The Dementia Praecox Of A Vaporous Woman - Kamala Harris Is Running For President Again

No candidate in recent American history has run such a presumptuous, flatulent campaign for President.  Kamala Harris had nothing to speak of, nothing of note or political worth; just a racial and sexual identity which she assumed would be all she needed to get to the White House. 

'It is time', she said, addressing a crowd, 'for a proud black woman to achieve the highest office in the land.  It is our time', she went on, 'our time and your time, the time of a lifetime, the moment of history we have all been waiting for, an anointed time, a blessed time a....'  

Here her chief campaign advisor gave her the 'cut' sign, doing a pre-arranged finger ballet that silently called for another play, but the Vice President was on a roll. 'When I was growing up in the inner city... (here the aide winced)...a child of misfortune and oppression, I never imagined this moment of destiny, but here I stand before you....'  

The loudspeakers squawked and screeched, the aide's last resort to cut the woman short.  Once she got her engine stoked, there was no stopping her.  'Ladies and gentlemen', the aide shouted to the crowed as he escorted Kamala off stage, 'the next President of the United States'. 

And so this vaporous, airy, insubstantial woman went banging on from stop to stop making no sense, trotting out old chestnuts, Trotskyite non sequiturs, and just about every other thought that came into her porous, well-ventilated brain. 

At a meeting of her inner circle well into the campaign, a number of aides voiced their concern.  Donald Trump, despite every possible booby trap they had set, every conceivable lawsuit, every possible hateful screed and invocation of evil, was still a comer, rising in the polls, defying every assumption of miserable defeat touted by the Left.  

While Trump was laying out his platform - strong, defiant statements about immigration control, energy exploration, free markets, confrontational geopolitics, and a rollback of woke genderism - their candidate was still howling at the moon. 

The black thing, the woman thing whacked and thumped, touted, hammered until it was just a dented lump of no luster, brightness, or meaning was all she seemed to be able to muster. Cackling and crowing, she went down to defeat. 

'How could this be?', she asked herself, a woman marked for greatness; and yet there it was, plain as day, irrevocable and done. 'But there is a next time', she consoled herself, a time when the demon is off the political stage, and the decks are clear for running.  'Right on!' her aides shouted in unison; but few stayed on for the lady's second act.  They had seen enough. 

President Biden was on his own crazed journey to a post-electoral world, and as a final act of bitter vengeful spite against the man who would replace him, he opened the doors to death row and let out a spate of convicted murderers.  'There! That'll show him', Biden was heard to have said as he signed the pardon papers in front of him. 

 

Show whom? his aides wondered, for it was Kamala who had thrown him under the bus.  Joe had no gripe with Trump, a politician doing his thing, nothing more. It was the Kamala Cabal that fired up the boiler and her troop of lackeys and wannabes who set the progressive course. As a parting shot, he should take aim at that bitch, that calculating airhead.

So with Biden's St. Vitus' dance of political hysteria - open the floodgates of the Treasury and watch billions pour out willy-nilly, unaccounted for, and impossible to stop; and open the doors to death row to let out the most scroungy and disreputable killers ever locked up; and open the Southern border to all comers, and let them join in the fun - Kamala's decision to take leadership of the Democratic Party and run again in 2028 was overlooked. 

'Bad timing, Madam Vice President', her chief aide commented, 'but you will have your day'.  This said as he was out the door, back to his law practice or lumber mill, never again to show up in Washington.

'Gotta give it to the lady', said a Trump operative. 'She comes from a line of ditzes - Hillary and that Alaska clown who ran with McCain - yet she still thinks she matters'.  At least Sarah Palin ran on a platform, although she never recovered from her 'I can see Russia from here' dopey comment about dealing with Putin.  

Hillary was the back channel of Kamala's woman thing.  She insisted that it was time for American to elect a woman, and so sure was she that she would be elected, she chose to keep her mouth shut, avoid controversy, and let the electorate do the right thing.

She was even more nonplussed and gobsmacked than Kamala when beaten by Donald Trump.  Hillary actually believed that she had been touched on the shoulder by God himself, while Kamala settled for secular justice.  Both women learned the hard way that good intentions and an empty head will get you nowhere. 

'Dummies rule!' chirped a member of the incoming Trump Administration, laughing about the fumbled and botched White House coup, the cackling harpy down the hall, and the bitchy little ankle-biters in Congress who thought they knew a thing or two, but who got laughed out of town. 'By the way, where is that bad joke?'

 

She was nowhere to be seen, not because she was ashamed to show her face but because she was already jockeying for position.  Usually the candidate for president is considered the leader of the party, but in this case, given her humiliating defeat against all odds, and the conservative juggernaut gathering steam in all quarters, Democrats were wondering whether it was time to ditch the woman for good. 

'It's never too early for the good fight', she said to her tightening circle of supporters, 'so let's get to it'; but there was only desultory interest in that idea, and most of those gathered in the war room of the Vice President had already secured positions elsewhere. Kamala was too dense to take the temperature of the room, sense its indifference, and see how to most she was just whistlin' Dixie; so she shuffled her papers and started to talk about Nebraska and Bernie Madoff, non sequitur, random bits of supposed relevance left over from the campaign. 

'Well, thank God, she's gone', said an Iowa delegate who had pledged her support for Harris, but then, after a whistle-stop tour of the state where the Lady talked gobbledygook, turned in her pass.  Legions of supporters did the same thing leaving only a small gaggle of weird progressive shills behind.  

America's Dalliance With Dictators, A Love Affair - National Interest, Machiavelli, And Realpolitik

There is no doubt that Vladimir Putin is an autocrat, but a dictator?  For that he would have to be compared to Stalin, Mao, Assad, Idi Amin, and the raft of despots who have ruled Africa since its independence.  That is a rather unique club, one whose prisons are nasty hellholes filled with political prisoners, whose judicial process includes the rack, and whose democratic intentions are nil. 

Just recently (December 2024) the prisons of Bashir-al-Assad were opened for inspection by rebel forces which had taken over the government, and they found medieval dungeons, instruments of brutality and inhuman torture, foul, cold, and barbaric living conditions, no light, and the reek of  bodily wastes.

