Donald Trump, A Man Of The People - The Rightful Legatee Of American Tomfoolery

The rise of Donald Trump is nothing but amazing.  How could this braggart, this inflated Hollywood, Las Vegas, New York mean streets hustler ever have been President, and how after years of law-gating him, branding him as Beelzebub and the spawn of the Devil, accusing him of insurrection, treachery, and racism could he possibly be a few weeks shy of the Presidency?

Easy.  America is not the England of Churchill nor the France of Louis XIV, the Sun King and never will be.  It is a lowbrow country of political rubes and a credulous electorate.  P.T. Barnum, circus king was right - 'A sucker is born every minute' - and so was Lincoln - 'You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time' and so are the carny barkers, street hustlers, con men, shell game artists, Ponzi scheme architects, megachurch preachers, and advertisers. 

The meme, the ethos, the permanent zeitgeist of America is tomfoolery. Although it is surprising, given the principle and moral rectitude of the Founding Fathers, America in a few short years turned populism on its head and into a Wild West grand guignol - a shoot-'em-up, cowboys-and-Indians circus of the plains.

It never returned to the prudence and patience of Jefferson, Hamilton, and Adams.  The country under Al Capone, Bonnie and Clyde, the Robber Barons,  get-rich-quick shysters and con men who figured every angle and took everyone for a ride, selling remedies and salvation until the whole country was awash in cheap, throwaway, irrelevant, and unnecessary junk. 

 

Nothing has changed.  The same shysters, crooks, and easy money panderers are still at it, hawking climate change, gender reassignment, systemic racism, and the putative regency of The Black Man. 

Americans swallow the fol-d-rol hook, line, and sinker.  Environmental Armageddon is coming in our lifetimes, the polar ice caps are turning to water flooding the oceans while forests will soon be incinerated.   The next cataclysmic depression is coming in a wash of new credit swaps, innovative financial instruments, and soulless Wall Street investors.  Artificial Intelligence is on the cusp of wiping out reality, truth, and God causing the greatest social upheaval since the Cretaceous. 

Enter Donald Trump, a politician far from the anomaly the Left assumes - a crazy man out of nowhere tapping into American animism, a demigod, a pagan nonsensical aberration.  Trump, to borrow the line of the movie Freaks, is 'one of us, one of us', no more freakish and side-show ready than any other American, and certainly no weirder than the Chicken Little worriers whingeing and whining about the end of the world.  He is the first real Man of the People, a man who is the heart and soul of a virtual, fantastical credulous electorate. 

There is no shame in this patent gullibility.  Philosophers and artists since Plato have understood that there is no such thing as the truth only subjective interpretations of it.  Kurosawa, Browning, and Durrell have created a fictional world of alternate truths which when assembled resemble some vague, collaborative version of what happened but probably never did.  

Bystanders witnessing a crime will all see a different version of what happened - the perp was black...or white; the car was a sedan...or an SUV....It was green, speeding or grey and slowly moving.  Lawyers in courtroom trials stretch the facts, tempting the jury with alternate visions of reality. 

Why should anyone, philosopher or Americans tuned in to As The World Turns to see if Amanda killed Robert, assume that there is such a thing as the truth? And why, more importantly, should they care. 

America is not the crass, bottom-feeding, populist culture so ridiculed by the French.  By placing this faux reality, this virality, this artificially intelligent preference and its high valuation of show girls, pasties, starlets, and glam front and center of this fantasy make it a cultural avant garde. 

While coastal progressives- old Samuel Gompers Upper West Side Jews, inner city racial demagogues, academics, and hot house-grown politicians - believe that there is such a thing as truth and it is theirs, no one else does.  The rest of us want the Barnum & Bailey big top never to leave.  Let the bearded ladies, two-headed babies, dwarves, and camel-backed Quasimodos stay forever.  We could watch them ad infinitum, and to give us a new look, we have Donald Trump. 

France claims that it is, la fille ainee de l'Eglise - the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church, a title assumed thanks to Charlemagne’s victory over the invading Muslims at Roncesvalles, saving Europe from the brutal Dark Ages of Islam - and considers itself the cultural regent of Europe spreading high culture and enlightenment throughout the continent.  

For years Apostrophes, an intellectual talk show about esoterica, was the most popular prime time show on French television.  It symbolized the cultural heights of the nation, expressed the conviction that every Frenchman, high-born or -low, was heir to France's storied tradition of art, music, literature, and philosophy. 

America was the antithesis of French cultural supremacy.  A nation of fast food, fat people, brawling politics, foul ghettoes, and mind-numbing entertainment was a gutter culture, worth little in the universal scope of things. 

Nothing could have been further from the truth.  American culture is the universal world culture.  Sensationalist movies; hip-hop, bling, grilles, ho's and pimps, braggadocio and bombast, cheap thrills and cheap carny rides are everywhere. Nothing escapes.  Friday nights in Dubuque or Monday mornings in the well of the House of Representatives are no different - nothing but a revival, a carnival, a show of shows. 

The American Left wishes that this populist America would go away, but they have no idea that they are as much a part of it as anyone.  They are just as captivated by fanciful, outrageous ideas as the people of Dubuque.  They are clowns, mountebanks, and fools.  Each day in Washington they do a St. Vitus' dance, a rollicking, possessed whirling dervish escapade; and we are supposed to take them seriously. 

Finally in Donald Trump Americans have a man with no such pretense.  He may be a vaudevillian, Borscht Belt tummler but he admits it.  He makes no bones about his lowbrow taste for arm candy, yachts, mansions, and glitz. What you see is what you get. 

His followers are not exercised over his exaggerations, distortions, and hyperbole.  That is the American way after all.  They simply pay attention to what he means, not what he says. 

This cultural icon, this Man of the People, this oversized panderer is about as American as you can get, and if he wins the election, hold on to your hats.  The rats will be scurrying off the ship in no time. 

Kamala Harris, Cleopatra Of The West - Queen, Seductress, And Goddess

 'I am a proud black woman', Kamala Harris shouted to the crowd, channeling JFK's famous 'Ich bin ein Berliner' to West Germans hoping for the fall of Communist East Germany and the reunification of the country. It was a rousing line spoken in solidarity and passion and in defiance of the totalitarian regime across the Berlin Wall, a defining moment for the young president and the first of many such endorsements of freedom to come. 

 

Kamala also knew of Ronald Reagan's 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall', but thought only of his dashing, virile predecessor.  She didn't so much admire Kennedy or wanted to be him, but to be in bed with him just as many beautiful women had been before her. 

The regent that Kamala truly admired was Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt and lover of emperors, the consort of Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Pompey, the triumvirate of Rome, all irresistibly drawn to her charms and irresistible allure.  

