TRUMP WINS! America Therefore Is Evil, Fascist, And Racist - The Shameless Aftermath Of The Left's Decisive Loss

It's over, a win far greater and more impressive than anyone on either side expected.  The polls were wrong yet again and failed to account for the millions of Americans who, badgered, hectored, and intimidated by the Left hedged when asked, but voted their convictions. 

The almost ten years of howling, vicious, personal attacks on the President, the complicity of the media, and the reflexive knee-jerk condemnation of the political clergy kept conservatives under wraps, closeted, but never doubtful; but when it was time to vote, vote they did in record numbers to reverse the damaging, corrosive, hateful programs and policies of the Left. 

The coastal elites assumed in the failed Hillary campaign and now in the even more self-righteous, empty one of Kamala Harris, that victory was a foregone conclusion. Partisans believed their own cant and received wisdom: a) Trump is evil, a spawn of the Devil, Hitler reincarnate; and b) there is no way that a black woman can possibly lose anything.  

 

These arrogant, supercilious assumptions were a sign of political myopia at best and a deep-seated antipathy and shameless scorn, for the American working class.  Rubes, crackers, brainless gun-racked bass boat noodlers, Bible-thumping intellectual throwbacks, they were called; and fed up, riled up, and ready to act, they shouted in unison, 'BASTA!', and the rest is history. 

Will the Left finally admit defeat? Admit that they, in their political insularity, noxious dismissal of middle America, and self-righteous claims, were wrong?

Hardly. As of this writing Harris is still in hiding, not a peep, not one word of civility, respect, or modesty let alone congratulations which would be a sign of capitulation to Trump Nazi terror.  Things were not supposed to work out this way.  I was supposed to be elected.  I was supposed to be the first woman, a black one at that, to sit in the Oval Office.  There must be something I can do.  Think, Kamala, think!!!

As for those Democrats who were pulled from behind the arras to comment, nothing has changed.  America is a racist, homophobic, slanderously bigoted country and the only difference between yesterday and today is that voters admitted it.  'Our fight is just beginning', said a Harris supporter in Scranton.  'We must never let down our guard against the viral hate, the bilious spew of genocidal lust, the....' Here the woman spluttered with anger...'the Hitlerian jackbooted, brown-shirted, SS thugs who will put all black and brown people in a new, American Auschwitz...'

The reporter from MSNBC nodded and frowned with recognition.  A dark day for America, her network moaned; but half the country is still progressive in spirit, and We Shall Overcome. 

The howls and rancid commentary have just begin.  No navel-gazing among this crew.  Self-righteousness is not so easily tempered.  When one has bet one's whole being on the election, and gone to bed with smiles and a warm feeling and then awakened not just to a hair's breadth defeat but a gob-stopping blowout is an existential moment.  Everything in a progressive's mind, body, and spirit knew, simply knew that right would prevail, the Demon would once again be cast out, and sweetness and light would prevail in a Utopian age. 

The miscalculation was millennial.  They should have seen it coming, but turned away.  It cannot possibly happen, they said, never in a million years; and there he was again, smiling, joking, bantering as if the election were a round of golf at Mar A Lago and the victory speech a round of drinks.  How could he!! And not a black person in sight on the dais, all lily white people, smug, blonde, and impossibly beautiful, goddamn them!

 

Worse yet, not only did Democrats lose the Presidency, they lost both the Senate and the House of Representatives.  Now, with Republican control of all branches of legislative government and perhaps most importantly the Supreme Court, the cleansing of the Augean Stables will soon begin.  Trump will make good on his promises to roll back insidiously destructive gender-twisting, deforming policies, close the doors to the southern border and open them only to legal entries; end the war in Ukraine and stand solidly and immovably side by side with Israel against Palestinian and Iranian thugs; lower taxes, lighten regulation and stop the Stalinist oppression of the American energy industry.  

And the Senate and House will approve, ratify, and endorse every last one of President Trump's policies. The Left will lick its wounds, cavil and bitch, stand up and shout, but will be unheard - the new political supernumeraries, the new 'insignificants', time to pay up for the last four years of unbridled hatred and fantasy. 

America has spoken.  The working class, for so long disparaged and dismissed is ascendant.  Populism - not only the rule of the people but the ethos of popular rule - has returned. 

When Wackos Try To Go Straight - How Tarted Up January 6th 'Insurrectionists' Get Schooled

The image of the Viking-helmeted, face-painted crazies on the steps of the Capitol on January 6th went viral, a display of the hijinks of the day.  While Democrats wailed the worst, the beginning of the end of democracy and the coming of the anti-Christ, most Americans were unmoved.  The whole thing was a marvelously American show - a circus act of grand proportions, Sturm und Drang, sound and fury signifying absolutely nothing.  

