The New Year And The End Of The World - Trump Is Coming, Be Afraid!

Since the arrival of Donald Trump on the American political scene, the Left has performed a fascinating, compelling, outrageous show of fear and loathing - a combination of grand guignol and lion taming; a freak show of abominations and a house of horrors.  America has become a megachurch of wild fulminations with terrifying visions of the fiery coming of the end of the world filling the pews. 

It has been a remarkable period of politics, unlike any other because of the terrifying fear of an ordinary man; and despite the demonic, twisted caricatures of him as the Devil incarnate, he is just that - ordinary.  An American from top to bottom, skin to bowels; a man of big appetites, a street brawler, a wrangler, an open plains cowboy, Custer, Grant, and Sherman all rolled up into one.  'One of us, one of us' is the chant of his supporters, following him like Deadheads and groupies - a man with their desires and ambitions but who has satisfied and achieved them.  

Bob Moselle was the Left's poster boy and chief exorcist.  Never ordained but brought up by descendants of New England Puritans and versed in Ecclesiastes and Revelations, Bob found his calling when the Reverend Hoyt Cummings, Pastor of Yale, first on the busses to Selma and Montgomery, on the front lines against war and nuclear destruction, champion of the black man, hero to women laboring under the misogynist yoke of patriarchy and male privilege, received him in his chambers in Woolsey Hall.  

This was the man Bob had been looking for, a man with the passion of his Salem prosecutor forbears, the agile, winning ways of an Ivy League patrician, and the fury and bombast of a Southern preacher.  Cummings was a man possessed. This world, he said, this greedy, coarse assembly of selfish, self-assured, amoral, intellectual dwarves, could not, would not, and above all should not stand; and he would do all in his power to see that it toppled to be replaced by a kinder, gentler, compassionate place. 

He, with God's help would return the black man to his rightful place on top of the human pyramid, empower women to not only break through the glass ceiling but to reign.  The world would be a woman's place of compassionate dominatrices.  Sexuality would be as variable as the weather, soft southern breezes one day, whips, chains, and leather the next.  Love, kindness, and understanding would replace bombs and rockets. 

 

So Bob went out as the Reverend Cummings' disciple, and set up his revival tents where the spiritual deficit was greatest.  He would be the Billy Graham, Aimee Semple McPherson, and Billy Sunday of the secular Left, but fill the canvas he could not.  He did everything right, his oratory was perfectly pitched timed, his voice rumbling and soft at intervals, and his message compelling.  The MAGA right wing in America was no less than an insidious, evil force to be met with strength and resolve. 

For the first time in his life - this was his first foray into Indian country - he was booed; and like a bad vaudevillian was saved from the rotten eggs and pulpy tomatoes by a hook from the wings.  "Must change my approach", he thought as he regrouped; but the crowd wanted nothing of his messages of transgender deformity, white oppression, and socialist reform. 

"I must be progressive", he said to himself, "not abrupt', and found a more congenial home at universities which had already been rid of conservative infection. Students, faculty, and administrators cheered his call to arms.  "The Doomsday clock is ticking", he shouted, "and only you can stop it before time runs out.  YOU!', he yelled, pointing to an older woman he thought looked like Esther Pilchman, Upper West Side Jewish radical of the 60s; "and YOU!", singling out a fey gay boy in the front row.

But preaching to the choir made no waves - its resonance confined to the auditorium.  He, like Graham, McPherson, Jesus, and Cummings, needed to get out among the unbelievers, the apostates, the unborn again.  In short, to MAGA country; but his his brief foray into the heartland was dismaying both for its indifference and its egg-throwing hatred.  What in God's name would be the Idaho panhandle be like?

Stubborn because of his born-again progressive beliefs, but not stupid by any means, Bob was surprised at the political deafness he found outside of the current administration, universities, and the progressive media and think tanks of Washington and New York.  What was going on, the cultural sociologist in him asked? How is it that Jefferson's people, the intelligent majority, could be so far off base?  How could intelligent, or rather moderately....no, let's be honest, more-or-less intelligent...refuse the logical integrity and moral rightness of his message?

'Many a slip between the cup and the lip', he remembered; and he must pay more attention to the harmony of message and delivery - in other words, be more like Trump, a genius in a crowd. 

