The Best And The Brightest? - Kamala Harris And The Rise Of A Vaporous Woman

Modern American politics has never had a Churchill let alone a Sun King or Caesar Augustus.  We are a democracy after all and a distinctly populist one, a country of the masses, with a reluctant acceptance of those who rule, and an overweening, absolute belief in democracy.

 

There is no room for doubt on this last issue.  The Left insists that 'Democracy Matters' and this suggestive aphorism is on lawn signs everywhere in liberal cantonments throughout the United States.  Of course not every or all versions of democracy matter, just the one envisioned by the Left - one without the likes of Donald Trump, his insurrectionist claques, backwoods crackers, bayou trawlers, and gun totin' rednecks from the hills.  The Left's democracy is a tailored one, an exclusive, protected one; and the Right's is one of laissez-faire, OK Corral, shoot 'em up macho individualism. 

There is no such thing as democracy per se, just visions of what it should be.  All parties claim they believe absolutely in the principle of it, but beg to differ on interpretation and application - and there's the rub.  

Neither conservatives nor progressives have any recollection of the Enlightenment principles which were the foundation on which the American republic was built - a nation of laws, respect for the rights of man, a country of optimism, opportunity, and unlimited headway. 

The group of men who were the Founding Fathers of the nation - Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, and Adams - wrote a Constitution which embraced and incorporated these principles, and counted on wise and patriotic citizens to lead the country to prosperity.  A 'genius cluster' as it has been called, a once in a millennia, serendipitous coming together of brilliant minds.  Jefferson alone, philosopher, linguist, inventor, diplomat, and man of insight and humanity would have been enough to shepherd the young nation out of colonial rule, but five or ten political geniuses?

'The best and the brightest', a term coined by David Halberstam writing of the Kennedy generation of bright young patrician men, reprised the sense of genius cluster.  Kennedy deliberately and carefully selected those of superior intelligence, rectitude, patriotism, and sense of history to serve in his White House, a leadership group of unparalleled quality. 

This Roman principles of honor, duty, courage, respect, and compassion - etched on the diptychs of Cato the Elder, the educator of those young men who were to lead Rome and expand the glories of Empire have been at the foundation of eastern and western civilizations ever since - until now.

There can be no country more dismissive of these ideals than modern day America, a country of incidental intelligence, corrupted intellect, and the lowest common denominator of leadership.  It is a country mired in insignificance - parsing sexuality, banging away on the black man's rightful place on top of the human pyramid after decades of patchy, incomplete, and foundering attempts to put him there.  It is one which prizes racial, sexual, and ethnic identity over talent, intelligence, and brilliance.  

America has become a circus side show with two-headed babies, bearded women, dwarves, and zombies; and the irony of it all is its currency.  This is what democracy is all about - a program of inclusion of the weirdest and the most debilitatingly insignificant to make a social stew. 

It is no surprise that Kamala Harris has been chosen to lead the country into the next generation of progressivism.  This insignificant, vaporous woman without a motherboard and the circuitry to make any sense is primed to be the next President of the United States. 

'I am a proud black woman', she repeats this, her campaign mantra  again and again as if it made any difference whatsoever to the republic or to any of its citizens.  Blackness, femaleness, diversity...as vaporous as the woman herself; and this is to be the 'leader of the free world', the one to take on Putin, Xi, the Ayatollah, Kim, the Houthis, Hezbollah, Iran and every last tinpot dictator who wants to do America in and take the leavings?

 

None of this resonates with Harris. The irony and the gross miscasting of the electoral drama is lost on this clueless, devoid woman.  'I am a black woman' is enough for the people as is channeling Rosa Parks, the black civil rights activist primed and trained to sit in the front of the bus and become a cause celebre of the movement, but lionized for her individual courage and racial persistence.  

The country Harris would like to rule has been thrown to the wolves by the likes of her and her admirers - a nation of identity can only be one of sectarian infighting.  The Biden White House, looking so much like the America he imagines - black, white, gay, transgender, day laborers, pimps, ho's and every other bit of the ragtag collection that passes for citizenry - is a good example of what's coming if that woman is elected, a nation of nothing but scat. 

Alexander Hamilton had it right in one - the masses, so championed by Jefferson, needed a buffer, a redoubt of aristocratic decency and rectitude, a firewall against the incendiary and ignorant views of the rabble.  He was a good historian and Shakespearean.  The Bard never flinched from his disdain for 'the people' of Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and Henry VI among others, and Hamilton had learned this lesson well.  He was not for instituting an American monarchy but for resolutely encouraging aristocracy. The greatness of European, Persian, Japanese, Russian, and Chinese civilizations would not exist if it weren't for kings, courtiers, shahs, shoguns, and emperors. 

 

The American Left has dismissed the notion of 'greatness' and marginalized the contributions of civilizations past.  Privileged, elitist rule has no place in the world regardless of its accomplishments.  The America of today and the one envisioned by progressives will be democratic to the core, populist, egalitarian, harmonious, and yet diverse - the kind of nation that Hamilton knew would never survive, would collapse upon itself, and be over and done with, a divided, antagonistic kennel of mongrels all fighting for scraps of meat. 

So Kamala Harris is the right person to lead the charge, but exactly the wrong one to lead the country.  Her black womanhood will only be a footnote to history, a funny commentary on the politics of the early 21st century, nothing more.  The Presidency of Donald Trump will be no bed of roses, but at least he will scour the country clean of the infectious, viral notions spread epidemically by the progressive Left; and then, and only then, might there be some space for a Churchill - doubtful, but possible. 

Redecorating The Oval Office - A Woman's Place Is In The Home And Kamala's In The White House

'I must do something about those ghastly drapes', Kamala said to herself as she left the Oval Office after a meeting with the President.  'Both he and they will soon be history', not a very kind remark but an accurate one.  The old man, conveniently shoved under the bus to give her leeway and running room to the Presidency, would soon be gone; and as soon as she was Chief Executive, she would indeed redecorate the White House.  

 

She had already canvassed the Oval Office, the West and East Wings, the halls and corridors between them, the ball room, the Executive Dining Room, all down to the smallest, most out-of-the-way alcove tucked away behind the main allée with all those unnecessary martial flags, the allée down which she would soon be walking to Hail to the Chief, taking her place at the podium and addressing the nation...the nation! Imagine that, she smiled, me, a black woman....

Here she stopped herself.  It was one thing to go black before her public, another thing to signify, identify, be black, something she had never considered in her whole life until she had been bitten by the political bug and in the right place at the right time. No, she thought, I am as white as the driven snow, or at least in my heart and soul since I can't get rid of this damned tint that makes me look like a Navajo. 

