Here Comes Avian Influenza! - The Fretters Are Fretting, The Sky Is Falling, And Armageddon Is Nigh

There have been a few reports buried below the fold on the appearance of avian flu in the United States, incidental so far - it has shown up in animals with a rare jump to humans with little consequence, sniffles, aches and pains - but the worriers are already battening down the hatches. 'We've learned our lesson from COVID', they say, 'and this time we are ready'. 

 

Learned what, exactly, and ready how, ask most Americans? Learned to shut down schools and let children lose two years of educational maturity?  Mask them up and deprive them of any facial clues to behavior, further stunting their development?  Shut down small businesses, forcing them into bankruptcy? Create a 'j'accuse culture of neighborhood vigilantism and a hysteria of thousands of maskless Typhoid Marys spreading disease and in the crosshairs of a defiant community?

We didn't learn a thing from the HIV epidemic two decades ago.  A former head of CDC was quoted as saying that this was the first time America treated an epidemic as a political phenomenon. 'Aids Is Everyone's Disease', proclaimed banners, festoons, placards, and lawn signs, when it of course was not.  Its epicenter - the classical epidemiological characterization of where and how a disease begins and how to stop it before it spreads - was ignored.  

Despite the evidence, AIDS, said public health officials, was not a matter of suck-holes in bathhouse walls in the Castro, homosexual promiscuity on the Bay, or the practice of the most infectious sexual practices.  To so identify, define, censure, and isolate such practices and their practitioners would be to again consign a whole, newly liberated sexual minority to the closet.  

However, pretending that these vectors did not exist had two pernicious consequences. First, it allowed the disease to spread beyond what should have been closed borders; and second it created a panic throughout the country.  Billions were spent on warning people against AIDS when the risk in their sexually conservative, modest communities was almost nil. 

 

The gay community of course led the avant-garde and warned the nation of gay roundups, pogroms, Kristallnacht, storm troopers, and concentration camps.  We are not vectors, advocates shouted. We are unfortunate, hapless victims. 

COVID was no different.  It was clear once the earliest data came in that the highest mortality and severe morbidity occurred in the old and the immune-compromised.  Focusing epidemiological efforts on surveilling, isolating, and caring for these groups was clearly the obvious route to containing the virus.  

This of course did not happen, and the disease spread; but because the immunologically sound, the young and healthy would not die from it, the general mortality was less than the last serious epidemic, the Hong Kong flu of 1968, which was treated as any other flu where people got sick and a relatively few died,  Nothing was shut down, the country did not panic, and life went on.

So we have learned nothing from previous influenza epidemics, nothing from COVID, and even less from HIV/AIDS; so what are those who claim we have talking about?

The CDC, Anthony Fauci, and their legions insisted on draconian measures to counteract the Corona virus because they said, 'we don't know...we must wait for the science...caution is the greater part of valor'; but they were being disingenuous at best. If you don't know that children are especially infectious vectors of the virus, you can either wait and see; or shut everything down tight.  Either approach is legitimate, and the former reflects 'science' far more than the latter.  Yet Fauci and his acolytes rejected epidemiology and common sense, and went post office. 

In Sweden restaurants, bars, shops and museums all remained open. Schools were open (though six formers studied from home). Households were allowed to mix and until the end of March there were parties of up to 500 people allowed. Masks were not recommended and people rarely wore them.

Yes, more people in Sweden died than in more controlled Norway, but what about the jobs that were saved and the children who had a better education? Not to mention the levels of debt that were accrued.

A recent study by the Institute of Economic Affairs, University of Buckingham, concluded:

Our results suggest that the Swedish policy of advice and trust in the population to reduce social interactions voluntarily was relatively successful. Sweden combined low excess death rates with relatively small economic costs. In future pandemics, policymakers should rely on empirical evidence rather than panicking and adopting extreme measures. Even if policymakers appeared to act rapidly and decisively, the rushed implementation of strict lockdowns in 2020/21 probably did more harm than good.  

 

Epidemics are not the only cause for such 'rushed implementation' and political decision-making.  A few decades ago, the American breastfeeding lobby argued that only exclusive, long-term breastfeeding was best for women and babies; and yet in so-doing they ignored the legitimate lost opportunity cost of bottle feeding.  Women with the opportunity of higher wages and secure employment - work which required the assistance of a bottle-feeding relative at home - were censured.  

Mixed feeding - breastmilk and bottle - was harshly condemned.  It was all or nothing.  While there is no doubt that exclusive breastfeeding in water-borne disease-ridden countries in Africa could lower infant morbidity and mortality, the opportunity costs and benefits of the bottle were universally ignored. 

The hammering and intimidation about exclusive breastfeeding was never louder than in America, where the risk of disease from bottle feeding is almost zero, where the bottle freed a generation of women from their traditional, limited roles, and where the benefits of breastfeeding, so torturously parsed and exacted, were minor compared to the benefits of bottle freedom. 

There was never compelling epidemiological evidence why exclusive breastfeeding should be America's policy, but it became so because of powerful lobby groups, the tsunami of women-centered policies, and fundamentalist America's unfortunate tendency to favor belief over fact. 

All of which is fair warning for what's coming with Avian influenza.  Panic is likely to set in, and the same risk-ignorant responses that came with COVID are bound to follow. 'But we don't know!' will be the cry to once again turn the country into a gulag. 'The science, the science!' the Chicken Littles will howl; but hopefully with a new Administration and its cautious conservative-minded appointees at the Health Department and CDC, ,government will not repeat the COVID fiasco. 

Sweetness And Light Are So Yesterday In Washington - The Tale Of An Ambitious Bad Girl

Felicia Brandon was a good girl - cute, pert, lovely, and obedient until she hit fourteen when the wheels came off and she realized that her toast tasted better on the burnt side - bad boys. 

'Isn't that always the way', snipped Helga Parsons to Felicia's mother one morning as they were both tending to their roses; but Mrs. Brandon was still in a state of denial.  There was no way that her daughter, child of dutiful parents, educated by the sisters of the Convent of St. Mary, guided and taken in hand by Father Brophy, could possibly turn out bad.  Why, there was nothing bad whatsoever about her, thought Letty Brandon, remembering the two of them making chocolate cookies, laughing over the crumbly bits and tossing them in the air like confetti.  No, there must be some mistake.  Her daughter could never turn out bad.

 

But it was Letty who was wrong, for Helga Parsons had seen Felicia rutting in the back seat of Bobby Farrell's Lexus in full view of anyone who passed by.  It was that indecency, that impropriety, that careless disregard for the community that irritated, revolted her.  Not so much the rutting.  God knows she did plenty of that in her day before she met her husband, a tired out, greyish short of man, the very caricature of indistinction.  So it was not with little nostalgic envy that she looked in on the two of them and in fact didn't turn away, watching till the end until Felicia howled like a wolf at a full moon. 