During the long, protracted civil war in his country, Assad gassed thousands of civilians and slaughtered many more.  The prisons were for minor dissidents, journalists, clerics, and lesser opposition figures.  In all this Assad presented a civilized face to the rest of the world which engaged him only desultorily. Syria was a land politically and ethnically fragmented, with shifting allegiances, foreign alliances, and constant internecine struggle.  Getting involved there would be a disaster for there was no one clear path to democratic reform.  The more likely outcome of the turmoil in Syria would be radical Islam, but how to prevent that while neutralizing the barbarism of Assad?

The United States has been complicit in decades of African misrule, mismanagement, corruption, and autocracy. In its desire for trustworthy allies, it has befriended and supported dictators throughout the continent to safeguard and promote American commercial and economic interests. Oil, precious metals, and other natural resources have become political commodities in the international marketplace, and the US is a major player.

Under pressure from the African American lobby and its progressive political allies, Democratic administrations have desperately tried to show their support for African regimes which are 'democratic'. Not surprisingly, given this bias, they have made foreign policy with blinders on. Hillary Clinton made a disastrous mistake in Mali, loudly cheering for President Touré even though many Western observers knew that he was a corrupt despot.  Bruce Whitehouse (London Review of Books) wrote: 'It turns out that many of the democratic reforms and institutions were shams and used by canny politicians to keep the sluice gates of foreign assistance flowing.'

‘A fish rots from the head,’ Malians say. To keep the aid money flowing, Touré maintained a veneer of progress. His government at first boosted the number of children enrolled at school, which pleased donors, but never invested adequately in the country’s dilapidated education system. Only 12 per cent of students passed the high school leaving exams this year, the lowest rate ever recorded. 

Touré purchased a temporary peace in the north but never made good on promises to reduce the acute poverty there. He accepted millions of dollars of US military aid, which was supposed to be used to drive out al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, but he never actually went after the group’s encampments. The military itself was racked by nepotism, and officers often skimmed off their soldiers’ ammunition and pay.

Dictators prevail throughout the region and not only that continue to receive aid from the United States, aid which serves to keep them in power

The leader of Ethiopia who either died or was murdered was a dictator, and despite years of misrule, was the beneficiary of billions.  Idriss Deby, the dictator of Chad played the US and the World Bank for fools, duplicitously agreeing to a gas-for-reform agenda and then reneging completely and continuing his despotic rule over one of the poorest countries in Africa..  The lionized Kagame presides with a repressive regime which muzzles opposition.  He has lied or distorted reports about his support of anti-government clandestine military operations in the Congo.  There are many more examples.

 Other long-serving aid-receiving dictators included Idriss Déby in Chad ($6 billion in aid between 1990 and 2000), Lansana Conté in Guinea ($11 billion between 1984 and his death in 2008), Paul Kagame in Rwanda ($10 billion between 1994 and the present), and Yoweri Museveni in Uganda ($31 billion between 1986 and 2000) 

At the same time dictators keep the peace, and the United States was quite complaisant during the Duvalier family years in Haiti. Papa Doc Duvalier and his son assured that Haiti remain an idyll, an irresistible mix of voodoo, Africa, and La France d’Outre-Mer. The Tonton Macoute, henchmen of the Duvaliers, secret police more brutal and threatening than Sevak or Stasi ever were, maintained order, enforced loyalty, and kept the island a secure redoubt of Duvalierism.  

American diplomats and development workers elbowed each other for opportunities to visit Haiti, and lovers went everywhere without a second thought – dancing in Carrefour, dining at the best restaurants in Petionville and Kenscoff, spending weekends in the cabanas of Cormier Plage and Port-Salut. The anger, resentment, and civil violence which were to erupt after the Duvaliers were gone were unseen and unspoken.  There were only pleasures, the assumption of idyll, the complete exercise of romance.  For the foreigners who visited, that is, who stayed at the Olaffson, who dined at Cote Cour, Cote Jardin, who ate lambi creole and bouillabaisse by the port, and who slept with their verandah windows open.

The billions of dollars in foreign aid has been largely used to keep the peace and to assure a compliant government, one with control of valuable rare earth materials, oil, and gas. Donors have been anxious to keep African countries friends of democracy in perpetuity, and allowed them to rule with impunity. The guarantee of civil order, fondness for the West, and a continuing supply of energy, rare earth materials, and precious gems have been enough contractual security for the United States and the EU.

Where dictatorship has broken down, civil war has broken out.  Ethiopia and Somalia once under militant dictatorships, have been in a state of perpetual conflict for decades. 

Africa is not alone in this phenomenon.  Thanks to Soviet support and his own bullying, intimidating character, Marshal Tito gained absolute control of Yugoslavia.  Not surprisingly when the Soviet Union disintegrated and Tito’s power was no longer absolute, civil war broke out between and among the former republics of Yugoslavia. Autocrats and dictators keep the lid on dissent and unrest until they are gone.

Modern day autocrats are many, powerful, and immovable.  Putin in Russia, Xi in China, Kim in North Korea, Erdogan in Turkey, and the imams and mullahs in Iran rule with absolute power and authority.  History has shown that it will take more than ill-advised military adventures or ham-handed civil rule to depose them.

It is better to leave them alone.  Russia will eventually win the war in Ukraine, a war not fought over democracy as President Biden has claimed, but over the rare earths that Ukraine possesses - elements essential for the operation of cell phones and computers - and their production of wheat and other grains.  The United States has been unwilling to confront Russia directly, so will have to accept the eventual capitulation of Zelensky.  Incoming President Trump will negotiate such a settlement, and do whatever he can to assure a modicum of sovereignty - and access to the rare earths - for Ukraine. 

China, is now the most powerful country in the world and dealing with its autocratic president is essential given China's significant holdings of US debt, their steamrolling control of natural resources throughout Africa, and its militancy in the South China sea. 

Turkey, a rising power in the Middle East is governed by another autocrat, but given his weight, influence, and military power in the region, America must remain on a good footing with him. 