In any case as she looked around the Oval Office, she knew exactly how she would redecorate it with a little help from Frannie Leggett, the gay boy on her staff who was so good with antiques and Persian carpets.  This has to go, she thought, staring at the horrendous gift from some Turkish dignitary.  God! Turkish people had such seriously bad taste, all those nasty ceramics and kitschy vases more suited to a pasha's harem so overwrought and garish were they. 

Where did the Turks get such abysmal taste? From the Iranians she suspected. She remembered being dragged as a child to the house of Mrs. Amanpour, the old Persian friend of her mother's who lived in Little Teheran - shag carpets, thick embroidered drapes, clumsy little knickknacks on all the shelves, a nightmare especially for a sensitive little girl. 

Then there were the old chestnuts - photos and paintings of King, Abernathy, Rosa Parks, and Louis Armstrong, all of which belonged in the African American Museum on the Mall, or better in the storage room.  She would get rid of this morose crowd on her first day.  Her presidency was going to have none of that old school, overhyped old dead men trotted out whenever Joe wanted some cover for his Delaware whiteness; but not so for her, a modern, upbeat racially stupendous woman. 

'Madame Vice President', her senior aide said, looking at his watch and looking harried.  Kamala kept dreaming of her white house, all done in pastels and Italian sconces with 'ghetto trim', some retro, iconic Fifties tchotchkes from South Central, cool and very impressive.  She no longer responded to 'Vice President' so close was she to victory and the prize; but she had to say something to this niggling man, follow the governance schedule which still held although it was campaign time.  

In fact these daily war room briefings were just impossibly boring, unnecessary leftovers uneaten by Old Joe.  She would get rid of them and replace them with something else, of what exactly she was unsure,  but certainly not venues for these windy generals which by the way could use a re-do as well, all those pretentious portraits of Napoleon, Sherman, and Clausewitz.  At least put Nat Turner up there. 

She had a look at the day's schedule handed to her by her aide, shook her head, and said, 'Cancel all of them.  I've bigger fish to fry', which meant a campaign speech to the steelworkers of Pittsburgh, a distasteful job but one she had to do given the importance of Pennsylvania as a swing state. 

She had done this once before, stood up before a crowd of hard hat-wearing, sweaty, beer-bellies who only knew union rules, union goons, and union dues.  So much for her brand of sophisticated progressivism, nuanced, and broadly American. They wanted red meat and she would have to give it to them.  Yuk, and yuk again. 

But off she went and speak she did, smelling the stink of bratwurst wafting up from the grills smoking on the concourse waiting for her and the big men of Local 352. 'Oh, Gawd', she whispered to a campaign aide. 'If I have to eat another one of those disgusting things, I will lose it, really and truly, lose it'. 

It was not hard to campaign. Tiring, yes, all those whistle stops and rallies did tire one out, but not tiring in any real sense.  Every word had been scripted for her, every line large and bold on the teleprompter, ever pause, smile, wave inserted in the text; so she had to do no thinking whatsoever, just get up there and look womanly - or rather Presidentially womanly, whatever that was, but suggested by the woman who did her make up.  

Walz did all the heavy lifting.  She sent him into Indian country on occasion, their testing of hostile ground to see if there was any give, but he got booed and jeered until he walked off stage. 'It's no use, Kamala', he said. 'Assholes will always be assholes, pardon my French'. 

'The South Lawn could use some lawn furniture', she thought while Walz was rattling on about environments and potential.  Not the tacky Italian kind, pink flamingoes and cute deer, but something more appropriate - something Egyptian or Nubian perhaps, reminiscent of earlier, relevant times, or even something by Dale Chihuly, the glass-blower who could do something fanciful with a red, white, and blue motif. 

 

'Let's not put the cart before the horse, dear', her husband said to her before turning in. 'We're not there yet', but she had long ago given up on any advice from Doug, a typical man who knew nothing about women's hard-fought road to visibility and prominence.  He was happy enough with locker rooms and towel snapping, and although she had reminded him of this on numerous occasions, he still felt it his place to put in his two cents. 

So she carried on, a well-programmed performer on the campaign stage, a notional Vice President for a few more months, but a decorator-in-chief in her mind.  All the rest - policy briefings, white papers, Cabinet meetings, and signatures - could wait, put on the back burner at least until she got things in proper order - office first, bedroom second, and Executive Lounge third. 

'Dougie', she said to her husband one morning as she looked out the French doors to the Rose Garden, 'soon this will be all ours'. 

Treacle, Nostrums, And Bombast - The Vanities Of Trump And Harris, But Only One Of Them Makes Any Sense At All

Donald Trump is a master of hyperbole, exaggeration, and downright tall tales.  His invective is unparalleled, his stereotypes are as accurate as those of Shecky Green or Jackie Mason and as hilarious.  He is full of bombast, braggadocio, hot air, and wild ravings.  He is a whirling dervish, a St. Vitus' dancer, a voodoo priest, a Mad Hatter.  

  

Amidst all this vaudeville, this Wild West show of bull riding and lassoing, clowns and high-wire acts, how can anyone take him seriously?  How can anyone vote for a man so mentally discombobulated, and so entirely vain?  What are his policies?  Where does he stand?

The Left howls at his lies, his fabrications, and his downright distortion of fact while his supporters cheer and go wild.  There is a disconnect somewhere, something someone is not getting.  Either he is a clown, a carny barker, circus freak, and overrated showman, or he is a man of principle and sound policy, gussying up every speech with marvelously ingenious slights, lambasting his critics as bumpkins, rubes, and downright fools and letting his minions parse his words.  After the weed-whacking, the ground - his ground - is as clear as day. 

Of course Trump, as a son of Hollywood and Las Vegas, a performer, vaudevillian, and big tent revivalist in the old American tradition, doesn’t mean what he says.  He says what he means.  His is a political circus act with a semiotic foundation.  Crazy as a fox and as smart as a whip, he speaks a firestorm but is more rational than his opponents who speak in platitudes, shopworn nostrums, and self-righteous appeals to righteousness. 

None but unreconstructed liberal elites take him at face value.  Everyone knows that his call for expatriating all illegal immigrants is purposeful hyperbole, circus act exaggeration, and vaudeville at its very best.  Everyone but old Eastern progressives and young idealists understand that there can never be an impenetrable wall on our southern border. 

No one but academics who insulate themselves from the world in their Cambridge, Upper West Side, San Francisco, and Chicago redoubts think there will ever be mass deportations, electrified wire fences at Dulles Airport, and storm troopers on the Canadian border to keep immigrants out. It is the heart of the matter that counts.  