'I am Cleopatra', Kamala said as she looked in the mirror, seeing in her dark complexion, slightly Oriental eyes, and luxuriant hair the very image of the Egyptian queen. She tilted her head upwards, giving her face an imperial look, stern, resolute, but still enticing.  'I would look good in gold', she fancied, 'gold threads in my robe, a gold scepter in my hand, a gold tiara on my head'. 

She smiled to her reflected image, saluted, and walked out of her boudoir to the applause of her admirers, ready for the new day, the campaign, and anointment as the new President of the United States. 

'God forbid', said Elton Graham, closet but not disloyal, a former supporter who had seen enough but kept his own counsel, feeling like many in her inner circle that a Democratic victory was worth the woman's intellectual irrelevance.  Yet and still, every morning that he had to listen to her drumming about legacy, historical imperative, and moral right, he thought of jumping ship - leaping over the side of her royal barge. 

As much as Kamala fancied herself the beloved Queen of the Nile, it was Enobarbus' coda to his famous elegy to Cleopatra that fit:

Other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies; for vilest things
Become themselves in her, that the holy priests
Bless her when she is riggish.

'Ready, folks?' she asked, greeting her staff with the famous Harris smile, practiced and perfected as an eye-wrinkling, happy, joyous one, but Graham could only see the Joker, lips smeared into a red smile, covering up the demented soul within. 

 

'First stop Philly, City of Brotherly Love', she continued walking briskly past her staff, head held high, the presumptive President of the United States only a few short weeks from coronation and her rightful place.  She had already thought about how she would redecorate the Oval Office, something a bit more fitting to her person, something symbolic of the historic moment and of the universal resonance of a dark-skinned, female regent - the head of Nefertiti, perhaps, loaned by the Egyptian Museum of Berlin. 

As she thought of the great royal wife of the Pharoah Akhenaten, one of Ancient Egypt's greatest and most powerful rulers, she wondered what she was doing still married to this old Jew, hardly the consort appropriate to her station; but he would stay in the wings, and the people would think of her and her alone. 

It is easy to see how this black thing had gone to her head.  If she hadn't risen to political prominence in the Age of Identity, she would simply have been an ambitious prosecutor of indeterminate racial and ethnic origins.  Her Genghis Khan tenure in California would have done the trick as far as political possibilities were concerned - she had beheaded many a defense witness and attorney and left a bloody trail of lifeless bodies on her way to Washington - but now that it was only her race that mattered (ethnicity and that nagging bit of saris, pujas, and the Elephant god kept well out of view). She rode high and mighty thanks to race, and her selection of Vice President was thanks only to that. 

An aide had given her a copy of Black Athena, a book based on the assumption that Greek civilization was rooted in sub-Saharan African influences rather than Indo-European ones. Author Bernal argues that such influences were underestimated due to the racism prevalent among nineteenth-century Europeans.  Nonsense of course but still in currency and often cited in American progressives' demands for a return of the black man to his rightful place atop the human pyramid.  Not only was he the inheritor of natural wisdom derived from his tribal, forest roots, but was responsible for the efflorescence of Greco-Roman civilization. 

Kamala appreciated the thought of her assistant, but said, 'I am not that kind of black woman', the full-lipped, tightly-curled hair, wide-nosed African of the jungle and the ghetto.  'I am Ptolemaic'. 

Of course she knew which side of her toast was buttered and presented herself on the campaign trail as just that - a woman as black and African-looking as Michelle Obama, a woman of the inner city with as much street cred as an Anacostia ho' - and as much as the inner Kamala hated to do it, she pimp-walked her way from city to city. 

'You're going overboard on the black thing, Madam Vice President', said a trusted advisor, 'so better get onto the woman bandwagon for a change', and so it was that beginning in Sioux City, where there were few black people to speak of, she rode the female thing.  ' I am Woman', she began, fitting she thought of a woman embodied, symbolized, and incarnated in all women. 'A woman for America, a woman for the world, and a woman for all of history to come'. 

Her aide whistled gently and gave Kamala the 'tone it down' sign, but she was on her way now, on a roll and unstoppable.  Women were not only entitled to the Presidency, they belong there, and belonged in every position of power and authority everywhere. Men were necessary add-ons, supernumerary sperm providers, irrelevant in all but the rooster's contribution, and she would emblemize the female future. 

Here the aide whistled much more loudly gave the Vice President the 'cut' sign but she banged on with even more passion and invective. After twenty minutes, flushed and exhilarated, she stopped and waited for the applause which this time would be louder and more prolonged than ever. She had made her point. 

And so it went on from whistle stop to whistle stop, from one campaign rally to the next until election day drew near.  Victory was almost at hand.  She had no doubt that she would ascend to the highest office in the land to cheers and rousing acclaim.  She would rule kindly but firmly, and justice and compassion would be her bywords.  A woman for the times, and woman for all seasons. 

Time will tell.  The election is in two months and the race is tightening, but Kamala had a vision of herself sitting on the throne of Cleopatra, took it as an omen, and knew that her destiny was near. 

Saying Grace - 'What On Earth?', Said Kamala - There Is No Place In My America For Nonsense

As Kamala Harris walked past the open door of the staff cafeteria at the White House, she overheard some of her staff saying grace. 'Bless us O Lord, for these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty, through Christ our lord, Amen'. 

 

She walked over to the table and said, 'What is this all about?'. The staff, surprised and nonplussed, looked up at the Vice President, and Sean O'Malley, formerly of Hell's Kitchen, a brawling Irishman recruited for his creative accounting and whiz-kid ways with a spread sheet, replied, 'Grace, Madam Vice President'; but the Vice President was having none of it, and laid into him. 

'That', she said, 'is exactly the sentimental fol-de-rol my administration is dedicated to wiping out, and here you are....'.  Here she spluttered, looked for the right words and felt for the right rhythm. 'Here you are on a select team of privileged Americans (by coincidence not design they were all white) dedicated to progressivism, secularism....' Again she hesitated, always befuddled by the last term, something to do with church and state but she was never sure what.  

Her mother always performed puja in the morning to Ganesh, the Hindu elephant god, and prayed for rain or a good harvest, and when Kamala’s friends walked in on her mother one morning, Kamala, embarrassed as all get out, yelled at her mother to stop it, stop the chanting and weird fire shit, slammed the door and apologized to her classmates and threw a temper tantrum for the rest of the week.  

Kamala remembered the incident and wanted no trace of such pagan idolatry and retrograde appeals to some fictional fantasy god; so when she heard Sean O'Malley and his friends saying grace over mac n' cheese of all things - why would anyone thank God for that, assuming there was a God?