What Bob missed of course was Trump's outrageousness.  He not only accepted the anti-Trump meme of 'fake news', but reveled in it.  It was, after all his invention, and a tribute that it was now turned around on him.  Of course he exaggerated, played fast and loose with 'the truth', a figment of academic nonsense in the first place, and confabulated story after story to make a point.  His supporters got the idea, laughed and loved his performance, and dug in to find the message; and the message was resonant and reflective of a solid conservative agenda. 

 

Everyone but Bob, Esther Pilchman, and the Biden team got the picture.  It wasn't enough to be animated at the pulpit nor to have policies that resonated. To be American, real, downhome American, you had to be outrageous, ridiculously oversized, and full of a goddamned righteous indignation.  Fuck 'em.  

This was no evil man, no Lucifer, Prince of Darkness, but a comedian, a tummler, a brilliant showman who earned his bones in Hollywood and the mean real estate streets of New York.  Going up against him was like swimming up Niagara. 

 

Bob of course simply could not turn that corner; and so outside the ivy he got nowhere. The hysteria of the Armageddon-laced claques of the Biden Administration never parsed in Sioux City. Americans were not buying the race-baiting, gender-twisting, climate freaky messages to come out of the White House. 

It was Trump's time.  Americans had had enough hectoring and badgering about how bad people they were and how the nation was going to wrack and ruin, headed for a fiery end. Enough is enough, they shouted and voted in numbers for their man in November.  

Hell, No To Wooden Dildoes - Biden's Swan Song And The Return Of Donald Trump

 'Be afraid, be very afraid' was the poster meme for a Hollywood horror movie; but it could be a film about Donald Trump.  Why the Left is so afraid of the man is curious and surprising.  There are enough differences in policy, programs, and political philosophy to simply take him on politically, or better yet dismiss him; but they cannot. There is something frightening about the man, something terrible that goes beyond politics. 'Hate has no home here' says the lawn sign, a totem to ward off evil, a banner to the 'better angels of our nature'; or more likely the first lines of an exorcism

We confidently undertake to repulse the attacks and deceits of the devil.  God arises; his enemies are scattered, and those who hate him flee before him.  As smoke is driven away, so are they driven.  As wax melts before the fire, so the wicked perish at the presence of God

 

Trump is Milton's demon, cast out from heaven, but unbowed, challenges him for the rights to eternity.  Milton's devil is heroic, determined, purposeful and unstoppable. 

The contest between Trump and Biden is not political but Biblical.  It is existential, say the Left.  The fate of the nation and the world depends on his defeat. 

 

Where, oh where did progressives become so obsessed with Armageddon? How have the descendants of Roosevelt become such crazed, unhinged streetcorner preachers? What happened to the 'Let Us Reason Together' compromises of LBJ? How have liberal Democrats become the stumbling, lurching zombies of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers?  

The US electoral process has never been a pretty one, and scurrilous charges over paternity, license, fidelity, and moral fiber have always been part of the scene. Just yesterday Republican hopeful Chris Christie called his opponent, Nikki Haley, 'slippery and slimy', benign thwacks at a legitimate candidate and nothing like the seriously down and dirty. Historian Kerwin Swint notes:

Almost everyone will remember the 2004 battle between George W. Bush and John Kerry. But no less dirty was the lesser-known fierce 1800 contest between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams for control of the White House, finally settled on the floor of the House of Representatives in Jefferson’s favor. Number one? The brutal 1970 Alabama Democratic primary, in which George Wallace repeatedly slurred his opponent Albert Brewer as “sissy britches,” spread false rumors about Brewer’s sexuality, and made patently racist appeals to white voters.

There are numerous victims of muddy political skirmishes, including Helen Gahagan Douglas, smeared as a communist by Richard Nixon, and Michael Dukakis, whose defeat in the presidential election of 1988 by George H. W. Bush was due in part to the infamous “Willie Horton” ad.

The vitriolic, incessant, hysterical hatred of Donald Trump has been front and center for almost a decade, ever since the man showed up on the political scene.  He was a never before seen politician, a newcomer to politics straight from Las Vegas, Hollywood, and the nasty world of New York real estate. He was full of bombast, vaudevillian pranks, Borscht Belt zingers, and foul mouth.  He cared nothing for nobody, was full of himself, outrageously flippant and over the top.  