Hyperbole is window dressing, frills and pinafores, a scent of perfume and a bit of lace. Illegal immigration is a serious problem which has to be addressed, no longer with the tentative, hesitant gestures of the past but directly. 

Trump's Borscht Belt comedic insult of those ‘alternately sexed’ does not mean, as his opponents claim he would intern, punish, and neuter them Nazi style.  His words, loud and outrageous as they are, mean only to alert the electorate to the flaming idiocy of sexual diversity.  

 

His offhanded dismissal of the dysfunctionality of the ghetto and the unregenerate hypocrisy of Black Lives Matter championing racial rights instead of racial responsibility is not racist but indicative, time to call a spade a spade, to look objectively at corrosive social ills. 

The Left listens to his words and takes them at face value, but Trump is smarter, more savvy, and a genius at rhetoric, a Mark Antony, a Hamlet, a Demosthenes; and ironically the embodiment of Derrida and Lacan, deconstructionists who insist that the words of a text don't matter, only the hidden content, the pernicious and persistent catalogue of social injustice behind them.

Deconstructionism has had its day, although because of tenure there are many academics who will preach this secular animism until the day they die.  All texts are equivalent, they say.  There is no such thing as artistic genius, and the works of Shakespeare, Aeschylus, and Dostoevsky should be read only within the narrow context of  race, gender, and ethnicity.  Hamlet and Macbeth are nothing more than plays about political power, the corrupt nature of elites, and the alienation of the many to serve the powerful.

If one reads text carefully, deconstructionists say, one will discover the true meaning behind the words which are mere and artificial constructs of individuals who can but express political zeitgeist and the particular configurations of social, economic, and cultural conflict.

So where are these deconstructionists when it comes to parsing the stump performances of Donald Trump? Why are they so literal in their interpretation of his words?  How could they assume that his hot button rhetoric is anything more than getting sinners to walk up the aisle and accept Jesus as their personal savior? 

Americans are all lay deconstructionists. We understand that what Trump says stands for something else and is not ex cathedra.  We get it.  We get him. He gets us.  We can read between the lines, and like the narrative we find there.

Most people hear what they want to hear, make up their minds early and quickly, and use information to confirm or consolidate their opinions.  Once they have concluded that a public figure is worth attention because of his commitment to their causes, principles, or ideals, they stop parsing his speeches, analyzing his white papers, and listening to his debates.  

Donald Trump - and Ronald Reagan before him - understands this social phenomenon and knows that what a catty journalist called 'profound simplicity' actually captures the essence of political brilliance. 

  

Meanwhile Kamala Harris caterwauls on, mixing and matching, jumbling, a trifle, a gooey, custardy mess of fruit 'n' things, a cloyingly sweet dessert with no character, no class and no uniqueness, a sugar tit.  

When she gets on one of her rolls, the words come tumbling out of nowhere, linked to nothing or at best to some notional idea she had when she was a child.  And when she stops to think, to explicate and parse with care, she makes even less sense.  Notional ideas are gone and only longwinded metaphors remain.  'Word salad' is far too kind for her incoherent, indecipherable allusions and mix-and-match randomness. 

The intelligent listener cannot decide which is worse, which is more telling of the vacuity and inanity of the woman - making no sense whatsoever or spilling nostrums, platitudes, and pablum.  The objective critic listens, pays attention, loses her after the first winding, circuitous, virtual circle. The most charitable claim is that somewhere in this babbling brook is meaning,  She is only being Kamala, searching for le mot juste, putting her own brand on familiar themes, saying what she feels for God's sake, unlike that madman who rapes and pillages the English language.  Sound and fury meaning absolutely nothing. 

So, a week before the election, the show goes on - bombast, braggadocio, big top lion-taming, and high-wire acts; and immeasurably incoherent homilies, metaphors, and allusions. The Left is worried, very worried that the man they have branded as evil, spawn of the Devil, a dangerous, destructive man may again sit in the Oval Office.  How could this happen, they repeat again and again as the polls narrow and Trump edges closer to victory?

 

While at the same time Trump supporters throw their hats in the air at each wonderfully wild and wooly attack on 'that woman' and her succubus claques and wait for their day to come. 

Who knows? Either a clown or a vaporous fool will occupy 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue, but only one knows exactly what he is up to.                    

There Was Never Anyone Like Harry Muster - The Washington Success Story Of A Dunce

Harry Muster was a graduate of Yale, a scion of a family of old English rectitude and propriety, one of many generations of Musters who had gone to New Haven, but a man with only a kind of dopey complaisance that got him through the Gentleman C provisos of the university, but left him without any wherewithal for his second act.

He raided Hadley Hall, the women's graduate dorm, played bladderball on the Old Campus, and took the NY, New Haven & Hartford to New York on weekends to meet his St. Grottlesex classmates at the Yale Club.  

His first three years at Yale were happy, carefree ones, without undue academic stress, without concerns for his future - a seat on the NY stock exchange and partnership at Locke, Burberry, and Gunston awaited him - and most importantly a harem of girls who had gotten a whiff of his family's extraordinary wealth and social position and who had conveniently overlooked the fact that he was a clueless, aimless negotiator of life's twists and turns. 

For some unknown and ungodly reason - so said the Episcopal side of his family - he found the Yale Chaplain, a man of distinctly secular progressive sentiments and as far from pastoral counsellor as the Man in the Moon, a spiritual leader of immeasurable proportions. God would notice the bruises inflicted by Bull Connor and the bites of his attack dogs and reward accordingly.  

Life might be a journey to The Promised Land but not before a few stops in Selma and Montgomery. Most Yalies thought the chaplain a weightless arriviste and political climber of no significance; but Harry Muster thought him the answer to his prayers.

 

He became the Chaplain's acolyte, and followed the man around from New Haven to Tuscaloosa, sitting in, marching, parading for the black man, eating at segregated black lunch counters, and filling Woolsey Hall with his nostrums about black 'nobility'.  

Harry, without an original thought in his head followed a man without much in his, and together they made the perfect team, guru and chela, Zen teacher and one-hand-clapping disciple, the two together, present and future, marching for God and Man.  

There was no room in this cabal a deux for anything but love for the 'man of the forest', a Thoreauvian primal being that needed a leg up in the modern, capitalist world, so much so that Harry wanted to be black, to think black, and to love these high-shelved women from the Louisiana bayous. 

