Progressive Equipoise - Doing The Right Thing But Still Ending Up With The Shit End Of The Stick

'God is on our side', said the Reverend Brixton P Fellows, pastor of the Westover Methodist Church of Bethesda, formerly minister of the Shiloh AME Zion congregation in Aberdeen, Mississippi, the only white man to have been so chosen and appointed.  

The Reverend had been a soulmate of black people ever since he was a child, born into a Mississippi hill country cracker family which during Reconstruction had squabbled and fought with the newly enfranchised, former field hand plantation Negroes, but which had turned out a boy who loved them, saw them as the key to his and the nation's spiritual renewal. 

 

After a long tenure in Mississippi, Brixton had been noticed and approached by Westover.  The congregation needed a dose of the real thing, a sufferer, a white, converted, renewed Southerner who could recount tales of woe and contrition and bring the aspiring faithful to their feet.  They had wanted a black man, but despite their best efforts came up empty. 

The closest they came was Elijah Jackson, a charismatic preacher from Tuscaloosa, former child prodigy and storefront boy wonder who packed old Hiram Jenkins' dry goods place to the rafters, renowned for his Biblical knowledge and old time religion passion; but Jackson was simply too black, too rooted in gospel music, charisma, and whooping and hollering for the tony confines of Westover. 

Brixton Fellows on the other hand was a bridge over troubled waters, a white man steeped in the black plantation tradition of the Old South a man who could speak with two voices combined in choral harmony to praise the Lord and pursue his earthly ends. 

It took some time for the new pastor to suss out the ways and means of his new, white, well-to-do suburban elite congregants, but he soon learned that they were no different from the people of the South who found Jesus, shouted 'Hallelujah' and 'Praise the Lord', and took him as their personal savior. 

The rich white folk wanted the same spiritual epiphany, the same glorious renewal, but didn't wanted it such carnivalesque terms. They simply wanted to be reassured that their reformist sentiments, their desire to make the world a more generous, verdant, and peaceful place was legitimate and as sacred  as Moses on Mount Ararat.

Every Sunday, the Reverend Fellows went on about the black man, the penury and hard times of Jim Crow, the errors of Reconstruction, systemic racism, and the continued struggle for final, deserved recognition at the top of the human pyramid. 

'The black man', intoned Fellows, 'denizen of the forest, attuned to the subtle complexities of God's Creation like no other, a native of intelligence, beauty, and primal insight, the black man is close to his Maker, an anointed prophet, and a marvel'.  

 

The congregation nodded their approval, their signifying endorsement of this obvious but ignored principle.  'And as such', Fellows went on, 'he deserves our militant and enthusiastic support.  'The black man's struggle is OUR struggle'; and at that the usually reserved, recondite, and quiet congregation stood up and cheered. 

It would have been good if the Reverend had stopped there, satisfied with the shepherding of this small bit of aspiring Christians; but in this adulation, this rock star fame and renown (Christians from all over Washington, Montgomery County, and Virginia flocked to Westover to hear him speak) he knew that God had other plans for him. 

And so it was that he became part of and in time leader of that great social justice revolution that would assure God's greatness on earth.  Not only the black man but gays, lesbians, transgenders and Mexican asylum seekers needed to be fully recognized and brought into the brotherhood of Man. 

Although of course he never admitted it, the gay thing stuck in his craw.  The whole idea of men with other men was distasteful at best and downright disgusting at worst; but Jesus welcomed the lame, the crippled, the marred, the sclerotic, and the syphilitic; so why not homosexual love? ' And the floats in New Orleans and Mardi Gras were wonderful, enthusiastic gender-fluid orgies, a great show.

 

Here the Reverend tamped down the nasty thoughts, the unconscionable conservatism, and stood proud and defiant with his hard-driven gay crew and waved to the crowd. 

Every human being has his imperfections, he recognized, and his incomplete embrace of gay men was one of his; but that did not dim his political commitment, and he was warmly welcomed into the gayest, queerest clubs in the city, a champion of their cause. 

But in the rabidly dysfunctional, nasty ghettoes of the inner city, he did not find encouragement or opportunity.  Every time on MLK Avenue in Anacostia, a deep-black Washington ghetto that he was accosted by a whore and her pimp, had to step over nodding Fentanyl dopers, and duck to avoid Uzi repeater slugs, he wished he had never crossed the line, stepped from nice, tony, white Bethesda into the heart of darkness.

 

What was left for a God-fearing progressive secularist?  Women? Hah, they've had their day and they’re still uppity and as bitchy as ever, demanding academic chairs, legal partnerships, and public office and getting them!.

So Fellows was left with climate change, but for years had basked in warmer winters and a much more felicitous and manageable weather.  What was all the fuss about anyway?  Que sera, sera, As the World Turns, and what goes around comes around. 

In his last and final sermon to the Westover Methodist congregation, he came clean - Christians love epiphanies and revelations - and said he was retiring from spiritual guidance and, in so many words, his congregants should 'get a life'. 

He left them holding the shit end of the stick when they had been promised the white, clean, sanctified end; but he was in no mood for coddling.  Life was more cesspool that virginal delight, and the sooner these fools recognized the fact, the better.  Don't be buggered about black men, lesbians, or the climate, moral red herrings all.  Lighten up.  

Besides, Donald Trump and his cavalcade of beautiful blonde, blue-eyed white women were coming to town so the long dark dismal, dour night is ending

'Have a nice day', Reverend Fellows said before leaving the pulpit one last time.

My Name Is Bruce, And I'll Be Your Server Tonight, Or A Foodie Circus - The End Of Faux Haute Cuisine

Brandon Lord had grown up with meat and potatoes, fresh milk from the cows in the barn, a chicken from the coop, and snap peas and green beans from the garden. His mother, busy with a hundred other farm chores and caring for his twin baby sisters and a younger brother, had plenty to do other than think creatively in the kitchen. Her cooking was good, simple, staple, and filling, and no one ever complained. 