'Because we are thankful, Madam Vice President'

'Thankful for what exactly?', said Kamala looking down at the half-eaten mac 'n' cheese and weedy steam tray hamburgers. 

Sean, his Irish up, was about to say 'What do you think, you fucking fool', but kept his tongue, answered politely, but knew that his days were numbered.  She had grilled him about Father Murphy and his altar boy service, and this would be the last straw. 

 

Kamala went on as though hammering Sean O'Malley were good practice for the stump, and brought up Saul Alinsky, Samuel Gompers, and Noam Chomsky, three secular Jews who replaced the Holy Trinity in her mind conflating them in a mishmash of progressive jargon about the state, the people, and her own good self. 

Sean had heard this before from a woman he knew could be very venomous after he watched from the wings as she went after Brett Kavanagh like a bloodsucking succubus.  Recently she had been on a tear about those 'Christers in folding chairs', revival freaks and born-again idiots from crackerland, and once she got going there was no stopping her. 

'Let me not see this again', she said, waving her arm across the soggy buns, spilled ketchup, and crusted macaroni.  'Not the food mind you, but the whole grace thing.'

The table was set, a secular one with no hint of anything but progressive sentiments and launched into another tirade about goodness, the Democratic party, the future of Man, and the rise of women.  

Once she got her motor running, there was no stopping her; and now convinced of her electoral victory, she was even more prolix and indecipherable than before.  Her aides worked overtime to parse meaning let alone sense from her tirades, and finally learned how to trim and taper her speeches to conform to some kind logic. 

'Now, we as a pluralistic, inclusive, and diverse society - look at me, for instance, a proud black woman who stands on the threshold of greatness - have our limits.  White people may still be the demographic majority in the country but not the moral one.  White people....' And here the Presidential candidate went off on her branded tirade against country clubs, 'the refuge of the privileged'.  Lobster dinners, standing rib roasts, pearl necklaces and debutantes, whiteness personified, little white children playing croquet. 

When her father, a tenured professor at Stanford, heir to the endowed Galbraith Chair, author of The Wealth of Nations - How It Should Benefit The Poor, a redistributive treatise that got recognition from academics as far afield as Jacques Poirier, legatee of Lacan, deconstruction revivalist, and crypto Communist with a significant following in the Arab quarters of Marseilles and Lyon, applied for membership at Piping Rock, the West Coast affiliate of the Cold Spring Harbor original, the most white Anglo-Saxon club in America, he was summarily turned down. 

The black-balling document issued by the club and leaked to the liberal press said, 'While we appreciate the notable academic contribution that Professor Harris has made, we feel that he would offer no such social attribution to Piping Rock'. In other words No Colored Need Apply. Kamala never forgot that hateful rejection and it became the source of all her white animus. 

This was nothing however compared to Kamala's anti-religious screeds, fueled by the embarrassment of her friends witnessing the pagan idolatry of her mother, bowing and scraping before an elephant god.  When she heard Sean O'Malley, head bowed and eyes closed, saying grace, images of her mother's ridiculous display of totemism resurfaced, and Catholic or not, he was the incarnation of her mother and all her mother's idolatrous friends who gathered in the living room and chanted bhajans to the music of a harmonium. 

'Religion is the last refuge of fools', she said, adapting the patriotism meme to suit her purpose, and leaned in to a screed about the false gods of the Bible.  'Abraham and Isaac', she said, 'what was that all about? Ignorant obedience to a slave master, a tyrant, a bludgeoning anti-socialite...' and again her closest aides urged her to temper her speeches with a little more political savvy. 'There are a lot of Christers out there', he warned. 

 

But the Vice President was not to be deterred.  She had a message for America that had to be heard. 'God upsets the progressive applecart', she said, 'and leaves the poor, the disadvantaged, and the marginalized to scramble for the leavings.

'We are different.  We are proud progressives who understand that the future is in the hands of community and state, and under my administration, the state will be stronger than ever and the last vestiges of religious ignorance will be removed.'

The aide again approached her, thanked her for her honesty and call for an enlightened secularism, but warned even more urgently that all Southern states would be lost if she continued in this vein.  'Nonsense', replied the Vice President. 'I will be President of this great land of ours and they will learn their lesson'. 

When the conservative press got wind of all this - Washington being a porous, leaky place - they were delighted.  A self-destructive, egomaniacal offering from this harridan that would expose her for the empty headed,  empty suit that she was.  One did not touch religion in America no matter what the political ideology. 

Yet the woman kept hammering on urging an end to the patriarchal, demeaning, disruptive influence of religion.  'There will be no grace said in the Executive Dining Room at the White House', she said. 

So be it.  Two months to go before the election and anything can happen.  Progressives are tone deaf when it comes to religious sympathies, so it is likely that Kamala will keep banging on about the need to expunge its last traces from the body politic. 'At her peril', said her aide, but that did not deter her, and only inflamed her.  She was a dervish, a St. Vitus' dance one-woman show of heretical passion.  It was worth the price of admission whatever November 5th had to offer. 

 

An End To The Tedium Of Marriage - A Return To The Delights Of A Pasha's Harem

Sultan Ahmed of Izmir once had the most splendid harem in all of the Middle East, the envy of pashas, princes and emirs from the Bosporus to Jeddah. He lived in gold-bedecked, bejeweled palace high on a hill overlooking the Aegean.  He was attended by young boys, nubile girls, and the most beautiful concubines of the Empire. Massaged with oils of frankincense and myrrh, lying on pillows of silk and muslin, he was pleasured every night by Fatimah from Baghdad, Emriye from Amman, or Usha from Lahore. 

 

Ruling a great kingdom, feasting on roast pheasant, sweetbreads of boar, and the cutlets of Asian fowl; fed the sweetest dates from Tunisian oases, the most succulent figs from Cappadocia, and pomegranates from the Levant, and loved by the most beautiful women of the realm, he could not ask for anything more. He was a happy man. 

Harry Bindham looked up from The Splendors of Pashas, Sultans, And Emirs and was not happy with what he saw - the sound-dampening, coruscated separators of his cubicle, the fluorescent ceiling light stands over from division to division, department to department in an endless, uniform glare.  The hum of copy machines, coffee makers, air conditioning, and elevators sealed the floor in a uniformity of sound and absorbed every odd click, and gave all a supernal quiet. 

Gone were the perfumed scents of the harem of the Pasha of Antalya and the Princess Songul; gone were the lambent melodies of the lyres of court, and all that was left was Betty from Bayonne. 'Would you please look these over, Mr. Bindham?', she said, holding out three large spreadsheets accounting for the sales, inventory, gains and losses of offices in Kearny, Woodside, and Elizbeth. 