It hadn't been orchestrated by any Rasputin or Kremlin plotters.  It was a bunch of halfwits rounded up from the Idaho Panhandle, Appalachia, and Humboldt County, given war paint and feathers, put on any conveyance East, and let loose in the Nation's Capital. 

No one knew they were going, any more than old-school panty raids on Hadley Hall or the gay Halloween parties that broke out of Castro walk-ups onto the streets - happy bacchanals, whose revelers were tarted up, costumed, and half-naked and bridled were marched up and down by their hostlers and Simon Legrees. 

Why didn't the Capitol Police or the Secret Service know the march was coming? Had they failed in their duty to protect the very temple of democracy?  Of course not  The revelers, all doo-dadded up,  bangles, toy store Ninja swords, and fright wigs were here to party, not insurrect.  Leave them be.  This is America, and even busloads of crazy idiots are normal in a free country. 

So this great eclectic, random cluster of wingnuts from the farthest, most remote and forgotten shitholes of the country somehow cohered, coalesced like a New Year's mob and when someone yelled, 'To the Capitol', off they went like a flooded river, going this way and that until it found its course and headed up Pennsylvania Avenue towards the iconic dome.  To do what and for what, they didn't know.  They had no idea other than camaraderie.  

When a thousand of them like catfish had been pulled and plucked out of riverbanks by noodlers, or hung over from moonshine rousted out of straw tick beds, slipped into overalls and work boots and hauled onto cattle cars only to disembark on the Mall, the shrine of America, who was to question purspose?

This was their time for once.  Every forgotten bit of America finally recognized and given their due; and so they marched to their own drummers up the Avenue, shouting, cheering, hawking and spitting. When passersby, bureaucrats who had spilled out into the winter sunshine for a break from tube lighting and cubicles, saw the parade, they waved and tossed their hats in the air.  Their dull, grey, thuddingly boring life finally had some cheer. 

The rest is history.  This group of backwoods hole-dwellers and crackers got ambition, and dumb as they were raised the ante and burst through the doors of the Capitol as crazy as ever but without a clue as to what they were doing there or what was expected of them.  They had no leadership, no marshals, generals or drill sergeants to give them orders.  They were an inchoate, ridiculous crowd of dopes suddenly realizing that they had been caught with their pants down. 

Now, this episode is only a historical prelude to the real point of the story.  While a few of these wild men were arrested, convicted, and thrown into jail, the rest of the lot went back home.  Not easily, mind you, because these numskulls had no money left after blowing it on beer and street hookers of Anacostia ('Let's get us some chocolate pussy', said one good ol' boy from Arkansas), but return they did; but once they'd seen the lights of Gay Paree, leaky shacks in the woods where it seemed to rain all the time were not exactly they way they wanted to spend the rest of their lives. 

The Humboldt gang had enough to live on - cooking meth gave them incidental change, and day labor on fishing boats or clearing brush in national forests kept them in potted beef and cornmeal - but the Washington caper had shown them another world beyond this one, and the American Dream began to take shape.  They would make something of their lives, make a difference; but just as they had not one coherent idea in their heads when they boarded the busses for the Capitol, none came to them now.  Just a kind of Barbie pastel scene of blondes and broad avenues. 

It was peripheral vision that had done it - the bureaucratic onlookers on Pennsylvania Avenue, probably all with wives and children, a mistress on the side, sirloin and Cabernet at McCormick & Schmidt's, all cheering them but probably laughing at the excess, the boorishness and unkemptness. 

Despite the fact that the 'Insurrectionists' - a label pinned on them after the escapade was over which they proudly adopted - were cheered when they returned to their back woods and hollers, there was a dreary down that settled in quickly.  Ok, maybe they were just out-of-work marginalia, dumb as stones not because of lack of native intelligence, but bad circumstances, all of which could be overcome, American style.  Not exactly chuck it all for lawnmowing and house painting like the Mexican wetbacks in Southern California, but something...'ennobling', a word that one of them had heard along the way, rolled it over on his tongue enough times that it stuck. 

Wayne Fricker caught ambition on his excursion to Washington.  He looked down at his piss-stained overalls, stanky work shirt, and miserable surroundings, and said, 'I am an American'. 

Yet, as it turned out, inclusivity did not include the likes of him, a notion reserved as it was for everyone but white trash who were supposed to be as privileged as every fat-assed white prick at General Motors. Why, who knew if he was really white?  He never knew his father and his mother had led the sporting life for a while in El Paso, so he could claim something other than what he was, probably Mexican. 

When he made it out of the woods to town - a small lumber town with one sawmill, a hardware store, and a saloon - he was stymied but had enough sense to walk over to the mill; but one look at this disheveled, shambling mess of a human being and he never got past the girl at the counter; and from that moment on The Land of Opportunity became nothing more than a seedy brothel, two-bit whores and rotgut whiskey. 