After Yale, Harry, thanks to the Chaplain, secured a fellowship at a premier Midwestern seminary which was known less for its doctrinal exegesis and pastoral mission than for its social activism.  The Dean of the school had been on the same busses headed south as the Yale Chaplain, and they had shared more than a few beers along the route.  'Thank you for sending him our way', said the Dean, and Harry went out west. 

 

He was lost in the classes on Biblical exegesis and Koine Greek, hoping for something more simple and direct and found himself foundering in academic parsing and esoteric interpretation until he graduated to the lessons on community organization. There he was in his element, no thinking required, only love, ambition, and purpose. 

On the steps of the grand neo-Gothic library, surrounded by cap-and-gown and Bibled academic deacons, Harry graduated, but again had to ask, 'What next?'. 

By now progressivism had sunk its roots deep into American soil and its sprouts had become the top pick of the political elite.  'I am a liberal', Harry finally and conclusively averred, and on to Washington he went, referred with kudos by both the Dean of Students at the seminary and by the Yale Chaplain, now an old man retired surprisingly in Sarasota where he owned a condominium and who was seen every morning sunning himself in a chaise lounge. 

First intern, then aide, then counsellor, then possible and likely candidate for the 4th District of his home state, Harry had done well for himself. 

For a man who had never been sure of what was what, Harry was unfazed by the twisted political shenanigans of the nation's capital.  He might not understand what all the fol-de-rol was about, but he was man enough to storm the enemy. 

As it turned out, Washington needed no thinkers - since they had dismissed Adlai Stevenson, pointy headed intellectual, decades ago they had embraced brush-cutting, peanut-farming good ol' boy machismo ever since.  Harry was in his element. 

In progressive Washington it was commitment that counted - a passionate, ineluctable, absolute belief in the natural superiority of the black man, the indisputable demise of heterosexuality, and the received wisdom of economic equality.  All revolved around the pole of diversity, equity, and inclusion.  The white, privileged descendants of predatory European colonialism were forever supernumerary, life's rejects, hopeless cultural vagrants. 

As a charter member of the Environmental Defense Fund, The Black Lesbian Coalition, One Wall Street, and the San Francisco Coalition For Homeless Rights, Harry was an indefatigable warrior for justice; and as such was tapped for greater things.  LaShonda Evans, senior advisor to Kamala Harris in her  campaign for the Presidency wanted him. 

Despite his age - an old Yalie, however much his wealth and/or academic excellence might still be fresh, was still an old man - and despite his association with the old guard, with the accommodationists Ralph Abernathy and Jesse Jackson, alte kockers and political supernumeraries, he still had some traction left, some passionate pull. 

He saw Kamala Harris as the very embodiment of all that he had fought for.  Imagine! A black woman poised to assume the Presidency of the United States, thanks in part to his unerring and unwavering support and activism.  'Praise be to Jesus', he said before he realized the words that were coming out of his mouth; but there was a good chance that The Lady would be sent packing by the demon himself, the anti-Christ.

As of this writing Harry, Kamala, and every last claque, shill, and progressive socialist in Washington is on tenterhooks.  What if, what if....

If Trump does win, all the collective, treacly ribbons of progressive Utopianism will finally be tossed into the dumpster; but Harry, at last able to sleep at night, never gave defeat a second thought 'We will prevail' he said before turning out the lights.

He had made it, and win or lose he was in the big tent, the Show, numero uno and he would never go back to Chillicothe 

Kamala Goes 'Round The Bend - The Last Days Of A Hysterical Woman

There was no sight like it, even in the smarmy mess of American political history. There was Hillary, a woman of pretentious entitlement who assumed that her womanhood would guarantee the Presidency; and Sarah Palin, another woman of incredible presumption who thought that her time had come.  Both women bumbled their way to political asylum because of those wooly notions, never really understanding what hit them, deer in the headlights of political reality. 

Kamala Harris, like Hillary before her, simply cannot believe that the nation could possibly vote for Donald Trump, a dishonorable, despicable man - a fascist, misogynist homophobe at best, and a spawn of the Devil at worst.  Her campaign has been based on that assumption - the election, because of the man, is a foregone conclusion, good vs. evil, a righteous woman vs a moral derelict. 

'How could he?', Kamala wondered. How could a convicted criminal, a hateful caricature of a man, a proven insurrectionist, and a downright fool be neck and neck with her, an anointed, chosen, courageous woman who stands for everything that is right and good. 'What is this country coming to?'

Despite years of scurrilous, unfounded, ad hominem attacks, round after round of lawfare, witch trials, and universal condemnation by the Left, not only is Donald Trump still standing, but he is poised to take the Presidency once again.  

'We must win', says Kamala, worried that Trump if elected would wreak a vengeance never before seen since God's destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah - vengeance upon her, her party, and the claque of vixenish women in Congress who have been relentless in their pursuit of him.  There will be a new Kristallnacht, a violent uprooting of the liberal ghetto, an extermination of a whole race of true believers.  It will be Armageddon. 

 

'I need an escape plan', she thought, and pictured the border with Canada as the one with Mexico - clogged with political refugees from the United States, all desperate for asylum, all fleeing oppression, persecution, and defilement.  Her border, by the way, and even as she panicked, she - a woman without a scintilla of irony in her fleshy body - had to see something of the what-comes-around-goes-around moment in her flight north. 

The Donald was breathing down her neck and she had played every card in her hand - the racist card (deportations, internments, and desperation of the black man the hands of this white supremist), the woman card (Trump, squire of beautiful women and beauty queens is a mental rapist, a hater of the very essence of women), the capitalist card (The Art of the Deal is nothing but a tale of manipulation, coercion, and bullying), and the abortion card (the man is a papist ignoramus who has bought into every Catholic trifle about 'sanctity'). 

He like Andrew Jackson before him, would push all LGBTQ+ people west of the Mississippi into reservations. If elected he will turn America into a Soviet-style gulag complete with Politburo, KGB, and Israeli security forces.

Yet nothing had stuck, and Donald Trump was as near as had ever been to sitting again in the Oval Office because of course, her accusations were nothing but fictitious nonsense. Yes, Trump had every intention of stopping the entitlements to the ghetto, finally interrupting the cycle of dependence on the public trough and lack of personal responsibility, and promoting the new ethos of opportunity where nothing is given but all is possible - the old American ethos responsible for Gates, Jobs, Bezos, and Buffett. 

 

Yes, he admired and desired beautiful women as all men ever have, and prized those with intelligence and allure above all. He hated the idea of what men did with each other in the bedroom, but, a man of Hollywood, he knew that without them, the critical industries of costume design, hair styling, and make up would go begging for talent. 

