The End Of The World Is Nigh! - The Desperate, Incredulous, Humiliated Left Craves Doomsday

She did it again, his wife had, this time with a doozie - inviting to dinner another woman who still, in the face of a humiliating electoral Democratic defeat at the hands of Donald Trump, soldiered on, flapping away about her grandchildren living under the yoke of the Devil in a country of foulness, ordure, and the remains of black people. She was unstoppable. 

'You've got to stop inviting these people' her husband said. 

'This cretin' the dinner guest howled. 'This maniacal evil, this unconscionable, infectious....'  Here she stopped, gurgling and bubbling, unable to form her words and complete her curse.  Her eyes were wild, her lips flecked with dry spittle, her chest heaving with breathless anger....'This...' and here she resorted to the infantile things her mother used to say about the Polish pharmacist who had overcharged her. 'This masher, this cad, this horrible, horrible man'. 

Her invective didn't match the bald, stooped, druggist who could barely reach the phials on the top shelf and who compounded God knows what for unsuspecting customers and was simply an old Jew who resisted retirement like the plague and had lost interest in women decades ago.  

'Zackin', she said, 'That's it, Zackin, Amos Zackin, the crook', she went on channeling her poor mother who couldn't make heads or tails of the world especially of Dwight D. Eisenhower, went apoplectic with rage at the plight of 'the little man' and how he would be crushed by the bootheels of capitalism.  

'Donald Trump and his jackbooted Gestapo will engineer another Kristallnacht', the dinner guest said. 'Just you wait.  The SS will come barging in here and drag you off to Utah or someplace, chain you like a dog, throw you scraps until you waste away, down to skin and bones in your befouled, tattered rags'.

The husband had to admit the dinner guest could turn a phrase, mixing metaphors, twisting and turning the language until it came out in a marvelously hysterical phrasing which she punctuated with a bang of her fist; but he wished she would eat some more of the mashed potatoes which turned out gummier than usual and made speech a bit difficult.

Finally in complete desperation between the salad and cheese and dessert, the woman raised her eyes to the ceiling, and howled.   'The end is nigh', she moaned in agony and supplication. 

Supplication to what, the husband wondered, since the woman had long subscribed to an unremitting secularism, and had marched to Selma in a strange reprise of the Freedom Riders of the Sixties, to rail against Biblical fundamentalism, to demand a woman's right to choose, a man's opportunity to go queer, and in general to toss religion aside in one fell swoop of the mop. 

'There is no God', she hollered from her Escalade at the marchers for The Restoration of Religion, sent to Washington by preachers who promised Je-sus' second coming.  'Be prepared', she had heard from the pulpit of her own Southern Baptist church years ago, and now she knew what Reverend Pickens J. Hardy meant.  The Apocalypse was near, the Devil was in the White House, and the end of the world was at hand. 

The irony of her secular hysteria was lost on her, of course, so committed was she to ridding the country of this spawn of the devil, so much like the streetcorner preachers of her youth hollering about Doomsday and eternal fire and damnation. 

Now this woman was not alone in her apoplexy.  The entire East Coast it seemed was in mourning after the resounding Trump victory of November 5th.  The rending of garments, gnashing of teeth, and beating of breasts was universal.  Harvard felt it necessary to give students time to process their feelings, recharge their moral engines, and return energized and ready to do the work of a generation.

The husband, a professor at the local university in a non-degree program which attracted retired residents who prided themselves on their mental edge and devouring curiosity and to a man were as deeply dyed in progressive wool as humanly possible, put out milk and cookies for them.

'It's the least I could do', he said to his students, stifling a laugh at this collection of hugging, commiserating alte kockers who took him seriously and thought he was one of them, misreading his intentions entirely and thanking him for his concern. 

It was hard for him to live in this insular redoubt of received progressive wisdom.  It would be hard for anyone to keep their mouths shut for months on end, risking cat shit dumped on the porch, the silent treatment, and the smirks of self-satisfaction everywhere. 

'Isn't it just terrible?', said a woman in the Whole Foods checkout line to a random neighbor, and by the time the neighbor had bagged and paid, the two women had bonded - in misery, yes, but in the kind of solidarity that Kamala Harris had proposed, a communitarian sisterhood of good intentions.  They wanted to hug each other, but a certain propriety restrained them.  'Keep your chin up', the older woman said. 

The dinner wore on with the dinner guest showing no signs of fatigue even when the husband hurried dessert.  Still rattling on as she helped carry dirty dishes to the kitchen, the woman was increasingly febrile, and finally in a moment of pure misery, having been forced for the first time in her life to listen to the husband's defiant defense of conservatism, she broke down, sobbing and looking desperately for comfort. 

'There, there', the wife said, putting her arms around her guest. 

A protest had been organized for the next day by Women for Equal Justice, a pseudo-feminist group who felt particularly aggrieved by the re-ascendency of Donald Trump.  The man wasn't even in his Oval Office chair and the women felt the need to express their protest.  The dinner guest had planned to attend with her granddaughter but to her chagrin and horrendous disappointment, the young girl had come out for Trump.  He had made inroads into her crowd which was fed up with black this, black that, cross-dressing and a non-stop historical revisionism which made them sick. 