 

Everyone was hungry at five o'clock - Brandon's father worked the fields from sunup to sundown, Brandon walked the three miles to school and back, and the babies caterwauled until fed.  The only variety in Ma's cooking was which meat she would prepare, and that depended on whether a hog had been slaughtered or a chicken pulled from the roost.  Beef remained on the hoof - the cows provided ample milk for a growing family and earned a tidy income by selling it to the local dairy- they had no goats ('rancid, nasty-smelling things'), and deep in the heartland, far from river and stream, fish was a rarity. 

Ma was whiz in the kitchen, efficient, quick, and careful.  As a young boy Brandon marveled at the way she chopped and diced carrots, trimmed meat with a surgeon's precision and dancer's grace, watched and stirred three pots on the stove, and cooked everything to taste. Those were the days before medium rare, but even if that cuisson were known, Ma would still have cooked the roast well done - a lot of give that way, and served with a thick, rich, rendered gravy and mashed potatoes, anything medium rare would have been lost. 

Brandon liked to help out in the kitchen and especially liked cutting the meat into cutlets, steaks, or rolled roasts, stuffing the chicken, or whipping the pureed turnips.  He had a good sense for complementarity, and the family appreciated the little herbal flourish he gave to the meals - never too much, of course - this was still meat-and-potatoes land after all - but a hint of the marjoram that he had planted in far corner of the garden added a bit of interest. 

 

One thing led to another - an Iowa state scholarship to Harvard, mathematics, a PhD in number theory from MIT, and an assistant professorship at Berkeley.  

In all this, he had never lost his interest in food, cooking, cuisine, but was uninspired by the food around Harvard Square, student food, pizza, and bangers and mash at the Irish pubs up and down Cambridge Street; so when he moved to the Bay Area flush with the nouvelle California cuisine of Alice Waters - local ingredients cooked simply but with arrangement and interest - he was delighted.  Waters had taken farm food and made something of it. Never in million years would he ever have thought of garnishing meat with quince or a raspberry coulis, and he had never tasted duck, rabbit, pheasant, or squab; but now that his palate had been tempted and opened, he never looked back. 

Like everything American, the new cuisine could simply not be left alone, and over the years architectural towers, fanciful Art Deco arrangements of edible flowers and pine, and decorative presentations of sea urchin and foie gras took over.  The meals, while pure Kyoto in their minimalism, were perplexing.  Where, in that fragile, high, complex tower of thin radish stems, pea shoots, hibiscus, and cockles should one start? And if one was still hungry after three courses of the same, was it uncouth to ask for bread? 

 

Slowly but surely prices rose, edible content diminished, and the service became precious, gay, and impossible. When he saw Bruce smile and approach the table, Brandon looked away; but the waiter had been trained to be attentive, never obsequious, and always knowledgeable. 

'Hi, my name is Bruce, and I'll be your server tonight', the young man began. 'Do we have any allergies?', and with that Brandon adjusted his napkin ring, took a sip of sparkling water, and wondered why he had come.  

Unlike French waiters for whom waiting is a profession, as noble and respected as any other and who take food seriously, Bruce was stumped after the first rambling overture. Bruce knew no more about food preparation than the man in the moon. 

'Tonight's specials', he said, 'are crispy skinned Branzino in a light ginger-miso confection, garnished with periwinkles and local sea grasses, and finished with a spray of Meyer lemon infusion.  Second, we have....', and Bruce went on and on. 'Print the fucking thing', Brandon said to himself, tuning out the whiny, importuning voice of the waiter and waiting to order from the menu. 

Impatient and hungry, pissed that he had agreed to even come to the restaurant, and finding nothing but indecipherably recondite offerings, he asked Bruce if he could order a steak.  Bruce sighed, flicked a piece of lint off of his dark blue, freshly-ironed linen shirt, and smiled. For a moment he was nonplussed - nothing in his practiced patter was even close to a response to this patent absurdity, and nothing in his fey, self-assured, twitty little manner prepared him in the slightest prepared for such an improbability. 

Brandon's frustration had been brewing for some time, and because he had seen potential in Alice Waters' vision of local, unusual, fresh ingredients presented in a simple but attractive way, he persisted, only to find one restaurant more absurdly pretentious than the next.  Of course San Francisco had its share of steak houses and oyster bars - the Ferry Building's Hog Island bar serves a variety of Pacific Coast oysters and excellent grilled fish and chowders - but it seemed like everything from Sonoma to Carmel was nothing but an assortment of flighty, frivolous, offerings. 

Foraging was perhaps the longest and strangest reach for innovation.  Rene Redzepi, a Danish chef known for his innovative creations harvested from local waters, marshes, and estuaries, is perhaps the most well-known exponent of the trend.  Photographed in his sunhat, wading boots, long gloves and foraging tools, poking among the tidal pools of the North Sea parting the high grasses of nearby wetlands, he looks part safari bwana, part birdwatcher, and part weekend walker; but he is deadly serious, and picks with care among the tiny crustaceans, sea weed, and marsh grasses to come up with dinner at his restaurant, Noma. 

 

The waitlist is months long, and the diner gets very much what he expected - a marvelously-presented pastiche of greys, greens, and browns, a scent of the sea, and curiously edible stalks, strips, and shelly things.  The anticipation is so great and the event so long in coming, that satisfaction is guaranteed, so great is the willing suspension of disbelief. 

No one in his right mind would find this potpourri of barely edible weeds, straw, and snails appealing, but the reputation of the chef is enough to dispel any doubts.  The meal ipso facto has to be good. 

Brandon of course was not the only one at the end of his rope when it came to eating out.  The satiric television series Portlandia had a go at faux haute cuisine, and in one sketch gave two patrons a biographical sketch of the chicken they were about to eat - 'cared for in best of conditions, even loved, Isabella was an example of the respectful, almost spiritual nature of our mission...' and so on and so forth.  

A restaurant near Washington, DC, The Restaurant at Patowmak Farm, touts its home-grown produce, meats, and fish; and invites patrons to have a walk around the property, the free-range chickens, the pastured cows and goats, the herb gardens, and the trout stream.  'All husbanded, grown, cultivated, and harvested with love and respect'. 