He valued the inalterable conviction of John Paul II who said abortion for expedient reasons added another layer of inhumanity to this unforgivable sin, and women should think about what they were about to do - not outlaw it, but decommission it as the go-to option. 

He understood enough history to know that bloody Latin American civil wars, the brutality of African dictatorships, the autocratic, punitive regimes of the Soviet Union and Communist China were insurrectionist and destructive, not the Viking-helmeted, war-painted frat boys who stormed the Capitol on January 6th. 

 

'Fascist', Kamala shouted in Pittsburgh. 'Fascist', she howled on the Main Line. 'Fascist', she screeched in Scranton and Lancaster until her voice was hoarse; and yet of course she had no idea of what life under Hitler was like. 

'I was at Auschwitz', said Saul Katz, hearing one of the lady's rants.  He was being herded into the showers when the 4th Infantry brigade stormed the camp, and freed him and his fellows.  Skeletal, naked, hollow-eyed, and tearful, he ran to the gates and for the first time in four years, smiled. 

Hitler, Katz said, was a man of monumental, unparalleled evil - a devil, a demonic, cruel, demon; and his fascist regime, Brown Shirts, storm troopers, panzers, SS, and all the rest had no match for its savagery, barbarity, and inhumanity. 'Donald Trump is no fascist'; and yet the lady insisted and continued with her vaporous, inane remarks, 'the last resort of a fool', as H.L. Mencken once said. 

So the lady, having pulled out every stop on her Wurlitzer, having piped every scurrilous claim and unfounded accusation, having howled like the Mad Woman of Chaillot, was now running on noxious fumes.  'What's a mother to do?', the old advertising line from the Fifties about a harried housewife saved by an Electrolux popped into her head.  'Indeed', she said to herself. 

The time for temperate consideration was long gone.  Kamala had stepped over the line and now was teetering on the edge of panic.  What if she lost, she wondered, a traitor to her cause, to black women, and the nation - and to that man, that piggish, clumsy oaf of a patriarchal boor, that....

Here she stopped herself.  There was still time to get the message out, but her irritated, feverish insides were not capable of rationality, not at this point where the infection of Donald Trump had eaten at her organs for so long; so her only recourse was to give in to her frenzy, and do a last, hysterical St. Vitus' dance, her own, personal orgy of miserable accusations. That was the least she could do. 

'When will it end?', a five-year old was heard saying to her mother on a park bench in Lafayette Square, across from the White House, referring to the endless hawking and screeching of the Vice President. 

'Soon, my love, soon'. 

Confessions Of A Moral Zealot - A Life Of Good Causes, Left On The Curb, Then Death In A Chaise Lounge

Bob Muzelle was a social justice warrior.  From his earliest upbringing by his father Isaac and mother Cordelia, he was imbued with ideas of charity, compassion, duty, and The Other - this catch-all term used by his father to include all dispossessed, marginalized, suffering people of the world.  'How can anyone call this country great', his father said at Sunday dinner, 'when so many people cannot sit at the feast' and from there launched into his retelling of the Wedding at Cana, the miracle of the loaves and fishes, and the absolute responsibility of every Christian to follow the example of Jesus Christ. 

Not that old Isaac was a fundamentalist Christian.  Far from it.  He was an indifferent Methodist, a scattered and questioning one at that who had kept his union card only because The First Universalist Methodist Church of Great Neck had recruited a fiery preacher from Bayonne who gave the Bible a modern, socialist twist.  'Jesus was the first community organizer', Pastor Evans said from the pulpit, 'the first social activist, a man of faith and action'. 

Bobby went to church with his parents but was more interested in flipping through the hymns, replaying Bach, and waiting to get into the fresh air; and was only rightly initiated when he met the Reverend Sloane Beveridge at Yale, a man of moral rectitude and Christian faith but schooled in the ways of Saul Alinsky and Paolo Freire.  God and Man formed a distinct, foundational partnership, and was in New Haven to promote the interests of both. 

Beveridge was the first of the lot of nouveau missionaries - men who, instead of carrying a civilizing message to the Jivaro and Aymara Indians of Amazon and altiplano, brought it home; and marched arm in arm with his black brothers and sisters to Selma and Montgomery. 

To all but his coterie - Yale students who thanks to upbringing (like Bobby), predilection, hero worship, or absent parents - Beveridge was just a windy poseur - a political panderer feathering his own nest and headed, he hoped, for The Church of St. John the Divine, Upper West Side bastion of 'social worship', a term coined by the then pastor, Parker Amory who, Beveridge hoped, would soon retire and leave the pulpit to him. 

Beveridge spent many long weekends in New York with Amory, currying favor, cajoling, enticing, and finally wringing a tepid commitment from the old man. 

All this was not beyond the notice of the St. Grottlesex crowd - young men from old, patrician New England families who had been anointed at birth to continue their aristocratic tradition.  'He's a jerk', said one, laughing at Beveridge's goatlike prancing to meetings here and there, popping up where he was not wanted, talking ad nauseam about the black man and his rightful place atop the human pyramid. 

Beveridge was as ubiquitous as Billy Graham, counselling deans, college presidents, and wealthy alumni, preaching his message of Christlike love and activist compassion.  A St. Vitus' dance, a peripatetic whirling dervish performance better suited to vaudeville or the male ward at St. Elizabeth's loony bin. 

 

Bobby however, found the man irresistible.  A man of good Puritan stock - he claimed heritage to the Davenports and Potters, founders of New Haven and Yale - Hollywood looks, and a potent message of love and militancy.  Bobby wanted not only to be with him but to be him. 

Bobby, for all his social commitment and Christian purpose had no real moral spine, no theology of his own, no real agenda.  In other words, he was a perfect follower - a credulous, insecure person needing only a kind word of encouragement to send him to altar and barricades in a flash. 

So he went with Beveridge on freedom rides, sit-ins, demonstrations, marches, and protests, finding his voice in harmony with the Reverend, feeling blessed and motivated.  He would do anything for the man. 

When Beveridge died - dead from hysteria said the St. Grottlesex crowd - Bobby was disconsolate, bereft, and all alone.  His mentor, friend, and supporter was gone, and now what? Yet the answer was as clearly writ as the Ten Commandments on Mt. Sinai.  He would take up Beveridge's progressive cudgel and leave no issue unattended.  In tune with the temper of the times, he took up the causes of nuclear disarmament, world peace, the black man, women, gays, capitalism, and the environment.  He was a whirligig of good works, a tireless advocate for every cause, every issue, every bit of intemperance trouble he could find.