It is not that America loves dictators, but understands the good and bad of their rule.  Donald Trump, a good Machiavellian, heir to Kissinger's realpolitik, and America first nationalist will eschew any high minded talk of democracy and see how to exact the best deals with the world's autocrats  

The Resurrection of History - Donald Trump And The Demise Of Cancel Culture Revisionism

Arthur Kreis had read about the Nazi purges of the 30s; but he like many of his generation thought that the days of pogroms, Kristallnacht, and concentration camps were a thing of the past; and that the German Reich and Soviet Russian autocracy would never again appear, but he was wrong.  The legacy of intellectual purification was alive and well in America.  The cancel culture - the pseudo-intellectual movement to remove any and all taints of assumed incivility - had gained in relevance and potency with the rise of the far Left.  

For four years, the Biden Administration oversaw the dismantling of Richmond's Monument Avenue, a remembrance - not an elegy - of the Confederate South.  It approved of and encouraged the renaming of all streets, schools, and public buildings that acknowledged Southern history and summarily dismissed anything that smacked of a racially oppressive past.  Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson Davis both had to be consigned to irrelevance, the one a miscegenist and brutal plantation grandee, and the other the leader of a movement to institutionalize and preserve slavery. 

 

In so doing, the right and proper legacy of these men was cancelled.  The genius of Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights was deemed irrelevant given the concubinage of his slave, Sarah Hemmings, a consensual droit du seigneur at worst. The South's principled defiance of the North's hegemony and sanctimonious censure of an economic system dating back well beyond ancient Greece  was demonized and dismissed. 

Arthur Kreis was a man of rectitude, principle, and honest commitment.  He was a follower of Adam Smith, Hayek, Friedman, Ronald Reagan, and William Buckley - an intellectual conservative who understood the cultural centrality of the philosophy.  He was determined, undaunted, and forward thinking in his vision of a freer, more independent, more culturally dynamic society than that proposed and promoted by the liberal Left.  He was no street corner preacher, no wild-haired hysterical Cassandra.  He was a man of historical legacy, an inheritor of Enlightenment principles, Jeffersonian vision, and Hamiltonian objection. 

 

And yet, one by one he was cancelled, dismissed, marginalized and sent to an intellectual gulag.  The Utopian dream cannot be sullied by deniers, said his friends, family, and colleagues who insisted that his view of the world had been corrupted by anti-secularist, deep state monarchists, and that his opinions were ipso facto insignificant and irrelevant. 

Arthur had grown up in an earlier age, one whose political differences were no less pronounced but equally acceptable. He wore an 'I like Ike' button while his classmates touted Adlai Stevenson as the candidate for the little man; yet they all played baseball on the Green and drank sodas at Waverly's.  Politics was serious but not a be-all and end-all. 

Now, thinking in the same vein, educated in the philosophies of the English and Scottish Enlightenment, familiar with Time on the Cross and other disquisitions on the economics of slavery, and a student of Russian and Chinese Communism, he had become an eloquent advocate for historical relevancy and philosophical integrity. 

And yet, he had been dismissed, cancelled, and relegated for his views.  A supporter of Donald Trump who despite his histrionics and vaudevillian genius was a sound, republican conservative, Arthur was ceded no ground.  Anyone supporting such a racist, misogynist, predatory capitalist could not be trusted around children; and so it was that Arthur was told to stay away, keep his noxious distance, and steep in his own bilious broth. 

Arthur was an admirer of Cavalier gentility, the sophistication of genteel, high society, and the appreciation for manners, respect, and social dignity of the antebellum South.  Not a racist or pro-slavery advocate, he was a student of slavery, its persistence, its longevity, and its many incarnations.

Slavery was by no means only black and African, but universal.  Paleolithic tribes took slaves as booty and traded them along with cowrie beads as wealth.  Greeks and Romans kept Nubian and Eastern European slaves. Anyone who conquered anyone else exacted tribute, often in the form of slaves. African tribes profited from the sale of their slaves to Europeans. 

A review of the cultural antecedents of slavery – Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character  – provides the context for life in the modern South.  Pilgrimage Balls, celebrations of the grace, style, and genteel manners of past generations of Southerners are historical reminders.  Not only are the restored antebellum homes and dress balls testaments to the Old South, but more importantly a given sense of regional identity.

Yet Northern liberals are quick to dismiss this very regional phenomenon which, like everything else Southern, has to do with some form of congenital ignorance.  They conflate fundamentalism with racism – both are products of insular thinking and perpetuated by the same retrograde absolutism.  To make matters worse the so-called ‘faithful’ are the dupes of venal pastors who prey upon ignorance and backwoods belief.

While Southern fundamentalism – like any other phenomenon – may well be a product of regional isolation, a stubbornly agrarian society, and a social conservatism bred in the defiant days of the antebellum and Reconstruction periods; it would be wrong to dismiss its spiritual dimensions.  Whether for profound spiritual reasons, the need for community and belonging, or a sign of status and public image, religion in the South cannot be dismissed. 

Southern evangelicals are far more open, proud, and expressive of their belief in God and Jesus Christ than most Northerners ever will be.  Religious faith can be felt in the South. When put all together – racial harmony, discord, and the legacy of the Civil War; religious fundamentalism, social and political conservatism, persistently low socio-economic rankings, and a continuing proud regional identity -  the South is a very complex place. 

All of which does not exclude slavery from moral discussions nor exonerate it, but simply includes it; Arthur felt that no true intellectual historian should ever take sides - a position for which he was castigated and cancelled for giving succor to the enemy.  A traitorous apostate, an unbeliever, a social heretic. 

His 18th century originalist views of free market capitalism were excoriated as backward, socially insensitive and abusive.  His Biblical views on sexuality, marriage, and procreation were immediately challenged, dismissed, and ridiculed. 

 

In short his belief in the conservative canon was laughed at, an impossibly ignorant avowal of discredited theories of human behavior.  Accordingly, he was dismissed from Christmas, grandfatherhood, and Thanksgiving.  He was a pariah, a street pie dog, an unwanted political supernumerary.  

Never in his life did Arthur ever consider limitations on free speech.  The restrictions, censure, deliberate cloture of debate of today would have been heinous and unconscionable in the Fifties, and traitorous in Hamilton's time.  And so he took his cancellation and marginalization with a bit of indifference - history is tale of the ruled and the ruling and the preeminence of the latter - but still was angry and vindictive. 

Joining the Trump juggernaut helped assuage the frustrated sense of political insubstantiality, and gave him a renewed sense of purpose; but he would not get his family back any time soon, so inextricably bound as they were to the progressive canon. 