Felicia was not exactly promiscuous, for she chose her partners carefully. There were plenty of ciphers who wanted her, but she picked only the creme de la creme, boys from the West End, the Anglo-Saxon end, the leafy corner of the city reserved for the descendants of the captains of industry who had built the town two hundred years ago.  The Potter, Booth, Hart, Vibberts, and Stanley boys were all headed to Yale where their fathers and grandfathers had gone before them, but all of them had sowed their share of wild oats along the way.  

 

They were confident legatees of an aristocratic tradition where the rules of proper New Brighton did not apply.  They were the Nietzscheans of the Farmington River valley, forceful, determined, ambitious, and less concerned with those who got in their way than where they were going. Bad boys only in the eyes of the timid burghers of the East End and the likes of Letty Brandon who lived among them but didn't belong.  Their ways - the vodka bottles in the trash on Sunday morning, the golf, the summer homes on the Vineyard, the tan, and Scottish wool - were not hers, although she admired them, peered into their windows at night just as Helga had ogled her daughter in the back of Bobby Farrell's Lexus. 

Felicia not only wanted those boys, but wanted their insouciance, their absolute sense of privilege and expectations of respect and position. Reassembling her underthings, she saw the road ahead as clear as day. 

Now, Felicia as well as being an attractive, available girl, was also quick - before the Potter boys started calculating dimensions, she had gone on to elliptical quadratics and theoretical calculus available only at Yale where she commuted every third day.  Her grasp of the tight logic of mathematics enabled an almost instinctive understanding of complex grammar, and by graduation she had mastered both Russian and Japanese.  Harvard took her without question. 

Harvard, not far from stereotype, had more than its share of geeky Asians who smelled of fish sauce and some other rancid thing.  All polite and deferential - they, like all non-white boys, wanted a taste of Felicia's blonde hair, blue eyes, and creamy, luscious complexion - they were of no interest to her.  So she vetted and culled until she found the Cambridge version of la creme de la creme and rutted with them as often and as openly as she had with Bobby Farrell.  

By Senior Year, she had assembled a stable of promising suitors, all anxious to follow her wherever graduation might take her, willing to defer law school for her, quite a sacrifice given the hard-driven families from which they came and the expectations of partner and millions. 

Felicia knew that there was only one place for her - Washington, the nexus of power, the seat of unrestrained ambition and the apotheosis of what she saw in the West End boys.  Nothing would stop these one-man amoral juggernauts, these expresses of hot, driving, uninhibited desire from getting what they wanted.  Washington was a witches' brew of sex, sedition, and a marvelously care-free insurrectionist mentality. Here was where one's mettle was tested.  Deciphering the complexities of rival palaces and the insidiousness of both friends and enemies all existing in a miasma of suspicion and dishonesty was the challenge she wanted. 

 

Good girls went to Washington to make a difference, to do good. Felicia only wanted the prize that the capital offered - unlimited, unmitigated power - and she had the moral abandon, intelligence, and fierce ambition to get it. 

She sussed and vetted the men in Washington just as she had in New Brighton, and picked them off one by one, a seductive little tramp with a Harvard degree and a summa cum laude mind.  Congressional aides, influential lobbyists, and elected representatives found themselves falling for her charms. Promises were made, paths were cleared, note taken, and in a short time she was being considered for top positions in government. 

She was a Rasputin, a Cardinal Wolsey, a Robespierre - a woman of preternatural savvy and understanding of the ways of men.  She was able to negotiate her way around pricky brambles, bear traps, minor plots and intrigues, frontal and rear-guard skirmishes, and always come out ahead. She like Rosalind, Portia, and Viola of Shakespearean Comedies, she bested each and every man around her.  She played them for fools and geniuses, built them up or castrated them like a Strindbergian vixen.  She  was brilliant, a player, a marvelously complete woman. 

 

It was a perfect symbiosis, this happy marriage of devilishly ambitious woman and the craven, corrupted souls of Washington.  An American morality tale to some - nothing could be more Dreiser-esque but less of an American tragedy than the tale of Felicia Brandon and her insatiable desire.  Clyde Griffiths, the hero of Dreiser's great work, is a man of limited intelligence and ability but with the undaunted, unrestrained ambition that characterizes all Americans. 

Griffiths comes to a predictable, sorry end, but there is no bad ending to the saga of Felicia Brandon, an American hero, a feminist legend, a woman revered and adulated.  Her questionable means to these storied ends were either forgotten or never discovered; and besides, in America it doesn't matter how you get where you're going, only that you get there. 

'Whatever became of Felicia Brandon', one journalist asked many years later after she had surprisingly and unconventionally left Washington without a note of explanation or destination.  She simply disappeared; but anyone who knew her was not surprised in the least.  It wasn't results that Felicia was after - a law, a piece of influential legislation, or major public works.  She had never had any such interests. 

It was the pursuit and attainment of unchallenged power in a hyper-competitive world that got her juices flowing, the be-all and end-all of her ambition.  Victory was not in doing good or making a difference, but the number of recognizable heads on sakes down Pennsylvania Avenue.  Her heroes were Genghis Khan and Tamburlaine, not The Great Conciliator. 

'Quite a woman', said the journalist's colleague. 'There'll never be another like her'. 

Jackboots, Storm Troopers, And The Ethnic Cleansing Of America - The Left's Hysterical Terror Of Donald Trump

For over a decade the Left has branded Donald Trump as a Fascist - a man of anti-democratic, autocratic, authoritarian instincts who, if elected, would turn America into an Aryan state, a Hitler in intent, philosophy, and resolve.  He would deport all the brown people who had crossed the border illegally, scourge and humiliate gay, lesbian and transgender people until they huddled in North Dakota reservations, bulldoze the inner city and send black people back to Mississippi, carry crosses and the banner of St. George and sing The Battle Hymn of the Republic, shutter store front churches, and be the Master Builder of the new white America. 

 

Of course none of this had even a scintilla of truth and was only the fevered nightmare of progressives who were still incredulous that such a man, the spawn of the devil, Beelzebub and Satan incarnate could possibly be headed to the White House once again.  They had done everything in their power to ruin the man, to eviscerate his neo-tribalistvblood lust, to suck his blood and leave the whited sepulcher cracked, broken and empty for all to see. 

In fact the 75 million Americans who voted for him saw through the craven, hysterical campaign of the Left.  Every false accusation, every Salem witch trial, every corrupt political prosecutor and judge, every attempt at tar and feathering, ever rack and cauldron of boiling oil, every slanderous attack only garnered more votes for the man; and by Election Day, he was the conquering hero, the man to rid the country of the scourge of the Left, unpatriotic, seditious naysayers who deserved nothing but a Genghis Khan decapitated impalement along Pennsylvania Avenue.  

Terror remained in the progressive redoubts of the Left; and when the President-Elect announced that on his first day of office he would round up all illegal aliens and ship them back across the border, they went into an apoplectic St. Vitus' Dance, crazed whirling dervishes, cabals of lunatics renting their clothes, howling and wailing to the heavens, and banging their heads against the shibboleths of Independence Avenue. 