He was a man of the people. Finally, his enthusiasts shouted, one of us, one of us.  America has never been a Kennedy Camelot country complete with Robert Frost and Pablo Casals.  We are all glitz, tinsel, pasties and booty.  We love starlets, yachts, over-the-top resorts, braggadocio and OK Corral shoot-'em-ups. 

So perhaps the hatred comes from an inverted envy - liberals are proud of their sensible shoes, Jewish bookishness, Samuel Gompers and Saul Alinsky community action; but deep down want Trump's arm candy, sequined beauty queens and outsized personality. 

Perhaps it is because what liberals have considered received wisdom, an anointed canon of righteousness and absolute good is being challenged.  How could anyone contest what is obviously and evidently right?  And yet there he goes again, lambasting climate change hysteria and the ridiculous shadow play of no gas stoves and the return of ice boxes.  The most hilarious clip on social media is an AI reconstruction of Greta Thunberg, young climate activist, speaking from a lectern asking women to give up their battery powered vibrators. What's wrong with wooden dildoes, she asks, or your fist?  It's time for all of us to think about the planet. 

The Left's agenda of drag queens as storytellers, tough-looking trannies in see-through glam bodices and ugly-as-sin male-female sexual turnabouts in the Cabinet side show has had its day.  No one is buying tickets anymore, so fold up the tent. 

 

You can't think straight when you are discombobulated by hate, so the Democrats are in a tizzy about the upcoming elections.  They have an old man who no longer can make sense running for reelection.  He is a codger who shuffles about like a demented grandfather and yet is still President of the United States.  His claques do their best to prop him up and claim victory for 'the wallet issue' -  the economic rebound - but the healthy rise is the result only of the Fed's husbandry, successful despite Biden's inflationary, illogical drunken sailor spending on discredited public 'investments'. 

Support for the war in Ukraine - a foregone conclusion of Russian victory, billions of dollars of desultory military support, fear of Putin, and a faded, discredited policy of peace at any price - is increasingly unpopular, but Biden is tone deaf.  Support for Israel, half-hearted, weak, and pusillanimous are losing not gaining him credibility in the Middle East.  His border 'policy' is a dismal failure and national shame; and his social policy of race-gender-ethnicity, an obtuse distortion of human history and common sense is finally seen for the ridiculous show it is. 

Does the reelection campaign strategy focus on these issues? No.  Biden and his shills simply cannot give up the fight against the Devil; and the more they launch witch hunts, Salem-style trials, smear tactics, and burning at the stake attacks, the more popular Trump becomes. 

For the good of the party, it is time for the chaise longue.  The President speaks longingly of Delaware, Rehoboth, and the warm, cuddly friendship of former constituents, and should quickly head north.  Yet, since he is not his own man these days, he is propped up, fueled with vim and vigor and told that he can win in 2024.  Not in a coon's age.  He is already history, a stale, unsaleable piece of yesterday's loaf of bread. 

Is There Such A Thing As Too Much Diversity? - The Primacy Of Privilege

Eleanor Bartlett grew up in a white, upper middle class, privileged family in a neighborhood of likes, all with the same values, tastes, and ambitions.  Yet far from the staid, stolid, and boringly conservative caricature drawn by proponents of diversity, Ellie's community was nothing of the sort.  Yes, it was Hamiltonian in outlook, Episcopalian in belief, and very good-mannered, polite, and respectful - fundamental traits that had not changed or wavered since their first ancestors arrived in Plymouth and thrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  While they had evolved to a more tolerant and considerate Protestantism since the days of Cotton Mather, Salem, and John Davenport, the never lost that spartan rectitude of their ancestors.

 

The more telling description of the New Brighton West Enders was their remarkable intellectual diversity.  The community had produced more financiers, philosophers, mathematicians, and musicians per capita than any other on the East or West Coasts.  Success had been ingrained within the community ethos; and a remarkable nurturing of individual ability and enterprise had assured that many attained it.  No one in New Brighton was forced into a profession for which they had little aptitude, so all thrived on the sense of individuality and personal worth instilled in them from birth. 

The current generation of West Enders, living in the full bore of anti-liberal progressivism, a latter day Utopianism which championed a diversity which stopped at race, gender, and ethnicity.  Being black or gay was enough to gain entry into the big tent of neo-idealism.  Anything further was incidental to individual identity.  