 

'He's a worse jerk than Pepsi', the St. Grottlesex crowd said, referring to the dead Pastor Beverage. Bob of course, given his anointment and holy mission was undaunted.  They were the jerks, the white privileged has-beens who would soon be left out in the cold by the likes of him and his missionary followers. 

Bob whinged and whacked on for decades, never losing a step, never doubting for a minute the rightness of his causes.  Who, if not him, would look after the moral health of the world?

He never saw the handwriting on the wall, how women whom he had admired and put on their well-deserved social pedestal were paying no attention to him.  They sat him in the back row of the auditorium at women's conferences, never once invited him on the dais, and gave him the bum's rush during coffee breaks.

Black people were even worse.  Gone were the accommodating white-black love-ins of the Sixties with Jesse Jackson, Ralph Abernathy and King.  Now there were only do-ragged, gold-toothed, silver-grilled pimps from Anacostia and South Detroit, Black Lives Matter Fuhrers and racial terrorists who hadn't a clue as to who these great men were.  Bob couldn't even get a word in edgewise when they started rapping their ghetto rhymes about the white man, aimed at him, he thought, one of only a few white faces in the crowd. 

 

His excitation concerning the coming climate Armageddon was old hat now that 37 separate predictions of doom had come and gone, and the country was well on its way to adapting to new climate reality, happy in fact that they could simply move their truck farms north and be cooler along the way. 'Listen', Bobby shouted, 'Listen!', but not a soul within earshot was paying him any mind.  He was a supernumerary, a leftover sandwich, a soggy Oreo cookie. 

'Isn't time to let it go?', his wife of fifty years said to him one evening over her famous pot roast; but Bob still had fire in his belly, and the problems of the world were increasing, not decreasing.  Gays, transgenders, Palestinians, and octoroons were still damned and insecure, at any time exterminated, eliminated rather than included.

His wife couldn't tell him what everyone but he knew - he was old hat, a tired, limp, piece of yesterday's sponge cake that nobody wanted.  'Let's move to Florida', she said. 

Now, nothing in the halcyon days could have been more unthinkable - sunning himself on a Miami beach in a chaise lounge sipping pina coladas.  Nothing could be more bourgeois, anti-progressive, a downright moral failure, a dismal, pathetic end; but there he was actually considering the option. 

Luckily the reality of it all - a life that nobody really cared about, all his social activism either for naught or coopted by goons and comers, an existence as pedestrian and unremarkable as any.  He could have been a Walmart greeter for all his social conscience had gotten him; and now that that spawn of the devil Trump in the White House again, a President who in all probability would sweep under the rug every last bit of progressive reform that Bobby had worked so hard for, it was indeed time to cash in his chips, buy the farm, go into That Great Beyond.  And to do that better on a tacky beach in Miami than in some nasty Baltimore slum. 

'Fascist!' - Kamala Harris And The Last, Humiliating Resort Of A Desperate Woman

The most recent loose screw of the Kamala Harris presidential campaign is her sorry, spineless attacks on Donald Trump.  He is a fascist, she claims in the final, desperate attempt of a candidate who has campaigned on nothing but assumptions of rightness and hopes to gain ground in the final going.  

'I am a proud black women', she shouts at every rally, every whistle stop, and on every platform - a transparently obvious reprise of James Brown's, 'Say It Loud, I'm Black And I'm Proud', but without the entertainer's soul and without anything more substantial that a light tint of skin color. 

The Left has been trying to brand Trump with the fascist, Hitlerian label for years, all for naught, as the former President is neck-and-neck with his opponent, and given his electoral margin in key swing states, poised once again to take the presidency.  

On what basis do progressives make this claim? On the shifting sands of desperately vain, vacuous assumptions.  The 'insurrection' of January 6th, they say, was a well-orchestrated, deliberate attempt to overthrow the government of the United States, take power, and institute a dictatorial autocracy; but it was nothing of the sort, only a ragtag bunch of deep woods, Viking helmeted, war painted side show rejects with nothing better to do than stir up trouble and with nothing better in their resumes than DUI stops, vagrancy, and drunk-and-disorderly arrests.  These fools barraged their way to the Capitol like frat boys storming a women's dorm, a rampage of jerks, dazzled by the bright lights of the city. 

'I was at Auschwitz', said Hyman Rubenstein.  He was being herded into the showers when the 4th Infantry brigade stormed the camp, and freed him and his fellows.  Skeletal, naked, hollow-eyed, and tearful, he ran to the gates and for the first time in four years, smiled. 

Hitler, Rubenstein said, was a man of monumental, unparalleled evil - a devil, a demonic, cruel, demon; and his fascist regime, Brown Shirts, storm troopers, panzers, SS, and all the rest had no match for its savagery, barbarity, and inhumanity. 

 

'Donald Trump is no fascist', said Rubenstein. 

The old camp survivor's words went viral, and the Harris campaign felt it necessary to reply, to save at least some of the Jewish vote which for decades had been Democratic in lockstep, but was now foundering Right given the lady's compromising stance on Israel and her kowtowing to the anti-Semitic, Jew hating campus mobs. 

'The Holocaust was a terrible event', Harris said in a pre-recorded message. 'A horrible event, an unforgettably barbaric one, but....'; and here every Jew within earshot waited for the other shoe to drop, the incriminating betrayal. '...Donald Trump, while no card-carrying, torchlight parade, pogrom, Kristallnacht Fascist Party partisan, is fascist in mentality, purpose, and intent...'

The Jews went wild - this vacuous woman had no idea of what she was saying, what they went through, or anything about the consummate evil of the Fuhrer; and the more she banged on about fascism in America, the more she dug her own political grave.  She had not lived through the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, the ovens and gas chambers of Birkenau and Sobibor, the extermination of six million Jews.  She was a poseur, and imposter, and a characterless fool. 

The conspirators who plot to murder Julius Caesar in Shakespeare's play of the same name, convict him of pre-crime - his attitude, demeanor, his faux heroism, and the credulous following of the mob all point to the likelihood that he will assume the crown, dooming the Republic perhaps forever.

Of course there was no proof whatsoever that Caesar would in fact become the tyrant Cassius and Brutus assumed; but there was no harm in branding him as an evil interloper, a dangerous man, dangerous to the people of Rome.  Death was what he deserved and what Rome needed. 

And so it is with Harris' attempts to brand Donald Trump as a fascist - a pre-crime supposition that if he takes the White House he will turn it into a storm-trooper, Schutzstaffel, cabal of murderers, butchers, and exterminators. 