'Jumping ship felt good, very good', she had told her grandmother, so the dinner guest planned to go alone; but her breakdown at the table, a moment of inconsolable misery was too much. She hoped that Armageddon would come sooner rather than later, and burn the motherfuckers off the face of the earth. 

And so it was that yet another dinner spoiled by hysteria came to close.  The invited guest needed help out the door and down the walkway, and was seen crying at the steering wheel under the streetlamp before she turned on the ignition.  Doomsday, she thought. Yes, Doomsday. 

Why 'The Truth' Never Matters - Banking On Absolute Truth, The Left Suffers A Humiliating Defeat

Not one of Donald Trump's supporters has ever assumed that every word that comes out of his mouth is the God's honest truth.  They have always known that he is a bloviator, tummler, vaudevillian-in-chief whose stock-in-trade is hyperbole, exaggeration, and plain ol' big whoppers. 

They don't care because they look beyond the bombast to the principles that lie beneath - secure borders, control of inflation, free markets, opportunity, energy independence, a muscular foreign policy, and a roll back of the insidious, ridiculous woke programs of the Left.  

Of course this man of Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the streets of New York stretched the truth - of course he inflated his real estate values, but in the give-and-take of the market, buyer and seller sussing each other out and agreeing on a price.  

 

Of course he exaggerates, howls, contests, and shouts 'foul'.  Nothing less should be expected from a man who made his millions in a world of intimidation, bluster, and closely-held cards. 

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

His principles are clear, unmistakably conservative, and unchanging.  His braggadocio, machismo, vaudevillian and Catskills hilarity are just for show.  He has always played fast and loose, a survivor in the bloodiest arena ever, New York real estate.  Who better to deal with Putin, Xi, Kim, and the ayatollahs?

Standing up to them will not be a matter of friendly negotiation and agreeable compromise, but a defiantly adamant, unshakeable posture of strength and imperturbability; and his take-no-prisoners approach to his Democratic opponents who have tried to string him up, tar and feather him, run him out of town on a rail, castrate him, and toss him in the garbage, is not only expected but looked forward to. Lessons must be learned. 

The Left for the ten years that Trump has been on the world stage has not only vilified him, but proclaimed their own received wisdom.  Gender alteration, income redistribution, open borders, the sanctity and superiority of the black man, the fungibility of sex, secularization of society, and the glory of Mother Earth are not just adjudicated principles but absolute ones.  

There can be no discussion whatsoever that the black man, emerging pure, sentient, aware, and proud from the forests of Africa three centuries ago should be restored to his rightful place atop the human pyramid. 

Gender fluidity is not just an option but a given.  For millennia Man has labored in a heterosexual gulag, and only now has he been freed to finally and once and for all explore his own personal gender future. 

Capitalism is a damned and doomed relic of the Robber Barons of the last century, old predatory, insatiable white men who ran roughshod over the worker, the poor, and the colored.  Individualism, a legacy of the Neanderthal shoot-'em-up West is nothing more than an outdated, anti-communitarian idea. 

The Earth is not a plaything, a toy to be used once and tossed aside.  It is a miracle of magical interrelationships, a sacred thing, a goddess; and its environment, that fragile cloak around her must be protected and preserved.  No ignorant, overly-ambitious landlords of her land can be allowed to raise the rent. 

 

All total nonsense of course, part and parcel of the whole idea of received wisdom, an arrogation of right, and assumption of absolute truth.  Nothing in life is absolute, all is subject to evolution.  Today's values are tomorrow's anathemas.  The conservative right understands this - that if there is one irreducible fact in the world it is human nature which can never be denied.  Hardwired, it is a matter of ganglia, synapses, strands of DNA, its purpose is survival, propagation, and longevity.

The world in which human beings act out this nature is changeable, mutating every hour; values, principles, convictions change with the direction of the wind.  Those who attempt to stop it, to deny evolution, are doomed to failure; and that is precisely what the American progressive Left is trying to do.  

The Year Zero, Pol Pot proclaimed as he plunged Cambodia back to the Dark Ages, another political fool trying to deny human nature and the cyclical valuelessness of history.  Nietzsche had it right when he said that the expression of pure will was the only validation of the individual in a meaningless world.  The Left has never learned that lesson. 

 

So given this philosophical vision, it is not surprising that 'the truth' is finally seen for what it is - a fictional assumption of those with a personal agenda - and that seen within that perspective Trump's distortions, confabulations, wild hyperbole, and excitable claims is quite normal. 

There is no more truth in gender assignment than a Henny Youngman joke; as little truth in socialism as in a Grimm's fairy tale; as little salience and relevance to praying at the altar of Mother Earth as tumbling down Alice's rabbit hole.  Go ahead and pursue a political agenda.  Just don't be so stupid to claim it is forever right. 