He tried again down the coast, something, anything other than cheap day labor.  He wanted to be signed up, enrolled, chartered in a good place; but one look by management was enough to send him packing, out the door and back up into the woods. 

No such luck, America had passed him by and would continue to do so.  He was detritus, leavings, replaceable and insignificant, noticed by no one, recruited or addressed by no one.  Insurrectionist? If only he had been, perhaps that political cachet would have legitimized him, given him some record of having belonged.  As it was he was flotsam, trash, street dirt. 

Yet, at the very least he could say, 'I did that', and for a long time he knew he could again, would, and should. 

When Priests Go Bad - Fairies In The Vestry And The Compelling Case For Atheism

Father Aloysius F. Brophy, Jesuit, rector of St. Maurice's Church of New Brighton, loved little boys, and couldn't wait until they came of age.  He refused to admit that he was a pedophile - in the quiet of the rectory or the silence of the confessional, he was an honorable member of the Society of Jesus, devout Catholic, and man of principle and moral rectitude; but when the saw those sweet. young, innocent altar boys, his resolve and resolution weakened.  He became a sinner, if in intent only, and if the Catholic Church taught anything, it was the occasion of sin, the fountainhead of actual sin, the place to be avoided above all else. 

 

And so as far as young boys went, he kept his hands under his cassock, on the chalice, or on the host with purity and cleanliness of spirit, but when Father Peacock joined the parish, a gorgeous seminarian who had just taken his vows and turned down far more lucrative and promising churches for St. Maurice, Father Brophy was entranced.  'They' knew each other from the first, in that demure, pious chastity that suggested anything but; and before long the older priest and the newcomer joined in sexual congress. 

The act, officially condemned by the Church, was wrongly decided the young Peacock and his fellow seminarians averred - Jesus himself could not have remained celibate for long with the likes of Paul, John, and the lovely Luke as apostles.  The Last Supper was part seder, part early Christian ceremony, and part male camaraderie, the last being the most important, and God knew the most soulful; and so it was that Peacock and his Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John had a marvelous time as novitiates of Christ, bound and bonded together by Holy matrimony to each other and to Christ. 

While many observers wondered how the Church would survive the counter-cultural revolution of the Sixties and the sexual apertura of the Seventies, a disastrous secularization dismissing religious orthodoxy, their concerns were premature.  The Church was the go-to place for the newly uncloseted gay men who were looking for just this opportunity.  Imagine! a sanctioned all-male institution, cloistered, protected, and cared-for by the Vatican itself, what a sanctuary and playground for a certain, privileged ordained sexuality.

Well, 'ordained' might not be the mot juste for an activity prohibited and condemned for over 2000 years, but human nature and sexual desire being what it is, it should be no surprise that the 400 graduates of St. Bartholomew Seminary dismissed the censorious opprobrium of the Church and turned it into a 'What Would Jesus Do?' moment of Christian charity and community, and off they went happily anointed, married to Christ, and free to enjoy the life of the gay Catholicism. 

When Father Lennon was caught in the vestry in delicto flagrante, using the kneeler to comfortably service the rector, he was warned but not chastised. 'Be a bit more careful, Father, where and when, etc. etc.' but nothing more.  St. Maurice's like every parish up and down the East Coast and then some was gay heaven, so who was to chastise or censor whom? The pot and the kettle were both black. 

So the 'friendship' between Frs. Peacock and Brophy not only went unreported, but was admired by clergy in the archdiocese from Hartford to Willimantic. Theirs was a love affair made in heaven, no irony intended but well appreciated.  God had created these immeasurably congenial enclaves of male bonding and affairs such as those of St. Maurice were to be limned, loved, and written about. 

Until Father Brophy got greedy and crossed the line.  He became lascivious.  Peacock was not enough, and those delectable altar boys were there for the notional picking, so why not?  They were, after all, simply adolescent versions of Peacock, young virgins ready to sacrifice themselves on the altar of God with older, more originalist fathers like him, so where was the harm, the damage?  

None and none again; and so it was that Father Brophy invited the young Peters Marshal to tea one Saturday afternoon, and amidst Easter lilies and frankincense, the priest enjoyed the boy to God's greater glory. 

However, Peters was not the complaisant young fairy that Brophy had become accustomed to.  He was as straight as an arrow, son of a pipe fitter and a nurse, good Catholics, good contributors, and good parishioners and had to be 'encouraged' in the art of pleasuring the good fathers of St. Maurice.  It all came out in the end, part of the growing scandal within the worldwide Church, and Father Brophy was reassigned to a missionary outpost in Chad where he suffered cerebral malaria and died.

