Sexual Entitlement - Reparations, Retribution, And A Pound Of Flesh, A Woman's Right

Alicia Mill married at a time when everyone did. There were the outliers, the math whizzes who took jobs at IBM, the few who thanks to family connections went on to Wall Street, the odd lesbians, and the simply unmarriageable - those at the end of the bell curve who as desperately as they might want a Yale marriage, were left alone. There's someone for everyone, goes the old adsge, but some women are simply beyond the pale. 

Not so Alicia who was attractive, intelligent, and with all the social graces a Boston Brahmin background could afford.  She was la creme de la creme of New England society, sure to marry well to someone of her class, live a prosperous and generously endowed life in New York, Palm Springs, and St. Bart's. 

Which she did, to Barrington Pierce Alling, direct descendent of President Franklin Pierce, heir to the Barrington family of Northumberland and first colonial settlers of northern New England, and relative of Fielding Alling, financier, confident of J.P. Morgan, and one of New York's first families. An arranged marriage could not have matched a more perfect couple. 

Yet for every perfect algorithm, there are dropped stitches, imperfections, and flaws overlooked in the suspension of disbelief.  

Alicia was perfect as far as checking the boxes of perfection were concerned, but she had some nasty, overlooked, but seminal traits that were so inbred and familial that they were overlooked, cloaked as they were with the mantel of breeding, education and social ease. 

These 'imperfections' were nothing serious - no horrendous reserves of anger, hostility and frustration - and were only what was taken for granted in women.  A kind of Don't Tread On Me uber-feminism bred of privilege, the suffrage of great aunts, and naturally occurring defiant pride. 

Alicia's forbears had had to put up with patriarchy, male privilege, Victorian mores, and second-class citizenship, and the canniness, calculated chicanery, and downright castrating ambitions of women in her family were to be expected. 

Of course no prospective mate in a love culture bothers with deep inquiry, and is happy to be romantically taken with a beautiful, charming, complaisant lover.  In Third World countries like India and Turkey where arranged marriages are still common, delving into these matters is de rigeur. No woman or man wants to be surprised. 

Caste, skin tone, and breeding may be important and decent markers for compatibility, but the real meat and potatoes of a marriage lies within. 

America being a love marriage culture, this inner world of psycho-social dynamics is overlooked. 

And so it was that Alicia, more endowed with the family traits of a certain stubborn righteousness, turned on her clueless husband soon after their wedding, a fabulous affair, one of many days, held on the lawns of Barrington Alling's family estate overlooking Long Island Sound. A wedding reported in the New York Times and even in the Wall Street Journal usually not given to social reportage. 

Alicia was a 'tweener' a woman caught between prim Victorian rectitude, pre-Sixties pride, and the first loud, insistent demands of feminism.  She was a product of all three when she signed the marriage contract, had nothing but love in her heart when she did, but proceeded to exact her due from day one. 

Living with a man was something new, untried, and unexpected.  True, she was the daughter of a marital union, but her mother and father, both independently wealthy, went about their own business, sat at the opposite ends of the formally-set dining room table, and retired to separate bedrooms.  Tooth-by-jowl arrangements had never been discussed; and yet there she was, seeking some cold comfort under the duvet with a a snoring, restless man. 

'Can't you do something about the snoring, darling?' she said one morning not long after the honeymoon.

The dutiful husband tried nasal separators, sleeping posture aligners, a variety of over-the-counter and organic alternative remedies, but no dice.  Not only did his snoring continue, but increased in volume and depth as the weeks wore on. 

'I love you, sweetheart, and I am always there for you and will come when you ask...' but she decamped in the spare room which she made her own - dolls from her childhood, balms, creams, and lotions, an Edwardian full-length mirror, and peace and quiet. 

As far as the promised visitations, they became few and far between. Sex wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and there was plenty to be had in other quarters if she so desired. 

After that - the tethers that bind having been loosened and the emergence of her own private life encouraged - it was a quick step to de-masculinizing the rest of her marital life.  