His censuring, cancelling daughter-in-law had been caught on camera channeling the Red Brigades, shouting, 'Death to America' and calling for the overthrow of the unholy imposter, Trump; so Arthur would have to wait until the dust cleared, his and all speech was admitted, and the country reverted back to first principles before he would be readmitted to his family; but ignorance always disassembles if given time and persistence, and he would have his day. 

The Second Coming Of Donald Trump - A Latter Day Genghis Khan Thunders Into Washington

Genghis Khan was a charismatic and fearsome figure.  He and his armies were known for their cruelty and barbarity, and the sight of them advancing across the battlefield in a storm of dust, the earth shaking with the thunder of 50,000 hooves, was enough to send enemies into retreat. The thought alone of this terrible, bloodthirsty, and mighty warrior was enough to rout enemy armies. Genghis Khan was a man of absolute will and power, a frightening presence of power and vengeance.  He was a horseman of the Apocalypse.

 

There have been many successful armies in the world.  Julius Caesar, Scipio Africanus, Pompey the Great, and Marcus Agrippa were as brilliant generals as Genghis Khan, and brought Roman organization, discipline, and management to the battle.  They won because of superior ability, armaments, and military thinking; yet it was Genghis Khan who, with an almost untamed savagery, conquered the world.  At its height the Mongol Empire extended from far eastern China to the Danube, the biggest empire the world has ever seen. 

The Second Coming of Donald Trump will be no different from the rampaging hordes of Genghis Khan who with his Mongol-Turk army charged out of the steppes in a rampage of bloody violence and absolute conviction. Donald Trump's second presidency will be one no one ever expected.  Progressive Democrats who have hectored, badgered, and lambasted the man since his first appearance on the national political stage ten years ago, are already on the run, scurrying for the exits before the legions of destroyers arrive at the gates of the city.  

The return of Trump is something remarkable - a man condemned as an ur-villain, the spawn of the devil, a vile, hateful, arrogant and self-serving criminal is now again poised to lead the country.  Progressives were blindsided, sandbagged and totally taken unawares, so confident were they in the righteousness of their beliefs.  It was unthinkable that anyone could defy the vision of a multicolored, multilayered utopian society, a Tausend Jahre Reich of goodness and beauty, and yet here was the Demon himself at the gates.

The return of Donald Trump, as surprising and historic as it is, will indeed be the End of Days envisaged by his enemies.  The capital will be upended, uprooted, and made unrecognizable as his occupying, unrepentant tribe of merciless conquerors take it over.  Enemies' heads will be impaled on spikes up and down Pennsylvania Avenue, as a reign of vindictive terror and radical change will be established. 

There is nothing that will be untouched by the occupier's fury and intent.  His cadres of silencers and destroyers will stop at nothing to rid the capital of the rotted, viral infestation of the past four years. 

The Second Coming will indeed be of Biblical proportions - the savage destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah will be nothing compared to the devastation wreaked on Washington, a place of equal godlessness, deserving of every blow of Trump's righteous sword.

The new President of Argentina, Javier Milei has become known for his buzz saw and cry of Afuera! the memes of his own Genghis Khan intents to destroy and remove the legacy of decades of penitential Peronism, years of brutal inflation, low wages, profligate public spending, all cloaked in the righteous mantel of populism and historic destiny.  Useless, sycophantic departments of government - Afuera! Clock-punching, sybaritic bureaucrats - Afuera! Vaporous preachers, vain and venal politicians - Afuera!  The new Argentina will never again repeat the errors of the past.  Juan and Evita Peron will be finally dead, buried, and forgotten; or remembered only as opportunistic despoilers. 

The two men - Milei and Trump - are men with an unmitigated, unshakeable mission.  Both are men of energy, will, and purpose; but Trump's engines are fueled by a high octane vendetta. Whether it is for the Robespierre satisfaction of seeing the old guard, the settled, self-assured, political autocrats under the blade of La Veuve, the guillotine; or for the leveling of Leftist Louvre and Palais de Versailles of 'progressive' Washington, Trump is licking his chops. 

Oh, yes, the checks and balances, constitutional principles of American government, will prevail and there will be no such unilateral slaughter.  Democracy will show itself to be still the best and most trusted form of governance there is.  Trump will be stopped. 

 

Such is the vain hope of the Left which for the last decade has done everything possible to undermine the rule of law. Their unmitigated attempts to try and convict Donald Trump on frivolous, politically motivated charges are only the most obvious and exaggerated examples of their disregard for and disrespect for the law

'Democracy Matters' say the lawn signs in every wealthy, progressive neighborhood.  Trump is the anti-Christ, the insurrectionist interloper out to destroy democracy, liberals said, and now see that their worst fears are being realized.  In the four years of the Trump presidency, democracy will be a goner. 

Of course not, for Donald Trump is a manipulator of the system equal to that of any Democrat.  He knows how to use the gears and wheels of government to further his ends.  He understands how the American legal system - political to the core with judges either elected by a partisan electorate or appointed by a self-serving politician - can be used to achieve sought-after ends.  He is not a survivor of the 'So, sue me' mean streets of New York for nothing.  The system is there to be had, and to use it for one's own ends is not undemocratic, but at the very heart of populist democracy. 

Donald Trump has the same worldview as Genghis Khan - one of conquest and complete victory, fueled by geopolitical ambition and massive ego.  America will once again be Republican, conservative, devout, principled, and unified.  No namby-pamby president, no Jimmy Carter, could possibly realize a vision of such scope and magnitude. 

Heads on spikes, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the guillotine? History has a tendency to repeat itself, but then does so in remarkably innovative and creative ways, so Donald Trump in his Second Coming will find new ways of channeling Nietzsche and Monsieur Khan.  Hold on to your hats. 

'All Happy Families Are Alike; Each Unhappy Family Is Unhappy In Its Own Way'

Tolstoy knew very much what he was about when he wrote this famous first line of Anna Karenina, but few people really understand it until they are old enough to have a gander at their neighbors.  The Carpenters, Booths, Lows, and Bristols were all very happy and secure in their happiness.  The children were all blonde, blue-eyed, and well behaved. Husband and wife were faithful to each other, summered on the Vineyard, skied in Switzerland, and enjoyed their inherited wealth.  