Not only were these buggering priests rather unseemly in their predation of little ones, they were ordained ministers of Christ, in the unbroken line of clerics through archbishops, cardinals, the Pope and the resurrected Jesus of Nazareth.  They were priests by Holy Sacrament, not just approved applicants for a job.  Their abuse of children was not only a reprehensible social act, a crime against humanity itself, but a callous insult to Jesus Christ himself.  A sin above all sins, an unforgiveable sin. 

When Harry Gooding got word of the events at St. Maurice, he turned in his union card.  A lifelong Catholic, nurtured by the Church, faithful and devoted to Jesus, the Pope, and the legacy of saints, he reluctantly gave up his faith. What Father Brophy had done was an unconscionable, unforgiveable act. 

'Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater', his friend Rocco Palafutis counselled. 'They are only men'; but that did nothing to deter him.  Anything...anything but this, he replied. 'Those fucking, buggering....' and here he spewed an unprintable, corrosive stream of hateful sexual bile.  It was one thing to approach children, but another for a priest...a priest for Christ's sake.  Nothing but the rack and death by burning was good enough for them. 

Of course it is one thing do leave the Church, another thing altogether to go over to the dark side, the Godless side, but that was exactly what Harry Gooding did.  'Fuck 'em', he said to no one in particular. 'Fuck 'em all', and so it was that Harry became a practicing atheist, more out of anger and spite than blame of the Deity, but so be it.  The dark side can be recrossed with difficulty, so why bother.  His was a more considerate, rational, temperate side without the likes of Brophy and Peacock. 

When The Emperor Returns To Rome - The Triumphant Return Of Donald Trump To Washington

 'The Emperor Returns', what three words strikes more fear into the liberal heart than these?  If Donald Trump win the election and sits again in the White House, the country will become a totalitarian gulag. In a flash the bastions of democracy will be dismantled, due process abandoned, and a secret police force, far more murderous and savage than the Tonton Macoute, Sevak, Stasi, and the KGB combined will be armed and ready to enforce order.

 

Black men will be rounded up in the ghettoes, Latinos corralled and shipped back to Mexico, and gay men and women forced to wear the yellow star.  America will become the land of pogroms, Kristallnacht, the Gestapo, and brutal neo-Fascism.  Only white males will comprise the Politburo, and every January 6th, Insurrection Day, they will stand on the portico of the White House, dressed uniformly, medals and commendations on their chests and salute their leader when he steps forth to address the crowd. 

This fabulist nightmare, collectively concocted by the Left, added to and made more ghoulish and terrifying every day, is the meme of the day before the election.  If the man is elected, the horrors, the savagery, an untoward and unbridled terrorism will rage through the land.  Deliver yourself from this evil, progressives urge, stand tall and defiant.  Let not the tyrant reign!

Of course, few except progressives' credulous minions give this notion even a passing glance.  To the rest of the country it is just this very fantastical tarring and feathering of a true American patriot that is the problem.  For almost a decade since Donald Trump first expressed his political ambitions, his opponents, nonplussed and incredulous that this misogynistic, homophobic, racist imposter could possibly be fit for national office and then actually win it! are now fearful that it will happen again. 

Nothing has stuck.  Despite lawfare, the frivolous, cooked, political witch trials in New York, DC, and Georgia, the man is still as free as a bird.  Despite howls of his indecency, crassness, and callous hatred of the crippled, the demented, the fat, and the other-colored, the man bests Henny Youngman, Jackie Mason, and their claque of Borscht Belt tummlers at every turn.  Despite claims that he is a raucous, untamed, uncontrite devil, the most unconscionably evil being ever to set foot in the highest offices of the land, there he still stands, a demon possessed. 

All of which hysteria is why he is poised to win the election and return to the White House.  It would be one thing to point out alleged policy failures, neglect, or slights; another thing altogether to damn the man as Beelzebub, the spawn of the Devil, a hateful, soulless, craven monster out to burn America to the ground.  No one in their right mind believes one bit of this demented cant except those  naive, impossibly dewy, duped, and political infants of the progressive Left. 

'I am a proud black woman', Madame touts from the podium to whoops and hollers, 'and I will always be', her marvelous non sequitur suggesting the longevity of his burnished identity, to which the crowd roars. 

But the crowd is just the run of the mill, the expectedly unhinged - women, mostly, who still pick up after their husbands, clean the hair in the sink, slam the toilet seat down, and put up with their sexual shenanigans, and look to Madame to free them from this horrible patriarchal bondage.  On Day One she will sign an Executive Order doing away with male abuse, force husbands to listen for a change, pay attention, and give them some credit.  Go, girl! they shout.