Before running off the rails they had said only, 'No, he can't...he wouldn't...he won't', expecting some Deus ex machina to arrive with a crusading heavenly army and carry him off, to save the nation since they could not, to spare the republic from four years of penitential fury and the horrors of Bedlam.  Now, however, as Trump's avant-garde of white men, blonde wives and children in tow, came storming into the capital, they knew it was time to head for the hills, crouch in their own deep state warrens until the Sturm un Drang had passed and they were welcome in Washington once again.

Even from their exile in the back country, in wet and nasty shelters, they continued to bray their  fantastical notions of Nazi cattle cars filled with Latinos, headed to the camps and the ovens, the first step in the ethnic cleansing of America.  Before the black ghetto is emptied and its residents shipped to the cotton plantations of the South, Trump will deploy phalanxes of storm troopers to the inner city, shooting looters, pimps, ho's, and car thieves on sight.  There will be torchlit midnight parades down Pennsylvania Avenue, huge MAGA flags flying over caparisoned horse guards, tanks and cannons behind, followed by ten thousand goose-stepping soldiers. 

Although illegal immigrants rounded up and sent across the border will not travel first class, they will not be in cattle cars either.  The President of Mexico, the country which ranks Number One in exports to the United States, higher even that China or Japan, wants no Trump tariffs, has welcomed the Trump deportation initiative, and promised that those deported will not return.  NAFTA, the cross-border free trade agreement which was largely responsible for the rapid economic growth of Mexico will be restabilized - a legal exchange of goods, services, and labor will once again be the ordre du jour. 

Democratic mayors of sanctuary cities will see the handwriting on the wall.  Their protected electoral status (the highest proportion of Harris votes came from large metropolitan areas) will be under threat given the Trump juggernaut, and no matter how much they howl righteous protests, they do not want to see federal grants curtailed.  They will be willing informers to ICE, naming names, and giving addresses. 

These are the same mayors who fought to defund the police and stop police brutality and the oppressive intimidation and dishonor of black men, only to see ghetto crime increase and their cities turned into lawless third world places. Unless they are careful, municipal control of police forces will be wrested from them as unwanted federal officers will take over the job of law and order.  Trump threatened Chicago with that in his first term and will do it again.  These Latinos are not black, say the mayors, so giving them up will make room for their own people. 

Many illegals who took Trump at his word have already hightailed it back across the border.  Better take up again with cock-tease Juanita in San Miguel than be bussed to Sinaloa-land, and given the porous border, they will be back - maybe not immediately, but American politics is a cyclical circus at best, not much better than their own banana republic brand of in-and-out. 

'It's not as bad as I thought', says one of the Griner brothers in John Boorman's Deliverance about the thumb he had just banged with a tire iron, a meme beginning to make the rounds in official Washington, as the more savvy, street-wise Democratic politicos look for opportunity.  Not that there would be much, but feathering one's nest is another popular refrain in town.  As in the movie, there would be a lot of buggering and murder in the next four years, but there would be an end to it all. 

In the meantime, hold on to your hats.  Trump means what he says and there will be zero tolerance to crime as well as illegal immigration.  The Black Lives Matter nonsense - the lionization of the black man, the vilification of the white, and the intemperate hatred of one for the other - will be a thing of the past.  A culture of restraint will replace that of erroneous assumption, automatic forgiveness, and hands-tied neutering of the police. 

A severe, abrupt turning to the right, and an enforcement of American laws of the land may appear anti-democratic to some and reminiscent of El Salvadoran government roundups and Filipino extrajudicial measures to others; but the country has veered so far into ungovernable incivility that even normal exercises of police power are suspect.  In a society so intimidated by the Left, so timorous and hesitant to call out anti-social behavior for what it is, any expression of muscular rectitude will be at first questioned then embraced. 

 

The Left has reason to be exercised, and well they should be.  The culture of unquestioned permissiveness, the glorification of racial identity, and the proto-socialist faux inspirations of 'equality' has finally been challenged, and the country is ready for a reversal. A little Wild West justice doesn't seem so bad.  A return of hanging judges, the law of the six-shooter, and the pacification of American territory might be just what the country needs. 

The Circus Leaves Town - The Left's Diverse Menagerie Heads For The Hills

The diverse cabal of the Left was one and done as a new white, straight Administration came to town - not just in a quiet transition, but in a bandwagon with floats and sequined dancing girls.  It seemed like Trump had emptied Las Vegas and brought the whole lot of them with him.  It was his show now, an extravaganza of lowbrow, showy, glitzy America.  

Gone would be the moroseness of progressive worry - worry about this, worry about that until a grey, threatening penumbra had settled over the entire city.  The sky was falling, the climate was warming, Jim Crow was at the gates, oppression and greed were daily assaults on good black people, cripples were wheeling themselves to higher ground, asylum-seekers were in the crosshairs of ICE sharpshooters, yada yada, on an on ad infinitum ad nauseam. 

'A new broom sweeps clean', was your grandfather's way of describing a turnover in government; but the Trumpists were coming with sparklers, rockets, and Roman candles in an avant garde ahead of the bulldozers and backhoes.  No sweeping here, more than a broom was needed to get rid of the dirt and trash that had piled up for four years, scoop it up and away and while you're at it, tear up the cracked and crumbling foundations that propped up the whole dismal lot. 

There was more than just show in this straight, white, able-bodied, no-nonsense crowd come to run the government.  Collectively they made a statement of solidarity - gone would be diversity and in its place rock-solid, unshakeable intelligence, talent, and creativity.  The Cabinet was to look like nothing except be the locus of ability, drive, and commitment. Gone would be affirmative action, identity box-checking (black, gay, transgender, disabled, and any and all combinations and permutations thereof), and the dull, slavish, prescriptive hires of the past. 

'What will become of us?', wailed Roberta Perkins, nee Robert Perkins flouncing up and down in her Capitol Hill office as the movers took stock.  'Ya gotta go, Bobby, time's up', a hairy brute of a man grunted as he lifted Roberta's cute little settee on his dolly and wheeled it into the corridor in a migrant stream of desks, swivel chairs, and lamps. 

'Where will I go?', she screamed to no one in particular, but her howls of grief could be heard up and down Pennsylvania Avenue as offices were emptied of progressive faithful, pushed aside by the juggernaut of that man whose name would not be spoken.  She hugged and kissed her way to the street and stood there disconsolate but surrounded by the very menagerie put in place by her patrons.  

It was a well-dressed group - the new Left had left the Upper West Side Jewish shabby, concerned look long ago, and had bella figura, expropriated from Italian dons and Venetian women, lookin' good, attractive but beneath the veneer beat the same progressive heart of Eugene Victor Debs and Samuel Gompers. 