The Left has never understood this, and has misjudged the intelligence and perceptiveness of the electorate.  In fact they derogated, humiliated, scorned, and dismissed the worker, the farmer, the shrimper, the greeter, and the mechanic.  How would they know the truth unless told?  It is shameless, disreputable, unconscionable arrogance. 

The humiliating electoral defeat s incontrovertible hold on truth and reality rejected out of hand is another altogether.  It is no wonder that in the aftermath of the election, liberals are a crying, devastated, inconsolable lot.  Their very beinto Donald Trump is one thing, to have one's received wisdom, one's absolute conviction of right, one'g was tossed in the gutter like so much street trash. No one comes back from that. 

Of course these wounded progressives are trying.  The truth is still out there as plain as day, and we must never give up the good fight.  La Lucha Continua, they say, hammering on about the renewed plight of the black man, the death of the planet, and the rise of the greedy.  It wasn't the fault of the message, they claim, only a few missteps in political judgment. 

Bullshit! It was indeed the message that was thrown out, as irrelevant and useless as moldy bread.  Liberals can whine and commiserate as much and as long as they want, but they are supernumerary, flotsam and jetsam on the political tide. 

The Second Coming Of Donald Trump - A Real Insurrection, And The Demise Of Progressive Elitism

The Left is still huddled, crying, and wounded after their humiliating defeat on November 5th, but crybabies will be crybabies, and the Trump juggernaut goes on - a unified, concerted, and determined movement intending to rid the country of the cant and presumptuous arrogance of the last four years. 

'What is a woman?' Are you kidding? Trash, so much inane, distracting nonsense, as insignificant as old wrappers and cigarette butts pushed to the curb.  Enough! and with that, the whole woke premise, the whole balmy charade, will be swept into the Potomac downriver to the Bay and out to sea. 

Ronald Reagan was a revolutionary.  'Government is not the solution', he said. 'Government is the problem', and with that simple manifesto remade the country and returned it to its origins.  An era of individualism, private enterprise, and American patriotism was ushered in.  The legacy of the suppressive state was dismissed, ignored, and replaced by a new entrepreneurial dynamism that had long languished under progressivism.  

 

'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall', Reagan said, challenging the Soviets to end their oppressive, autocratic Communist state, to liberate the people of the East, and return Germany to freedom and opportunity. 

Reagan was a man of principle and few words.  What more was needed to be said about lower taxes and less regulation, reducing the influence of government, returning the military to strength and international status, and restoring respect for the fundamental values of America's Founding Fathers and the Constitution? 

The government that Reagan inherited was a tame, dull, sodden, soggy place. Its assumptions, brought forward from the old-fashioned unionism of Gompers and the socialism of Eugene Victor Debs, were tired and shopworn.  Old warmed-over chestnuts, no longer activist but a kind of resting-on-one's-laurels sedentariness.  Americans were ready for the Morning in America message of Reagan, his optimism and his faith in individual enterprise, God, and country. 

The situation in the America of today is similar.  Americans are fed up with cant, bloviating self-righteousness and the perpetual hammering and hectoring of the Left.  'Leave us alone!', voters shouted after four years of intrusive, redistributive, unilateral reforms; after four years of seeing their values derogated, the country compromised through the weak policies of compassion and goodness.  

There the similarity ends, for the state of the union today is a far more bloody-minded contentious place than it was almost fifty years ago.  Not only did the Left push their neo-progressive reformist agenda, they were a rabid pack of street dogs. Making America into a fantastical Utopia was not just a political agenda but a life-or-death existential struggle against any logic, any reading of history, any understanding of political dynamics.

The ten years prior to this, Donald Trump's second presidency, were vile, hateful affairs, ad hominem, scurrilous attacks on him and a scornful pissing on the 'garbage', 'the deplorables' who voted for him. Not only would the Left have to stay in power, but the whole country would have to reform and regroup into a compassionate progressive union - by force, intimidation, and threat if necessary. 

So it is no surprise that the second coming of Donald Trump will be revolutionary.  Now with all the organs of power firmly in Republican hands - White House, Senate, Supreme Court, and House of Representatives - the job will be far easier than before.  Trump overwhelmingly won the popular and electoral vote, and made significant inroads into formerly rock-solid liberal constituencies.  His mandate to govern is absolute and uncontested. 

 

Not only will Washington be a radically different political place, it will be a new, welcomed cultural one.  Donald Trump is America's first real American president - glitzy, showy, full of outrageous bombast and self-confidence, with middle brow tastes for yachts, mansions, and arm candy, an OK Corral shoot-'em-out mentality, and a fierce America-first patriotism. 

With all the levers of power in his hands, he will roll back the Left's radical environmentalism, ghetto entitlements, pusillanimous foreign policy, neutering of natural competitiveness, and sing-song social permissiveness.  His administration will be Ronald Reagan's and then some.  Given the smearing, dismembering attempts to remove him from the political scene, Trump will be no accommodating, generous, winner.  There will be payback, and then some; but structural and systemic.  The judicial system which was used by Democrats to destroy him will be the first to go.  No longer will such venal and self-interested uses of the courts be allowed. 

