Washington has drawn the curtains on bawdy, hilarious sex. In today’s censorious times there really is no fun in the Nation’s Capital. Joe Biden is a man of rectitude and failing abilities, hostage to the progressive Left and identity politics. He is focusing on eliminating ‘pow-wow’ and ‘circle the wagons’. He is careful in his choice of phrasing, temperate in his remarks, and always attentive to doing the right thing.
There is too much troubling news, he says, for levity; too many needs of the poor and too much racism and oppression for anyone to be amused. The world is a serious place, and the President of the United States must always act with decorum. There can be no room in a threatened and threating world for clowns, vaudevillians, and Lotharios.
Mr. Biden was referring of course to former President Donald Trump who had not a serious bone in his body. He was a true heir to Hollywood fantasy, Las Vegas tinsel, and the humor of the Borscht Belt. Like Henny Youngman and Jackie Mason before him, he was most at home at Grossinger’s or at a table in the Carnegie Deli.
He was a master of the zinger, a circus ringmaster, a side show barker. There was no such thing as serious, he said, and if anything, the world was more melodrama and second rate opera than ever before. Who could take seriously the likes of ambulance-chasing Al Sharpton; or media hussy Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
More to the point, Donald Trump was the squire of beauty queens, a man of healthy sexual appetites, unrepentant and unreconstructed lover of women and their charm, elegance, and allure. He had had decades of glamour, escapades, starlets, Nantucket and Beacon Hill grandes dames and countless groupies.
Power invigorates, and as Henry Kissinger once famously said, it was ‘the ultimate aphrodisiac’ both for powerful men and the women attracted to them. Life was meant to be lived on yachts, in resorts and watering holes of the rich and famous. Trump was a man of Gstaad, Rimini, Portofino, and Cannes.
John F Kennedy was a more sophisticated version of Donald Trump. JFK was bred as a New England patrician, and despite his Irish Catholic roots and bootlegger father, he was heir to a privileged Anglo-Saxon tradition and the liberties it afforded. Not only was he patron of Pablo Casals, Robert Frost, and the literati of America, he was a lover of women – not just the beautiful, but the truly beautiful, every man’s dream.
While the socially conservative mores of the times prevented any public disclosures of Kennedy’s affairs, those inside Washington were quite aware of them, and his dashing, virile, daring sexual image was admired inside and outside the Beltway.
Congressmen, rubes from every cracker corner of the South, every prairie hick trading post of the Midwest, and every cow town and holler everywhere else, took sex as a perk of the office. ‘In high spirits’, drunk as loons, they went galivanting and carousing whenever and wherever they pleased.
The Tidal Basin Affair of Wilbur Mills, Chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee and Fanne Fox, exotic dancer and clone of the more famous Blaze Starr, the rhinestone and sequined consort of Huey Long, kingmaker of Louisiana, made headlines.
After a boozy night at a nightclub in October 1974, Fox and Mills were stopped by police who had noticed that their car, driven without headlights, was swerving erratically in downtown Washington. Fox, later known as the Argentine Firecracker, jumped out of the car in an evening gown and dived into the waters of the Tidal Basin. The drunk Mills attempted to follow her but was restrained by police.
Governor and Congressman Mark Sanford of South Carolina was equally enticed by an Argentine, and under the pretense of ‘hiking the Appalachian Trail’, flew off to Buenos Aires leaving the Governor’s office empty. His flimsy, easily disproven excuse was quickly discovered, and Sanford returned to give an apology to the people of South Carolina and America.
John Edwards, a Senator representing North Carolina, had a longstanding affair with a woman with whom he fathered a child. His evasions, excuses, demurrals, and downright barefaced lies were easily discovered, especially the smarmy enlistment of an aide to claim paternity of his bastard child.
Eliot Spitzer, Governor of New York was caught in a luxurious suite at the Mayflower hotel in Washington with a hooker, a woman who was part of a well-known prostitution ring. Spitzer admitted his liaisons but said, “So what?”. Sex between consenting adults regardless of the circumstances was a normal, routine affair.
He was not easily forgiven because of the unseemliness of the occasion – a governor, man of influence and power, respect and admiration paying chippies for sex. Where was Nelson Rockefeller, a class act New York Governor who died of a heart attack in bed with ‘another woman’?
Newt Gingrich, Speaker of the House of Representatives had an affair while his wife was suffering from cancer. This had been only the latest sexual dalliance of the influential politician, but certainly the worst. His apologies to the public were accepted, and while it took some time to restore luster to his conservative image, he went on undoubtedly, unrepentant, to many more affairs. It takes more than public censure to shut a politician’s sex life down.
It was reported that LBJ used Secret Service men to pimp for him and to arrange his outings; and like Kennedy, when his tomcatting was finally made public, no one seemed to care. This is what men did, after all, and what men in power did more than most.
Martin Luther King was said to be the Lothario of all Lotharios, a man of insatiable sexual desire; and while the eventual leaks concerning his many dalliances were initially troubling – how could a man of God and a man of his people be so adulterous and inconsiderate? – the concern quickly passed. Was Paris censured for seducing the beautiful Helen and carrying her off to Troy? Was Zeus condemned for having seven wives and many lovers? On the contrary, MLK was revered not only as a national hero but a real man of earth, fire, and blood.
In any case these hijinks are gone and done with, replaced by the most censorious period since Salem. Sexual dalliance is a hanging offense, infidelity a sign of inveterate disrespect for women, and sexual desire a retrograde adolescent fantasy. Looking is wrong, admiring is worse, unwanted approach nothing less than boorish rutting.
Kangaroo courts are the rule, men’s sexual offenses are never alleged, but automatically assumed. Men are dismissed from office, high position, tenure, and responsibility for just the hint of sexual impropriety. Women who claim to be superior to men in every way clamor for protection from them.
The heroic women of literature – Shakespeare’s Rosalind, Beatrice, and Portia; Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Rebekka West, and Hilda Wangel; Strindberg’s Laura and Miss Julie, all of whom ran rings around men, manipulated and dominated them with ease – are only figments of the imagination.
These days a man might be a boor behind closed doors, but he is a model of propriety outside. Women are to be respected, not wanted or loved. Love and sex are for women to decide on their own terms. Male probity and downright timidity are now the rules of the new sexual canon. It is not surprising that so many women to go off on a feminist tangent; but it is surprising that so many men have capitulated to their arbitrary demands.
Without Donald Trump, JFK, LBJ, MLK and the likes of Blaze Starr, the Argentine Firecracker, Mayflower hookers, and self-indulgent politicians Washington is an uninteresting, somber, funereal place.
This will not last. Boys will always be boys, rectitude and righteousness come and go with the times, and Donald Trump will soon be back in the Oval Office.
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