Classic art of the Renaissance gave way to the Baroque and then the Rococo - a period of flounce, flourish, and artistic exaggeration, horror vacui, leave no space unfilled - and it seems that every cultural movement must go through these phases before it dies out; and so it will be with American 'haute cuisine'.  With Redzepi, Portlandia, and The Restaurant at Patowmak Farm, American cuisine is in its final Rococo phase, and R.I.P. 

 

Ma's pot roasts and mashed potatoes might not become the fare of Bay Area restaurants, but at least there will be some comfort food on the menu, some refuge from the exorbitance and absurdity of food fancy.  The best restaurants will get rid of the architecture and the painterly presentations and stick to simplicity - local ingredients to be sure when possible, but the international marketplace is abundant with fish, meat, vegetables and fruit.  The ethos will be once again, good, fresh, properly prepared food at a reasonable price.  Not exactly Iowa farm fare, but a good approximation 

It's only a matter of time. 

Happiness Is A Hard Pill To Swallow - Progressivism And The Sad Demise Of A Morose Social Reformer

Bob Muzelle was not a happy man, but in this depressing rectitude, he was content.  What was there to be happy about, he mused, when the world was beset by predatory capitalists, mindless racists, and homophobic fools?

Bob was a man who had always seen the glass as half-empty, a deep, burrowing pessimist who loved dark, rainy days, who even when walking through the park as a young man on a bright Spring day, he could only see the homeless, dead pigeons, the hospital where only the wealthy were interned, and the spires of churches which promised God but delivered nothing to improve his Creation.  

The scent of apple trees, lilacs, lilies of the valley, and honeysuckle - God's marvelous distillation - went unnoticed as Bob, head down, mind in the lunch pails of the poor immigrants slaving over steam presses and lathes at Stanley Works, trudged onward across the park to his three-story walkup home. 

'Happiness is a fiction', said the Reverend Branford Parrish, former chaplain, Freedom Rider, and champion of the black man, women, and the other gendered in a sermon on 'The Inheritance of Good - The Promise of Progressivism' at the Westover Methodist Church, go-to and spiritual home for the suburban elites of Washington.  Westover was a congregation whose flock was shepherded by the Very Reverend Marcus Hawley in whose hands Jesus was an oppressed man of color whose compassion for the poor, the marginalized, the disabled, and the emotionally broken was the foundation for modern liberalism. 

'We not only should follow the teachings of Jesus', Hawley said. 'We must!' and from that point de départ went on to lambaste the incontinent rich, the unheeding, rapacious capitalists who in their desire for untold wealth 'are anti-Christs, distortionists, skulking, miserable, arrogant fools who want to raze the homes of the poor to erect shibboleths of grandiosity...'

When Reverend Hawley got his mojo working, he was unstoppable, a prolix, whirling dervish of passion.  Like the old time Baptist preachers in the South, he raised his worn, well-used leatherbound Bible and shouted, 'This shall not stand!' and the ordinarily temperate, judicious, and recondite crowd leapt to its feet and cheered. 

The two men - Hawley and Parrish made an enviable tag team.  Parrish, a Harvard Divinity School scholar, long time social activist, and dyed-in-the-wool progressive whose sermons and lectures were as academically sophisticated as the classes of Harold Bloom on William Blake; and the fiery, possessed, Old Testament-like prophet Hawley were a good cop-bad cop duo impossible to resist; and the congregation at Westover was simply in tears over their masochistic bludgeoning. 

There was indeed no room for happiness in such a troubled world, they concluded after Parrish had finished his sermon; and after the harangue of Hawley, out the door they went, soldiers of the new progressive millennium. 

Bob Muzelle was a congregant at Westover and never missed a Sunday.  The sermons were advertised on a large display outside the church for all passersby to see, but Bob needed no introduction, so assiduously did he read The Westover News in which the sermons of guest pastors were announced.  All were on heady topics relevant to the current miseries of racism, homophobia, misogyny, climate ignorance, and the devils of Wall Street; but each and every one had a reference to Jesus, Paul, and the Evangelists.  

 

After coming home on Sunday mornings after church, Bob was happily depressed, never dejected, for that would imply defeatism and spiritual loss, but simply delightedly upset by the inglorious, degenerating world around him he was chosen to fix. He had deliberately planted no flower garden, cut back the chrysanthemums, and uprooted the hydrangeas in a kind of penance, a visual hairshirt to remind him of the lives of quiet desperation of the poor and disadvantaged. 

The interior of Bob's modest Bethesda split-level was as spare and spartan as the yard.  There was nothing of beauty there, not one Art Deco figurine, Edo woodcut, Persian miniature, Audubon print, or Sargent reproduction.  Not even a Persian carpet or Kashmiri durrie.  All would be disturbances to the ethos of penitential purpose. Just a lone portrait of Samuel Gompers, labor leader of the Twenties and progressive icon, hung over the fireplace. 

 

Bob's wife Corinne was also a veteran of the culture wars, a dutiful social reformer, former head of an impressive women's organization, and recognized figure on the front lines and at the barricades of abortion, abuse, and male privilege, but had given it all up in early retirement, turned to lesser concerns - book clubs, Pilates, and cooking classes - and had quietly but insistently asked Bob to reconsider his monastic tastes and spruce the place up. 'God knows', she said to him over breakfast one day, 'it wants a bit of color'. 

The Muzelles did not get out much, only to see friends, but for Corinne those dour, unhappy meals were worse than staying home.  Bob's idea of a good time was talking about the worker and the black man or watching King Lear - the most depressing, downbeat play of the canon, a horrible story of an old man abused by his thankless daughters, left to rant and die on the heath with no solace or refuge.  She knew that that type of play suited Bob. On the way home in the car, he could only shake his head in commiserating misery, but contentedly so. 