The reins, traces, and harnesses will be off the private sector, the perennial engine of American productivity.  Education will return to a McGuffey's Reader Three R's originalism, and gone will be multiple intelligences, self-esteem, gender studies, and cooperative learning.  Traditional welfare will be a thing of the past, and government largesse will be no longer, replaced by an incentive-based, goal-oriented private system. 

By the end of four years, Washington and the nation will retain few traces of the intellectual buggery and patronizing of the past.  The economy - both at the high end, Wall Street and economic indicators, and the low end, jobs and opportunity - will flourish.  Machiavellian foreign policy will rule, and Putin, Xi, and the ayatollahs will be met with someone with the same determined, willful approach to international relations. 

 

'Insurrectionist!, shouted the Left after the Mardi Grass, wild frat-boy drunken revelry of January 6th; but of course it was nothing like a real insurrection as anyone who has given a cursory glance to real insurrection, civil war, internecine, inter-tribal conflict would know.

The Cuban, Russian, and French Revolutions were insurrections, and the rise to power of the Sandinistas and the Paraguayan generals smaller events but no less important. 

This second coming of Donald Trump will be a real insurrection - not the violent, guillotine, chopping block kind, but revolutionary nonetheless.  No shibboleths will be left standing in the aftermath.  The country will return to its Enlightenment, Jeffersonian origins, a far, far better place that Americans have seen in a long while. 

'Garbage', 'Deplorables', And White Hatred - Reverse Racism And The Arrogant Infamy Of The Left

'There should be an N-word for the white trailer trash that voted for him' said one of Kamala's advisors, still smarting from the fracas of a complete and overwhelming loss at the polls; and there could be no better way to express his deep-seated, festering, hatred for poor whites. 

'We didn't lose the election', the advisor went on, 'they did, the fucking bass-boat assholes'. 

And so it went within the liberal cabals of Washington, still apoplectic at the bottom-feeding lowlife ignoramuses who voted for him...him of all people, this....this...And again, like many in post-election Washington, the advisor spluttered and stumbled.  Words were not enough to express the moral heinousness of the man, his insidious, foul, hatefulness, and nothing could possibly define the dim crawling things that voted for him.  

 

In political war rooms throughout the capital the story was the same.  They all wanted to leave the country, not because Trump would soon be President - that was bad enough - but because the country was filled with backwater fools, idiots, cretins, and retards. The country was being taken over by this slime, this stinking, rotting ooze, this....this...

'Cancel all who voted for him', counselled angry middle-aged women.  'Scrape the shit off the walls', yelled a professor in Harvard Yard.  'Bugger the whole bloody lot of them', echoed her colleague. 

In an ironic twist, the very people who condemned ignorant white people for inherent, systemic racism -white, privileged liberals -  had now become one of them.  If their hatred for white, rural, lower-middle working class whites was not racism, then what was?  For years they had subscribed to the notion that whiteness was at the heart of the race problem in America.  

It was whites who had enslaved the black man, tortured him, oppressed him, marginalized and whipped him; Jim Crow whites who refused him access to America's wealth, who ridiculed and exiled him from society.  Whites were the problem, and now they, in their most ignorant groupings, in goatish cabals, in miserable jobs with pitiful wives, were at it again. 

'Just look at that!, blurted Bob Muzelle, an old Yale graduate, once the scion of New England royalty, an aristocrat among aristocrats, member of the Cabot, Lodge, Davenport, and Potter families, a legatee of colonial and early American greatness, turned liberal in his college years, acolyte of the Reverend Peters Langley Thompson, leader of marches, Freedom Rider, immovable sitter-in, hero to the underprivileged and the put-upon. 

'That' was a Politburo of white men all lined up for Trump cabinet posts, not a black or brown face among them.  Bob 's dream of a crayon box of colored Americans, a racial potpourri, a heady stew of cultural diversity had gone down the drain.  The rise of the black man to his rightful position atop the social pyramid had been stymied if not reversed.  The very value, inherent logic, and absolute rightness of diversity was being unconscionably challenged by...by...

Here Bob, like every one of his liberal colleagues, could simply not say Donald Trump's name, as if saying it would call up the devil; so Bob resorted to the common memes of his crowd - sadistic homophobe, women-hater, mindless, predatory capitalist, insurrectionist, convicted criminal.  Yet in reciting this litany, he realized he wasn't warning people to stay away from the man - the bloody fool was President! but engaging them in the continuing struggle for right. 

The string of white men, spread above the fold in the New York Times, arms folded, chins up like so many Mussolinis, Soviet apparatchiks, and Hitlerian goons, was anathema. A bunch of unwashed white backwoods crackers, cheap-whore buggering bastards had voted in a cabal of Ur-white men - the unconscionably wealthy, privileged fraction of one percent who ruled, oppressed, and dominated.  

Bob had always fought against the perniciousness of systemic whiteness, and now this?? Four years of unmitigated whiteness to come - blonde, blue eyed, flaxen haired, pert nosed young things on the dais, on the dance floor, on the very balcony of the White House; steely-jawed, perfectly featured young white men at their side, phalanxes of well-fed older white men behind.  