Yet this well-dressed coterie was standing around looking like they were waiting for an Uber, talking and gabbling among themselves, snatches of 'Boise....New Orleans...Europe' heard among them.  They and the whole Democratic progressive Left had been caught with their pants down.  They had never in a million years ever considered electoral defeat.  Their candidate, a proud black woman of intelligence, experience, and commitment would ipso facto take her rightful place in the Oval Office.  This now supernumerary, shell-shocked cabal, standing disconsolate, grieving, and wounded on the corner of 18th and Constitution never believed it could happen, and made no plans for if it didn't. 

With DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) over and done with, their chances of employment were slim.  They had been propelled upward by their gender, race, and ethnicity alone, and now faced the no-nonsense competition of the private market.

Horror of horrors, Roberta even considered changing back - yes, God forbid and forgive such apostasy, go back to being a man, sexually wobbly at first but recognizable and flying no red flags during interviews.  He once followed the Bears and the Cubs and could do so again.  Anything to avoid this awful drifting feeling. 

 

Of course poor Jackie Phelps, ghetto recruit, wheelchair bound, and dyslexic would have a harder time changing his spots.  He had a remunerative sinecure in the White House, a kind of sentinel or banner-bearer of multi-minority stature who had to do nothing but show up for work; and now what would he do?  It was one thing to stop sashaying and walk like a Marine another thing altogether to alter an identity which was already too deformed for a fix-up. 

The only recourse of the gold-toothed, steel-grilled former Anacostia pimp, Pharoah Jones who represented 'authentic blackness', as the Vice President had mentioned when she introduced him to the press, would be to return to the 'hood, pick up where he left off, the 'Monsieur of Anacostia', whose stable of women beggared the imagination of even street-savvy black men. 

It was one thing to change Administrations, but this Trump thing was simply intolerable - all these square-jawed goons with their blonde wives acting all business and authority, muscling aside their betters as they rushed in, ripping down rainbow flags, Hate Has No Place Here signs, Black Lives Matter festoons, and pink and roseate throw rugs.  This was not a transition, it was a Genghis Khan marauding invasion and their heads were to be chopped off and impaled on spikes up and down Independence Avenue. 

 

'Folded back into the body politic', snipped one streetcorner exile, but since that body was now bloated and proud of its misogynist, homophobic, racist ways, there would be no room for them, not even in the creases. Devotedly secular, they didn't even have the church to turn to.  In more religious times, there would always be a home for them in God's house, but their persistent banging and hammering at the falsity and pretention of religion closed those doors forever. 

So, the circus tent was taken down and the ringleaders, acrobats, clowns, lion-tamers, and freaks all headed for the hills, weird-looking asylum seekers in inhospitable parts unknown.  They had no patriotism to speak of, nothing consummate about American goodness to fall back upon, no ties to the heartland, no nothing, identity flotsam and jetsam floating about, drifting in and out on the tide. 

Or so it seemed to Roberta, always of a poetic bent. Didn't do her a bit of good, however, for no matter how you cut it, her kind was in one sweep of the broom unnecessary, supernumerary, dismissed, and forgotten.  

'We'll be back!', she shouted to no one in particular, but one of those square-jawed straight white Trumpers in a BMW with the top down, shouted back, 'Not for a long, long time, sweetheart'. 

The Sorcerous Transformation Of Kamala Harris, Presidential Candidate, Into A Nasty Old Woman

'You gave it a good run, Sweetheart', said Kamala's husband after the election. 'I know you'll be smarting for a while, but you're a fighter.'

 

I know he means well, she thought, but sometimes he can be an obtuse dope. 'Smarting?? Jesus Christ'.  She never admitted anything but resolve and indomitability to her closest circle, and only in the hours of her seclusion after the election returns had come in did she fly off the handle.  'That prick', she yelled to the paneled walls of the bomb-proof rec room in the basement of the Vice Presidential residence. 

'That fucking asshole...that...' Words always failed her when she resorted to trash talk, so well-brought up by her Indian mother was she. 'Ah, mother', she sighed, 'I never gave you the credit you deserve. Black was the thing, Daddy's black thing, not curry and holy cows which is about all Americans can imagine when they think of India'. 

That nostalgic memory of her mother calmed her, and the mood of badmouthing passed. 'I must prepare for the next phase', she whispered to the bar dog caricatures above the rows of Jameson and Laphroaig her husband had arranged.  'But what is it?'

That was indeed a good question, for given her humiliating electoral defeat, and her miserably low opinion polls, there was little room for her in the political aerie. An aide had shown her an MSNBC poll showing strong support for a 2028 presidential run, but no one had ever trusted that shameless shill of a news outlet, little more than a circle-the-wagons Never Trump howler. 

'You should be thankful', an aide reminded her. 'MSNBC kept Donald Trump in the crosshairs'.  

Indeed they had and so had the fat ass prosecutor in New York and that self-serving cunt in Atlanta.  Her own party had done her in with their cockamamie witch trials and cooked up accusations without ever giving her sound campaign advice when she needed it. 

'And oh boy, did I ever need it', she thought, put out on the line and left hanging.  'Of course I had to laugh, big joke it was, faux half-Indian black woman trotted out and expected to wow everyone in sight'. Where were my position papers? My policy statements?  Go get 'em, Madam Vice President they said, you got rid of Joe, now make something of it. 

'They say I pushed the old man under a bus', Kamala mused, 'but I had no choice. Either him or me, and the doddering fool couldn't tie his own shoelaces let alone run the government. I did the country a favor'. 

'Happy Thanksgiving', Madam Vice President, said one of her aides as she made an appearance at the White House to help with the transition.  That word stuck in her craw.  Transition to what? To a perverted quack, a bullying cock, a fat fucking slob?  'I can't do it', she had said to her husband who nodded in quiet support as he had always done.  'I won't be in the same room with him, Oval Office or not, my bloody office it should be, not that asshole's'.

Her husband was a bit surprised at the outburst. This was not the Kamala he knew, the Genghis Khan of the courtroom, Siva the Destroyer on the Judiciary Committee slashing Brett Kavanagh until the poor man lay bleeding on the floor of the Senate.  No, this was not the measured, drilling, brutal woman he married.  She was unhinged.  This did not augur well.  

'Happy Thanksgiving to you too', she murmured as she walked past the aide.  Thankful for what, exactly? Pilloried at the polls, a laughing stock, a caricature with no second act. 'I'm being too hard on myself', she thought.  'Far too hard', but it was difficult to chase those videos of her cackling away like a chicken, word salad and all.  It was hard to get one's thoughts together on a good day let alone to face the press. 'And I'm philosophical; and that doesn't lend itself to simple replies'. 

'Thankful for what?' she said to a portrait of Thomas Jefferson in the North Corridor; and with that the lady became an embittered old bitch, nasty in temperament and spirit. 

'Pull yourself together, Dear', said her husband, noticing the change and upset by it.  One and done had always been his motto, and although they had no children, they sat on a comfortable nest egg of millions and there was her memoir to write. Retirement wouldn't be such a bad idea, and he already had designs on a nice property in Beverly Hills. 