On and on the hammers, hectors, and warns.  The Evil One is coming, shut your doors and be afraid, very afraid.  This is enough for the crowd.  The dwarves scramble to the front row for a better view, the crippled wheel themselves to the dais, dashiki-robed women shimmy and shake with pride and joy that one of theirs - imagine that! one of theirs is poised to take the White House.  Hallelujah!!

Not one question is asked about the failed, dismal Biden years - the tens of thousands of you-name-it, unwanted Latinos traipsing across the Sonoran desert to El Norte; or 'Electric now, electric tomorrow, electric forever' ironically reminiscent of the George Wallace speech on the steps of the University of Alabama predicting segregation forever; or cozying up to Gazan thugs because they are representatives of the poor, oppressed, underserved brown populations of the Strip; or the disruptive, punitive lunacy of wealth distribution, reparations, and enforced equality; or the nonsense about pronouns and weird sexual transformations. 

 

'I am a proud black woman' is enough - more than enough for this gullible, transparently naive crowd; while on the other side of the city Trump lambastes Madame and her old boss for just these political idiocies and lays out his vision for the future. 

The campaign is finally over - months of pandering, hysteria, and crass manipulation finished and done with.  Nothing has been resolved - Trump supporters are still adamantly for their man, and the credulous true believers, the Kamala Krowd, are still passionately desperate for a victory - but one of the two has to win and sit where Joe still sits, unaware of just about everything - and eventually the results will be known and confirmed and the entire nation can breathe a sigh of relief...Well, not exactly.  Half the country will be pissed at the result and will regroup for another four years of smarmy, bottom-feeding political antics; and the new President, if Madame, will bang around the Oval Office and Cabinet imagining what leadership is supposed to be; and if Trump will put his house in order. 

Whew! It's finally over...Well, not exactly.  It's just beginning. 

Putin, Xi, The Ayatollah, And Machiavelli - Overmatched, Diversity-Only Kamala Harris In The White House?

'I am a proud black woman', shouts Kamala Harris from the podium to a cheering crowd in Scranton; and then when the applause dies down, she wraps her arms around LaShonda Washington, her campaign aide and really black window dressing black woman who is on every stage with her - her ventriloquist's dummy, her stage prop, her can't-do-without sign of solidarity with every black man, woman, and child. 

'And I am here for you!' Again cheers and momentousness.  The lady will not be denied, and the love and adulation from this crowd proves it.  Her time is coming, and it is about time. 

Vladimir Putin had just been shown a short video montage of the woman, smiled, and said, 'We will bury them'.

 

Anatoly Karpov, his aide de camp was old enough to remember Khrushchev's same words said in a similar reference to a grand promise, the burying of capitalism, and he laughed at his boss' irony.  They both knew that if this woman inconceivably but possibly made it to the White House, they - the Russians - would have the last obstacle in their way of total victory in Ukraine removed.  

And, they both knew, everything else as well.  They would have free rein to achieve every ambition they ever had since Russia's humiliation after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Vladimir Putin was ruling over a renascent, ascendant Russia, heir to Alexander I and Peter the Great, the vision of a new empire before him extending from Vladivostok to Vienna, Siberia to the Black Sea, and with worldwide economic hegemony. 

 

Who would stop him?  How could anyone deter this brilliant Machiavellian who was outsmarting the West, concluding military arrangements with America's bitterest enemies, purging the nation of outliers, dissidents, and counter-revolutionaries?  The hegemonic victory of Russia was a foregone conclusion, now made easier by the likelihood of Kamala Harris in the Oval Office. 

It was hard to imagine how far the United States had fallen, how weak and impotent it was in the face of Russia, China, Iran, and bloody Muslim insurrectionists from the Middle East to the Horn of Africa. A once proud, defiantly patriotic and ambitious nation, it had become a pusillanimous, silly, self-reverential non sequitur - an international cipher. 

The clips of Harris surrounded by cross-dressing, tarted-up transgender hookers, ghetto pimps and street whores, fey, swishy gay men, and a circus tent full of dwarves, elfin men, and bearded ladies were not only hilarious, they were as portentous as were the Signs of the Seven Seals of the Apocalypse.  No nation so mired in trifles and so self-assured about them; no nation as hopelessly Utopian and historically ignorant could ever prevail.  

Kamala Harris was a caricature, a cackling hag, boasting, claiming, assuming with nothing at all behind it.  A poseur, an imposter, a bad vaudevillian, a clown; but as Putin's aide said to him, 'Let's hope she wins'. 

 

The scene in Beijing was no different. President Xi had gathered his intelligence unit to give him a briefing on the American election; and when the heard the news that Harris had a good chance of winning, he smiled, thanked his advisors, and offered a toast to the lady.  No outcome could be more accommodating, generous, and welcome.  Now he could take over Taiwan with impunity, continue China's economic roundup of all the rare earths, oil, precious metals, and gems in Africa, expand Chinese influence far beyond the South China Sea, and increase its financial stranglehold on America. 