He - dear Barrington - was either to be home on time for dinner or to give a good accounting of his whereabouts.  Toilet seats were to be permanently and irreversibly down.  Hairs in the sink - an affair for the upstairs maid - couldn't be overlooked in the interregnum, and she called her husband to task at each and every errancy. 

Nor was it long before Alicia took a lover - a surprising liaison given her pedigree since Arnold Bates was not of her kind.  Not quite the Connie Chatterley-Mellors epiphanic union, but satisfying in ways that poor Barrington would never understand.  

Rutting was what it was all about, and more delighted she could not be until Arnold and turned out to be not unlike every other man she had come across. Except for a rather wolf-like sexual attention, he was her uxorious husband with a big, overly-responsive dick. 

Barrington, as considerate and sensitized as he was to female needs, had soon had enough of his wife's hectoring, noodging, and incessant harping.  He settled for Amanda from Accounting for his first extra-marital affair, but quickly moved upscale until he was in Turkish pasha territory, an idyll and promised land from which he did not want to return. 

'Where have you been?', Alicia asked  having been up half the night waiting for his key in the lock. 'Working at the office' no longer held water, and the two had it out at two in the morning, both contrite and promising to mend their ways. 

But before long of course, Alicia, as much as she hated herself for such bourgeois inanities, was after her husband for pee on the floor, pots left on the stove, leaves caught in the downspouts, and shirts on her side of the closet. 

She simply could not help herself. No matter how she tried, the umbrage remained. The toilet seats, the hairs in the sinks, the leaves in the drain, the diffidence, the excuses, the indifference were not just incidental, bothersome, usual interruptions of marital accord, but symbolic of a growing disregard for her feelings, her being, and her self. 

She upped the ante and found surprising ways to take her husband to task, to bring him around, to tame and domesticate him. 

She was owed that much at least. She had not signed on for such penance. 

It got worse.  While never descending to the bathos of George and Martha in Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf where the characters 'flay each other to the marrow', it was pretty bad.  Marriage was bound to have its ups and downs, but never this - this complete regard for female integrity, the essential value of woman. 

It got even more worse.  The Michael Douglass film, The War of the Roses, was only a milder version of the affair between the Allings.  No physical violence, no broken furniture, no racks and bastinadoes, just pounds of flesh taken in very small pieces, Mao's 'death by a thousand cuts'. 

'This is my right', said Alicia as she enjoined her husband in this war of wills. I am fighting patriarchy, male privilege, and machismo.  I am the castrating goddess Kali.  I am the Destroyer, the Enabler - or words to that effect as she planned her next assault. 

In modern, less mythological terms, she was simply bringing the fight to the enemy in a campaign of reparation and retribution.

She failed of course.  Barrington simply gave notice and left, and Alicia was left with the empty house, the mortgage, and a mess to clean up. 

Be careful what you wish for is the old Chinese proverb, but Alicia standing amidst the detritus couldn't even remember first principles - why she had bothered to get married in the first place. 

But what's done is done.  Barrington is living in Tampa Bay with his young wife, and she, Alicia, is making do. 

Ukraine, Russia, And The New World Of Machiavellian Realpolitik - Zelenskyy Must Go

Even a cursory look at world history and the political philosophies which underlie it, shows that territorialism, geopolitical hegemony, and empire are the rule rather than the exception.  Not only have empires been a part of history, but they are recalled by modern world leaders who see them as a Golden Age of high culture, moral principle, and order, and they are not wrong.  

The great empires of Persia, China, India, Japan, and Europe were indeed all characterized by periods of intellectual energy, wealth, and cultural influence. While criticized today as profoundly anti-liberal and dismissed by historical revisionists for their lack of inclusivity, civil rights, and democracy, they were the ineluctable, irreversible expressions of human enterprise and human nature. 

What is human nature but a defensive, territorial, competitive, survivalist mechanism?  It expresses itself in family, sexual competition, regional autonomy, and nationalism.   The behavior of children and the behavior of nations are similar.