Few geniuses ever emerged from the tent, so limiting and prescriptive was it.  Individual enterprise, particularly if it prospered in the white, majority society, was discouraged.  Radical progressivism was tribal and obdurate.  It was totemic, a society worshipping image, icons, and statuary; and as such stale and unimaginative.  While West Enders were writing musical addenda to the Goldberg variations or taking atonality to another level, progressives were reopening bathhouses, advocating for more transgenders on afternoons soaps, and filing briefs for the recognition of the inner city ghetto as the new breeding ground for African bloodline. 

 

For decades American progressives have championed the African American as a more pure human being.  As the first descendants of Lucy, Africans and now the African diaspora, retain the tribal essence of the heart of the continent, and as such should be raised to their proper place on top of the social pyramid. 

As much as this retro anointment seems folly to most, it has become the core and the heart of the progressive movement whose goal is a majority black population.  Progressives are the last to censure inner city men for their sexual adventurism, serial relationships, and lack of fatherhood, for to do so would be to censure the very vigorous reproductive life of the black male; and in a disturbing irony, act no different from Antebellum slaveowners who encouraged procreation among their holdings with no concern for family, traditional morality, or social integrity. 

The same is true for the LGBTQ+ community.  It too can do no wrong, sexuality is fungible, and straight heterosexuality is an antediluvian, retrograde idea to be dismantled and dismissed.  

The list of progressive assumptions is seemingly limitless with advocates heaping issue after issue onto the pile.  Everything goes.  Diversity extends to every aspect of social life. 

To progressives the West Enders represent the worst of the worst white, privileged, patriarchal, capitalist men - the enemy of social justice and social reform.  Yet their very existence and their perennial prosperity and socio-cultural success is a stark rebuttal of progressive diversity.  Race, gender, and ethnicity matters not one whit to a productive society; not one iota to those who look similar and act according to common codes but who are prime individuals, indivisible by some alternate mathematics. 

In fact, the homogeneity of the West End provided the foundation for its excellence.  No one in the fertile, boundlessly productive ground of New Brighton, every worried about that kind of personal identity or social diversity. Everyone was the same simply on the surface.  Everyone walked on common ground, reflexively hewed to the morality of respect, rectitude, and honor that had been part of their ancestors and their ancestors. 

The progressive brand of diversity siphons off talent, wastes ability, and diverts intellectual intent.  In its neo-socialist culture, the community of the oppressed - gay, black, women, and Latinos - is paramount.  Your first obligation is to your tribe.  Individuals are poor seconds, only pegs in the larger board of community. 

Ellie Bartlett was so confirmed in her belief of the historical, social, and cultural importance of her family and the community of like-minded residents around her, that she never questioned its preeminence.  How could one criticize a community which had nurtured, educated, and encourages such a range of talent.  One had only to give a cursory look to find judges, start-up billionaires, New York artists, philharmonic cellists, and Ivy league professors - all white, all Christian, all cut from the same cloth. 

Pop culture observers turn to Leonard Bernstein and West Side Story for parallels. 'Stick to your own kind' was the lesson of the musical despite its cross-cultural enterprise.  Communities since the Paleolithic have been insular, tribal, self-protective and self-interested; but as Bernstein hoped to show, it was narrow, hidebound thinking. 

The West Enders and their social kin, however, were nothing like the gangs in the musical.  Although the West Enders were well aware of their cultural uniqueness and the great chasm of cultural difference between them and the inner city redoubts of their progressive urban neighbors, it was of no practical concern.  Fussing about non-essentials had always been an idealist's territory.  The whole package - revisionism, censure, identity, victimhood - was a grab bag of history's leftovers, old chestnuts and discredited ideas. 

The percentage of blacks in the US populations is little over ten percent; but to see the number of blacks on television, in movies, and in advertisements one would think their proportion far more. This legacy of affirmative action, finally getting judicial repeal, is getting tiresome.  We are a tolerant society but not one to be badgered by faux truths spun by political idealists.  

If Ellie watched television, it was by chance. There was simply no time in her research day for the tomfoolery that passed for American politics, and the hammering, harping, and crowing about diversity. Elite, privileged, white, and wealthy?  Yes, but so what?