'I'm sure they're fine, Betty', he said, finding a place for them on his settee, one of Rhode Island cabinet maker Townsend's finest works. His highboys, chairs, settees, and end tables were the best of a generation - delicately hand-tooled, polished and carefully finished pieces.  

Harry left the office at five and drove the short distance home - past Montgomery Mall, the fast food places, Verizon, car rentals, and discount big boxes on the pike, into Brierly Village, his gated community of Georgian-style homes, far enough back from the strip to give an illusion of social position if not wealth.

His wife, Amanda, was busy in the kitchen - a more wifely occupation than she had ever imagined, and so did the scut work with an attitude - not quite resentment, but bordering on a suburban angst she had associated only with the Fifties, dead and gone in the ages of feminism. She saw herself as a dutiful,  obedient woman slavish to the Kinder, Kuche, Kirche of her mother's generation.

Amanda had been a K Street lawyer for the years before the birth of Robbie and Lisa, hadn't missed it in the first few years in the suburbs, but now was desperately anxious to trade diapers and bottles for accounts, billable hours, and the boardroom.  

Sex was desultory at best, and now that both Harry and Miranda were approaching sixty, it was limited to Saturday night deadened by two bottles of Chardonnay, a social sealant, an obligatory dance to confirm marriage but nothing more. 

And so it was that Harry Bindham, a man ordinarily of sexual rectitude and propriety became a regular customer at Mrs. Finchley's, a premier brothel serving the K Street and Capitol Hill crowd. 

It was not his first choice, so enticed was he by the beauties of the Levant, but he needed a respite from the tedium and deadening ordinariness of his marriage. He settled for Chantal, an octoroon from New Orleans with a touch of the East left in her ancestors' native Haiti, product of one of any number of slavers from an Arab mission which made the trip through the pirate-controlled waters of the eastern Caribbean on a monthly basis. 

 

Chantal had the cafe-au-lait complexion, dark hair, and almond eyes which could have come from anywhere east of Rhodes or Cnossos, a high-priced beauty, top-of-the-line consort but still with the innocence of a young girl.  She was not one of the pasha's concubines, especially those from Yerevan prized and never sold or bartered; but still a remarkable mixed blood beauty who was enough to satisfy his fancy. 

Chantal was a professional and teased out his most exotic fantasies.  She dressed in silken pantaloons, tied her hair with jasmine, bathed in rose water and hibiscus and disrobed with subtlety and grace. 

His wife never questioned his unaccountable absences.  She had herself become completely disenchanted and wholly dissatisfied with the life she had chosen, felt beyond despair, moping in a state of lethargy, waiting for a chance happening but retreating so far away from opportunity that it would never arise, 

There was Jonathan, their young estate lawyer, Reginald, their accountant, and Benedict the priest all of whom had made their sexual interest clear; but none fit the category of Prince Charming; for Amanda like her husband was smitten with what might have been, lost in former times, hers being the Medieval England of knights, sexual favors, maidenhood, fortune, and shining armor.  

So Henry came home to the smell of pot roast on the stove and the taste of his octoroon lover on his lips, the disconnect making the candlelit dinner all the more painful, sitting across the linen tableclothed, silvered table from his wife, both as silent as an old growth forest but seething with resentment, frustration, and some inchoate desire - inchoate and dissolved because both knew that this was the end of the line, too late for a new partner, too soon to die, too unsettled in all affairs to go quietly.  

Did it have to be this way? Wasn't a pasha's harem to best way out of sexual indignity? Or a Mormon's polygamy? Or a Frenchman's cinq-a-sept - she with Monsieur le Comte at Versailles and he with Madame de Merteuil in the 16th - returning to the Chateau de Longworth or an elegant Hotel de Ville in the 5th where wives were fixtures, part of a mutual agreement without entanglements?

Millions of men were punching the same clock, Harry thought as he boarded the N6 for town, the same ticket, filling the same time sheets - 6 1/2 hours on McDermott, 3 on Callahan, 12 with wives - his few hours with his octoroon left out but made up with a few uncounted on Harris.  Whatever he did, the collar of metro, boulot, dodo never loosened.  He would forever be headed in the same direction, picking up the same pen, and turning his wife over to the beat of a metronome. 

Nothing was left, and the obituaries were kindly without reference to his suicide or to the rather detailed note left for his wife, an indecipherable mess of references to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the palace of Versailles and a woman named Chantal de Miramon.  'Let it be', said the editor of the Washington Post.  

Dwarves 'n' Things - Kamala Harris' Bid To Be The Most Inclusive President Ever

'We are the party for all the people', said Kamala Harris, Democratic candidate for the presidency of the United States, smiling and looking down at Robert (Little Bob) Evans and then out at the large crowd gathered for her campaign speech.  'We take all comers, all those of alternate sex, lifestyle, disability and...' Here Kamala reached down to pat Little Bob on his back but managed only to tousle his hair...'stature'. 

 

Bob Evans was a canny one, a smart one, a savvy one who knew how to feather his nest in an age of inclusivity, and sensed that this was his time - not his community's time, for little people would have to fend for themselves, but his time and his alone.  He had waited years for this opportunity, but doors were shut at every turn. 

There was the film producer in Hollywood who told him two was enough, meaning the two dwarves who had made it big on the silver screen.  'The days of R2D2 are over, bud'. the producer said. 'It's all AI now, and my Apple can generate a hundred of you before lunch'. 

 

Or the Account Executive and Bailey & Peabody, Advertising, a firm known for its diversity and inclusivity.  Bob had heard that they were working on a spoof of the infamous Bud Light transgender misadventure and were looking for the 'alternately gifted'.  Again he was met at the door with a 'we already got one of those', and true enough on the sound stage behind the door was a dwarf Bob had met at Burning Man.  

His installation was a paean to little people, although because of its retro-expressionism, the figures were lost in some metaphorical garble; but most who watched this little person managing grappling hooks and block-and-tackles to hoist a cast iron Quasimodo into position thought it was part of his performance and applauded as the figurine swung back and forth in the hot desert sun until affixed at the top of a mess of cylinders and rod baskets. 

 

Little Bob waved to him, hoping to get a chance to chat, but the Account Executive slammed the door before he could get a response. 

Still, there was hope.  If Dirk Devin could get a job as an actor, albeit in some minor pitch for peanut butter or chewing gum, maybe there was room for him; but no dice  The dance cards of even the most woke and inclusive enterprises were filled. 

The fact was that small people were not top of the inclusivity agenda. Especially among liberal ranks every possible permutation of black people, gay men, and large women came before the 'height challenged', and whether public sector or private, inclusivity seemed to stop well above four feet. 