Some political philosophers insist that with the proper care, will, and determination the world will evolve to a non-violent, inclusive, respectful place; that human nature can be blunted and overcome; but this is fantsy, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine is but the latest example.  

Vladimir Putin is no historical renegade, a delusional monomaniac, and a man out of touch with history.  He is expressing the same ambitions that the Shahs of Persia, the shoguns of Japan, and the emperors of China and India had.  Putin is not an anomaly or an outlier. He is one of many. 

The war in Ukraine has gone on now for years, and except for those frantically holding on to Cold War hysteria and the Domino Theory, most people want it resolved and ended - which will involve compromise - the ceding of Donbas to Russia, territories already Russian in language, cultural, and political allegiance, deferring consideration of Ukrainian NATO membership which Europe never really supported (the idea of defending a corrupt, venal, and self-interested regime was folly) and defining a new trade algorithm including grain, rare earths, and gas. 

Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor and Secretary of State under Richard Nixon, was an advocate of realpolitik - a foreign policy devoid of moral exceptionalism and principle, which admitted and promoted alliances with whatever nation furthered America's interests, which committed America to positions of strength and a willingness to use it to promote its security and influence, and to engage in war only to further them. 

Kissinger was a Machiavellian:

Power is the pivot on which everything hinges. He who has the power is always right; the weaker is always wrong  

It is much safer to be feared than loved, if one of the two must be lacking. 

 

Politics have no relation to morality

The leader should know how to enter into evil when necessity commands

 

Donald Trump has revived realpolitik and Machiavelli. Support for Ukraine has been based on moral geopolitical principles - Ukraine is a bastion of democracy and a bulwark against Russian hegemonic imperialism, and no matter what the cost, it must be defended - which have no relevance to America's interests. 

Ukraine is of limited geopolitical import. While its rare earths and grain are of interest, America is not beholden to Ukraine for them.  It is not a military power nor is it geographically strategic.  It does not control waterways, land bridges, or critical airspace.  No Gulf of Aden or Straits of Hormuz. 

For all its protests, Ukraine is not a model of democracy, a fearsome defender of constitutional principles with the resolve and power to defend them.  The countless billions poured into the country for 'defense of democracy' have never been fully accounted for, and have served principally to keep what amounts to keeping a corrupt regime in power.   

Russia on the other hand is a member of the new Machiavellian triumvirate joining America and China in a nuclear power bloc which controls world geopolitics.  It cannot be ignored, and must be thought of as an adversary but not an enemy.  Alone or together with China, Russia to a large degree determines America's interests in the Middle East, the real center of geopolitics. 

Trillions have been spent propping up a Ukrainian regime run by profiteers and canny manipulators. Ukraine's 'democracy', has been far from the ideals of Oliver Cromwell, Jefferson and Hamilton, Locke and Thoreau, and the philosophers of the Enlightenment. Hardly worth supporting.  Yet the West has continued its idealistic generosity while the country was being destroyed.  

American focus should have been on Russia; and within a Machiavellian and Kissingerian foreign policy perspective, dealt directly with it, a world military and economic (resources) power. The United States after the fall of the Soviet Union missed its chance to form a productive alliance with Russia, and instead piled on.  It continued its Cold War animus and kicked Russia while it was down. NATO moved troops and missile bases closer to its borders deliberately sending the message that the country would never again threaten the European alliance.  The West bullied Russia, took advantage of it, and underestimated its power for resurgence and geopolitical influence. 

In the war in Ukraine, the West is still fighting the Cold War, and under the new geopolitical algorithm, Ukraine cannot win. 

Trump's recent deal with Russia for diesel fuel to help stabilize US pump prices is the latest example in America's new focus on realpolitik.  Throwing Ukraine under the bus?  Hardly, just practicing world politics as they should be played. Support for Ukraine was always for principle never for practical reality, and now Trump, radically changing course, becomes a worth adversary of Russia (and China). 

