Darn It! I Was Born A Man–Vladimir Putin And Joe Biden’s Struggle To Realize His Feminine Side At The Very Worst Time Ever

It is no coincidence that President Biden has surrounded himself with women – especially women of color – in his Cabinet.  His short list for a Supreme Court justice to replace the old, white male Breyer is made up exclusively of women of color.  Despite the fact that such racial preference would be unconstitutional in any other setting, the President is undaunted.  “It is about time”, he said, “for women to take their proper place at the highest levels of American society and for women of color to assume pre-eminence.”

Now, Joe Biden never grew up this way.  He, almost 80 years of age, grew up in a patriarchal society.  Women in Delaware as in all 50 states were subservient to men, did their bidding, and knew their place.  For as long as he could remember, men were at the top of the heap, king of the mountain, and rulers of the world. 

He, like many men, had to learn their place in The New Ascendency.  For him, a natural born politician, one bred to sail with the winds of the times, had an easier transition than most.  He had learned to be circumspect about his memories, attentive to the fierce social rectitude of his party, and careful in his utterances.

He was quite oblique in his references to the 50s, a conservative age vilified by the progressive Left; and only spoke in generalities about the peace, civility, and comfort of those times.  He had become aware, thanks to his young, activist coterie, that the Fifties were not simply a bygone era, but a hateful, racist one – the decade of patriarchal horror that it has taken years to undo.

Of course like any other man of the Fifties, he remembered things differently.  The milkman, the bus driver, the mailman, and the policeman were his friends, his everyday acquaintances; and for a boy who never fit in, who was beaten up on the playground and who had no success whatever with girls, he cherished these simple, unaffected friendships. 

The Fifties, if not America’s Golden Age, were certainly better than today’s awful inclusive times.  As much as he hated to admit it, homogeneity – white, Christian, middle class sensibility – had its strong points.  While he wished he could return to the happy days at Friendly’s, Bowl-o-Rama, and Christmas balls, he knew that they were gone forever, to be replaced by blackness, hip hop, and bling.

Biden, a politician by personality, genes, and upbringing, knew early on that the wonder days of his youth would nevermore be recovered or relived.  He might be a child of the Fifties, but he was President of the new millennium; so he embraced whatever came his way.  

While he instinctively hated the pounding, primitive rhythms of hip hop, the cheap, tarted-up antics of Mary Bligh, Snoop Dog, and Fifty Cent, and the ubiquity of the mean streets of the ghetto, he went with the flow.  If that was America, he would be a reformed American.  No fond, hazy reminiscences of Perry Como, big Buicks, and friendly corner druggists.  He would be as with it, as plugged into the ragged  popular culture of the 20s as anyone.

Of course, such a transition was difficult for a man of his age,  and he had to rely on those young people who had helped him win the presidency to follow the new compass heading.  His Vice President was the leader of the pack.  Although she was now way beyond youth, she still had her radical, youthful roots in social reform, and he listened to her petitions for racial and gender equality.

In private, the President was never that impressed with his Vice President, chosen and approved because of her gender and color.  She was a dunce, tone-deaf, ambitious, and an uppity woman as far as he was concerned; but she represented a good chunk of the Democratic party and had to be listened to.  

Now, AOC, that young, mixed-race, Puerto Rican American up-and-comer from the South Bronx was another thing altogether.  She was beautiful in a diverse kind of way, darkish but not ‘Negro’; diminutive, cute, and assertive; just the kind of girl he hoped he could have dated back in Wilmington, minus the color.  He had to pay attention to her, he said to himself.  Her wheels were greased and she was on the move, and he could be her engineer.

The whole gender ‘thang’ was the most intriguing to the President who had grown up in a pure and simple heterosexual world where boys skated across polished dancing school floors to dance with the likes of Kathleen O’Hara, Margaret Connell, and Lizzy O’Reilly.  Never in his life did he, or could he, ever imagine sex with a transgender person.  The idea of sexual consummation with a man, even though transitioned to a woman was repulsive.  The image of all those hairy guys playing with their dicks in the shower was indelible; and the idea of sex with a beautiful woman, the woman of his dreams, concocted into bullish muscled maleness was disgusting.

Yet, the zeitgeist, the temper of the times was of this character.  Whether he liked it not he, as a progressive president, had to go along.

So, regardless of his distaste for transgenderism in the raw, he had to be its champion on stage.

There was one glitch in this coming of age story.  Joe Biden did, actually, have a pronounced feminine side.  It took will and hours of practice for him to stand up and be macho, the playground bully, Casanova, Lothario, or Genghis Khan.  His heart beat flowers, valentines, and love songs.  

He loved his mother, the Virgin Mary, and all women – their beauty, grace, charm, and feminine allure – and wished that he could be one of them.  He hated his male, macho persona.  It was gross, hairy, underarm smelling, crotch pulling ugly; but the public, as much as they had been cajoled and enticed into a transgender world, still wanted Donald Trump.

This all would have been incidental if it hadn’t been for Vladimir Putin and his incursion into Eastern Ukraine. Putin was the ur-male, macho man par excellence, the unreconstructed, unashamed man who had no feminine, accommodating, soft, nurturing side.  He was all business, all Machiavellian purpose and ambition.  To him Biden was a soft, malleable, woman who could be subjugated, brought under, and dominated.

“Guns or butter”, the President said to his inner circle, managing the old saw.  “A velvet glove in an iron fist”, he went on “or vice-versa”, “a wolf in sheep’s clothing”; or more to the point, “a man in woman’s clothing”.  With that last metaphor he remembered his mother’s elegant, stylish Fifties dress, simple hats,  tailored skirts, high heels, and fanciful brooches and channeled her until he was wakened from his reverie by the Undersecretary of Defense, a butch woman of means and authority who said “ Give no ground, Mr. President, no ground at all.”

So it was the hairy apes vs the soft, pliant, lovelies who fought for the President’s attention.  How to deal with the bully in the Kremlin was the issue on the table.  Not that long ago, the discussion would have been on troop movements, economic influence, treaties, and imperialism; but in the Biden presidency it was all about gender.  “What would a woman do?”, the President asked himself.

“I will tell you what this woman would do”, interjected the Vice President; but the President had heard enough from this insurgent, marginal woman of color, a woman who, if he had to pick a transgender poster boy/girl, would be her.   If there was anyone who might get him more in touch with his feminine side, it was not the Vice President.

If history is any marker, than the emotionally androgenous President is badly mismatched.  Macho men win wars, say chroniclers of Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Alexander; so leave your feminine side at home.  But the President, never a student of history or ethno-biology was convinced that he could meet Putin on new turf – a soft and giving one, one of easy landings and face-saving, a feminine one.

The time, of course, had not het arrived for such a feeling, considerate president, and he was made mincemeat by Vladimir Putin.  Concessions were considered capitulations and the Russian president was taking no prisoners.

“Where is Donald Trump when we need him” was the meme and cry as Putin advanced westward in Ukraine.

“Reap what thou hast sown”, Trump replied through a spokesperson.  “I will be back”.