 

'Things have got to change around here', said Corinne one day, sick and tired of their miserable, sunless life.  For years she had supported, gone along with, and put up with it; but now, the time had come to shift gears and head to Florida.

'What?', replied Bob incredulously. 'Florida?  For God's sake, anyplace but', and with that he turned the page of Sartre's Being and Nothingness and turned off the light. 

Yet Corinne was serious, and when Bob walked in the next day and smelled the floral bouquet his wife had arranged on the coffee table, he said, 'This is not funeral home, Corinne'; but to her it was, for she couldn't resist the irony - flowers he hated disrupting the morose sanctity of the living room.

When Donald Trump got elected a second time, Bob was disconsolate. His depressive morosity turned to flaming, hysterical anger - a St. Vitus' dance of rage and insult.  'At least there's that', Corinne mused, glad at least that something spiced things up and put some spark and pizazz in the house; but the more Bob wailed and screamed, banged his fist and head against the wall, the more she worried about his mental state.  

 

He was  clearly going off the rails.  This abrupt, unexpected shock would be bad for his heart, jacking his blood pressure and overworking his brain; but nothing she said or did calmed him down, and every morning as he headed out the door, she worried; and one day her fears were realized. 

Bob had been picked up by the police in Lafayette Park across from the White House, a ranting, raving lunatic, the arresting officer attested, a threat to himself and to others; and when Corinne went to the station to bail him out, he said he wanted to stay put.  Incarceration was too good for him when the black man was suffering indignities not more than five miles from the White House, in chains and subservience in the ghetto. 

A good lawyer and a good psychiatrist were called in, and a reasonable denouement of the sad and troubled tale could be told; but wigged out on Thorazine and God knows whatever else to keep him quiet, life in the Bethesda split-level was worse than ever.  Perish the thought, but Corinne did think of shipping him off to Green Acres, a private mental facility in Falls Church which cared for the demented. Eventually she did the deed by which time Bob had no idea what was what and was as morosely happy as he could be. 

When Social Justice Goes South - Donald Trump And The Education Of A Hopeless Idealist

Bob Muzelle looked out the window of his tidy suburban house, noticed the fading roses, the brown patches on the lawn, and the loose stairs on the porch; and wondered whether repairs and renovations could wait.  He had given his whole life to the poor, and now he was ironically skating far too close to them. 

'I don't regret one moment of it', he said to his wife Corinne, herself a social justice advocate who had also given her best years to the betterment of others, but who had recently, like Bob, suffered some reverses.  She had been the Deputy Director of Women For Social Responsibility, a modest non-profit whose charter was unequivocally feminist - the glass ceiling, sexual abuse, abortion, etc. - and had linked the cause of women with that of racial and gender injustice.  As such a black lesbian woman had leapfrogged her into the position of Director, saying that 'no white bitch belong here', and within a month of her appointment had cleaned house. 

The staff and board of directors were all tough ghetto femmes, happy to be out of the closet, out of the miasmic slum neighborhoods of Anacostia, and finally earning some real money. 'We ain't no ho's and pimps', LaShonda Williams announced upon assuming her post, and 'we out to show that we n--ga dykes goin' pump up the volume'. 

 

Women for Social Responsibility was a respectable organization founded on the progressive principles of Eugene Victor Debs, Louis Brandeis, and Lafollette,  the racial awareness of Martin Luther King and Ralph Abernathy, and the suffragettes of the Twenties.  It had maintained this political rectitude since its beginnings in the Sixties, refused both radical feminism and insurrectionist black power, and had kept on a steady keel though years of shrill divisiveness and inchoate anger.  In its own way it was a very patrician organization led by women from Shawnee Mission, the Main Line, and Beacon Hill - women whose sense of fair play never diluted their passion for women's rights. 

But this lily white gentlewoman's redoubt was to be no longer, and with the leadership of LaShonda Williams, its demise was assured, for the self-proclaimed 'welfare queen' ('I gots mine, honey'), black tout and pussy hound was taking no prisoners.  Passed over, marginalized, and given a windowless office, Corinne was on the curb before she knew it.  

Nonplussed, dazed, and confused, she never knew what hit her - she of all people who had given heart and soul to women, her sisters in the struggle for equality, and had sacrificed leisure, a new stove, and decent shoes for them; and now here she was tossed out like moldy bread, disconsolate, lost, and feeling totally abandoned. 

None of this mattered, for in an ironic twist, one of sweet revenge, Donald Trump came into office dismantling everything that smacked of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, pulled all federal grants for any organization in the business of social reform and forced the closure of Women for Social Responsibility.  No sooner was Corinne on the curb than that big bull dyke Williams was sitting there next to her. 

So, Corinne was of no help whatsoever when Bob came to her lamenting the Trump Administration's reactionary putsch, his wanton destruction of the very instruments of social change. He was no less than a Hitler, a genocidal maniac, a brutish, ugly, man arrogantly dismissive all that Bob and his fellow progressives were able to accomplish.  In one fell swoop and one flourish of the pen, their hallowed policies and programs were no more.  

Bob had been President and CEO for Scientists for A Sane Climate Policy, an organization committed to fight global warming and with in the capitalist engines which fueled it.  Socialist by upbringing, progressive by inclination and moral suasion, and political activist by a homely need for camaraderie and companionship, Bob had been a tireless fighter for social justice.  Having cut his teeth on civil rights, jumped through the hoops of feminism and gay pride, and now well-established as a leader against climate change, he had been through it all. 

He and his wife had made a formidable team - knights in the same crusades, partners in purpose and holy commitment, colleagues, warriors.  The had stopped sleeping with each other years ago, so heady and all-consuming was the political struggle. Carnal desire simply had no place in their lives, a tedious distraction at best, and an easy way out of full engagement with the cause; so when it all came apart, Bob could only remember the lines of Anton Shugur in Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, as he is about to kill Carson Wells, 'If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?'.

No vacations in St. Barts, skiing in Gstaad, Lambo in the garage, Bel Air dinner parties; no Armani, Gucci, or St. Laurent, just two-pants suits from K-Mart, a shabby rambler in the suburbs, a twenty-year old Corolla, and an abstemious relationship with an increasingly sour wife. 