Cut all new financial and military support to Ukraine, thereby forcing it to the bargaining table.  The settlement will favor Russia but that was always in the cards and part of the realpolitik game.  

Any world leader who puts moral concerns over geopolitical ones is headed for defeat.  History's victors have been notoriously dismissive of morality.  Genghis Khan, who swept out of the steppes to conquer more than half of the known world was brutal, consequential, and single-minded.  The French kings who mobilized the Crusades were not tolerant, inclusive-minded monarchs, but rulers committed to punishing Muslims for their slaughter of Christians in Jerusalem and for their avowed hatred of the West.  

Political philosopher James Vaccano expands on the notion, including Nietzsche in the discussion:

The internal competition between tendencies or natures that Machiavelli recognizes in individuals and groups and that Nietzsche sees as multiple drives is a form of “agonism.”  Agonism is the idea that conflict and struggle are the natural basis of life and that this is replicated in social, political, and cultural life. Human artifice can in many ways transform nature, but it does not eliminate the presence and preeminence of conflict in individual human consciousness and Nietzsche’s Machiavellianism in social groups.

The world has never been one of compassion, compromise, or good will; but always ruled by realpolitik and the ineluctable human nature which fuels it. 

Donald Trump in joining in the Machiavellian, realpolitik world view of Putin and Xi of China, has joined the world's ruling triumvirate - not one united and collegial but joined in outlook, perspective and policy. 

It is time that the United States and Europe realize the handwriting on the wall and cease their reflexive, idealistic support for Ukraine.  

God Forbid! The Gunfight At The OK Corral Redux - The Return Of Rugged Individualism And Prairie Justice

Betty Barker turned off the eleven o'clock news and promised herself once again never to watch so late.  Donald Trump kept her up, and the stations she watched - CNN and MSNBC - were so decidedly angry at the insanity of the man, that they made her blood boil, not the recipe for a good night's sleep. 

As a young child and the sister of an older brother, she watched old Westerns on Saturday morning and then sat through a double feature of shoot-'em-ups at the Strand theatre matinee in the afternoon. She, despite her natural tendency to prefer frills, princess outfits, and baking cakes with her mother, dressed in boots, chaps, and ten-gallon hats, strapped on six-shooters and had it out with her brother and his neighborhood friends in the back yard. 

She hated herself for having so complaisantly followed in her brother's violent fantasies - they were nothing more than the testosterone-fueled early imaginings of the typically aggressive male, the fully-formed adult expressions of patriarchal bullying against which she now so vehemently fought.  

She loved her brother, and resented him less than the macho culture which made him and drew her in as a side-kick. America started off as a gun-slinging, trigger-happy country and never once took its foot off the gas. Just as the fabled Westward Expansion and Manifest Destiny were responsible for the slaughter of thousands of Native Americans, on-the-spot hangings of presumed cattle thieves, and the settlement  of disputes at the end of the barrel of a gun, Donald Trump was carrying on the tradition of prairie justice. 

What else could be said for the rounding up of needy asylees like so many stray cattle, herding them into holding pens, and then shipping them back across the border?  How was ICE any different from the Union Army which cleared the land of Sioux, Cherokee, and Comanche to make way for white settlers?

Some of Betty's anger might have been mitigated, and she might have taken a more comprehensive look at American history if the President wasn't so much like a cowboy, full of himself, a swaggering, six-gun-on-the-hip, rider of the plains ready to shoot first and ask questions later.  

Trump embodied the most absurd gunslinging television heroes she had been forced to watch as a child. He was so much like them, such an exaggerated version of them, that he was a caricature. With a cowboy hat, leather chaps, and boots, he could be John Wayne or Tom Mix. 

The President's supporters saw exactly the same thing, but cheered loudly.  This is the macho man the country needs, especially after that gay, mumbling, errand boy of the progressive Left, Joe Biden. 

The contrast between the two men could not be more stark - the feminized, castrato and the tough, undaunted, fearless, and resolute president currently in the White House, a man with not an ounce of give in his body, not a scintilla of compromise. 