Bob of course was himself white, but he had long stopped considering himself so.  Years in the cotton fields alongside black tenant farmers, tooth-by-jowl with black men on the way to march across the Pettis Bridge, endless conferences of black women, Black Lives Matter revolutionaries, and ghetto pimps and ho's conferred an honorary blackness.  The final telling would be the results of a genetic test to see if the rumors of a former family slaveholder's beautiful mulatto mistress could be confirmed.  If so, if he had even a trace of black blood in his veins, he would indeed be black. 

Bob wasn't sure whom he hated more - the ass-crack hokies who had voted Trump in, or the privileged white men who would form his government.  It all boiled down to the fact that he like the rest of the white liberal crowd, hated whiteness, and looked in the mirror every morning hoping to see a thickening of the lips, a broadening of the nose, a kinking of the hair, and a slightly darker tint on the cheeks. 

Kamala was his hero, his chosen one, the one to lead all into a new verdant, peaceful, and equitable age - a proud woman who embodied both blackness and femaleness, the headiest of combinations, a fertile, colored, sexually feminized America; but here she was left on the curb, summarily tossed aside by whiteness - the gummy, dumb fuckers in Mississippi trailers and fat-cats on Wall Street. 

'Hate Has No Home Here', said the lawn signs in Bob's white suburban Washington neighborhood, a reference to racism, homophobia, and misogyny; but the irony was lost on him as he seethed venomous hatred at the white fools who had elected Trump.  This animus was not hatred, he reasoned, because it was righteous anger; the other way 'round, like the signs said, was truly, fundamentally inerrantly wrong.  He would always be on the side of justice, fairness, and good will. 

None of this augured well for the Republic, a respectful transition and an era of compromise and political sense.  Bob and his henchmen would ride herd on Trumpists, and would do everything in their power to rid the country of this blight - this blustering white, pretentious fat slob.  The job would be tough given that after almost ten years of lawfare, impeachment, non-stop badgering, ad hominem attacks, and suggestions of Hitlerian evil he was once again President of the United States, but 'La Lucha Continua', Bob repeated yet again. 

Regardless of Bob's resolve, Republicans had won not only the White House but the Senate and the House, and during his term, the new President would accept the resignation of older conservative Supreme Court Justices and replace them with young, even more conservative jurists.  All four agencies of governance would be in Trump's hands, and he would use them to assure the success of his agenda. 

'Maybe it's time to retire', said Bob's wife one evening after watching her apoplectic husband nearly choke on piece of chicken as he tried to express himself; but he would surely die in his traces, for what was a life of righteous effort worth if it ended on a chaise lounge on a Florida beach? 

But We Were Right!! - Kamala Harris And The Unravelling Of An Arrogant Vision

Kamala Harris hasn't been seen or heard from for days, ever since her belated congratulations to President Donald Trump and her Wha' Happened address to the nation.  All her plans for redecorating the Oval Office, filling the Cabinet with wonderfully black and brown Americans, standing tall and proud as the first black woman ever to sit in the White House, have gone down the drain in an unceremonious flushing. 

The election wasn't even close, for had it been, she could have protested, contested, and demanded attention. She did not even win the popular vote as Hillary had done and claim that she was 'America's real President'.  No, she had won nothing, lost everything in a landslide, and was so unpopular that she dragged everyone down-ticket with her.  The White House, The Senate, The House, and The Supreme Court are now in the hands of Republicans for the foreseeable future. 

Luckily the Vice-Presidential residence is two miles from the White House, and she can hide out up there, huddled with her advisors, faced with the task of helping Joe out with the transition; and he, the old fool, has opened his doors wide to the imposter, said he hoped for a seamless, orderly, and respectful transfer of power and bumbled on from room to room still wondering whether or not this meant he was still President. 

But Kamala is a relatively young woman in full possession of her faculties, beaten, wronged, and dismissed like so much flotsam, drifting here and there with no future to speak of.  The leader of the Democratic Party, the usual honorary post granted to their candidate for President?  Hardly. She was a dismal failure, an airy, vacuous woman of insignificant substance, thrown up just as Old Joe was thrown under the bus - and this is what her friends said about her! Imagine the rest of the country which of course is not hard to do since so many Americans found her fey message just as empty and airless as the candidate herself. 

 

What's a woman to do?', Kamala said, ironically reprising a Fifties ad for labor-saving floor wax, and considered her options - professor at UCLA was a possibility, but the Board of Regents, as fully supportive of her candidacy as any, wanted no part of a woman who would remind everyone of the complete and utter failure of her liberal agenda. 

The leader of a new political action committee, a Washington version of The View, the television gaggle of sour, angry women, but with a heart, was a thought, but most of the members of her progressive claque had gone running for the exits. Or fade away like Sarah Palin did, making a few waves at first, then retiring back to whatever glacier she came from.  A Hobson's choice at best, but I need to do something, she said. 