This had been her problem all along - a chameleonic come-hither, go-there career without much substance.  No meat there, no center to speak of, no guiding light, no beacon.  To her credit she had made a lot out of nothing, but now, the brass ring deprived, and the future as empty as an old barrel, she needed something, anything.

Every so often in these last months in Washington, scraps of ideas for her memoir popped into her head.  'I Am A Proud Black Woman' would be the title of the book and its first line, but after that she had only scattered, inchoate ideas of what was next.  First of all it would take time for this rancid bile, this maw-slamming, animus to die down.  Can't write a book while seething with hostility.

Every white male on the White House walls - Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, Monroe - they were all buggering idiots. 'Founding Fathers'? Fat chance, old discredited fools like Joe without a clue to what makes women, let alone the country, tick.  Day by day the famous broad smile turned more and more sour and unpleasant until it became a sneer. 'I want out of here now', she said, 'not wait for the Inauguration of that wigged poseur'; but the nagging question of where never left her screen and was never answered.

'It will come to you, Dear', said that blundering fool of a husband, increasingly simpering and toadying, an uxorious charade of a man. 'Need to get rid of him too'. 

Some of her most ardent and passionate supporters saw her downward turn as an expression of the depth of the woman.  Only a woman of such complexity could suffer such an existential crisis.  Most defeated candidates went happily back to pottering in the garden or appearing at ladies' teas, but this remarkable woman was experiencing a crisis of Greek tragic proportions. 

'Nonsense', said the rest of America, glad to be rid of the harridan, and glad finally that that barking, unpleasant woman would disappear completely. 

'You tried, Sweetheart, and that's all anyone can ask', comforted her husband. 

Just as she was about to send him off with a Fuck you, Jack, the doorbell rang, and it was Jehovah's Witnesses.  'How did they get past security?', she wondered, but now that they were here, might as well listen. 

The Coming To Washington Of A Man Who Loves Women - Donald Trump And The New Sexual Ethos

The political-social climate in America has been censorious, presumptuous, and unrelenting in its righteousness. Social reformers have been intent on neutering sexuality, removing all traces of a Lawrentian, Williams-like heterosexual power, and replacing it with a passionless gender spectrum.   

All that is behind us now as Donald Trump will soon be in the White House.  An unapologetic lover of women, a bad boy par excellence, a man of male allure, attraction, and sexual intent, he brings with him to Washington a sexual counter-revolution.  The old game of seduction is alive and well.  The lap dogs trained and muzzled by women in the MeToo, No Means No ethos, the men who bought the whole consideration, flowers-on-her-birthday, do-the-dishes cant of the progressive era are now supernumerary, flotsam and jetsam, muscled aside by the newcomers. 

It is about time, and in our low-brow society, Trump brings with him not just sex but glitzy, sequined, arm candy sex - the kind of uninhibited, unabashed love of perfume and high heels, décolleté, and a walk that turns heads. 

There is something irresistible about glamorous, showy women – the ones who wear makeup and perfume, high heels, and minks.  Outrageous to some they display sex and feminine sexuality like no other.  They are burlesque, Can-Can, Folies Bergères, painted, gussied, long-legged beauties who fill music halls and casinos.  Men may say they prefer sobriety, good taste, and intelligence in their women, but their heads turn at something entirely different.

For the last four years there has been a sexless drone to the Oval Office.  Despite his past weakness for ‘inappropriate touching’, Joe Biden kept his sexual distance from women.  Some feminists have suggested that it is exactly this immature sexuality – hesitatingly and affectionately touching them but never ever really wanting women– that has kept the President faithful.  

Whatever it has been, Biden’s silly familiarity with women, a kind of chummy fraternity transposed to the opposite sex, was never really male; certainly not in the JFK mold, nor in LBJ's, and not in Bill Clinton's.  It has been  decidedly asexual, friendly – the intimacy of an old, harmless uncle.

Today’s feminists and their male coterie make automatic assumptions about such relationships.  Tennessee Williams’ ‘fragile’ female characters – Blanche, Alma, Laura – are, these progressive advocates insist, are all oppressed and dominated by the men in their lives.  They are victims, sufferers, and in no way independent from the predatory male.  

Williams of course thought just the opposite, and put social assumptions and environment aside.   Sexual attraction at its best and worst is primitive, and at the heart of both epiphany and disaster.  In either case it is not an affair of misogyny, abuse, or oppressive domination.

Donald Trump comes to office with a sexual defiance that in one fell swoop will wipe away every last trace of solemnity, obeisance to the feminist canon, fantastical notions of  gender reform and alternate sexuality.  The bump and grind is back, hookers and playmates will again be frequent visitors to the White House, and an ethos of virility, male pursuits, and feminine allure will be the meme. 

The French have always been the beacon of frank, mature sexuality.  Former President Sarkozy kept his mistress in the Elysees Palace, and his predecessor Francois Mitterrand's mistress and illegitimate child stood hand in hand with his wife and their children at his funeral.  Putin's mistresses are legendary, and sexual permissiveness is the rule from the Thames to the Volga.  

Chinese emperors had their concubines, the shahs of Persia had their harems, and the kings and courtiers of Europe were always accompanied by high-toned elegant princesses or harlots.  Sex was for the asking and taking; but not in America, land of puritanical, bonneted, cloistered, and deeply censured sexual relationships; but now, finally, the lid has been lifted, Shakespeare's Boar's Head Tavern and the tricks of Mistress Quickly are back on Pennsylvania Avenue.  

Most importantly, the Trump White House will be the residence of The Man Who Loves Women, an unabashedly virile President who makes no apologies for his desire.  The President-elect has not one precious, timid, and sexually demurring bone in his body.  His allure comes from that confidence, pursuit, and persistent sexual intent.  

One of Donald Trump's political advisors, had always been, like his boss, a man who loved women.  As a young man he made the rounds of the classrooms and refectories of Miss Willard’s and soon the most adventurous and sexually precocious girls were seen with him.  It didn’t seem to bother them that he had already had his share of girls from both sides of the tracks, that he bedded and left them quickly and unceremoniously, that he showed no interest in love or a relationship, or that he showed no signs of interest in them as people, individuals, beings of value.  In fact every new report of his dereliction piqued their interest even more.  

None of this is surprising or new, of course.  Good girls have always fallen for bad boys. Their unshakeable male confidence; their calm, determined sexual nature; their social defiance, and their rejection of the proper and the predictable are Darwinian traits.  The righteous, the dutiful, and the honorable cannot hold a candle to them.  It is their children that good girls want.  They want to pass on to their sons their mates’ irrefutable maleness. 

Although the other side of the brain tells them to be sensible, to marry a good provider, a family man, a man of principle and caring, they cannot resist the allure of bad boys.  Most women fall prey to the inevitable social pressures of a good, profitable marriage, and a solid roof over their heads; but will always regret never having at least tasted a wild seed. 