So encouraged by the predictions of his staff, he threw a great banquet in the Hall of Emperors for them, and in his welcoming speech expanded on his vision of a new Imperial China.  A nation which had already restored much of its former world stature would continue until it was once again glorious. 

The Ayatollah, unhappy with his country's desultory, inconsequential attack on Israel and the surprisingly weak responses to Jewish oppression by Hamas and Hezbollah, knew that Iran's time was coming.  When that whore of Babylon was in the White House, things would change.  She had already signaled her retreat from America's solidly pro-Israeli policies and offered a generous helping hand to Palestine.  She would not stand by while innocent Gazans and Lebanese were slaughtered by Jewish barbarians; and when she withdrew America's military and economic support of Israel, Iran would crush it.  

'We loved Barack Obama', the Ayatollah said to his clerics, 'but we love Kamala Harris even more', and love they should.  She has been all for Israeli restraint ('Think of the children') and support of Palestine, and such policies would be continued once she took over the government.  It would be open season for Iran, sanctions lifted, a blind eye turned to its support of armed Muslim Defenders Of Palestinian Rights. and a generous welcome to Iran into the Commonwealth of Nations.   

'A gift from Allah', said the Ayatollah, as he and the clerics bowed their heads in prayer. 'May you, O Almighty One, grant our prayers for total victory over the Jew, and may you grant peace and love upon Kamala Harris, and may the American apostates soon sit in obeisance to you'. 

Meanwhile, Kamala continued to bang on about the black man, the queer woman, the transgender, the poor, and the disenfranchised.  From stop to stop she invoked democracy, peace, well-being, social justice, and fairness, clucking and clacking about a woman's place, 'the inheritance of love', gender fluidity and the plight of the poor.  

Not a word of it made any sense except to her admirers who had no need to parse her words or go beyond her heady aphorisms.  She was a black woman poised to take over leadership of the world, and that was enough. 

Her admirers in Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran also cheered her on.  A Harris victory would be theirs at least until the American electorate woke up and in four years tossed the woman out; but four years was plenty of time to move forward with their own international agenda; and who knows what a marvelous triumvirate Russia, China, and Iran would make. 

The Campaign Menagerie Of Kamala Harris - And The Coming White House Zoo

'We must be relevant!', Kamala said to her aide as she set off to campaign in Wisconsin, a state she had never visited and still wondered exactly where it was. 

'Cheese Heads', Madame Vice President, 'Cheese Heads', repeated the aide, a Green Bay fan who once had been in the end zone stands when the Packer tight end, just having eluded two Detroit safeties scored and jumped into his arms.  A moment to remember.

He was disappointed that Madame knew little about his state other than cheese and now Cheese Heads. 'Aren't there a lot of us there?', she asked referring to the growing black population of the capital, once a nice, white, tight enclave of Scandinavians but verging on inner city dysfunction as bad as that of Baltimore and St. Louis.  Indeed, the aide replied, 'and I can guarantee their votes'. 

'But I don't have to go there, do I?', asked the Vice President who had been laughed out of Anacostia, Washington, DC's nastiest slum where she had visited to test the waters.  'Get yo' ass up outta here, bitch', shouted one woman from the fourth floor window of the public housing complex where she and a hundred other big black women lived.  

Kamala was surprised at the welcome.  She, a proud black woman, was sure that her people would respond with enthusiasm at her visit, and instead was jeered and insulted like a common politician...not including Mayor Marion Berry, of course, Mayor-for-Life who built his reputation in Ward 8, beloved man of the people, of the slums, whose walkin' around money and no-show jobs had endeared him to his constituents. 

 

Of course Madame was no ward politician, and certainly no convicted criminal whose 'The bitch set me up' remark when DEA broke in on him smoking crack with his two-bit whore became his trademark.  No, Kamala had risen to power thanks to white people, knew her place among them, and only dipped into the black trough enough to freshen her minority credentials. 

'Thank God, they always vote Democratic', Kamala said, meaning heading for the deep ghetto was no longer necessary, a waste of time when she needed the votes of white steelworkers and railway engineers. 

Now, hers was a movable menagerie, and she picked and chose carefully from it depending on the audience.  At the Madison campus of the University, to a packed house of cheering young people, every alternative life style member of her coterie was on stage with her.  A transgender woman who had once played on the Wisconsin football team, and as Kamala's aide reflected, might actually have been the tight end who jumped into his arms at Green Bay

. 