When a friend suggested that the new Democratic nominee for President of the United States was looking to fill her campaign staff with little person, he said he would call the Vice President's diversity recruiter, a former dancer at 'Men And Boys' a gay club in New Orleans that featured farm scenes, drew crowds for the choreography and libretto, and was particularly well known for its off-color acrobatic dances 

 

The contact was made, and thanks to the diversity recruiter who was anxious to fulfill the Vice President's promise of maximum inclusivity and because there had been no suitable candidates despite a tiring search, an interview was arranged 

The diversity recruiter had gone down many blind alleys.  Circus dwarves and midgets were being phased out thanks to a Barnum & Bailey initiative to review their appropriateness given changing community mores, and the only ones left were sixtyish men who had spent their whole lives riding the backs of trained bears and getting tossed through hoops by musclebound strongmen. They all snorted coke and were wired to the gills.  'An occupational hazard', one remarked. 

'Think about it'  The life of a circus dwarf was not exactly an easy one, so the snorting and freebasing was overlooked by management especially because a coked up dwarf performed particularly well. 

The diversity recruiter thought he might have found a reasonable candidate in Hiram Blunt who was coming off the hard stuff and made more sense than most of his colleagues, but still could not string more than a couple of sentences together.  

'A perfect match', said one conservative snoop who had gotten wind of the affair.  The Presidential candidate never made much sense herself, parsing, exegeting, twisting and turning the English language into a gobbledygook mishmash; so while it might make good vaudeville, it would make for seriously bad politicking. 

When Blunt was rejected, he sued the Harris campaign for discrimination, and despite many attempts at settlement and under-the-table payoffs, the dwarf stuck around until the price was right, pocketed his benefits and went back to the circus tent, coke, and his affair with Belinda Mayo, a small prostitute that doubled as a frilly ballerina in one of the producer's unlikely fantasies. 

So the recruiter, once burned, was twice shy and was particularly careful in his search for the right candidate.  When Little Bob turned up at campaign headquarters looking like Little Lord Fauntleroy in his cute blue serge suit, polished cordovans, and snappy tie, the recruiter was delighted. 

The interview went extremely well.  Bob was particularly well-spoken, temperate in his responses, cordial and respectful. 'This is the dwarf I have been looking for' and, pending an interview with the head honcho, he would recommend hiring. 

After the interview with the Presidential candidate, Kamala remarked to the recruiter, 'I just love the little guy', and soon thereafter he was at the lectern.  Asked to say a few words he mounted the lectern up a step ladder brought by an attendant, adjusted the microphone, gestured to the electrician to lower the lights, and began to read his prepared speech. 

He had learned his political lesson, and prompted by the lady's aides to say little with as much emotion, passion, and conviction as possible, he began with the usual Ladies and Gentlemen, but then wandered in the weeds of dwarf culture with all the memes, homonyms, viral asides, midget lingo, and obscure references common in circuses and old time vaudeville.  It was as good as it gets.  

Kamala had familiarized herself with deep ghetto pimp talk and could pass as a ho' for a few minutes; and could do a few bitchy gay comebacks she had learned in the Castro, but this....this incredibly poetic, eloquent dwarf talk did the trick.  She was now fully, absolutely inclusive.  

'I am proud to stand here before you', Kamala went on, 'here in this great land plenty, and celebrate all its people'.  Here according to the teleprompter, she was to point to her little friend; but he had moved, and given his diminutive size, no one had noticed that he was now on the other side of the lectern, so she pointed to air, smiled, and went on.  'Where is that bloody fool?' she whispered to an aide but there he was on the other, right side in a trick he had learned early on. 

Anyway, she had squared the circle, completed her mission, filled her coterie with just the right balance of black and white, fat and thin, gay and straight, and tall and short. What she didn't understand was human nature and our hardwired competitive streak, and she never anticipated the bitching and moaning among the specialty groups she had assembled. 'Boys will be boys' was her smiling response, but it wasn't until the blacks had ousted the gays and fat girls took center stage after clawing and biting their way that peace reigned. 

'Diversity is some hard time', Kamala said.  

'I Am A Black Woman And Deserve To Be President' - The Black Hole Of Kamala Harris

Kamala Harris has not had a press conference or sit-down interview since her candidacy for President.  She and her staff have felt no need.  'This is America's time', she said, 'a unique opportunity, a chance of a lifetime'.

 

She left the rest of the homily unsaid, for her supporters and enthusiasts knew exactly what she was talking about.  A woman, just think of it, in the Oval Office where only men have sat; and now nail polish, pearls, perfume, Armani, and Manolo Blahnik.  And a black woman to boot, and if you count her Indian mother, the trifecta everyone has been waiting for.

This was her moment, the moment, the turning point of the Republic.  In a few short months, there she would be - a person of breasts, periods, and menopause, standing in front of the nation and the world as President. 

In her private moments she looked in the mirror and said the words over and over again - 'Madam President...President Harris...President Kamala Harris.  It was actually happening.  Now that she had gotten rid of Old Joe, the path was clear.  Soon she would be at the apogee of her career, the pinnacle, the summit, all she ever worked for. 

As she looked in the mirror and saw this beautiful black woman looking back at her, she said, 'You're really something!' and began to dream of the handsome courtiers and lovely ladies in waiting that would fill the White House.  Pageantry, the New World Queen of the Nile, Cleopatra, Nefertiti, the treasures of the East in the West, her west. 

She felt powerful, whole, fulfilled, and proud as she stepped away from the mirror and walked out of her boudoir to the cheers and smiles of her inner circle all hoping for her blessing, her reward, her respect and her love. 'Madam Vice President' would soon be history and she would emerge from her chrysalis, the most beautiful butterfly of them all. 

She laughed when she heard the conservative press call for her to address the public, present her policy agenda, discuss the issues.  'These fools', she whispered to herself, who knew nothing of greatness and ascribed it only to temporal things. What were the debt, the deficit, and interest rates compared to womanhood, the ascent of woman, the era of women, and the real future of the planet?

Yes, she was an environmentalist, but talks of the snail darter, the spotted owl, and the warming climate were so many oh, hum issues compared to what she was about to become. An apocryphal, existential moment that would transcend any melting ice cap. 

What about the black man, her closest aides reminded her?  This is his moment too; but Kamala was as sick and tired of this black thing, this this, black that thing as everyone else.  We have beaten that horse to death, she mused, and while of course she retained sympathy for 'her people', it was the greater glory, the universal glory of women that was within her reach.  Compared to that everything else paled by comparison. 

'Remember Hilary', said one political strategist, the presidential candidate who also felt entitled to rule, assumed victory and watched it slip out of her hands.  Kamala must not take the historical moment for granted.  Too many people want something more than a...here he stopped himself before using a callously misogynist term, common in the locker room but not in the Vice President's quarters.  Let me rephrase that he thought to himself. 