'The Art of the Deal' was not negotiation, give-and-take, and consensus. It was intimidation and threat. To gain he did not give but forced others to back down.  What other way to do business on the mean streets of New York? 

The trading floor of the bond market was in the words of one observer, 'the last bastion of naked capitalism', a savage dogfight with packs of feral animals at each other's throats. The New York real estate market was but a few steps up the ladder from that, and Donald Trump was a master. 

The ordinary American tries to avoid law suits, is afraid of courtrooms, and will do anything to negotiated a peaceful, accommodating settlement.  Not so Donald Trump and his cohorts in New York.  They sue each other for a living, using the law as yet one more cudgel, one more howitzer in the armory. 

The Trump legions see a return to the Old West, to rugged individualism, to the OK Corral, hanging, machismo, and summary justice. Enough commiseration, compromising kindness, sweetness and light, welcoming kisses, turning the other cheek, and loving everyone. 

World leaders are following in Trump's footsteps. President Bukele of El Salvador has rounded up thousands of MS-13 Mara Salvatrucha gang members and summarily locked them up.  'We are for the civil rights of the good people of El Salvador', Bukele said, 'and their right to live in peace.  Criminals have no rights in this, our republic of democratic reform'.

The new president of Colombia has vowed to take the same approach with the narco-terrorists who have for so long disrupted civil governance.  They will be found, captured, incarcerated, and executed, the President went on to say. 

Former Philippine President Duterte was unequivocal.  He would root out Islamic terrorists and domestic criminals and return the nation to peaceful civility. 

Leaders of European nations are taking similar no-holds-barred positions on illegal immigration, and will aggressively and summarily deport all those in country illegally and those who refuse to abide by European laws and traditions.  'I am a woman', shouts Giorgia Meloni, President of Italy. 'I am a mother.  I am a Christian.  I am an Italian, and I am a European', sounding the alarm for those who want to turn the continent into an Islamic caliphate. 

'Democracy is the world's worst political system', said Winston Churchill, 'except for all the rest', but the Diversity Equity Inclusion democracy of today, responsible for the chaotic disassembly of coherent European, Christian societies needs to be reexamined.  No one said democracy or any other form of government for that matter is divinely ordained.  It is time to recalibrate, rethink the social equations, reassess cost and benefit. 

Although Americans have gotten used to an intrusive, autocratic, interventionist state and cannot quite conceive of a life without some form of solicitous government, enough is enough.  They are willing to take their chances, to fight those who intend to undermine the fabric of American culture, introduce foreign concepts antithetical to Christian ethics and morality, and turn the tolerant political process into a corrupt and insidious tool to achieve their own ends. 

Yet the American Left, despite Donald Trump and ultra-conservative political successes in Italy, France, the UK, Germany, Holland, Poland and other nations, still believe in socialist idealism.  They see open borders not as contributing to social disorder and the rejection of foundational values, but the new age of diversity - a One World utopian collective.  

They see police-free cities of higher moral value than those which put a premium on keeping order.  Minorites, for so long victims of white oppression, must be given a pass when expressing their frustration. 

The American Right sees all of this as fractious, disassembling, dangerous, and perilous.  They look to Europe whose new, young leaders are challenging old assumptions and forging new grounds of governance. 

'La lucha continua', said Betty to a group of women invited to her home to plan a more coherent, aggressive strategy to promote the progressive agenda and to remove Donald Trump from office. Every one of the guests were oldline liberals, veterans of civil rights, freedom rides, hand-in-hand marches led by Martin and Ralph, world peace, the environment and social harmony. 

Yet there was no stopping the newly energized, determined, and aggressive Right - a conservatism which embraced the Old West and its philosophy of individualism, enterprise, prairie justice, and survival of the fittest. 

Betty and her elderly colleagues would never understand these sentiments, and until they took their last breath would argue for a more compassionate, inclusive, considerate world; but all would live long enough to see the disastrous results of such fanciful idealism, such complete ignorance of history, and such pie-in-the-sky adolescent dreams.