Bob winced as he saw the blonde, blue-eyed gorgeous Trumpists frolicking on the South Lawn of the White House, carefree, wealthy conservatives with yachts and mansions.  Not an ounce of compassion among them, nothing but careless abandon; and yet, he felt cheated.  If all that he had worked for, all the energy, time, and passion invested, was gone as quickly as a fly shooed from the potato salad, his life had been worth exactly nothing. 

'Involvement is the alley of the blind', said the Stoic philosopher Epictetus.  'A man of true belief and the irascible passion to fuel it, is doomed to dismal unhappiness'. Progressives are an unhappy lot because they are convinced that the world can be changed for the better, and that the struggle to make it so is so important, any deviation is tantamount to dereliction, they are not allowed to be happy. 

Conservatives who believe the world simply is the way it is, a product of human nature, serendipity, circumstance, and good or bad fortune are always happy.  What's there not to like? So Bob cursed the fate that made him such a dour, hectoring, insufferable man.  'Goddamn it!', he shouted to the holly bush, 'Goddamn it again!' but there was no solace or refuge available.  The dice had been thrown decades ago, and as much as he had quickly and summarily learned that idealism and progressive Utopianism get you absolutely nowhere, he could look out the window and realize that the birdbath was empty. 

An Ivy League Belle de Jour - A Yale Call Girl With A Pedigree And A Bright Future

Barbery Byfield was a flaxen-haired, peaches-and-cream, blue-eyed beauty who could have had her pick of any of the pedigreed young men at Yale.  The heirs of the Cabots, Lodges, and Davenports were all interested in this remarkably beautiful girl from Ames, Iowa, had made their intentions clear, and were generous with their affections. 

There were few of these well-to-do, patrician men at Yale these days, their rightful places having been displaced by 'the other', that potpourri of racial diversity so sought by university administrators; but there were enough of them still to matter, to be noticed, to live a life of privilege even within a newly defined progressive context.  They still summered on the Vineyard or Nantucket, skied at Gstaad over Christmas, were fixtures at the Plaza or the Waldorf, and dined at Mory's or Fence Club. 

Barbery, however, was not the usual Wellesley or Holyoke girl, patrician by birth, aristocrat by breeding, and ambitious by nature; but a Belle de Jour, a high-class call girl with an open mind, a damsel without any particular moral principle, savvy in the way of men, and an impeccably proper date.  She lured and bedded young men from the best of families, promised them days and nights of Turkish delight and the exotic pleasures of a pasha's harem. 

Where she learned her trade was a mystery, recondite as she was about her past; but there must have been some tutor, some Blaze Starr or Fanny Brice, for no young woman coming from a childhood and adolescence of milking, hemming, and winnowing could possibly have emerged with such sexual brilliance. 

The truth is far less intriguing.  Some girls, as Vladimir Nabokov knew, were nymphets, preternaturally sexual beings well before puberty; girls with desire, know-how, and a sensual nature which had a remarkable purity for anyone so young. 

  

How did she know this? There were no recognizable, correlated antecedents, Nabokov wrote.  It just happens, like a murmuration of starlings, a surprise of nature to be enjoyed only by the very fortunate; and so it was that Barbery's fate was set and settled very early.  Although she was a promising mathematician and violinist, these possibilities paled in comparison with this thing - this impatient, nettling, irritating itch that needed to be scratched, this surprisingly incorrigible thing that wanted satisfaction. 

It might be enough for nymphets to become the Emma Bovarys or Connie Chatterleys of the world - demanding sexual prowlers for whom the act was inescapable; but when combined with a canny sense of opportunity, it was unstoppable and irresistible. 

How one in such a traditional university environment, let alone la creme de la creme, transforms ordinary dating, boys and girls together, into a commercial enterprise is subject for business school and a Freudian couch; but the reality was quite simple. Barbery 'traded' sexual favors for ski weekends in Aspen and summers in St. Tropez, a perfectly consensual affair with both parties properly recompensed. 

Barbery was such a genius at her craft, that the young men who brought her to the Riviera or Caribbean go-to islands valued her far more than she did them.  As a result and according to the law of supply and demand, the young men not only came back for more but fought each other for the privilege.  Exclusive trips soon lost their luster and value, and the best-heeled and most intent suitors paid her in cash; and so was her career as a Yale call girl begun. 

These adventures were only as an undergraduate, and Barbery's career was destined for bigger and better things.  She graduated Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa and headed for Harvard Law School.  Her reputation preceded her and before long the same trail of men followed her from torts to courts.  By the time she graduated and had secured her first clerkship, she was a wealthy woman.  

She was an equal opportunity business owner, and welcomed all comers, although she was fondest of the grandsons of old German Jewish families like the Rothschilds who had built New York - young men with millions who fell particularly hard for this cornflower blue-eyed beauty and who were ready to lavish her with everything their money could buy. 

To manage all this - torts and courts along with a growing business - was a challenge; but since her affairs were strictly on a paying basis, she did not have to worry about secrecy, jealousies, or squabbles.  That was a male thing, and all it did was to raise her value. 

Washington, her next stop as an attorney for Arnold & Porter, the city's most prestigious law firm, was a perfect venue for her polyglot interests.  Thanks to her tenures at Yale and Harvard, she was already well known on K Street and Capitol Hill - both for her legal brilliance and her sexual favors.  Washington, a porous, no-secrets place despite its official firewalls, was already primed and ready for her, and it was not long before the premier call girl agency in town contacted her.  What she could make for Madame LeCharnier would be far more than she could hope for with Arnold & Porter, even with the quiet investments made offshore in Aruba and Bimini. 

Her old classmates also in Washington to pursue their careers were more than eager to be with her and were quite willing to pay her new rates, among the highest in Mme. LeCharnier's house.  Their incomes had risen like hers, and commerce was in equilibrium. 