 

No matter what he said or might say about structural reform, immigration policy, energy independence, or social justice, Madam was not listening.  Did any of the great female monarchs worry about details? Cleopatra ruled because she was sumptuous, alluring, indescribably beautiful and the match for any man.  The world revolved around her.  She was the epicenter of culture, civilization, and power.  A woman!

Now, the reality of Kamala Harris is quite different.  There are many who see nothing but a nasty, clawing, ambitious harridan with not one honorable principle in her handbag, not one original thought in her head, and no plan beyond taking her seat in the Oval Office. 

Her associates knew exactly this.  The image of her eviscerating attacks of a good man, an honorable man, a principled man sitting before her in hoped for confirmation to the Supreme Court was hard to shake.  Her unbridled ambition, her political megalomania, her concern for nothing but absolute power was well known in Washington, so every supporter was determined to keep her away from the intense scrutiny that an impromptu press conference or one-on-one interview would be damaging.  There were enough voters who felt that being a black woman was enough, so leave it at that. 

'The people don't have to know', she yelled at an aide who had the temerity to suggest some kind of substantive approach.  'They already know enough', and with a flip of her hair and imitating the famous sculpture of Nefertiti, head held imperiously high, chin thrust forward, inward calm radiating through her perfect olive skin, she walked out of the room. 

The code words, the memes, the allusions were enough. 'Racial justice...equality...civil rights...compassion...concern...the time is right....the time is now...the American people' meant more than a detailed plan for social and economic reform.  The job was to convince voters that she had the right mettle, the right character and commitment to change American, and the rest would be worked out later. 

'A black hole', commented one journalist not as enamored with the lady as most. 'An empty suit and an empty head, a vortex, a sucking spatial thing with absolutely nothing in hand'.  No one in the progressive cabals or political harems of the Vice President had even heard these comments let alone reacted to them; but the journalist's words went viral, and soon the meme on the street was Black Hole Kamala, a double-entendre of genius and insight that made the rounds and was as clicked on as much as the Hawk Tuah girl's 'spit on that thang' or the English twin's 'Bet he can hear me!' 

By the time it reached the Vice President's quarters it was too late, but her press agent angrily denounced it as racist and misogynistic; but those cackling to themselves knew that they could easily and plausibly hide behind the cosmological meaning, not the off-color subtext. 

Maybe it was time to talk interest rates, slow the viral spread of the insult, turn the public's attention back to the greatness of woman, the destiny of Kamala, and the future of the country. 

No such luck.  The viral stream opened the Internet to the most hilarious take-offs on the Vice President, and all the puncturing AI transformations of the woman hit the big time.  Her staff was worried. 

As of this writing with three months left before the election, she, despite the wild acclaim of her supporters was tottering a bit, and God knows what will happen. 

Not With A Bang But A Whimper - The Sky Is Falling, Climate Change, And Other Nonsensical Existential Worries

T.S. Eliot wrote these final verses in his poem The Hollow Men

    This is the way the world ends
    This is the way the world ends
    Not with a bang but a whimper.

The exaggerated concerns of self-absorbed men will turn out to be nothing, hollow, shallow misinterpretations of the impossibility of predicting, controlling, and managing the future

    Between the desire
    And the spasm
    Between the potency
    And the existence
    Between the essence
    And the descent
    Falls the Shadow

Lessons not learned by the generation of existential worriers. 

Perhaps it is Biblical injunction, sin, forgiveness, and redemption which are at the heart of such concern.  If there is sin to be forgiven, evil to be countered, a generation of vipers to be reformed, then worries about climate change, income inequality, racial injustice, gender bias and a whole host of other obstacles in the way of salvation come naturally.  

 

Hindus and Buddhists have no such concerns.  The world was set in motion by Brahma and follows on in cycles of birth and rebirth without judgment.  Muslims prostrate themselves before Allah - the creator of all, the prime mover.  Everything may happen for a purpose, but his purpose. Existentialists and nihilists conclude no differently.  

As the Shakespeare critic Jan Kott put it, history is the record of The Grand Machine, a perpetual motion engine whose only purpose is to power human activities. Innate, hardwired human nature provides the context, the algorithms, the stuff that turns energy into action.  

If one were to lay down all of Shakespeare's Histories in chronological order, the dramas played out would be exactly the same - the same palace intrigues, interfamilial internecine warfare, the same greed, jealousy, envy, and ambitions - and only the particular way individuals behaved would change.  Richard III and Goneril wanted exactly the same thing but went about fulfilling their ambitions in very different, personal ways. 

Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil took this scenario a step further,  There were some men who, determined to act in a determinedly territorial, self-interested way, would do so with superhuman intent and ability.  They would be the Genghis Khans of the world who make it in their own image - no better or worse than anything that came before, but a pure expression of individual will. 

Which brings us to the current Chicken Little generation, worried about everything: 

One morning, as Henny-Penny was plucking worms in the henyard, an acorn dropped from a tree right onto her head! She had no idea what had hit her, however, and so she started shouting: 

“The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”

She ran around in circles for a while, calmed herself, and then got right to waddling—she had to alert the king!

So what happened to the philosophical circumspection of Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Nietzsche, and Epictetus? What squeezed every bit of historical perspective, every ounce of objective reserve, and turned an entire nation into a republic of worrywarts?

'Climate change is an existential threat', the worriers claim, the end of life as we know it, a devastating event as cataclysmic as the extinction of the dinosaurs. 

There is nothing in Darwinian theory to suggest that human beings are the final product of evolution, the end game, the be all and end all of existence but just another step along the way; and yet there are still those who want to hang on tooth and nail to our minor evolutionary episode. 

Understandable of course. No one wants to give up the here and now and the assumption that the best of all possible worlds is coming; but some attention ought to be paid to Leibniz and to Voltaire's satirical Candide. There is no such thing as better, said both, only the coursing of a random sequence of events 

Yet the climate worriers, the social reformers, the justice missionaries, and the street corner prophets of doom persist.  Chicken Littledom is an industry, a well-financed, politically-supported, neo-Biblical movement with no capital - a Ponzi scheme of impressive proportions.  Donations pour in, are recycled through agencies, institutions, churches, neighborhood groups, and end up absolutely nowhere in the scheme of things.  The earth may be warming or not, thanks to human activity or not, but there will be only the normal, evolutionary process of perpetual change.  