The men were well placed in business and the professions, their wives successful in their own right as volunteers and homemakers.  Aside from Mrs. Booth's penchant for large flowered dresses, it was hard to tell them apart. 

Of course each Townsend chair and Revere silver tea service was unique, and the Lows had a penchant for Persian carpets, but all in all these happy families were indistinguishable. The elder members of their families died old, peacefully, and at home; there were no squabbles about inheritance - there was plenty to go around, and the children were all successful in their own right - and disfiguring and disabling disease had missed them entirely. 

More than the luck of the draw, it was healthy to be born well, and navigation through life's ups and downs with a full treasury and a Yale education always ensured smooth sailing.  While less fortunate, envious neighbors kept waiting for crack in the marvelously polished and seamless armor of these favored families, it never came.

These neighbors, all unhappy, were indeed unhappy in unique and, for a small town, unusual ways.  No one could have predicted that in 1957 Harold Potter would have been caught in flagrante delicto with the Orchard boy in his uncle's machine shop, an unlikely place for such an embrace, but sexual desire seems to have no limits, and Blanton Orchard's metalworks were just as good a sexual venue as any, despite the greasy tools and oil rags.

The Potters had been the mirror image of the Carpenters, Lows, et. al. - good schools, good manners, and a respectable summer home - but there had always been something creepy about the father, lurking, and somewhat suspicious.  Nothing anyone could point to, no stains on his ties, no perennially loose collar; just something not right. Compared to the happy families down the street, something was off-kilter, awry...something waiting to happen, and when it did, it was no surprise.

Mrs. Potter stuck by her husband in the Fifties way, and for all intents and purposes her loyalty seemed merited.  Harold shaped up nicely, that creepy seditious quality was all but gone, and no Orchard boy incidents occurred again.  Until the Petrucci boy, son of the Italian grocer on Arch Street.  Luigi Petrucci, either a product or cause of yet another unhappy family, was the femme fatale of New Brighton High School, who despite the probity and social conservativism of the time, was a flaming queer who never made any attempt to hide it; and so caught the attention of the besotted Harold Potter. 

His relationship was as clandestine as that with the Orchard boy, but this time in an unpleasant root cellar beneath the abandoned Frisbee place where no one had bothered to clean out the rotten potatoes and onions after the Frisbees, another unhappy family, left town after the 'City Hall Scandal' when Bartlett Frisbee had embezzled $50,000, a hefty sum in those days. 

It turned out the embezzlement was only the tip of the iceberg, for Bartlett couldn't keep away from the track, and even with the thousands embezzled from the city, he lost his shirt and Monmouth, Yonkers, and Pimlico. 

 

A sidebar to the real story of Harold Potter and the Petrucci boy who had become, even at his young age, a moneymaker.  The nastiness of the Frisbee root cellar tripled his ordinary price, but Harold simply could not keep away.  He had never had a pretty boy before, and he would pay any price for ten minutes with him. 

Meanwhile Angelo Petrucci, livid, ashamed, and brutally angry at this fairy he had somehow created was finally arrested for child abuse, and handcuffed and on his way to jail, he hurled the most unheard of, vile, homophobic epithets the town had ever heard.  The happy families couldn't believe that such a person existed in their town, but that was their nature - so settled, accomplished, and successful in their ways were they, that the could not imagine the depths to which unhappy families descended. 

Nothing of course changed over the years, and New Brighton retained its social divisions even despite the leveling ethos of the Sixties. As always the town was divided - the heirs and legatees of the industrial fortunes of an earlier era; the doctors and lawyers who handled their affairs; tradesmen and clerks; and the workers in the tool and dye factories which remained and grew after the big factories were sold and moved to China - but the essential division between happy and unhappy families remained. 

Martha Anderson was a professor at Central Connecticut State University, and chair of the Department of Social Culture, a minor feature of the Liberal Arts Faculty, but popular because of its woke progressivism.  Prof. Anderson demanded little of her students except buy-in to the ethos of the Department, and her classes were no more than disassembling screeds that used culture as a convenient context for the promotion of her own extreme liberal notions. 

No one can hold such impossibly febrile and in her case discredited socialist ideals without some kind of leakage into family affairs. Prof. Anderson could not contain her academic anger at American society and a boiling hatred for political conservatism and brought it home with her.  Such was her intemperance and growing mental imbalance that she was convinced of a narrowing perimeter of social justice and a universal infection hemming her in. 

Her uncle, a conservative intellectual educated in the economics of Hayek, Friedman, and Adam Smith, a political satirist with a sharp eye for progressive overreach, and a profound social traditionalism which favored religion and marriage, was the enemy - an insidious, seditious traitor to political sensibility and the potential corrupter of her son, Adam, the apple of her eye, future progressive hero, good responsible citizen, and prized member of the new age of communality; and in one fell swoop she banned the uncle and his entire family from coming within a hundred miles of New Brighton. 

What had been a tightly-knit extended family was now history, cancelled, and obliterated.  The uncle, his wife, and the Professor's nieces and nephews were blindsided, sandbagged for no reason.  The former integrity of a happy family was disassembled in an instant and tossed aside.  

It gets worse.  No marriage can survive such virulent animus, universal enmity, and viral hatred.  When Donald Trump got re-elected, Prof. Anderson went completely off the rails and became a whirling dervish of uninhibited insanity, a St. Vitus' dancer, an apoplectic Mad Woman of Chaillot. In less than a year the marriage ended in divorce with all three family members thrown to the wind. 

No one had ever seen such a woman in New Brighton, and the happy families could only say, 'No wonder', when the professor's family split.  Martha Anderson had been unique in her political animus and on the asymptotes of the social bell curve; but it only takes one such individual to cause chaos. 

Now, it has been said that happy families in their predictable similarity are the brakes to a vibrant, dynamic society.  They in their rectitude, moral probity, and incessant goodness send just the wrong message to the rest of the upside down world which is in the vast majority.  

Ivan's Devil in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is a self-proclaimed vaudevillian. Without me, he tells Ivan, everyone would fall asleep in their traces. I do my villainy, my nasty tricks, my troublemaking just to wake people up.  Somnolence is no way to live; and Tolstoy had the same idea.  The families in Anna Karenina are unhappy in very distinctive, memorable ways, but without their vitality, sexual desire, and social ambition, where would Russian society be?