Those who do marry bad boys soon realize what they have done, for they never change.  Their irresistibility to women and their desire for them remains as much a part of them as it did before marriage.  The very traits that led to a marriage with a good girl lead to the beds of hundreds of others.  Ironically but not surprisingly, this male irresistibility is part of what keeps these women married.  They hate the idea of such an attractive, virile mate sleeping with other women, but this sexual insistence is why they married him.

D.H. Lawrence, perhaps more than any other writer understood sexual determinism – sex is not simply an act of pleasurable procreation, nor one of intimacy and consolidation; but one of almost epiphanic importance.  Men and women seek each other for the possibility of a uniquely powerful, if not transformative sexual experience.  Lady Chatterley and Mellors seek each other out despite the great differences in social class because of this instinctive, irresistible attraction. 

Flaubert’s Madame Bovary wanted nothing to do with her pedestrian, dutiful, and insufferably boring husband; and looked to men of physical beauty, sexual allure, and social prominence.

Sinclair Lewis’ heroine in Main Street grew  increasingly impatient with her rural doctor husband and his patient dutifulness.  She wanted  more than a man of principle and good intent, and she eventually left her husband to find her own way. While Lewis brings her back to reality and to her husband, he has created a female character of vitality and sexual energy.

Tennessee Williams’ Alma, the main character in Summer and Smoke was brought up in a rectory by a censorious, disciplinarian father, and has for most of her youth followed his precepts and good counsel; and yet she is ineluctably attracted to the bad boy next door, the ‘wastrel’, womanizer, and libertine.  He is the one, not the schoolmarmish, bookish young man who seeks her company.

Blanche and Stella, main characters in Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire both are attracted to Stanley, an unashamed male who likes women, who understands them, and in his irrevocably powerful sexuality attracts them easily and often.  In Williams’ mind, like Lawrence’s, this primitive, inexplicable, but captivating sexuality is the central point of male-female relationships.  It is no surprise that women like Stella, unpretentiously feminine in her wifely and motherly role; and Blanche in her sexually promiscuous way are both attracted to Stanley.

Because good girls always fall for bad boys, the boys have no reason whatsoever to reform, to repent, or to apologize for their ways.  They understand the indefinable but inevitable captivity of sexual bonding.  The wives who have married them for their untrappable ways, and who have voluntarily agreed to this particular marital contract will bear up, conciliate, draw some of their own lines in the sand, but be satisfied.

This is the essence of the Trump counter-revolution - a forward, unintimidated, supremely confident stable of men with no apologies for their sexual interest, and a pen of women who love them, want them, and bed them without reservation. 

Looking Like America - Pimps, Ho's, Ghetto Grilles And The Coming Of Donald Trump.

'The black man has been marginalized, demonized, and ostracized', the Reverend Isaiah  C. Thomas shouted from the pulpit of the AME Zion Church of Anacostia. 'The white man, the whitest man ever born on this planet, perpetuator of the slave mentality, the Simon Legree of all Simon Legrees, a plantation grandee, a slave trader, captain of the ships bringing us to America, is returning to Washington to take his seat atop a white Olympus, a Pharoah whipping Nubians into submission to build his pyramids, his white fortress, his incarcerating, intimidating, interning castle of power and privilege.'

 

'Amen', shouted the hundreds of souls that filled the church to overflowing.  'Amen, brother', was the deep-throated, resonant response to the pastor's thrilling words.  'This beast, this white avenging angel is set to suck the heart and soul out of the black man, take his being, throw him back to the jungles of Africa and be done with him.'

Again the preacher paused, mopped his brow, and looked out over the rapt congregation hanging on his every word, hoping against hope that he would cast out the demon and invite Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ into this holy temple of God, to appear to black people like him, swarthy, dark, and intensely righteous, hallowed, and anointed. 

 

Reverend Thomas spoke softly, invitingly, cajolingly. 'But we ain't goin' to let that happen, are we?  ARE WE? he yelled at the top of his lungs, and the congregation as one stood and said, 'NO WAY' again and again until the very rafters shook. 'We will rid Washington of the demon', he said, 'toss him on the curb, cleanse the altar of democracy of this spawn of the devil.  OUT SATAN!' he shouted, and the congregation went wild.  'Hallelujah', they responded. 'Praise be to Jesus' was the response that echoed from pew to pew.

'Let us pray', said the Reverend, spent by his efforts, worn and weary by the labor of the Lord, to the congregation, gloriously inspired, uplifted, and ready. 

That Sunday morning the tithes, alms, and contributions were never more generous - overflowing in fact, a godly support of the faithful on their pathways to heaven.  'A good take', said Barbary Jefferson, 'a very good take' as he emptied the collection baskets. 'You were on fire, absolutely incendiary', he said to his pastor. 

The congregation filed out of the church onto the street stepping over the detritus of the slum - needles, dopers, hustlers, and touts.  The church was the only building on the block not boarded up.  The nail salons, barber shops, liquor stores, and pawn shops had all closed.  Walkin' around money, entitlements, and political patronage could not slow the dereliction and the indifference.  Anacostia was Lagos West, a crowded, debilitated, crime-ridden nasty, opportunistic place. 

The words of the Reverend Thomas were uplifting and heartfelt.  This mess, this miserable, unforgivably nasty neighborhood was not their fault, but that of the white man, his Jim Crow insolence, lifelong hatred of the black man, racial animus, bullying indifference; and now the ur-white man, the man who was building an all-white Administration, a man who promised to end consideration for the poor and the oppressed, this racist neo-George Wallace bigot, was in the White House no more than a few miles away. 

 

'You've got to put a black man in the Cabinet', Donald Trump's transition advisor noted.  We're down to just a few positions, and still not a one'.  Now, the former President and President-elect had run on  talent-and-loyalty only criteria, and not once did he give the former administration's 'look like America' rainbow nonsense a second glance.  Affirmative action would be dead, cold, and buried before his four years were up, and American institutions would once again be places of excellence, merit, and equal opportunity. 

'What about HUD? asked the aide. 'One appointment won't hurt', but even then the President-elect demurred.  The whole idea of public housing, great Soviet blocs of rancid, decrepit brick and cinder block tenements was anathema. His solution to the housing crisis would be to bulldoze those pestilential housing estates, turn the land over to the private sector, and let the market do its magic. 

'It would look good, Mr. President', the aide concluded. 'A nice gesture', and so it was that one of the more than fifty top positions in the Administration went to a black man, a solid conservative and loyalist who would do no harm, would follow orders, and like his counterpart at the Department of Education, plan for its quick demise. 

Meanwhile in Anacostia, the Jamaican crews ramped up their enterprise.  Time was short and money was to be made, so increase the cocaine, heroin, and Fentanyl transiting the inner city before the old man closed the gates. 

'So, what we goin' to do?, said LaShonda Jackson, the unofficial madam of Anacostia who had a hundred girls walking the streets for her and who turned a righteous profit every week.  Cheap as a trick was on the street corner, they added up, twenty here, fifty there, and before Friday came, LaShonda was in Bethesda buying Armani. 