'One Flesh' - How The Gospel Of Matthew Made Sex Hot

Rainey Vann always squirmed in his seat when he heard Father Brophy talk about ‘one flesh’ which he did as often as he could.  On the pulpit, in a snap visit to catechism class, or in the sacristy to the altar boys, the old priest always recited Matthew 19:3-6

Jesus said, “Have you not read that the one who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two of them shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh

One flesh…How impossibly erotic and exciting for a young boy. As soon as the priest said the words all Rainey could think about was that soon-to-be delirious moment of ‘sexual union’, his flesh and the hoped-for coupling with Nancy Blithe.

Any boy growing up in the Fifties got shortchanged when it came to sex, and Rainey Vann was no different.  He was warned off of ‘impure thoughts’ by the same Father Brophy who had enticed them with his 'one flesh' sermons
Since Father Brophy was obsessed with sex, he delivered his ‘impure thoughts’ sermons many times a year, every boy in the parish knew that he would ask about them in the confessional.  Everyone  figured it was good to confess them right away so that he wouldn’t ask sticky questions.  They were only venial sins anyway, a few Hail Marys the absolution.

Rainey said that he had undergone a particularly severe grilling.  “Father did not just ask me if I had any impure thoughts”, he said, “but he gave me suggestions. ‘Did you think of a woman’s breasts?’ for example.  When I said, ‘No, Father. I didn’t, he said, ‘Well then, what about her thighs?’ The more he said, the more impure thoughts I had right there in the confessional and the more I had to confess.  I could have been in there for an hour.”

Rainey's  friends were old enough to be aroused by the thought of a woman’s body – even a quick glancing thought was enough – and they spent Saturday afternoons at Jimmy’s Smoke Shop ogling the girlie magazines that Jimmy had in the back.  He wasn’t supposed to let boys back there, but if Rainey gave him a dollar he would.



Rainey and his friends might have been aroused by a woman's body but they had no idea about what went where.  Their fathers had never told them anything, so they had to rely on rumor and innuendo.  Johnny Ritzer, a boy ahead of Rainey in sixth grade, had so badly mixed up a woman’s organs that only a circus freak could have performed the sex that he had imagined. 

Rainey Vann had an assigned seat to Nancy Blithe in History class which was held right after Religion.  Rainey always found it hard to concentrate when he sat next to her, especially in the warm weather when she wore sleeveless blouses; but concentration was impossible if Father Brophy had talked about sexual union and the flesh during one of his pop visits.  

Of course he was too young to know exactly what sex with Nancy would be like.  Up until now it had been only hearsay, what went where and how, how to get a girl excited, and what to do then.  That’s the wonderful thing about sex, he thought many years later. Even before you know what it is, you want it; and you never stop wanting it, no matter how old you are.  

Rainey's mother had repeatedly said to his father, “Henry, isn’t it about time you had that talk with your son?”; but he could never bring himself to actually do it.  Once he tried, but his allegories and metaphors were too abstruse to have any meaning.  He alluded to reproduction in the animal kingdom, spoke about family values and fatherhood, and said he knew what it was like to be a boy my age; but he never got down to brass tacks, what went where, and how to do it.

If all this were not enough, the heat was turned up at Lefferts School, a New England feeder to Yale, priding itself on its union of classical education and modern teaching principles.  Latin and Greek were standard fare for incoming freshmen, and the guest lectures by clergy men from local churches and temples nourished the heady mix of contemporary and traditional thinking.

Whether the Lefferts administration knew what Jim McCurdy was teaching sophomores in his Biology I course, was unclear, but one thing is certain - if any teacher today offered such a steamy introduction to human reproduction, or even hinted at any of these topics today, they would be tarred and feathered and run out of town; but somehow back then, the school administrators gave him a pass. No one was sure they would have if they had heard his talk about hard nipples, wet pussy, panting, moaning, and ‘ecstatic release’.

Mr. McCurdy was one of the youngest teachers on campus, not that much older than Rainey.   He had graduated from Yale a few years before, married Mrs. McCurdy n a big ceremony in Kingsport, Rhode Island, and had been appointed as the biology teacher at Lefferts. All students knew that once a year he gave his famous sex lecture; but since he liked to keep his classes guessing no one ever knew when it would come.

Mr. McCurdy  had divided the fifty-minute class into discrete segments: How to Get a Woman Hot; How to Know When She’s Hot; How to Know When She’s Coming; and How to Hold It In Until She Does. 