New Brighton is no different from any American Town.  Thornton Wilder in his Our Town writes of Grover's Corners where everyone is happy, but looking down upon it from heaven, a young girl recently dead sees nothing but an artificially settled happiness and beneath it endemic unhappiness; so perhaps the world needs more Martha Andersons not fewer. 

'God forbid', said a retired postal carrier who remembered both the affairs of 1957 and of the Anderson family.  

Back In The Closet - The LGBTQ+ Crowd Scurries For Cover As MAGA Man Takes Over Washington

Finally the hoopla, the sexual extravaganza, the great gender jamboree is over, and the nation can get back to brass tacks. The Trump Administration will not only be straight and white, but it will have no patience for the shenanigans trumpeted around the country as the new sexual order, no more transgender kindergarten story tellers, plus-sized transformers, and giant-sized helpings of swish, flounce, and flannel. 

 

Billie Flanders was on her way to tasting the last delightful morsel from the the sexual smorgasbord, otherwise known as the gender spectrum. She started off with traditional fare, but sampled urchin, cockles, sweetbreads, seaweed, and udder until she was sated.  Anyone who told her to pick any one of a hundred sexual delicacies was a fool.  The whole purpose of the gender spectrum was grazing 

Under the old sexual banner, you were determined by your chromosomes, and no one could tinker with XX and XY.  You either were or you were not; but now all that was just a stale memory.  Sexuality was what you felt, how you identified, and how you saw yourself.  The choice was staggeringly enticing; and Billie meandered her way slowly down the table sampling - one day all girly girl and the next jackbooted riveter.  The market provided her with all the prosthetics - marvelously soft and tender breasts, steel hard cocks, voice enhancers and tremolo sidebars, wigs from the finest South Indian hair, high-tech coloring and makeup.  It was all a three-ring circus, a jamboree of sexual flair, a statement of individuality, inclusivity, and just plain fun. 

When asked by a gay sister whether she was ever going to stop tasting, and finally settle down for the main meal, she looked quizzically at her, bent a wrist and shook the locks of her marvelously Dolly Parton hair, and said, 'Are you kidding?'

The whole gender spectrum notion was not like buying a new car when you looked at sedans, SUVs, pickups, and monster trucks and had to make up your mind and put your money down.  On the contrary fungibility was the thing.  Pick and choose moments were the nature of the life.  The whole melodramatic, game show, soap opera extravaganza was the whole point. 

The new Be All You Can Be clubs popping up in every major metropolitan area were sexual carnivals of Mardi Gras proportions.  Gender reveal moments were the glitzy, waited for, anticipated high times.  Guessing, sussing, and sexual savvy were party games.  Who is she/he/them/they? When frilly Billie gave the revelers at Clit's Place a quick look at her well hung junk, the crowd burst out with applause.  She had fooled everyone. 

In this wild, revivalist sexual fairground many men and women took this new gender fluid algorithm to its logical extreme and added parts they never had and lopped off others which were now unnecessary; but they were on the asymptotes of the bell curve.  Why would anyone go to such measures when changing sexuality like chiffon for jackboots could be an everyday affair? 

The likes of Billie understood - and profoundly understood - the nature of sexual identity.  She was so attuned to her primal sexuality - i.e. that unformed, malleable, but distinctly pleasure-seeking bolus of energy within her - that she could express it in any way she felt.  Not only was there no need for radical physical transformation, it belied very notion of sexual alternation. 

She was as happy as could be.  She was a sexual vaudevillian, a method actor, a marvelously versatile soap opera star.  Life was good. 

When news came in that the new American President, Donald Trump, was going to come down hard on the gender spectrum and turn America back to its farmhouse, Sunday-goin'-to-meeting, cornfield, and prairie sexual roots, nervous ripples went through the LGBTQ+ community.  How can he?, they shouted. How could he?, they wondered. Will he? they all worried; but all the storm troopers in the world could never round them up and send them to workhouses and gulags.  This was America, land of the free.  

 

Yes, of course it was, but there are limits to every free expression, and millions of Americans were simply sick and tired of the sexual doings of the coastal elites.  The whole idea of denying God's choices, refusing the holy architecture of human nature, throwing common sense and history to the winds was anathema.  Ghettoes weren't just for black people, Trump supporters argued, they are for the weird sexual freaks who make a mockery of Creation. 

The Castro and Folsom Street were two such sexual inner cities, and there the most unprintable things happened.  People did the unspeakable to each other - chains, whips, leather harnesses, giant dildoes, bronco busting and more - in a wild orgy of sexual abandon.  If this sort of American had to exist - and gulags, concentration camps, and reservations aside, America was still not a land of exterminators - let it be off camera 

 

Billie took Trump at his word, but knew that in her ethos of sexual fungibility, she could easily don suit and tie, show up at the office as straight as an arrow, trade off color jokes in the men's locker room, and chase women in the corridors, and then in the privacy of her own home fuck and be fucked by anyone she pleased.  That was the real advantage of the gender spectrum - it provided cover as well as expression. 

Trump's sexual cleanup crews were already mobilizing from Dubuque to Piping Rock, making an appearance at libraries, schools, and churches to show the new flag of sexual propriety, rectitude, and civility.  The muzzles were off MAGA politicians who went totally Rodney Dangerfield and Borscht Belt political incorrectness as they pilloried the twisted sisters of the Left.  It was a bodacious he-haw time in Washington, and for most Americans it felt good to finally have the blinders and wet blankets of censorship tossed aside. 

So, the rats are leaving a sinking ship - or so were the unkind words of the new administration which had campaigned on returning America to its foundational roots - but of course these rats, these benighted but upstanding Americans, would find another, more congenial, and accepting place to lay their heads.  It was not the end of the world, what goes around comes around, and the veracity of the vision, the absolute rightness of the gender spectrum would soon be seen and realized for the transcendent reality it was. 

For now, Billie went in mufti, straight white man of privilege and proportion, a man to be reckoned with, although she hoped to God this penitential period would not last long. OMG, these shoes!! 

When DEI Gets Nasty - A White Feminist Gets Left On The Curb By Her Uppity Black Sisters

Karen Musgrove had been a profound liberal since she could remember.  Child of privilege but of modest intellectual furnishings, she found herself rejected at the nations' top universities, but accepted at the best of the second tier.  Vassar it wasn't, but according to The National Academic Review, it was 'a worthy competitor to the Seven Sisters'. 