Her Yale reunions were the most fun, and she went every five years.  She was approached for an organizing, leadership role, but she demurred.  Her life and profession required at least a modicum of privacy.  No, she would attend as an alumna only.  

Surprisingly, those men who knew her at Yale had wholly and abjectly subscribed to the principle of 'suspension of disbelief'.  They chose to ignore or overlook the fact that she was a call girl and to treat her no differently than they would any other attractive, successful woman.  As such she could travel in the best of circles, curry favor with the best of families, and make millions from them. 

Men will always be men, she said, Yale or Podunk - all dumbly and reverently anxious to bed her - and she wondered why she had no competition.  She was bi-professional, a successful trial lawyer and a high-priced Belle de Nuit.  Unlike the Catherine Deneuve character, she had no sexual conflicts to resolve, no personal conundrums, no unsolvable emotional mysteries.  She was simply a nymphet grown up, smarter than most, with no inhibiting morality, and a very positive outlook. 

None of my Yale classmates know what has become of her.  At some point she must have given up her avocation but even advanced AI Google searches have come up with nothing.  So be it.  In this way she can be remembered for what she was, and what she was was really something. 

The Black Man Disappears - The Demise Of DEI And The Resetting Of The Nation's Moral Compass

Turn on the television any time of day, and blacks are everywhere - hawking Humira and Celebrex to seniors, jumping for joy for Reese's peanut butter, shilling for Toyota and Hyundai, and barkers for Cheese Whiz, Cheerios, and Charles Schwab.  They are on n afternoon soaps, prime time dramas, every Six O'clock News, ESPN broadcast, weather report, and Traffic On the Eights.  

There are far more blacks on television shows, in ads, or public service announcements than their 12 percent demographic representation would indicate. 

The disproportion is so great that if a European were to spend a day watching American television, he would have to conclude that at least fifty percent of the population was black. 

To liberal Americans this inflated representation is entirely called for to redress classic American racial prejudice and the underrepresentation of minorities in the media, Hollywood, and government.  If blacks are shown everywhere and in great numbers, the white population will 1) think that black people are indeed everywhere and that their voices must be heard; and 2) that they can fill the shoes of white people no matter what, no matter where. 

However, ordinary white citizens, especially those living the vast open spaces of America, can only imagine what the coasts are like.  Combining fabulist media demographics and reports of endemic crime, dysfunction, and disorder, coastal cities must be sinkholes of nastiness. To them 'Inner city' means 'entire city', and they feel better off with cows, pigs, and chickens than to be in such a minority miasma. 

That, plus the 90 percent blacks in the NBA, NFL, and NCAA basketball and football, the picture is complete.  Coastal cities, Iowa farmers conclude, are filled with black people, and despite hawking drugs, cars, and snacks they are really just athletes, pimps, and ho's. 

Nonsense, of course, for what about Barack Obama, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Clarence Thomas and thousands of postal workers?  They count, surely; but what really counts in America is perception, and the hoopla promoting DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity), the forest wisdom of the African diaspora, and the ubiquity and gong-beating presence of the black man in the media, is simply noise.   

Left to their own devices, white middle class, Midwestern Americans would take the black man in stride like everyone else - good at some things, not so good at others; mostly good people but some bad apples in the barrel.  They would judge black men like they judge white - on the basis of talent, intelligence, sociability, good taste, performance, civic pride, and patriotism - and leave the rest aside; but under the constant, hammering, dunning, and hectoring of the liberal media, Congressional shills, and self-interested Black Lives Matter-like organizations, they are forced to judge within a constructed, artificial, baloney-filled environment. 

 

Of course in the light of day, objective analysis would corroborate many of the commonly-held preconceptions - the inner cities are still segregated, nasty, dysfunctional places; educational performance of black students lags far behind that of Asians and whites, and social indicators of marital stability, child care, and parental involvement are near the bottom of anyone's scale.

These facts cannot go away, but if the hype and hyperbole were removed, and if facts were addressed as soluble problems they might indeed be solved.  

The Trump Administration has vowed to do this - to bury DEI and affirmative action once and for all - and if he succeeds and returns America to simple pluralism, cultural heterogeneity, and natural selection, the country will be far less divided, divisive, and angry.  It is time to stop banging whites simply for being white, to eradicate all fictious notions of systemic racism, and stop exaggerated claims of both racial oppression and black racial superiority.  An equal opportunity America. 

Already the Left is scurrying for a response, but none is possible for what they say is such an unconscionable act, a return to Jim Crow, segregation, and the back of the bus.  They sputter, howl 'racism', and stand proudly with black men and women.  Yet their balderdash is falling on deaf ears.

After sixty years of pro-active investment in the black community since the passage of the Civil Rights Bill in 1964, after billions in entitlement money poured into the inner cities, after decades of addressing 'systemic racism' and the persistent discrimination against people of color, the ghettos are still miasmic, horrendous sinkholes of poverty, crime, and dysfunction, and enough is enough says the rest of America.  

 

Time for the black community to man up.  Individual responsibility and the end to entitlements has been too long in coming. A return to proportionality.  Instead of packing the media with a disproportionate number of black actors and pitch men, let the media look like America - not the overhyped multicultural, 'diverse' country which progressives insist cannot look white, but one in which the media looks like the real America- seventy-five (75) percent white. 

This is not prejudicial against African Americans who will continue to have every right guaranteed and protected by the Constitution.  It will simply be reflective of their statistical minority and the first big step to eliminating race, gender, and ethnicity as markers of identity.  Each person of each racial and ethnic group will have the same opportunity, and the same consideration of every other and will be judged on merit - intelligence, talent, responsibility, performance, duty, and civic pride. 

Not only will the demise of DEI mean a new era of equal opportunity, it will restore the integrity of the past.  Statues will be replaced; street, school, and public building names returned to their originals.  The cancelling, expungement, and censoring of history in the name of protecting and shielding black people from historical unpleasantness will stop. 