Bob Muzelle was a Yale graduate, University of Chicago PhD, and a lifelong activist for social change. A Freedom Rider, a nuclear non-proliferation activist, an environmentalist, and an advocate for racial, gender, and ethnic justice he worked eighteen hour days until he dropped dead in his traces, hands still on the keyboard, shoes off, and a half-written article entitled 'Melting Icecaps - The Last Warning' on the screen. 

'A fitting end', said the Yale Alumni magazine in an obituary written by a colleague equally engaged in social reform.  'A man for all seasons, a mensch, a social hero', and yet for all his Sturm und Drang, few people outside the concerned inner circle of progressive claimants paid much attention.  The hammering, badgering, and hectoring of the progressive Left was dismissed and forgotten.  More and more people through what sociologists called 'philosophical osmosis' became Vaishnavas and Shaivites - instinctive, absorptive believers in the grand scale, the endless cycle - or Nietzschean nihilists without ever thinking about it.  

 

A sucker might be born every minute, and you might be able to fool most of the people most of the time, but there is some innate sense of equilibrium in all of us.   Maybe, said cynics, it might have been because of the increased sightings of flying saucers and UFOs over the American West that did it.  If we are not alone, then maybe we're not such hot shit, the only living things in the universe, and something will either visit us or follow us. 

Bob's Yale class set up the Bob Muzelle Fund For Social Progress but got no takers - a few desultory contributions nada mas, and the portal was closed after six months.  Just like environmentally-attuned investment funds all of which went bankrupt, this pie in the sky, fairy tail donation opportunity was irrelevant undesirable from the beginning, 

The funeral, the wake, and the burial were lightly attended.  Bob's brand of exercised righteousness was considered a historic anomaly.  Nobody rode Freedom Buses or chanted 'Freedom Now!' any more.  The world of virtual reality and AI made all of that irrelevant and supernumerary. There were a few alte kockers who braved the rain and threw some flowers on the casket; but they were far too old to even remember whose body was in the casket, but the gesture was appreciated. 

In Search Of Marilyn Monroe - The Cancelling Of Universal Beauty And The Dull Downside Of Diversity

It is no surprise that of all the Hollywood beauties who have appeared on screen since the beginning of film, Marilyn Monroe has had the most interest.   She was not classically beautiful, but had an unmatchable sensuousness and sensuality.  She had allure, an immediate, unmistakable and undeniable sexual appeal.  She embodied sexual desire.  Men were drawn to her not to admire her beauty but to make love to her.

 

It has been over sixty years since Marilyn died, but no woman since has matched her in universal appeal.  There have been many Hollywood stars who have the same symmetrical features, the same equipoise, and the same perfection of beauty that has been the standard of female beauty for millennia, but all of them lack Marilyn's ineffable sexuality. 

Statues, masks, frescoes of Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Persians have portrayed the same perfectly proportioned face.  Whether such perfectly formed features and their harmonious composition signified health, wealth, and well-being; or whether there was some innate human appreciation for and valuation of harmony, the historical record is clear. Beauty is not in the eye of the beholder.  It is something innate, universally appreciated, and valued. 

Marilyn Monroe, the woman men have wanted and will want for decades to come is because of her sensuality, an internal, ineffable sexual difference that cannot be measures, quantified, or summarized 

Vladimir Nabokov in his book Lolita came the closest to describing this sexual ineffability.  The young pre-pubescent Lolita was in his words a 'nymphet', a girl who even before sexual maturity knew what sex and sexuality were.  Lolita's was an innate sense of allure and satisfaction that pre-dated mating or reproduction.  She was compelled by some complex of genetic wiring, high-octane XX chromosomal weight, some unexplained, heretofore unchronicled sexual demand that made her desirable to every mature male in her presence. 

 

Marilyn Monroe had the same innate, inexplicable desirability - a sexual allure that went beyond classical beauty and historical appeal. No man has been able to explain why she is so desirable. Disaggregation would be the wrong approach, the wrong alley, the wrong algorithm. No parsing of features, symmetry, or physical arrangement could ever explain her allure. 

And so it was that she became an icon of American culture, a symbol of pure, unadulterated sexuality.  There might have been some subtle cultural tint to her appeal - she had a certain cornflower, blonde, healthy good looks, the all-American girl - but that pure desirability went far beyond calico and gingham, braids, and milkmaid looks.  Men wanted her, wanted to sleep with her. Nothing less would satisfy. 

Lauren Getty was not a particularly attractive girl, but she had signs of maturing into a woman of classical beauty.  Her bone structure, facial symmetry, and the classical features that have been admired ever since antiquity would single her out as one in a million.  Her genes were configured with bits of her ancestors who were not themselves particularly handsome or beautiful, but who had physical traits which when combined with others, would contribute to Lauren’s golden mean.  The almond shape of her eyes, her aquiline nose, her fine mouth would all come from relatives long forgotten, but it was some other Mendelian miracle that sorted them out in perfect proportion. 

Yet, despite her classical looks, Lauren was dissatisfied.  Her beauty was so perfect that it was intimidating and unapproachable.  As much as men might admire her, they did not desire her.  Something was missing.  For all her perfect symmetry, she attracted men far less often than classmates who looked ordinary. She had been gifted beauty but not allure; and allure is what every man wants.

Lauren did her best to disguise her classic beauty to become more like Marilyn Monroe – she accentuated her lips, and eyes, adopted a pouty, come-hither pose, dressed provocatively, and made not-so-subtle passes at boys.  Of course none of this worked, for not only was Marilyn Monroe physically alluring, there was something about her personality which fit her body.  It was an indefinable, impossibly subtle, and completely irresistible quality of femaleness.  Men do not want to admire women.  They want them as sexual partners; and men for generations have wanted nothing more than to go to bed with Marilyn Monroe - not Ava Gardner, Hedy Lamar, or Vivien Leigh.

Eventually, she came to her senses, realized her good fortune, and had a very successful career as a fashion model, wearing the best designer clothes on the most prestigious runways of Milan, Paris, and New York.  Since beauty is indeed destiny it was no surprise that after her career she married a scion of Wall Street, lived in a Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking the Park, wintered in St. Bart’s, and skied at Gstaad. 

She was never remembered - really remembered.  Of course men and women in her circle admired her, found her stunningly classical looks remarkable, but they were everywhere - on the covers of Vogue, in the paintings of Leonardo, Botticelli, and Caravaggio - admirably beautiful women.  But when men dream at night, they dream of Marilyn Monroe. 

Ours is a diverse, inclusive culture - there can be no such thing as Marilyn Monroe and good riddance to this fancy of white male hegemony say progressive cultural reformers.  Let's celebrate the beauty of black women. 

However, as much media attention is paid to Serena Williams in frilly things, Armani things; no matter how many staged provocative shots are photographed; and no matter how many come-hither poses are captured, she is still so far from the accepted classical norm, that her image will simply not go viral.  If any black woman surfaces, it will be Meta Golding or Haile Berry, mixed-race black women with classically beautiful features. 