 

Only the credulous, the duped, and the willingly spayed by the lady believe this bilge -  the stink of political sewage is perfumed air for true believers. 

Trump is unmoved, unaffected, and as undaunted as ever; and he has no qualms about labelling her as an empty-headed, disassembling charlatan.  His followers love his bombast, his incorrectness, his stupendous arrogance and self-confidence. They care little whether his extravagant claims are fact or fictional hyperbole. They understand what he means and disregard what he says or how he says it.  They take the political war-mongering of Harris as nothing but cover for a woman without a scintilla of logical policy, a vaporous comer with little more than a fictive presumption of authority. 

'I will do anything to keep that airheaded imposter from the Oval Office', said Hyman Rubenstein, remembering the savagery of the camp guards, the sexual abuse and whoring pandering of the overlords, the filth, the grime, and smell of charred flesh, the bodies, the skulls, and the shaved heads.  A demonic, devilish nightmare - and this woman had the ignorant audacity to bring it all up again, to demean the survivors and to infantilize Hitler and his goons. 

The torchlight parades down Friedrichstraße were the worst, witnessed by the young Rubenstein before he and his family had been rounded up and penned. He remembered the phalanxes of jack-booted, high-stepping storm troopers, monument-sized Nazi flags, martial music and the loud, delirious shouts of the crowds, and although he was too young to understand the full import of the event, he was afraid, very afraid. 

'Never again', he said to himself, and as he heard the outrageous, simple-minded claims of Harris in his head, he shook, tried to stand, and could only hear the bellows of the crowd and the maniacal speech of the Fuhrer.  

An Ivy League Side Show - When Gaza Love And Transgender Coupling Meet In A Splendid Jamboree

Yale University, over three hundred years old, one of the first institutions of higher learning in the country, founded by John Davenport as a place of religious instruction, philosophy, and logic in 1701, remained a school of impeccable academic credentials, moral probity, manners and social grace until the Sixties when the doors were opened to all comers. 

 

The villain, according to Old Blues, was Inslee Clark, Dean of Yale College, who decided that the university should no longer be pasture for wealthy aristocrats of New England, but fertile ground for the Jews of Brooklyn who had for so long languished at Brooklyn College.  With these talented, studious, and ambitious men Yale would regain the academic rigor that it had in the early days of Davenport and his Puritan refugees from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  

It would no longer be the holding pen for future investment bankers, but Brooklyn College North - as intellectually challenging as Harvard but with a civility and respect for patrician legacy that Cambridge never had. 

All well and good - the university certainly benefited from the contributions of Jews, Italians, Slovaks, and Poles - until the blush came off the bloom of the rose, and it went overboard.  Slowly but surely it devolved into a racial and ethnic mishmash - a grab bag of identity.  The Administration was convinced that simply by rubbing shoulders with the disadvantaged, the marginalized, the put-upon, and the closeted, white, Anglo-Saxon students would learn a lesson in humility, respect, and generosity.

And so it was that Yale moved off-kilter, tilting far to the edges of society while dismissing the legacy of John Davenport and the centuries of academic excellence and a solidly moral education. If there was ever more of a social hodge-podge, bits and pieces tracked in from God knows where, it was Yale; and the thing of it was, they were proud of it.  'This is not your grandfather's Yale', the publicity went, reaching far and wide from ghetto to North Carolina tarpaper shacks.  'You have a home here', and the university became unrecognizable but happy, said the new guard. 

 

By time of this writing, the university had gone through even more reconfiguring twists and turns.  Not only were people of color more than welcome, but those of alternate sexuality.  Applicants were encouraged to express their sexual identity in graphically explicit terms.  The Admissions Office was not satisfied with 'Other' checked in the M/F box on the application form, but wanted to hear the details of coming out. Videos were encouraged, and to the unexpected visitor, the Office looked like a seedy man cave basement with cunts ‘n’ cum videos playing to Mr Bojangles.

The San Francisco Folsom Street Fair - a sexual free-for-all of chains, whips, harnesses, chariots, and more cock-and-booty that anyone could imagine had nothing on the Yale Admissions Office.  They asked for explicitness, and they got more than they reckoned for; but soon the straight staff was replaced in favor of LGBTQ+ officer who were no strangers to such doings and would, therefore, be the most appropriate judges for admission; and in short measure, the campus had more than their share of buddies from random spots on the gender spectrum. 

 

At the same time the university had turned far to the political left, and there was no liberal cause not espoused and embraced by administration, faculty, and student body.  It was a lockstep cabal of progressive zealots.  Nothing escaped their attention - the black man, the lesbian, the environment, financial hooliganism, and income inequality were all in their sights. 

When the two currents met - political activism and sexual liberation - the Yale campus was as colorful and wild as a Barnum & Bailey circus, complete with its own versions of bearded ladies, two-headed babies, cretins, giants, and ape-men. 

The pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel demonstration on the Old Campus was a wild and wooly hoopla of outrageous sexuality and anti-Jewish hatred. While there were plenty of keffiyehs, mustaches, and Palestinian flags, there were even more frilly femmes, leathered-up bulls, Bay-to-Breakers gay floats, Mardi Gras sequins and tinsel, and every cross-retro-gendered outfit picked and patched in a second-hand extravaganza. 

'Down with the Jew', one brawny, husky, frilly person yelled from the podium to the cheers of the delighted crowd which picked up the lyric and repeated it in waves of chants from one end of the Old Campus to the other. 'Down-With-The-Jew...Down With The Jew...' until the whole place was filled with exuberant, unselfconscious cheers; and when it was over, happy couples, arm-in-arm, war-painted, exhausted, but delighted left for dinner. 

Alumni donations had already been declining as older alumni, sickened by what they saw as the ruination of a once superior, proper place, banked their money elsewhere.  Yale was not to be encouraged in this unholy dishevelment of tradition and history. Not their Yale any more, not by a long shot. 

The university, now in line with every vocational school, cow town junior college, and third rate midwestern university could only rest on its laurels for so long; and after a while this descent into a nightmarish woke madness slowed.  The Supreme Court's ruling dismissing affirmative action and the financial demurral of wealthy alumni helped, but the country itself was increasingly fed up with race and gender nonsense. 

'Well, Harkness Tower is still standing', said one alumnus at his Fiftieth Reunion.  Reunions were held after the school year ended, so there were no signs of the protests, festoons, and sexual antics of a few weeks before.  He looked at the bell tower, the Gothic spires of Davenport College where he had lived while at Yale, and smiled.  'There will always be an England', he mused, 'and always a Yale'.