A flouncy gay man in ribbons and silk; a Bernal Heights tough girl in flannel and leather; a Mexican farmworker who came up only to the waist of the football player (Kamala had debated even bothering with him, since there were few migrant workers milking cows in Wisconsin). 

At dockyards and factories she kept this part or the menagerie under wraps and brought out Dallas Cowboy cheerleader-type chippies, the bosomy tarts that these oafs drooled over, and had them do a choreographed entry - nothing garish, but enough T&A to keep interest.  

In the front row of the podium, neatly arranged as carefully as a Soviet Politburo lineup on the Kremlin balustrade was the Old Guard, the Jewish labor organizers, union enforcers, and AFL-CIO muckety-mucks released from the federal penitentiary on White House recognizance. 

 

When she spoke to women, the dais was all women, but differing given the audience and the venue. Black on black, white on white, depending.  Everything was scripted, choreographed, mixed-and-matched to suit the occasion. 

No one at these campaign stops expected anything more from the Lady than this display of racial, ethnic, and gender relevance; so she could bang on about 'the first woman...the first black woman...the only real democrat...the one who will do this or that...the champion of the people...' and what have you, often tangled and garbled, but since no one expected coherence, policy, or sense, it made no difference. 

It was a chorus line, a high-stepping can-can show, a La Cage aux Folles gay extravaganza, a burlesque show of beefy longshoremen and their tarted-up wives.  The crowd, as native and uncultured as any of Trump's MAGA crazies, but cut from a different cloth, was exuberant.  This was the moment they had been waiting for. P.T. Barnum had nothing on her. 

The crowds, however, were desultory and quiet compared to those drawn by Donald Trump, raucous, cheering, wild, and over-the-top enthusiastic - loud, cheering, animated crowds of thousands. 

'How does he do it?', Madame wondered.  I work so hard at assembling a meaningful lineup that looks like America; I embrace and embody America's future; our cause is the cause of the 21st century, and this imposter, this...Here the Vice President, as always was at a loss for words when it came to Donald Trump because in her mind no words could express the man's evil villainy, his insurrectionist, misogynist, homophobic ways, his absolute...Here she quieted her brain. 'Let it be', Madame considered. 

So the Harris caravan went on, painted wagons, loudspeakers, lion tamers, touts, and bearded ladies,  setting up their tents and side shows here and there, a display of social solidarity, progressive honor, and fealty to the masses. 

In her more sanguine moments, the Lady allowed herself to dream about the White House soon to be her White House.  It would have to be redecorated, of course, to get rid of those ghastly curtains in the Oval Office, the portraits of old, white men and their black altar boys - King, Abernathy, Jackson, and Lewis - the militaristic flags lining the allée down which she would walk to Hail to the Chief, and all the boring historical knick-knacks and tchotchkes everywhere. 

Then a Cabinet would have to be assembled - she already had some ideas about that, as diverse as can be, flamboyantly diverse, slammed door in the face of Trump's backwoods crackers. 

'A menagerie', quipped one political observer who had thought he had seen everything in the way of venal, vacuous politicians. This one took the cake and when the feral assortment of Cabinet hopefuls was leaked, he had a field day. 'The most absurd collection of misfit, wrong, caricatures of diversity..' his headline op-ed piece began.   

But the Lady's victory was by no means assured, and there was hope yet in Mudville. The 'poseur of all poseurs' might be sent packing, left on the curb; and 'good riddance', he closed. 'God bless the woman'.

Why Can't There Be More Civility In Political Life? - Are You Kidding? This Is America

There was once a roundtable talk show on French television called Apostrophes, an hour long discussion of art, literature, philosophy, and science - no commercial interruptions, no happy talk, no diversity, just ideas, lively, respectful debate, and an exploration of the intellectual universe. 

It was aired in prime time and had a viewership of millions from all classes of society.  The French, in the tradition of Voltaire and Descartes, valued rational inquiry and the lively interchange of different perspectives. Apostrophes was the very expression of the French notion of cultural relevance. France had long thought of itself as la fille ainee de l'Eglise, the eldest daughter of the Church, for its defeat of the Muslims at Roncesvalles saved Europe from barbarism and the oppression of Islam. 

Television ultimately changed, commercial narrow-casting channels came on the air, and as the French population became more African, tastes and preferences changed.  France unhappily became much more like America, and the intellectual solidarity of the nation was gone forever.  

America once had the makings of cultural refinement.  Jefferson was a European man of learning, sophistication, intellectual diversity, and social and political insight.  He and the other members of his 'genius cluster', a once-in-a-millennium grouping of uniquely talented, intellectually unparalleled men, established the new republic on the essential principles of the Enlightenment.  America was to be a nation of independence but one of laws, consideration, faith, and good works.