The biggest hurdle to jump was going to meet Trump at the White House during the transition.  How could she possibly gin up what it would take to meet that madman, that vile, scurrilous creature who had the gall, the audacity, the sheer chutzpah to beat her - her! a woman of color, dignity, and presence. She would have to touch him, shake that scabrous, scaly hand.  How could she? And the image of her with that man would go viral and bring back to all her supporters the sickening feeling of defeat.  No, she would refuse to shake his hand or go anywhere near him, and keep social distance. 

All of official Democratic Washington was in the same torturous bind, like sheets wound up and tangled in the dryer, impossible to fold neatly.  They to a man, refused to accept the fact that they and their unappetizing agenda had been defeated.  It was the infection of a demonic, soulless imposter that did it.  His racism, misogyny, and homophobia was responsible.  His supporters knee-jerked him back into office with fascist oppression and hatred.  It wasn't the progressive vision that was defeated - the upright, noble, and historically proven vision of the Left.  It was the maniacal distorted vision of the MAGA, deep-stage, congenitally retarded that was responsible. 

'La Lucha Continua', Kamala's supporters yelled to the midnight sky.  The fight against ignorance, hatred, and prejudice must never end, a howl at the moon, however, for they - the young women who had been so energized, touched, and blessed by the Vice-President - had no clue about the rancid death of Communism after Che Guevara, Castro, and the Soviet Union.  No one should want what these faux saviors were selling, let alone now. 

In fact the whole world was turning its back on the tired, faded, discredited and hopelessly idealistic ideas of the progressive Left.  The new world heroes were Giorgia Meloni of Italy, Javier Milei of Argentina, Marion Marechal of France, Geert Wilders of the Netherlands, and Viktor Orban of Hungary among others - all staunch conservatives who have vocally and loudly rejected the neo-Socialist cant of the rest of Europe and the Americas. 

Yet despite the evidence, the American progressive Left of Kamala Harris, still believe in the absolute, irremediable rightness of their vision. It will only be a matter of time before compassion, inclusion, diversity, and equity returns. 

Kamala squirmed in her seat in the Oval Office as Joe led the room in a discussion of the transition.  Every eye was turned to the ceiling rather than have to look at her, the woman who threw poor Joe under the bus, who assumed the candidacy through arrogation rather than process, who ran an empty, vaporous campaign, and who had not one clue about any of it. 

Outside in Lafayette Square a thousand chanting, delirious Trump supporters had gathered, all wearing MAGA hats, holding up posters of the famous 'Iwo Jima' photograph of the wounded Donald Trump raising his fist in defiance, and waving American flags.  Kamala heard the shouts and cringed.  The election wasn't a week old and she had to hear these wackos not a hundred yards from the White House. It was hard to pay attention to what Joe was saying. 

Fingers were pointed everywhere except where they should have been.  The gobsmacked Left said it was Joe's fault for not quitting earlier, Obama's for propping him up, Kamala's for orchestrating the coup, and most of all the tone-deaf idolaters of Madame's campaign staff.  Keep up the 'I am a proud black woman' meme, they said, and the rest will take care of itself; but out there Americans were concerned about inflation, paychecks, the border, and the onslaught of twisted woke ideas; and cared little about the lady's tricked out black identity. 

None of these progressive fools even looked at the radically liberal message itself.  A message no one except the coastal elites wanted to hear; a message rejected in Europe; a message with no currency, with no promise, and certainly no traction. 

The Left had branded Donald Trump as the spawn of the Devil for almost a decade, a Hitlerian clone, a Fascist autocrat, a cheap tout, a pimp, a ravisher, and an insurrectionist.  They had tried everything to get rid of him - impeachment, lawfare, media hammering, non-stop hectoring and ad hominem assaults - and nothing had worked.  Not only was the man still standing, but he was President Elect.  How did that happen?  What did it mean?

The answer to just about everyone but them was clear - what the Left was proposing, espousing, and promoting was sheer, unadorned nonsense.  

Most conservatives have once and for all stopped calling liberals 'progressives', for nothing in their bag of tricks was at all forward-looking or promising. They were Utopian idealists at best, who had been shown the door and who wouldn't be back for a long, long time. 

The Wailing And Gnashing Of Teeth - The Gobsmacked Left, Incredulous At Loss To Trump, Goes Berserk

Wednesday morning, the day after the election, was an inchoate, frantic hysteria of disbelief, shock, and loss.  How could this have happened?  It wasn't supposed to happen. Right and good was on our side and evil and hate on the other; and that fool, that imposter, that...

At an upscale Northwest Washington sports club - wood paneling, marble floors, brass fittings, proper trim -  every single one of the men and women burbled and garbled with rage.  They simply couldn't find the words to characterize the man and choked on adjectives and verb forms caught in their throats.  Their grief was Biblical, horrendous, inexpressibly anguished.  'How? How? How?, grieving members shouted, looking for comfort, a hug, a smile of understanding, a nod of grief-stricken solidarity. 

The scene at a university was no different, and in a class on King Lear the students, all emeritus, feted, read, and acknowledged for a lifetime of academic and professional commitment to liberal causes, felt one with the old king on the heath, left alone to wander and die, rejected by family and friends, a bit of flotsam, an insignificant nothing, alone, ravaged and disconsolate.  Two elderly men in the class cried, and as they wiped their tears, the women next to them held them in their arms. 