'Ain't no business of his', said one of her lovers just out of Attica and back on the streets, referring to Trump. 'He ain't goin' to set foot down here, no way, and there ain't nothin' he can do about DC', referring to the municipal government of the District of Columbia, all black, all ghetto products, all former allies of Mayor for Life, The Bitch Set Me Up Marion Barry, and all bound and determined to keep the status quo, soak the white folk in Ward 3 and send it on to the people in Ward 8. 

The ex-con was wrong, however.  There was no way that a conservative white man who ran on a 'cleanse America' ticket was going to sit quietly in the Oval Office when the ghetto was within spitting distance.  Get rid of Home Rule, he had told an aide, turn DC over to the House - our House this time - and get rid of the blight once and for all. His programs of vouchers, school choice, classroom discipline, and most of all a stop to the unaccountable millions poured into the slums with no questions asked, would be the modus operandi of his administration.  'Real Americans, real black Americans will get the picture.'   

Yet none of this would change the ethos, the environment, and the zeitgeist of the inner city.  Ways would be found to make money and make lots of it, plenty to go around.  Washington has the toughest gun laws in the country, but the city is awash in guns. Not only were they bought and sold locally, but Washington had become a major supplier to Baltimore and St. Louis. And drugs? The trade was national, not local.  An insignificant percentage got siphoned off for DC street use. The bulk of it went north and west. 

In other words, LaShonda had no cause for concern, and neither did the entrepreneurs of the gun and drug trades.  Like most white men, the new President would end up not caring in the least what happened across the Anacostia River, live and let live, let the pestilence run on as long as it didn't seep out into white America. 

If you listened carefully during the Hour of the Wolf when most of Washington is sound asleep, anyone on Capitol Hill still awake can hear gunfire from across the river.  That was Washington, they said, going back to sleep. Trump or no Trump, so be it. 

Kamala For President In ‘28! - A Poor, Deluded Woman, A Baffled Party, And The Final Turn Of The Screw

'There's always a next time', said LaShonda Markum, Kamala Harris' closest aide, selected for her loyalty, ambition and color.  She and LaShonda were the faces of the Democratic Party - golden brown and burnished by their ancestral African sun.  These were the faces of a pluralistic, multi-cultural, diverse world of community and peace. 

Of course no one on the juggernaut headed for Washington believed any of this, for the resounding victory of Donald Trump was an equally resounding and humiliating defeat for the progressive left and its faux-Hyperion dreams of sweetness and multicolored light.  That discredited fantasy was done and gone, tossed unceremoniously into the dustbin of history, a failed, disreputable idea of engineered happiness.  The new face of America would be high-performing white and Asian and the populist millions of the hinterland, forgotten and dismissed by the shills and claques of the Left, but raised to prominence by Donald Trump.

 

Almost a month after the election, the American Left is still shocked, dazed, and confused.  How could a woman of color, a proud progressive, and standard bearer for all that is right and good, have been so badly beaten? Worse still, how could all organs of power - White House, Senate, House, and Supreme Court - be in the hands of conservative Republicans?  Not only was their lady defeated, but the whole idea of progressivism was put on notice.  The country had in one fell swoop become the antithesis of moral rectitude, social progress, and historical destiny.  In the hands of an egocentric, authoritarian, anti-democratic rightwing bigot, the country would never become the land of promise and compassion progressives assumed. 

'Wait a minute', said Kamala loudly and sternly to her aide, LaShonda. 'I'm still here, and I haven't given up the fight.  I am still the leader of the Party, its torchbearer, its beacon, its....'

Here the lady stopped for breath and reflection.  Words alone could not describe the fierce passion she felt in her breast, the desire to lead, to make a difference, to be....noticed! But here she was, political flotsam, her name gone from the headlines, with not even a mention in Style or Metro.  'I need to get a team together'. 

 

Few people came running, for in American political terms, she was already a has-been, a supernumerary, better left and forgotten than to replay the past and remind everyone of her missteps, her ineptitude, and her arrogant assumptions.  Who remembers George Dukakis except a few old folks who can't forget the image of the fool poking his head out of an M-1 tank looking like a puppet barely big enough to see out? 

'No one will remember me', said the disconsolate, bruised, and shamed lady. 'Unless....unless...unless I act!'.  For a moment the adrenaline rushed through her veins and started her heart pumping fast. 'It ain't over till it's over.  I'm still Kamala Harris, proud black woman who will have her day'

The problem was, of course, that she still had no clue about running anything let alone a country, and could only think of her campaign speeches about 'Democracy In The Light Of Compassion', 'The Brave New World of Diversity', and her favorite, 'The Time Has Come!' 

Time for what? caviled her bedeviling critics.  Time for this propped up empty suit? This political arriviste?  This harpy?

'Yes', she said to herself.  'I must be more specific this time around'; but the future still was a foggy miasma with no definition, no signposts, no beacons or lighthouses, so how to even begin to frame it for the American people?

Democrats in Washington were scuttling around the floor of the House, banging on closed doors, and jamming the aisles to find some direction forward; but were clueless.  The twin messages they had been flogging for ten years - diversity, equity, and inclusion; and race, gender, and ethnicity - were now old chestnuts, cracked and hardening on dead coals with nothing there to replace them. They couldn't very well go back to the old days of progressivism, the era of Gompers, Brandeis, and LaFollette. She had only paid lip service to these heroes of yesteryear, champions of labor and the little man.  Things had changed.  The progressive struggle was one of new challenges. 

 

Everything she had proposed had gone down the tubes - abortion, the environment, racial equity, communitarianism, social justice, international compassion, and a welcoming, open, generously accommodating people; tossed aside like so many candy wrappers, trash, jetsam.  As far as new ideas were concerned, neither she nor her Party had any, and so looking out across the Potomac, they saw a vast, harsh, wasteland of rubes, crackers, and ignoramuses and could think of nothing to say to them.  

Maybe California will take me back, she thought.  Maybe not Washington, but Sacramento might do in a pinch, maybe get my old job back.  Or write my memoirs,  She already had a title in mind - The Conscience of a Proud Black Woman - and had even sketched out a few ideas for the opening chapter, something about the African forest, her noble tribal ancestry, the slave ships sailing from Dakar, and her ascent to power.  'Too much too soon', said her editor when he read Kamala's first draft, putting it on a back shelf. 

But Kamala was in a hurry to make something of herself, something to burnish her tarnished reputation.  Good Lord, Richard Nixon would have rehabilitated himself completely if he hadn't run out of time and died; but I'm a relatively young woman, she mused, just hitting my stride. 'You ain't seen nothin' yet'. 

 

Well, no licking wounds for her. No whingeing and whining. That was for followers, not leaders, and she would be - must be - on the prow of the New Left's galleon, a heroic female icon of strength, beauty, and passion.  Yet when she sat down at her desk with a White House pen and a blank piece of paper in front of her, she came up as empty as she had before.  Not one interesting, relevant, salient, or compelling idea came to mind. She was as vaporous as she ever had been. 