It didn't take long before that particular vision disappeared.  Westward expansion, the settling of the prairies and range lands, the Wild West, and the covered wagons to California, all far in both physical and intellectual distance from Philadelphia and Virginia, gave the nation its true character, and one which has not eroded a bit from 1789. 

The West was a free-for-all, a six-shooter, lasso, cowboy-and-Indians, rustler and gold-digger kind of place.  It was not for the faint hearted.  Law and civil order were abstractions.  Ranchers and farmers, herders, and planters were on their own.  Stockades, barbed wire, and Remington rifles were the rule; but out of that rugged individualism, shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later ethos came economic dynamism.  These saddle-riders were Adam Smith clones who believed in enterprise, risk, self-interest, and self-protection. Government was something remote, indifferent, and irrelevant. 

Nothing was beyond the ambition and initiative of these early Americans.  Not only was the West settled, but the South.  Plantation owners whose Virginia and North Carolina lands were yielding less and less, cleared, tamed, and developed hundreds of thousands of acres of tangled cypress swamps in the Mississippi Delta to make cotton king.  The entire country was a tsunami of rapid expansion and development. Government was only a second thought, and 'culture' far from the cattleman's or grandee's mind. 

The early Twentieth Century saw this great, expansive, wealth-producing enterprise grow.  The so-called Robber Barons - Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, and Vanderbilt among others - developed oil, steel, rail, and financial empires and in so doing laid the foundation for American exceptionalism - a nation freed from the medievalism of Europe, socialism, and hidebound family and social traditions, became wealthy and powerful. 

 

Along the way came dynamism's dark side - the rise of Al Capone, the Mafia, and the chaos of Chicago.  Money was to be made there too with the same muscle, guile, and intelligence.  The mafiosi were no different than J.D. Rockefeller in their absolute confidence, native ability, and determination.  

Finally and at long last, after decades of faux aristocratic patriarchal governance - the remnants of Eastern Establishment entitlement - America got a real American president, Donald Trump, a man without a scintilla of Rittenhouse Square, Beacon Hill, or Park Avenue sophistication in him.  For the first time in its history America got a barroom brawler, a gunfighter, a bare-knuckled roustabout of man who took on all comers.  A man of Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the mean streets of New York - an ambitious, amoral, Machiavellian who understood power, the American ethos, and its permanent zeitgeist of individualism and personal ambition. 

An unapologetically lowbrow man of cheap broads, arm candy, oversized yachts, garish mansions and resorts, apartment towers, golf courses, beauty contests, and casinos. Enough of the patrician Roosevelts, Bushes, and Kennedys and their formal dinners, recitations by Robert Frost, recitals by Pablo Casals, Kandinsky and Braque on the walls of the White House, the Vineyard, Nantucket, and the Main Line. The Trump America was lowest common denominator America - bass boats, gun racks, Walmart, football, and assembly lines - and unashamedly so.  Trump was America, one of us. 

The social divide could never have been so stark - this unruly, untamed, defiant bunch of old-fashioned, unreconstructed Wild West Americans; and the fey, European-minded, socialist-trending, faux compassionate, and historically ignorant reformists of the Left. 

This latter lot is no less uncultured and unsophisticated than the Trump supporters on the Right.  So-called 'progressives', fantasy Utopians who feel they have the keys to a verdant, peaceful, and harmonious future, are just as unwashed as the other side.  

The howling hysteria of the Harris campaign, its desperateness, its resort to empty, gross epithets, and its bald pretentious posturing is very American but a caricature of it.  Its caterwauling insistence on fictional notions inverts the notion of rugged individualism.  It is American only in its disregard for imposed civility.  Beyond that it is a party of feral cats on the prowl, rabid and everywhere. 

So, civility? Propriety? Grace and manners? Are you kidding?  This is America, honey, and you better believe it.

It can't possibly get any worse.  Diversity for progressive optimists means a step forward towards a New Age society of universal respect, a jamboree of difference, hot tamales, fatback, and chitlins, serapes and grilles.  For conservatives diversity is a further dumbing down of America, a dismissal of Jefferson's intellectual diversity, Hamilton's canny understanding of history, literature, and human nature; Franklin's sense of duty, practicality, and honor.  Gone are the Greco-Roman virtues of courage, honor, respect, duty, honesty, and compassion.    

 

Yet all this is still window dressing - a cover for the solidly American crude ambitions which lie beneath.  Strip away the cant, the caterwauling, and the riotous demonstrations of fidelity and belonging, and you have the same unsophisticated confabulation of bad ideas.  

Unfortunately someone has to win this Presidential election - there is no Churchill, Napoleon, or Caesar Augustus running.  We are stuck between bombast and sanctimony, the worst kind of rock and a hard place, but it is all our own making.  'Is this the best you can do?' ask foreign observers.  What a question. Of course it is.