These 'progressives' - a term finally laid to rest in the dust bin thanks to the outing of its pretention and irrelevance - had not simply subscribed to a liberal canon, they had incorporated it as an integral part of their identity, their persona, their being.  They were God's chosen - well, some permutation thereof for few of these secularists would admit to anything beyond a reachable, engineered Utopia - and now were universal rejects, unceremoniously tossed aside for this...this...

 

Again, like their counterparts at the sports club, the group stuttered and stammered, searching for the right word, the right expression of calumny, bitterness, and hatred for the man; but like them felt only a rising of the gorge, and a tight, choking sensation of everything horrible and nasty in their throats. 

When the agony subsided to anguish, they looked around for someone to absorb their rage.  'The idiots who voted for him!' were the agents of the devil.  The unwashed, unschooled bass boat, gun rack, goat buggering, toothless crackers were the problem.  Bible-thumping cretins, credulous, gullible, drooling retards.  Half the country - the country they thought was on the road to a more verdant, peaceful, loving place - lived in bald ignorance, cajoled and stroked into a bloody passion of insurrectionist treachery by that....that....

Again, words failed, but there was no need for articulation or logic. The room was filled with miasmic hatred of Donald Trump.  Everyone felt it and breathed it deeply into their wounded souls. 

The professor, a rock-ribbed Republican stalwart, a Trump supporter since the President's first appearance almost ten years ago, kept his own counsel, wondered at the grief and disconsolation.  His man, Donald Trump, might be an outsized, inflated braggadocio, a Borscht Belt tummler, a vaudevillian, carny barker, lion-taming, high-wire, ring master, but he was nothing at all like the deformed caricature drawn by the Left. Underneath the raw humor, the ridiculing, the balloon-bursting joy, was a man of sense.  

A reasonable immigration policy, energy independence, a rollback of statism and government intrusion into market decisions, lower taxes, decreased spending, and an end to the arrogant wokeness of the Left were all sensible, doable, and about time. 

 

Yet the students in the classroom and the members of the sports club were immured in personal worlds of naive belief, fueled and inflamed by the cant and incendiary propositions of their liberal keepers. The professor could only think of a tribal, voodoo ceremony with naked, beaded, painted shamans and the possessed celebrants howling and dancing around a fire. 

The atmosphere was so self-centered that no one noticed that the professor was keeping his distance and his own counsel, which could only mean complicity with the Devil, part of his coterie of evil.  

'If it's any consolation', the professor said, 'Goneril and Regan get their comeuppance', referring to the death of the treacherous Lear sisters; 'but they are sure to be back somewhere or other', a note of his familiar moral diffidence reflected again and again by Shakespeare but unheeded by his class which only wanted to believe in the inherent nature of evil, incarnated now in Donald Trump. 

Outside the university and the sports club, the scene was no different.  Students at Harvard were so disconsolate, wounded, and hurt that their professors deferred tests and quizzes, allowing them time to process and regroup their feelings.  Long faces were everywhere, strangers gave each other nods of commiseration.  A bad day, they said.  A terrible day.  A horrible day. 

Now, seventy-three million Americans felt nothing of the sort.  In small towns, on farms, on factory lines, in vineyards and cornfields, in shops and diners, in nail salons and pharmacies, there was sheer delight.  The cant, the hectoring, the intimidation and balderdash of the Left would now stop.  They had been recognized by their man and they returned the favor.  He didn't just squeak in, he blew in with a massive victory, and now the White House, the Senate, the House, and the Supreme Court would be conservative for a long, long while.  The penitential wait was over.  It was their time. 

Meanwhile in the corridors of Capitol Hill, Pennsylvania Avenue, and K Street, politicians, pundits, and aides, mouths agape, sucking air, paralyzed with shock and incredulity, whispered 'What now?', and in the interim reverted to form. 'Spawn of the devil, insurrectionist, fascist, misogynist, homophobic pig...' yelled even more loudly than before, but no one was listening outside of their coastal enclaves.  Hollywood went ape-shit, and badly trounced Democrats everywhere shouted to the high hills.  

The Minister of the Methodist Church of Christ, go-to place of worship and progressive Sunday camaraderie, asked his congregants to 'pray for America' while the Reverend Jackson Blyleven Peters  of the First Baptist Church of Aberdeen, Mississippi. shouted Hallelujah to his cheering faithful. 

'Wha' happened', said a lawyer tossing down another shot of Wild Turkey at the bar of the Old Ebbitt Grill, two blocks from the White House and watering hole of Biden/Harris people. 'Didn' see it coming'; and there it was in a nutshell.  The fools never saw it coming, overreached, overestimated and shat on the voters who could have made a difference.  'We'll get 'em next time', the lawyer said as he stumbled his way out to Pennsylvania Avenue.  'Next time.'