Eliminating DEI, therefore, is not a superficial step or the fulfillment of a campaign promise, but a systemic change and one central to returning America to its originalist roots.  'Black' will mean nothing except a demographic indicator.  The quality of an institution, public or private, will be judged and assessed based on the performance of those with in it without regard to race, gender, or ethnicity.  Schools either succeed or fail, public sector agencies either perform up to standard or do not. 

No racial group will be lionized, honored for presumed worth.  No American will be regarded, judged, promoted, or demoted on anything but performance; and about time indeed. 

Calling Trump Hitler - The Real Horrors Of The Holocaust And The Spiteful, Vengeful Hatred Of The Left

Esther Pilchman, a survivor of the Holocaust and now nearing 100 without losing one bit of her acuity, composure, and articulateness, was nonplussed - no, angered and incensed - at the way 'Hitler', 'Fascist', and 'Nazi' were so casually used were used to describe the President.  She had survived the camps, had suffered for three long years of brutality, uncertainty, rape, and torture at the hands of prison guards, and nothing applied to him at all.

Before being rounded up from the Warsaw ghetto, herded onto boxcars and sent to Auschwitz, she and her family had been threatened, intimidated and badgered - spat upon by the Nazi SS who treated Jews worse than pigs, bullied them, laughed at their fearful humility and their abject submissiveness.  

One by one Jewish families disappeared, never to be heard from again, interned, gassed, and burned in the ovens of Sobibor and Dachau; but even this unsettling disappearance gave the ghetto hope. 'The Nazis need workers', Jewish families told each other.  'The war is not going well', they said despite the panicked fear that they were next.

Esther's family had been jewelers in Warsaw before the Nazi occupation, prosperous and respected with business connections in New York and Johannesburg, a spacious apartment on ______Street, with hopes of a good marriage for their daughter.  There were rumblings about the rise of the National Socialists in Germany, but that was still far away, contained, and for the time being at least remote. 

Yet the clouds of war could not be ignored, overseas radio reported the concerning rise of Hitler and the re-militarization of Germany, and the Fuhrer made his hegemonic intentions clear. Rumors of Jewish disappearances and murders surfaced but could not be believed.  It was too horrific to consider.  Humanity had had its shares of war, Jews had always suffered prejudice and exile, but never anything so unconscionable as this. 

 

Then the nightmare began, and the Jews were branded, condemned, and intimidated.  Herded into the ghetto they still kept their collective composure but could not help but think of what might happen, the horrendous and the unthinkable.

Esther, her mother and father, aunts, uncles, and aged grandparents were all taken on one April day, stripped of their belongings, marched through the ghetto to a destination they surmised but never knew.  As soon as they got to the railhead, her family was split - men in one car, women and children in another.  Her mother protested, and grabbed the coat of a Nazi soldier on the platform, and shouted to her husband.  The soldier raised his rifle, smashed the butt against her head, and left her bleeding and unconscious on the tracks to be decapitated by the moving train. 

How Esther stayed alive was a miracle, she told a chronicler of the Holocaust; but it was only because of her striking beauty that she did. She was raped continually, tossed aside with an extra crust of bread, allowed to wash and cut her hair before the Obersturmführer came to visit but otherwise lived like a street dog with the other women in Block 34, scabrous, hungry, cold, and spiritless. Every day one woman would be singled out and beaten, bloodied and bruised, an example to the others.

Every day women were dragged from their beds and taken to the gas chambers.  By now the prisoners knew what was happening.  They could no longer pretend otherwise.  As soon as one bed was vacated, a new woman, shocked, panicked, and beaten laid down in it.  The deadly machinery of the camps was efficiently cruel. 

 

Soon all her aunts were gone from the barracks, sent to the gas chambers, leaving Esther entirely alone, fearful, abused, and barely alive.  The rapes continued until the Nazis tired of her. Sick of her now almost skeletal body, sunken cheeks, and hollowed eyes, they tossed her aside. She waited for the call, the herding, the death march to the ovens. 

It never came, for on a bitter cold, snowy day in January 1945, American forces liberated the camp.

It took decades for the horrors of Auschwitz to recede - never to be erased - from her memory, and her dreams were still of her mother's body on the tracks, of the brutal rapes by the Nazi soldiers, of the cold, the hunger, and the misery; so when asked to recount her experiences, she hesitated.  Why face it all again? Why relive such a past? But in the end, in the spirit of Never Again did she tell her story. 

So it was no surprise that when the terms 'Hitler, Fascist, Nazi' were so casually and cavalierly used to describe the President of the United States, she could only shake her head.  The Left which she had always supported for its unfailing commitment to the poor and disadvantaged, had lost its moorings and their bearings and had ventured into perverse fabulist imaginings. 

She warned them of the dangers of such dangerous perversion.  Unless the real horror of the Holocaust was remembered and left undiluted in all its exterminating inhumanity, it might happen again.

Calling Trump a Nazi, a reincarnation of Hitler was a bizarre absurdity, a callous demeaning of the office of the President, and craven attack on the democracy she loved, and nothing less than sheer, blatant ignorance. 

It was the same Left that called the January 6th frat boy folly an insurrection.  The Left that had never experienced the brutal civil wars in Angola, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, and Liberia - brutal, bloody affairs with wigged out child soldiers trained to kill and dismember, death squads, exterminating phalanxes of government troops razing entire villages.  

An insurrection was a fearful thing, a murderous, hateful, morally unredeemable thing; and the folly of the Halloween-painted, Viking helmeted, drunks storming the Capitol, as regrettable and staining as it was, was no insurrection. 

Her cherished Left, her progressives, her liberals had lost their compassionate, understanding center.  They had become unhinged with hatred. Nothing remained of the progressives of past - LaFollette, Debs, Dewey, and Brandeis were done and gone, their ideas only remnants, scraps of a forgotten history.  In their place was only foulness, hysteria, and intemperance. 