She had no children, no family legacy, and now no political one.  A footnote of history and a reproductive cipher.  She started to cry but caught herself.  A good thing no one was looking, me turning into a whimpering woman! and turned back to the blank paper on her desk; but after an hour of staring, all that was left was a few scribbles and doodles of space ships and bare trees.  Freud would make something of them, she thought, but no point in saving them for her memoir.  Let's be serious for once. 

So she sailed off into the sunset with no port in mind.  Life's a journey, she remembered, and given her good fortune and good looks, she would certainly find a place to lay her hat.  She fluffed her hair in the mirror, adjusted her jacket, touched up her lipstick, and click-clacked confidently down the corridors of the West Wing. 

Donald Trump's Last Roundup - Ahead Of The Gay Pogrom George And Phil Head For The Emerald Isle

'Oh, God', said Phil.  'You don't mean Italy!  All those beachy Ohio ladies parading around the Piazza San Marco and paddling around the Grand Canal?  You've got to be kidding'.  

Phil was thinking of Italy in high summer when busloads, carloads, and impossibly grandiose, ugly tour boats loaded with third class people were disgorged and headed for Bernini and Michelangelo, but George had found some cottagey thing in Alto Adige, very much their style, well appointed - or it would be after he made the rounds of the cute antique shops in Trastevere.  

Lovely Paolo had just shipped him a marvelous 16th century wooden cross that once hung above the altar at the church of San Pietro, said to be the apostle's place of rest, and would be happy to furnish him with much more.  

'I absolutely, positively refuse', said Phil who simply could not get the smell of diesel fumes and cheap perfume out of his head, and stood adamantly by the coffee while George buttered his toast.

'Where then?', asked George, more conciliatory than usual, but given the enormity of the task - and its imminence, he softened.  The Inauguration was barely two months away and Trump's storm troopers would be headed to Dupont Circle as their first stop. Easy pickin's, only a few blocks from the White House and just loaded with gay men.

'Ireland', replied Phil, remembering that he had promised his grandmother who had come over on the boat from County Donegal in hard times, settled in South Boston, and lit a candle every single day to St. Patrick for her dear departed mother and father, that he would one day visit the old country. 

Now it was George's turn to have a fit. 'Ireland??', he shouted.  'Land of Mickey Finn and the Irish laundries?', this last in reference to the Catholic Church's incarceration of young pregnant girls to work in Diocesan laundries washing knickers, stained sheets, and chasubles, slave labor by any definition

‘Never, ever, never', George said, taking a last bite of his toast on which he had put entirely too much butter, which was now dripping onto his new Armani cardigan. 

Both men, anxious to please the other but without too much conciliation, fished for alternatives.  They had plenty of money, planning ahead as they did once that beastly ogre made his intentions known, and most countries they were considering were quite easy on the visa question. Well not all. That bitch Meloni in Italy was cozying up to Trump, and both were in cahoots on the deportation issue.  Black and brown people would be the first to go, but other undesirables like them would soon be on the next ship to Tripoli if she had her way. 

And Wilders in Holland, Marechal in France, and Orban in Hungary - the whole continent was turning into a Fascist homeland.  What's a mother to do?  All Phil and George wanted was a little cordiality, a warmish welcome, some interesting men, and to be left quite alone when they preferred to be. 

'Let's make a list', suggested Phil, the more organized and practical of the two. 'Lists always help one focus', and so they got out a world atlas and began sifting and vetting until it was time for brunch, a nice champagne and truffle omelet with Harry Grillo, first violinist of the Kansas City (don't laugh) Symphony in town for the weekend.  Harry was such fun, and his behind the scenes anecdotes were priceless, especially the one about the tuba player and the clarinetist, reeds and things in the most unusual places. 

Now, of course Donald Trump had no intention whatsoever in rounding up gay men and interning them on the Pine Ridge reservation with the Lakota, the nastiest, poorest, most drunken and drug ridden place in America; although that was the meme spread by the Left which never appreciated the fact that a whole county of gay men, nasty as it might be,  would not be so bad - just look at Catholic seminaries and the priesthood.  What could be better for gay men than an institution without women? 

Maybe not Pine Ridge, perhaps someplace more congenial like a super-sized dude ranch in Arizona or Utah. 

'He'll be too busy rounding up black people', Phil commented to George when they first had intimations of a Trump-led gay pogrom, 'and God knows that would be the quickest way to get rid of those awful places east of the Anacostia', a reference to Washington's most abysmal, blighted, and penitential slums.

You would think that Phil, being a member of an oppressed minority himself, would never harbor such racist sentiments, but 'knives and forks in separate carrels', he liked to say.  The plight of the gay man had nothing whatsoever to do with the ho's, pimps, and stoop-sitters of the inner city. 

'And sending back the Latinos to wherever they came from', added George whose leaf-blower had forgotten Thursday and never came back even as the leaves piled up around the dead chrysanthemums and zinnias. 'Back to tortilla-land', he said, very much in synch with his partner Phil with regard to who should be first on the list of deportees and internees. 'So maybe rounding us up is just a tempest in a teapot'. 

Over brunch Phil, George, and Harry Grillo mused over the possibilities. 'Hyperbole', said Harry in his fluty tenor, 'pay no attention.  Sturm und Drang.' 

'But have you ever actually been out there?', said Phil, gesturing broadly to take in the entire country west of the Shenandoah.  'They want us dead and gone'; and true enough it was.  When Phil went to Dubuque for a meeting, he did his best straight man imitation at the board meeting, but the room went quiet when he shot his cuffs to show off his diamond cuff links.  They knew, and the silence was deafening.  These crackers all voted for Trump and would send him and George packing on the next boat to China if they could. 

'He can't...He wouldn't dare', said Harry, fussing with his napkin; and the three of them left La Petite Maison without a conclusion.  Wait and see, they decided, and if things get rough, passports and cash were in the drawer.  The thought of Kristallnacht and the emptying of the Warsaw ghetto - jackbooted Gestapo thugs breaking into their Washington duplex and dragging them off, ransacking and pillaging as they went - gave Phil a shudder, but he agreed that a President of the United States simply would not be allowed such power, despite the howling and screaming of the Left. 

Now, anyone in their right mind never took the outlandish claims of the Left seriously.  While it was certainly true that being gay would no longer be the be-all and end-all of American life, the dismantling of the ethos of diversity would be an institutional matter.  Gay stars would no longer shine so brightly in the firmament, but God knows, La Petite Maison would still be there after four years. 

So good sense prevailed.  Phil and George put away their travel brochures and flyers from Lindblad Travel and went about their business. 'Just watch your step', George said to Phil, flouncing and prancing up the stairs like a dancer at La Cage Aux Folles.  Phil got the message, straightened his tie, and walked demurely to work.