Donald Trump Is Coming To Town! - The Unthinkable Has Just Happened, So Buckle Up And Enjoy The Ride

Over seventy-two million Americans voted for Donald Trump, well over half the votes cast, a resounding popular victory, more even than his totals in 2016 and 2020; and yet he is still vilified by the Left as the spawn of the devil, an apostate, an intellectual derelict, and a poseur.  In so doing however, the Left is only vilifying the millions who voted for him - 'garbage', said Joe Biden; 'deplorables' said Hillary Clinton almost a decade ago.

This and this alone was the key factor in Kamala Harris' defeat - an unconscionable, arrogant, self-anointed righteousness.  Only the Left is privy to received wisdom, the vision of a Utopian future assured by them and them alone.  The vision is not utopian, said conservatives, but dystopian - a world of sexual deformation, blackness; a world without history, cleansed of the past, untouchable in its fantastical illusions.  

In their attempt to brand the Right with images of insurrection, internment, and punishment - jack-booted SS Gestapo thugs, concentration camps, and soulless imprisonment - they turned the tables on themselves.  It was they who became the insurrectionists, the anarchists, the deep, dark forces of anti-democratic hatred.  

Theirs was the gulag of penance, re-education, intellectual torture, barbed wire and impenetrable perimeters.  They were the feared Iranian Sevak secret police. 

Those whom the Left branded as crackers, hillbillies, gun-rack, Bible-thumping, gun-toting ignoramuses were nothing of the kind.  They were as smart, savvy, and precocious as any American and knew a charade when they saw it. The parade of swishy gay boys, cross-dressing transgender women, pimped-out ho's, grilles and gold chains, entitlement, corruption, and venality was not 'looking like America'.  It was a twisted caricature, a deformation, a total, arrogant, in-your-face, loud fuck you. 

The unthinkable happened because the Left could not possibly believe that an unwashed, unruly, empty-headed mob of creeps and misfits could have a thought in their heads; and never once did they take a moment to reflect on how their touted reforms looked to the rest of the country. 

Yes, Harris and the Democrats lost also because of inflation and the cost of living - pocketbook issues have always been front and center in presidential elections - but the vacuousness of Harris and her assumption that being a black woman entitled her to the Presidency were her undoing.  The American people can put up with corruption - that has always been part and parcel of politics and culture with credit swaps, creative financial instruments, Ponzi schemes, and barefaced lying; but being talked down to, demeaned, dismissed as insignificant bits of street trash was too much. 

And so it was that the Big Man, vaudevillian, carny barker, Borscht Belt tummler, mean streets mogul, squire of beauty queens and owner of yachts, mansions, resorts, and golf courses became the 47th President of the United States. 

 

Not only was the Left stunned and speechless, but afraid.  How would a man whom they attacked without restraint for four years and branded as a soulless criminal for many before that, react now that he held the reins of power.  The Left tried everything to emasculate him, shame him, tar and feather him and run him out of town, all to no avail.  The crooked court cases, unvarnished attempts to criminalize him, shut him off forever in some Siberian gulag, and remove him from American political life failed.  Who would not have at least a bit of vengeance, payback, and vindication after all that?  

Who would he string up first after Inauguration Day?

It will not be what his accusers think - mere personal vendettas are chicken feed. Trump will dismantle the Justice Department, rid it of KGB-style operatives, Internal Revenue enforcers.  This reform will extend to the local level where politically ambitious prosecutors supported by Democratic moneybags, who went hog wild and went after the former President with a vengeance of their own will be sidelined, marginalized, their careers over. 

That will be just the beginning.  The Education Department, as needless a bureaucratic enclave as any given the decentralization of the American education system, will go; as will other unnecessary, wasteful, Washington redoubts.  Labor? What for in a private give-and-take between labor and management?  Commerce? American enterprise is as competitive as any, and Presidents always have the power of tariffs and import controls. Health and Human Services?  Health care, the most private in the world, and welfare programs in much need of reform, will go in favor of direct cash payments, incentives, and quick cutoffs. 

Wokeness will not only not be encouraged or tolerated, but rejected out of hand.  DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) programs will be things of the past, affirmative action a goner, toleration of and encouragement of gender spectrum teaching in the dust bin.  Free speech encouraged, historical statues replaced, the cancel culture itself cancelled. 

Putin, Xi, Kim and the Ayatollahs will be put on notice, and a new Machiavellian foreign policy will be put in place. The world is not, never has been nor ever will be a peaceful place and parity is the only rule of international geopolitics.  Assured destruction will be the meme, a think-twice rational policy in an aggressive world.  No more love-you treaties and idealistic agreements. 

More than anything the progressive culture of moroseness will be gone, replaced by a Reagan-esque Morning in America ambitious optimism.  Gone will be breast-beating, rending of garments, wails of grief and misery.  America's genius is to be celebrated and its stature in the world restored.

There will be parties at the White House - all-night, bright and sparkling Gatsby-esque affairs. Glitz, glamour, and beauty will be back. 

 

This is what America has been waiting for - a man in the White House, a man of conservative principles, unbowed intentions, and a wide-open bombastic presence.  Whew! After four years of penitential sanctimony and long faces, America is back! 

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.