Asian women models and Bollywood stars are remarkably Caucasian in looks and styles.  Some say it is the distorting power of Hollywood that has squeezed race and ethnicity dry, homogenized women beyond recognition.  Others more rightly say it is innate, hardwired preference for a historical,  standard of beauty. 

In our multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-racial society, homogenization will inevitably occur, and all will hew to the middle - and that middle will always end up resembling Nefertiti, Dido, Venus, and Hedy Lamar. 

Diversity aside, there can be no accounting for the special, unique, irresistible sexual quality of Marilyn Monroe.  She is above and beyond, a universal icon, a fundamental, primitive, desirable woman.  There may be others in some dim, distant future, but for the time being essential, seductive, feminine allure has been demonized and derogated.  Yet Marilyn Monroe refuses to rest in peace.  Not a night goes by without some man dreaming of her. 

Orwellian Gulags In An Inclusive Culture -Teaching Children To Ignore What Is For What Should Be

Annette Bingham was a big girl, already into the plus sizes at Marshalls'. There was no end to her appetite, no end to her reach into the pantry for gobs of peanut butter, no limit to the shmears of mayo on her midnight ham sandwiches, no less than three-scoop peanut brittle ice cream, and banana splits with extra whipped cream. 

Annette was a genetic anomaly - a fat girl in family of neurasthenics, who never once walked when she could ride, never refused an extra helping, and tucked into English breakfasts of eggs, sausage, bacon, and mash; tea with scones and clotted cream; lunches of triple-pate and limburger sandwiches; and midafternoon cupcakes and elephant ears.

By the time she was ten, she had rolls of fat where her waist should have been, two double chins, thick ham hock thighs, a rear shelf like a Nigerian, and disappearing eyes in a full, pneumatic face. 

Now, ordinarily she would have been the butt of ridicule at school.  When she waddled up the stairs, squeezed into classroom chairs, and took up two places on the bleachers, she would have been shunned and teased until, under the barrage of taunts and ridicule, she lost weight. 

Bullying has always had a reconstructive purpose.  Adolescents with no sense of the civil decency hammered into adults, are little Tonton Macoute enforcers of the established norm. No diversion, no aberration, no emergence of alternate behavior is allowed.  The outrageous difference of girls like Annette would have been  punished without mercy. 

'Let's welcome beautiful Annette', said Mrs. Thomas, the third grade teacher of her new school in Shaker Heights; and Annette made her way up the stairs to the auditorium stage, grappling her way, holding tightly to the railings, having trouble making it up because she could not see past her stomach to the narrowly-pitched stair, until finally taking her place beside Mrs. Thomas. 

'Welcome, Annette', said the 100 third-graders.  'We love you', and with that they stood up and clapped, smiled and blew kisses her way. 

Now this would never have happened a generation or two ago.  Teachers, parents, and most of all the cawing, hectoring, flesh-eating students would never have even come close to such inclusive welcoming.  There would have been snickers, elbowing, chuckles, and outright laughter from the back of the room.  

Fatness disturbed the settled norm, upset the pretty pinafores, cute pumps and patent leathers, braids and flips. A fat girl could not have been ignored.  Her presence was upsetting, noxious, and disruptive. 

The bullying would have continued until the fat girl lost weight or dropped out of school, a good thing since svelte is healthy, beauty has a high commercial, social, and sexual value, and adherence to a common norm keeps society functioning without dissension. 

'Annette is a lovely dancer, has a sweet voice, and a preciously generous nature', Mrs. Thomas told the children who kept their smiles in place as they fidgeted in their seats.  Those who knew Annette as the ungainly, uncoordinated, tone deaf girl from Akron, tried to keep their counsel - anything less than universal acceptance of Annette as she was would be punished severely. 

So the Freer Allen Elementary School received kudos and praise from the School Board, Administrators, and federal watchdogs.  It was a model of the new educational algorithm of Inclusivity, Respect, Consideration, and Love.  Not one incidence of bullying, taunting, playground incivility, or misguided remarks had been reported. 

Of course once school let out for the day, the entire, sewn-shut, Orwellian, stifling, gulag was dismissed as well.  Students had their licks, and went after Annette and any other misfits foisted on them as beautiful, normal, exceptional, and desirable.

 

Like everywhere else, out of repression comes insurrection.  A lid on natural born little Darwinian trooper sentiments can only remain tightly shut up for so long, and then whoosh bang out comes all the stifled things artificially bottled, corked, and denied. 

Certain words were forbidden, suggestive references scotched, characteristics ignored.  Students were badgered and intimidated until Annette's fat rolls disappeared - disappeared in theory, in a corrective, idealistic fantasy - as she was turned into a svelte, pretty, desirable girl in imagination only; but of course none of this worked.  Fat was the operative term out of class, gone were the euphemisms, happy-speak word cloaks, and idealistic metaphors.  No matter how teachers and sensitized parents tried, children would not be robotized. 

And so it was for every other undesirable, out-of-norm character to be so singled out in a primitive ritual of elimination and removal.  Children were taught not to be themselves, sort out ability, beauty, status, and preference on their own; but to be measured, tailored, and fit within prescribed silhouettes. 

Annette, for all her gourmandize was not a stupid girl and got the picture despite every attempt to keep it under wraps by the inclusivity- trained teachers.  As she headed for adolescence, the pariah of the class, tormented by the girls, shunned and laughed at by the boys, there was no way that she, coddled and pampered by solicitous, over-sensitive parents, would remain a fat girl,  roly-poly caricature, a social discard; and so she went to work, shedding pounds, and shaping up.  

Beneath all that flubber was a very attractive girl, and once you could see beyond the dewlaps, paunches, and billowing rolls, you had to be impressed.  Before long she was out of the plus sizes and downsized to normal, and finally to the svelte and sexy. 

Will power.  It was a matter of calories in, calories out after all, and her self-imposed regimen of diet and exercise trimmed every last bit of blubbery waste from her naturally trim body. 

It would be too much of a stretch to say she was a Cinderella, turned into a princess overnight, the belle of the ball, the queen of all; but she came close. 

 

The teachers at Freer Allen Elementary assumed that somehow their potion of kindness, inclusiveness, and collaborative learning had done the trick.  Through consideration, compassion, and kindly tutoring, Annette emerged from her fat, engorged pupa to a lovely butterfly. 

Of course they missed the point entirely. It was through good old evolutionary pressure - the dunning, marginalization, and exclusion that has helped improve the human race over the millennia - and more that did the trick. Bullying, Darwin knew, works wonders.