeitgeist of the liberal movement?  It was one thing for two men to do unspeakable things in bathhouses, but to raise that level of peculiar satisfaction to the national agenda?

Ironically, this sexual abstemiousness must have been what it was like back in Salem - a Puritanical obsession with celibacy, necessary sexual ritual, and the co-existence of evil with female sexual desire. Of course there were women like Bennie then, demoiselles who had their pleasure in the bushes or the barn, but it was a censorious, brutally ascetic time. 

Bennie quickly saw the errors of her ways.  It turned out that she was not so much the wilting flower that her family had assumed, but a woman who only needed a wake-up call - the supreme arrogance of these ponderous, hoarse, ugly women to send her packing.  Liberalism might have some redeeming values, some raison d'etre, but the whole thing had gotten so baroque, so rococo in fact, that there was no aging in place.  It was time to go, and go she did back to her roots, her old Nantucket summer friends, Grandma Putnam and Grandfather Potter, and eyes on the prize - a handsome, successful Wall Street banker with charm and promise...or something like that. 

At this point leaving the big tent of social causes, the bloody sanctimony and sexual perversion was enough so that even Bob from Accounting looked good to her. 

Of course she reverted to form and married well, had the expected three children, and lived a happy, expansive, prurient (yes, she and her husband were not beneath that) life. 

Liberal women? In the rear view mirror where they belonged. 

'If The Rule You Followed Led You To This...' When Conviction Grows As Stale As Week-Old Bread

Vicki Pastor had given the best years of her life to social justice.  She had marched with Martin and Ralph across the Pettis bridge, joined Freedom Riders in Montgomery, braved the ax handles and dogs of Bull Connor, and had come back to Washington to continue the struggle for equality and fairness.

She had put up with Ronald Reagan and the Bushes – conservative politicians of reasonably good will but misinformed intentions.  You couldn’t help but like Reagan, a jolly old soul with a self-deprecating sense of humor. George Bush I was a patriot, whose noblesse oblige was memorable – WWII combat airman, long service in government, patient and dutiful Vice President, and finally Chief Executive.  

His son, George II was a bit of a cowboy but within reason, and took 9/11 with  proper stolid American commitment; but the man now in the White House, Donald J Trump was another Republican altogether.

He was a bully, a racist, and a warmonger in bed with his Wall Street cronies and New York real estate mogul, a self-satisfied criminal who had avoided the law for himself but went on to abuse and distort it for ordinary Americans.

Vicki hated him with a visceral passion, an unrestrained, immoderate, bilious hatred; and although she was not proud of such unchristian behavior, she felt that such animus was called for.  The more hatred for this hateful man, the better.

It wasn’t just his politics that was so upsetting, but his lack of culture.  The man was a crass, bourgeois caricature of America’s worst instincts. His yachts, his Mar-a-Lago, his glitz, faux glamour, and arm candy were revolting examples of his excess.  His gross superficiality, his disdain for high culture and intellectual sophistication, his defiance of reasonable social norms and outright determination to create a cheap, tinsel-and-sequin Washington were disgusting.

Yet here Vicki was in her later years, widowed, children in San Francisco and Paris, rarely invited out, disconsolate and feeling hopeless, with nothing but memories and Trump hatrcd to support her growing despair.  ‘I need to do something’, she said; but the climate conferences, rallies on the National Mall, letters to the editor, and speaking at college reunions were not enough.

She thought of Coleman Silk, the Phillip Roth character in his The Human Stain who takes a much younger woman as lover in his later years.  ‘She’s not my first love nor my last’, he says to a censorious friend, ‘but she certainly is my last. Doesn’t that count for something?’

Men, Vicki knew, had it in them to take young lovers even at seventy; yet here she was a shriveled up old prune whom no man wanted any more, let alone a younger one.  Men were the lucky ones.  Only a nice bank account and a flat stomach – and not even that – could assure a December-May affair while she languished alone, tending her petunias and hating Donald J Trump.

It was at the poetry reading she had arranged at her home, an event to celebrate the works of a local artist whose verses had been overlooked for the many decades she had been writing them, that she had an epiphany, a conversion, a bright light of possibility.

The poet stood up before the gathering and began to read from her works – one treacly, predictable, crushingly adolescent poem after another. The guests smiled at a simile, shook their heads at a painful metaphor and took the whole brutal recital as though it were the Second  Coming.

The theme, of course, was social justice.  ‘Oh, what these eyes have seen’, she read, ‘and wept tears of love and warm embrace’ and from there went on to speak of the black man, ‘the sentient soul of the forest’, the inheritor of God’s first graces, noble creature maligned, dismissed, and damned. 

This was only the beginning, for she went on and on until even the adoring crowd began to grow restive;  but their love for the poet, her poetry, and her heartfelt emotion was stirring, and they kept their attention.

But Vicki was shaken.  The poetry was so awful, so irremediably bad, so self-assured in its miserable sentiments, that she had to leave the room, down three shots of chilled Stoli, and turn the oven to high.  In a fit of pique and resentment at her own idiocy, and with a hateful desire to be done with the whole disgusting mess – the horrible poetry, the black man, the insufferable toadying of her friends – she would burn the canapés to a crisp, serve them on a silver tray, and watch her guests eat them, swallow the bitter bits and thank her profusely.

‘No mas!’, she shouted as she drank another shot. ‘Basta’, and with the last remaining reserves of patience let the old bitch finish her recital, sit down, and be feted.  What was she thinking?  How could she have let her sympathies go so far afield?  She and the event she had arranged were caricatures, horrible reminders of the penitential years spent promoting old chestnuts, goodness, promise, halcyon years to come.

‘Fuck ‘em’, she said, now drunk beyond control but relieved of the Sisyphean burden of doing good once and for all.  Like the Coleman Silk character, it was time to give it up, clear the decks for running, and be done with it.

Her friends and colleagues could not believe the transformation.   Every last trace of her fidelity, obedience to and respect for social justice was gone.  What was left was a pissy, dismissive bitch of a woman who had finally come into her own. 

She was off to parts unknown, drawing down on her private income, so long hidden from the censorious view of her progressive colleagues, and finally happy. Joyous actually, as only anyone who has finally given a last goodbye to the sodden past can feel.

‘Fuck ‘em’, she said as she drove past the White House for the last time, waving to the beautiful blonde young things along Pennsylvania Avenue.