 

At first she languished in the Midwest - the cornfields and prairies were far from her Philadelphia Main Line home - but soon found her place among the radical feminist cadres for which the college was increasingly famous.  Lavinia Hurd, perhaps the most recognizable of the leftist firebrands whose insistent demands gave them unusual influence in faculty hiring and admissions policy, had published widely.  Her Cunts On Top - The Rise Of Bitches In A Cock's World, published first in a San Francisco underground journal, then cleaned up and edited by The Atlantic and circulated widely - gave her national credibility and academic cachet. 

When Karen met Lavinia, it was an automatic guru-chela bonded relationship.  Karen would do anything for her mentor, and for her first year she was the woman's sycophant, acolyte, and gofer.  Thanks to Lavinia Karen also was also published although still in undergraduate journals, but by the end of her senior year, she was accepted by The University of Chicago School of Communications, and began her academic career.  

The School of Communications was as radical as that of Karen's alma mater, but had more salience and political influence because of the reputation of the university of which it was a part. Academicians in lesser schools paid attention to what came out of Chicago, and the uniquely radical feminist creed which had originated there spread quickly and universally. 

The problem with the School of Communication (SOC, pronounced 'suck') was that it was still white - far too white said the dean and far too Jewish, so it was time for the talent search to expand to the ghetto.  DEI was still legal and current - the Supreme Court had not yet ruled against Harvard - so beefing up the faculty with black sisters was no problem. 

The problem was the PhD. While some black women had managed advanced degrees in education and social work, there were few in the higher orders of academia; so when Chicago found LaShonda Washington who had been a star at Duke's School of Cross Cultural Studies and an intimidating presence, they opened the doors to the treasury and made her a generous offer. 

Now, LaShonda had no intellectual weight whatsoever, and she was one of the reasons that the Supreme Court had finally slammed the hammer down on Harvard.  Enough recruitment on the basis of race, gender, and ethnicity and a return to excellence, justices noted in the majority opinion; but LaShonda had been appointed and secured before the SCOTUS judgment, so she was a protected species.  A nasty bitch of a woman who had laid waste to her former colleagues at Duke, the university had been glad to get rid of her; but of course said nothing about her vileness to prospective employers. 

The worst part of it was, she was no feminist, only appeared to be that way because of her arrogance, stupendous posture of black entitlement, and take-no-prisoners ambition.  While her Chicago colleagues were squirreled away in their carrels writing screeds about 'the neo-socialist rise of the committed woman' and penning 'Buggery - Sex, Plunder, and Womanhood', LaShonda simply shot her mouth off at one conference after another about black women.  

'Booty is power', she shouted to a crowd of white women at Grinnell, 'so shake that thang, shop some poontang, and get yo'self done, I mean done, honey' but all that did was to make the slim-hipped, booty-less women in the audience feel bad about themselves. They could never be black and be ho's and bitches like LaShonda. 

 

Karen was not unlike these Grinnell women - she was not only a feminist but a black wannabee, and did everything in her power to be as black as possible without being a poseur or appropriator.  So when LaShonda brought in her crew of black women from Anacostia, the inner city Washington ghetto where she grew up, Karen was initially proud and happy.  The more color the better, and the university would have to endow the SOC with significantly more funds. 

The black women came on board, but the university was stingy with its finances. 'You'll just have to make do', the Purser said, which of course meant making room.  Someone would have to go. 

Much to everyone in the department's surprise, the next six months was a time of unexpected racial enmity.  All the white women there were hard and fast progressives for whom the jewel in the crown was race.  There were no social issues facing the nation to compare with white supremacy, oppression, and the persistent legacy of Jim Crow, and each faculty member, although hired to promote the cause of femaleness and gender supremacy, could not forget the forever lurking problem of systemic racism. 

So when these new black women, scarcely credentialed and as nastily uppity as LaShonda, started their concerted campaign of intimidation, threat, and retribution, their white colleagues were taken aback.  Black people were not supposed to act this way.  They were after all, children of the forest, endowed with native sensitivity to community, environment, and righteous behavior who would soon once again sit atop the human pyramid. 

Yet the black women were offensive, bullying, dismissive, and insufferable.  'Get yo' lily white ass out my way, cunt' said one to Karen as she moved in uninvited to Karen's office.  At first the old nostrums ruled - this was a person of dignity who had suffered at the hands of the white grandee and deserved every grace period, every consolation, every consideration possible - but then the bile rose and Karen was miffed, offended, and angry.  This wasn't just a case of one bitch, but the existential suggestion that there were more of them out there; and then what was she to do?  Black people were not supposed to behave like this. The blush was off the bloom of the rose.

Yet the soul sisters were behaving like this, and one by one offices of Karen's white colleagues were occupied by the black women, and before long the whole department, the whole School of Communications had become a ghetto no different from any one of the slums east of the Anacostia River in DC.  At least for now there were no men, no pimps to speak of, but before the decks were swept clean and the place was a black redoubt, gold chains and steel grills started showing up, and dudes smoking Havanas. 

Karen had been sandbagged by this turn of events, but found she had been caught up in a DEI jamboree. Chicago and Duke were not the only places occupied by black ghetto sisters.  The onslaught had been universal.  The sequelae were worse than the assault.  Schools of Communication, never the brightest stars in the academic firmament but wildly popular, were losing their funding; and the principal locus for feminist studies was becoming a goner. 

There are few places for a minor academic to go these days, so it was Walmart cashier or the poor house until she could figure out what's what.  A PhDs had to be worth something generically, and some fungibility was built in, but still, it was an uncomfortable period for Karen. 

She did find a part-time adjunct position at a small Idaho college teaching English as a second language, but after that neither hide nor hair of her could be traced. 

The moral of the story? None to speak of in postmodern America.  Morality is a white thing, a colonial, racist thing, a thin-lipped thing.  Bitches rule, cunt heaven is upon us, so get out the way and move on. 

Christmas In The Ghetto - The Last DEI Warrior Visits The Worst Slum In Washington

The Washington, DC slums are among the nastiest in the country, as drug addled as South Central, as putrid and derelict as the worst of Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago, or Detroit; and the thing of it is, they are a stone's throw from the Capitol. 