In any case, Mr. McCurdy had everyone's attention.  Fifteen open-mouthed adolescent boys being turned on by the biology teacher. He must have known that every one would think of his wife in that way every time they saw her; and that she would be the woman every boy thought of when they masturbated under the covers.

The wives of teachers always sat at the dinner table with their husbands and the boys.  Mrs. McCurdy always sat demurely next to her husband while he ladled out the soup and carved the roast beef; but she had to have known that all eyes were on her and not the meat.  Rainey said many years later that he was sure that the two of them must have been playing some elaborate, secretive sex game that involved the Third Form, some kind of twisted Liaisons Dangereuses with the poor, horny boys of Lefferts the innocent victims.

Perhaps to cover what he certainly knew was a serious stretching of academic boundaries McCurdy quoted an obscure German philosopher elucidating an arcane metaphysical point, something about anticipation trumping actuality. Rainey thought it described his early adolescence; but ‘Imagination is really what trumps execution’ was even more accurate. 

“A woman’s lap is a sacrificial altar; her hairs, the sacrificial grass; her skin, the soma-press. The two labia of the vulva are the fire in the middle. Verily, indeed, as great as is the world of him who sacrifices with the Vâjapeya (“Strength-libation”) sacrifice, so great is the world of him who practices sexual intercourse”

It all would have been a lot easier if St. Paul had not been so obsessed with sex and conflated it with sin; but that’s water under the bridge:

I wish that all were as I am…those who marry will have affliction in regard to the flesh, and I would spare you that …he who marries his virgin does well, and he who does not marry her does better…in my opinion she, a widow, is happier if she remains as she is and does not marry again (1 Corinthians 7)

 

Paul had no idea what he was doing when he let loose the sex-and-sin issue which has resulted in no end of stormy relationships, jealousy, and murder.

On the other hand perhaps he did know what he was doing – that there is a moral and spiritual nature to sex; and that moral responsibility should be a guide to our behavior. In other words, sex education is only important if it has a moral dimension.

In any case, Rainey could still remember exactly what Mrs. McCurdy looked like.  She might not have been the sexiest woman he had ever met but certainly the first.     

Toxic Femininity - Vixens, Harridans, And Succubae

Much has been made these days about toxic masculinity and how men are congenitally predatory, abusive, and dismissive of women - ogres, troglodytes, prognathous throwbacks to grunting Neanderthals.  Combined with whiteness, toxic masculinity becomes a poisonous potion, a virulent viral plague.  Feminism is too weak to counter such ape-like grossness.  Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir only hinted at the ugly nature of men; and it took another generation to fully expose their innate, foul brutality.  Men were now the enemy. 

Of course this misandry is understandable given the permissiveness or the times, the focus on victimhood and oppression, and the sense of sexual entitlement.  Women look back on their time in the kitchen, the bedroom, and the nursery - prisoners of their sex, no more than chattel slaves to men - and turn hateful and vindictive.  Their turn has finally come. 

Of course these latter day neo-feminists overlook the strong women of the past, illustrated and championed in Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Strindberg.  The men in Othello, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale among other plays are misogynous boors - distrustful of women but unable to control them.  There are the evil ones, Goneril, Regan, Dionyza, Volumnia, and Tamora who want nothing more to reign without men and to dismiss, marginalize, or kill them; the cunning ones, Isabela and Imogen who used trickery and guile to set their men straight; the strong ones like Margaret, wife of Henry VI who fights his battles for him, Margaret of Anjou, kingmaker; and the cutely canny ones like Rosalind and Portia.  Shakespeare's plays are sexual battlegrounds with women more often than not besting men. 

More restrained but equally powerful women such as Margaret of Anjou and Katherine of Aragon and Cleopatra were able to maneuver and manipulate the men around them to further their own political and social ambitions.  They gave nary a thought to the confining and supposedly abusive male dominions in which they lived.  Fighting, obstructing, and confronting the established order made no sense, especially when men were not so strong as they themselves assumed.  Shakespeare’s other heroines like Rosalind, Viola, Kate, Imogen, and Portia played with, laughed at, and bested the men in their lives.  They may not have had the same impact on history as their Tragic sisters, but they showed men for the less-than-able characters they knew they were.

The women of Ibsen and Strindberg are as devious and purposeful in their dismissive attitudes towards men.  Rebekka West, Hilde Wangel, and Hedda Gabler are all willful, amoral women who rise above the limits of their sex to dominate men.  Laura in Strindberg's The Father will settle for nothing less than commitment of her husband to a mental institution. 

Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Strindberg knew what women were capable of, understood the depths of their resentment of men, and their compelling need to destroy them.  Their works are both indictments of women for their vengeful, murderous natures and heroic tales of their  victories. 

Martha in Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is drama's harridan - a brutal, man-hating, vixen - and his George is a weak, sorry victim of her fury.  There is some hope at the end of the story - they have so flayed each other to the marrow that perhaps there can be a new beginning.  Tennessee Williams created Maggie the Cat, a duplicitous, treacherous woman  who wants only money, reputation, and dominance but he can't hold back his admiration of this beautiful, stunning example of feminine will. 

So, if one is to take these dramatists at their word - describing in theatrical terms what women are really like - then the war between the sexes will continue ad infinitum, with the pendulum swinging between male and female superiority.   Given history, and the ample examples of literature, women are certain the toxic ones, for they, given social circumstances, can survive only through treachery and deceit. 

The characterization of women in the past has been harsh indeed; but why have women been so insistent on taking their pound of flesh, hectoring the disappointing  men they have married?  Why have they stayed married despite all signs that point to dissolution and preferred to nag, irritate, and badger instead?

The image of the hag, the badgering, incessantly critical, unhappily married, resentful, unpleasant woman should have been long ago relegated to the archives.  Successful modern day women have either acquired enough financial capital to leave a bad marriage; or have, like Shakespeare’s heroines, figured out how to get the best out of their husbands and their marriages to satisfy their needs; but the unsuccessful women, the majority, still have not sorted out their independence nor learned from the Strindberg playbook.  Only women know whose child they are carrying, and there is no more poisoned arrow in their quiver.

Instead, women go toxic with their bickering, bitching innuendoes and never confront men on the battlefield, equal in strength, open and martial in their intentions, courageous and honest.  They are still confused, caught between their patriarchal upbringing and modern 'Be All You Can Be' propaganda. 

A confounding factor in all this is feminism itself.  On the one hand feminist jihadists are asserting their absolute strength, authority, ability, and independence; but on the other are demanding safe spaces, neutered men, congenial and protective institutional environments, limited free speech and civil rights.  What is a woman to do?  Which is she?  Strong, competent, and independent; able to negotiate the world of men easily and quickly? Or dependent, still needing shelter and accommodation?

In addition women are taught as part of the ‘male toxicity’ canon that men’s natural, biological, sexual drives – aggressive, demanding, persistent, simple, and undeniable – are wrong, retrograde, and destructive.   There is something wrong and suspicious about male pursuit.  Yet millennia of human history demonstrate just the opposite.  Human evolution has depended on male aggression, competitiveness, and pursuit.  While there is no doubt that such masculinity can have its excesses – the bell curve describes all human activity and ability – there is no reason to deny its reality or its legitimate place in modern society.

Therefore most women are caught betwixt and between.  They settle for bad marriages, bad jobs, and bad children and instead of doing something, complain, rage, nag, and harp and become as toxic in their own way as their wandering, dismissive, wandering husbands.  In being taught that the system itself is the enemy and that only by destroying it and remaking it in women’s image can women ever find reward, women have been sold a bill of goods.  Women need no institutional support, no self-interested twisting of legal codes, and no patrons.  True equality can only be achieved by asserting one’s moral authority, intelligence, and individual will.  In being taught that evolutionary biology is wrong, women have been further deceived.  Rather than dealing with biological difference – as Shakespeare’s daunting heroines did – women are instructed to deny it.  Certainly no good can come of that.

The honesty of Shakespeare and his successors is absent in today's culture of identity, diversity, and inclusivity. One cannot call a spade a spade - women in this apogee of women's place can do no wrong, deserve every advantage over men, and must be respected as society's true generals - or saints.   The only spade called is male toxicity, that spreading, infectious, viral swarm of bad intention, ugliness, and hormone-fueled ignorance. 

The war between the sexes, as hot as it has ever been, will cool down for sure.  Its anger, suspicion, and hostility is more a product of today’s identity politics, the politics of grievance and victimhood than it is any fundamental issue.  This era of over-sensitivity, inclusivity, and group identity will eventually wither and die.  Who knows what will come next, but one hopes at least some return to sexual reality, confidence, will, and individuality.