Her skin crawled when she heard 'Hitler' shouted and 'Nazi' bandied about.  Each time called up memories of the camps, the ghetto, the SS, the boxcars, and the ovens.  She wanted to step out onto her balcony and yell to the streets below, 'Stop it!; but she was an old lady who thought she would live out her last days in peace, and drawing on still powerful reserves of spirit and rectitude, sat down, and waited for the awful moment to pass. 

Useless Marches, Demonstrations, And Protests - Camaraderie, Solidarity, And Feeling Good About Yourself

Ophelia Marshall had been a solitary child, so much so that her parents worried about her.  Pleased that she was so attentive to her studies, quite religious in a quiet, respectful way, and as dutiful as a daughter could be; they were still concerned that she was becoming a recluse, timid, and hesitant to join others in the outside world. 

She was like Laura in The Glass Menagerie, a frightened young woman who spent more time with her delicate glass figurines than with people.  Laura finally comes out of this self-imposed reclusiveness to entertain a gentleman caller.  She is charmed by him and delighted that her fortunes might be turning around.  A life, a normal life, perhaps did await her. 

She is disappointed, of course, for the gentleman caller is otherwise engaged and joining Laura and her family only out of politeness, and when he leaves, Laura, disconsolate, wounded, and convinced that she has no worth except to her glass menagerie, returns to her room from which she will never leave. 

Ophelia was no Laura, at least not yet, but she was enough of a withdrawn, delicate, and sensitive girl that she might stay as a chrysalis and never emerge as a butterfly. 

Her parents needn't have worried, for Ophelia was only tending her garden, as she put it, a tender shepherdess of her own, special feelings.  She was sure that one day she would no longer need such tenderness and care, so she allowed herself the luxury of fantasy. 

True to her wishes, she began to gain confidence and certainty - the camaraderie of girls, their intimate clustering, and their shared secrets were comforting.  Ophelia knew that her life would not have to be alone, but in the company of women who shared her desires, fears, and ambition. 

The simple, innocent camaraderie that Ophelia had enjoyed at secondary school was a thing of the past at university.  Girls had grown up, matured, and while they still enjoyed female company, it was far less innocent and girly and much more demanding and political.  The young women joined together in solidarity rather than socialness - the innocent bonding had changed to collusive activism.  

The campus was filled with causes, everything from women's rights, to climate change, to the plight of the black man, and Ophelia was urged - dunned, actually, given the zeitgeist of inclusivity on campus - to join in one or more groups for social justice. 

Although Ophelia was not and never had been political - her parents were moderate Republicans, schooled long before the contentious politics of today - she understood that political affiliation and espousal of political values was tantamount to social acceptance.  Alliance For Climate Action, Bitches For Justice, and Gay Pride Forever were just some of the groups which courted her, and she accepted all of them.  Breathing the same heady air as a hundred like-minded women would be exhilarating.  

When asked about the specific purpose of their protests, demonstrators often answer, “To raise awareness”; but by now all issues have been presented, discussed, vetted, debated, and filed.  There is no more useful awareness to be had.

So it all comes down social collectivity – an expression of concern for a common cause which unites thousands into a community of ideas – an identity community with markers, banners, logos, doctrines, and liturgies.  Belonging feels good, feels important, feels useful, and most importantly reflects one’s own goodness.

The protests on campus were but the prelude to real, concerted action; and when a number of climate groups joined forces and headed to the National Mall for what they hoped would be a massive show of support for forcing radical change in energy use.  Ophelia was delighted.  This is what real female solidarity was all about - women's natural sociability, easy intimacy, and special, mature bonding joined with righteous passion was an irresistible force for change. 

The bus trip down to Washington was no different than the school bus shuttling girls from home to St. Mary's Catholic School in Radford - laughing, giggling about boys, virtual shopping for Manolo Blahnik and Armani, bitchy gossip about those girls on the peace train.  It was a joyful jamboree, a happy outing, an excursion that meant something.  The girl next to Ophelia smiled broadly and gave her a big hug. 

Ophelia was home.  This is what she as a timid, withdrawn little girl had  dreamed of and hoped for. The march was for climate sanity, but it could have been for anything.  The cause didn't matter, it was the generosity, emotional energy, and love that did.

Marches on the National Mall are unique phenomena. Although they are shows of popular democracy and free speech, they mean little or nothing to the residents of Washington - an unfortunate majority of whom are poor and isolated in nasty ghettos or managing in shabby middle class neighborhoods.  

Washington residents are used to these demonstrations and pay them little mind.  Washington is a city with its own problems – crime, drugs, dysfunctional families, corruption, and failing schools – and these are issues for the municipal government. Gun violence is endemic in the city, although concentrated in three majority black wards, and the issue is not gun control but police vigilance, community action, and  family responsibility. 

 

Marches for racial equality mean little in these de facto segregated wards where few if any white families live and even fewer risk driving through.  There is racial equality in Ward 8, but the worst, most pernicious kind – a persistent, dangerous, and violent homogeneity with no moderating influences.  No white, successful, middle class models of rectitude and community responsibility.  No entrepreneurial success stories.  No high-performing schools. 

 Yet the joy at these marches and demonstrations is palpable.  Demonstrators are not angry but happy, for they are shouting in unison with their sisters, hugging and kissing in exuberant displays of female solidarity.  Their soprano voices, loud and choral, might never be heard by the men that decide, but that is of no consequence.  It was femininity, femaleness, feminism expressed joyously and with abandon. 

What could be better, Ophelia thought, surrounded by hundreds of her sisters, all raising their voices in unison, validating womanhood and every woman, a great jamboree of togetherness, love, and affection. 

The trip back to school was memorable.  The young women, tired, worn, and hungry were in the best of moods.  Victory was a heady affair, and they had certainly won.  Won what was not the question, for the fact of such political commonality, of so many voices raised in unison creating one great orchestral piece on Washington's front lawn was more than enough. 

Some of the girls fell asleep on each others' shoulders, others were content to relive the event, and some chatted about this or that.  

Ophelia, who had for years longed to come out of her room and be one of the crowd, loved and accepted, had found a fulfillment she never dreamed of, and thanked her stars for such good fortune.