Bob Muzelle, longtime progressive, Freedom Rider, social justice warrior, advocate for gay rights and women, knew that he had a Christmas mission - to bring enlightenment to the inner city. 

 

Bob had grown up in a modest Christian home in Babylon, Long Island.  His father was an accountant and his mother a homemaker. Both were laborites, Eugene Victor Debs Socialists, and supporters of Adlai Stevenson who was for the little man, the common man not unlike the Muzelles, and a principled liberal who led a lost cause against the military giant, American war hero, man of the elite, Dwight Eisenhower.  For both of Ike's terms, the Muzelles did their best to organize political opposition to the man who simply rested on his laurels, played golf, and received tributes for doing nothing. 

Where was Eisenhower when the black man was suffering oppression, living under a Jim Crow society far worse than the more congenial antebellum South?  To be black in America was to be invisible, ignored, and dismissed - consigned to inner city reservations of pitiful neglect. 

So young Bob came to liberalism honestly as a matter of legacy and family tradition; but he took to it with even more passion and commitment than his parents.  From a young age he not only sympathized with the plight of the black man, he wanted to be one of them.  When the first crossover blues and funky rock was heard on New York radio, Bob knew he had found his calling.  The music spoke to him, and when he saw pictures of the Delta kings who were wailing the blues, he felt he knew them.  He might be white, he reasoned, but his soul was black. 

 

He wanted to be shuckin’ and jivin’ at the Apollo, arm-in-arm with black folk, squiring high-shelved women, drinking malt liquor and smoking Kools on a Harlem stoop.  Only because of the dire warnings of his parents - ironically concerned about the race hatred and endemic violence of the very communities the professed to love -  he never went uptown. 

When he was admitted to Yale, he hit his stride.  The Reverend Blanton Lodge, scion of the famous Boston family, ordained Episcopalian minister, chaplain of the university, and first on the busses to Selma and Birmingham, took a liking to the young man, took him under his wing, and built him into a mighty activist.  Together they took on the country's dysfunction - its racism, the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, and the persistent abuse of women. 

After Yale and a PhD in Chicago Bob did tours in every major city of the country, lecturing, hectoring, badgering, and imploring white people to open their eyes to injustice and urging black people to unite in reformist solidarity.  He was a whirling dervish of positivism, a man possessed, a force to be reckoned with. 

When he finally ended up in Washington in a senior manager at Action for Social Responsibility (ASR), he was no less impassioned, and as an executive he had the power to influence legislators and opinion-makers.  For many years he labored in this capacity, and was a well-known noodge on Capitol Hill. He was fearless, tireless, and devoted. 

  

Since his Freedom Rider days, Bob had been content to be a mover and shaker, a man of distinction who could influence national policy, and aside from frequent trips to universities, corporate board rooms, and state legislatures, he had not gone down and dirty.  The ghetto had become a cause, a meme, an ethos and a cultural icon rather than a place; but now late in his career, he decided to change that. 

For Bob, the black man, despite allegations of endemic crime, dereliction, abandonment, violence, and abuse, was still the primal man of the African forest, a being of supernal ability, in touch with the world around him like no other, a native environmentalist, a communitarian, and spiritually endowed.  The ghetto, the inner city, the slum were just social gulags of the white elite, but within them flourished the culture of the future. 

So Bob envisioned his Christmas Mission, yearly descents into the neighborhoods across the Anacostia River, the ones so unfairly condemned as dysfunctional warrens of primitivism, savagery, and tribal ignorance. The same voice, the same passion that had rallied white Americans to the liberal cause would resonate with black ones 

So on Christmas Day, he went across the river where his first stop was the Ebenezer Baptist Church of Anacostia, a historic black church that had welcomed refugees from the Reconstruction South and had been a sanctuary for spiritually abused and economically marginalized ever since.  The Reverend Pharoah Barnum was the pastor, and thanks to his past friendship with Mayor for Life, Marion Barry, and through him connections to the Democratic leadership in Congress, Bob's visit there was easily arranged. 

However, the black community had changed since the old days, and there was only a desultory, indifferent sprinkling of older women in black hats and veils who nodded off after Bob's introductory remarks.  He tried to gin up some of the old passion, the roots blackness that he used to channel, the hallelujah spirit of the Bible, but the ladies still snored on. 

'I've got to go deeper', Bob said to himself, and so it was that he visited the Cowper-Berman Homes, a vast public housing project that matched the old Chicago Cabrini-Green or the Central Ward projects in Newark.  Indian Country to be sure, and did he really want to go there, an aide asked him? but Bob was undaunted, kept the windows of his car rolled down, and waved to passers-by. 

'What the fuck you want, white boy', a giant metal-toothed, grilled black man shouted at him at a stoplight, ramming a Baretta into Bob's face. 'Get the fuck up outta here before I blow your fuckin' brains all over your faux leather seats'; and that was just the beginning.  As he picked his way through the trash heaps, dog shit, needles and syringes in front of A-Block of the projects, catcalls and spit rained down from each floor.  'Ain't no black pussy for you here, white boy...suck some white dick uptown, fa--ot...punch your ticket in Georgetown, motherfucker...' and at the steel, barred and blocked prison door that led to the 'social room' where he was to meet and greet, was a posse of impossibly black, do-ragged, armed thugs. 

'Where the fuck you think you goin', ofay?' said one as the rest crowded around him. 'I know one thing, it ain't here'. 

'We better go, boss', said Bob's chief aide and major domo.  'They don't want us here'; and so it was that there were no jingle bells that Christmas, no carols, hosannas, or Ode to Joy.  Bob had brought a message of love and brotherhood and barely made it back across the river. 

'St Paul never had it so tough', he said to the major domo, trying to squeeze a smile out of the aide who thought he would never get out alive; but Bob was sorely deceived and disappointed.  Had all his fervency been for naught?  Why on earth had he made this nasty, idle, lousy shithole his life's work?  

Maybe I should have been an accountant', he thought, remembering his father's famous last words as he headed into no man's land; and shortly thereafter, just like the old man retired to Florida.  'What was I thinking?', he said to his wife as he left a rather stingy tip for the black waiter.