The Old Yale Two Step - A Tea Dance For True Believers In A Woke Age

LaShonda Williams closed her book - 'Parsing Communication Theory - The Linguistic Dimensions Of Race' - and headed to the Old Campus for the demonstration, this time an anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian affair intending to force the university to divest all holdings in Israeli companies and, as many of the more radical protesters insisted, divest investment in all Jewish-owned companies.  It wasn't exactly a Down With Jews, brown shirt torchlight parades, but close to it.  The hatred for Israel (aka The Jew) had become white hot, and it was time that Yale students saw some response from the administration. 

For weeks no senior official of the university had shown up at the parades, midnight vigils, and all-day political tailgate parties at Yale Bowl, until Berkeley B. Hastings, Associate Dean of Yale College decided to speak.  Surrounded by Black Panther clones, do-ragged and keffiyeh-scarved, scowling black men, Hastings took the podium.  Only thanks to a rock concert high amp sound system was his voice heard. 

'Ladies and Gentlemen', Hastings began; but then he stammered when the crowd starting howling and shaking their fists at his faux pas - such honorifics were signs of a white, privileged, gender-accusatory past and would not be tolerated.  Hastings, however, had not been sufficiently prepared for his walk-on, nor for the red flags that would be waved.

'Friends', he corrected himself, and went on to acknowledge the students concerns, how war is a terrible thing, the loss of any baby, brown, black, or white was a tragedy, and that compassionate people everywhere hoped and prayed that the conflict in Gaza would end quickly. 

'Pig, slattern, cunt', shouted one student. 'Jew-lover', yelled a woman in the front row, 'White motherfucker', shouted a third. The crowd picked up the chant, 'Mo-ther Fuck-er, Mo-ther Fuck-er' until the Old Campus turned into a roaring, echoing, feral place. 

The Old Campus, one should remember, was in the university's early days the center of the university, and Connecticut Hall, an early colonial era building still stood, an unchallenged remembrance of Elihu Yale and John Davenport, founders of the university, devout Christians, and visionary leaders who envisaged a place of higher learning based on faith, intellect, reason, and sound political philosophy.

 

Davenport was a founding member of the Massachusetts Bay Colony but who, disappointed and discouraged by its slide into a non-committal, lax Protestantism, headed south where he and his company set foot in New Haven and established it as solidly, inalterably Puritan place.  Along the way in his spiritual journey, he founded Yale. 

For three hundred years the university thrived as a center of moral rectitude and academic excellence, and generation after generation of young men, many of whom were the descendants of the early Anglo-American founders, came to this redoubt of classical learning. 

So, many alumni old enough to remember their grandfathers' stories about Yale, The Game, the worldly sophistication, the summers on Nantucket, and the balls and dances at the Waldorf, were unable to process what they saw on the news - the raucous, ragtag, howling banshee crowd in the Old Campus. What had become of their Yale?

Indeed, but the true believers, the reformers, the social justice advocates for race, gender, and ethnic equality wanted no part of that old, retrograde, profoundly ignorant, and persistently dangerous Old Guard.  The more of them that died and left their fortunes to Yale the better.  

Of course they had not counted on the influence of these Old Blues, patriotic to the core, Yale men first and foremost, men who embodied the famous line of the university anthem, 'For God, For Country, And For Yale'.  One by one these old men pulled their alumni support and left the university stunned.  Administrators had never expected that the support of these loyal alumni would ever be abandoned; and yet there it was, a bald fact. 

  

Dean Hastings never recovered from his stumbles and the unexpected garbage pail of insults thrown at him by his students.  He stood nonplussed, agape, and mute as the insults and slanderous shouts continued.  Best to regroup, and to cheers he left the stage. 

LaShonda kissed her lover, hugged her, and said, 'We will overcome'.  

Overcome what? was the question for many alumni hearing this old civil rights refrain on the lips of the likes of LaShonda who had absolutely no idea where the idea came from as she banged on, arm-in-arm with her sisters, marching under the Palestinian flag, smiling, waving, and having a grand old time. 

'What on earth have we done', said Billington Potter, descendant of Hiram Potter, member of the Davenport mission.  'It was all the fault of that prick, Inslee Clark, that cocksucker'. 

Clark was the dean who presided over - in fact encouraged - the first wave of 'diversity' at Yale, stating that it would never again be an old boys' club for the rich and privileged of St. Grottlesex and Martha's Vineyard.  No, he would open the door to all the Jews from Brooklyn who had been denied entry, and all the public school standouts across the country.  

Academic standards would only increase, said Clark in a reference to the Gentleman's C and the no-fail policies of former administrations.  'Jews are very smart people', Clark said, 'and we welcome them'. 

All well and good until the real 'diversity' kicked in, and Yale felt obliged to attend to the underserved - the brown and black students who might not have the old Yale wherewithal, but who would add by their very presence to the inclusive environment of the institution.  So what if a few corners had to be cut or a few sketchy term papers overlooked.  That wasn't the point. 

LaShonda had been recruited from Anacostia, Washington DC's most pestilential slum, a child of single mother and absent father, raised by her grandmother, and near victim of God knew how many drive-by shootings; but she was exactly the student that Yale was looking for - a woman of color with a severely disadvantaged upbringing who would bring racial reality to the university.  

The Administration had already instituted a number of easy-pass courses for affirmative action students like LaShonda, and with any luck, she might progress to something more challenging.  Whether she did or not was irrelevant.  Her race, gender, and penurious upbringing were what counted. 

So was the case for the many gay, lesbian, and transgender students accepted by Yale.  They, by the very nature of their sexual struggle and courageous outing, would provide a living example of what diversity was and why it mattered. 

It was therefore a ragtag bunch that gathered in the Old Campus that day. Despite its raison d'etre, the death of Palestinian children, it still was a happy jamboree, a big party of belonging, good feelings, and camaraderie.  The angry shouts were actually intermittent among hugs and kisses.  'We Are The World', that old bit of treacle from the Eighties rang through those few heads with any sense of history or irony. 

Nothing ever came of the demonstrations.  Israel kept on undaunted in its violent reprisals against Palestinian terrorists and Iran-sponsored militias in Lebanon, and Yale protected its portfolio as it always had done - profits first and foremost - with only a notional withdrawal from investment in Soda Stream, the Israeli spritzer water company. 

The Supreme Court rejection of affirmative action, the pushback against wokism, and the likely re-election of Donald Trump have chastened the university, and it slowly but surely is regaining some of the academic stature it lost over the last few decades.  Bravo, said the Old Guard, about time and what took them so long, but this devilish wokeness was still abroad, and no one's guard should be let down.