A Second Opinion? Your Son Is Stupid - Family, Politics, And The Search For A Convenient Truth

Marybeth Burnside was never one to face the truth.  Some version of it always suited her more than facing facts. 

Her mother insisted that she was the cutest thing in town, although visitors', 'Wow, what a baby' was all they could muster.  

'She'll grow out of it', said Marybeth's father who believed that God's creation should never be doubted, and if He had given the girl something psychic, moral or devout, then her unfortunate looks were simply part of the plan.  A young woman's beauty would detract from her brains, artistry, or notions.

And so it was that Marybeth never came anywhere near the truth - if you discount the usual girl bitchiness of the playground - cross eyes and fright wigs, putty nose, and novelty store lips.  To her credit, Marybeth looked the other way, hurt, deceived, and ridiculed but still upright.  She would rather listen to her mother and father who knew her better than this gaggle of cunts. 

College evened things out - there were enough similarly misfavored girls in her class to make her feel more comfortable in her skin, and she tended to associate with them so as to meld, to blend in such a way that her lack of feminine beauty and charm would become irrelevant. 

The Young Progressives Union seemed to be the place for these young women.  Liberalism was based on principles of inner worth, social investment, reformist ambition, and political commitment, and so attracted girls who were happy to have found a place where physical beauty had no place.  It was the movement which counted, progress towards a more verdant, compassionate, inclusive world. 

And so it was that Marybeth became a progressive's progressive - a soldier in the armies of good.  She was on the hustings for climate awareness, at the barricades against police brutality and for the endemic rights of the black man, on the podium for gender equity, and in the streets to preserve democracy. 

She found a mate, a man of the same ilk, one of inner value, commitment, and pride and with the same unfortunate physical unattractiveness as Marybeth.  They were a good pair, passed through the radical stages of their youth, took more traditional jobs, moved to the suburbs and had two children. 

Marybeth never lost her progressive fervor, however, always voted for emoluments for the poor, affirmative action and DEI, free education and health care, and taxation of the rich.  She lived in a homogeneously liberal community, most of whom not only shared her political views but fell into the same 'inner qualities' camp. 

Marybeth came by her inclination to look for convenient truths rather than face facts honestly.  She had listened to her mother and father when they created happy fictions for her.  That belief in fantasy rather than facts is what had kept her on an even keel throughout her life; and the older she got, the more she was convinced that idealism trumped reality at every turn.  The world would only become a better place if we held to the highest ideals. 

 

A priori judgement was her stock in trade just as it was for her colleagues, friends, and neighbors.  Climate change was settled science, individualism was the root cause of incivility and the driving force behind predatory capitalist avarice.  There were good things and bad things in the world, and only the sentient, aware, concerned, and principled person could know the difference. 

Now, as often happens when idealism comes face to face with in inconvenient truth, there is always a bit of unhappiness.  Marybeth's older child, Rennie, stumbled his way through the early grades of elementary school.  He couldn't make heads or tails of addition or subtraction.  The most hands-on, tactile, Montessori-style lessons were beyond him.  

'Now, Rennie, here are four apples.  Let's count them, one, two, three, four. Now watch as I take two apples away and put them in my purse. How many are left?'

The boy looked blankly at the table, the apples (he liked Golden Delicious but these were Mackintosh which were too bitter and funny-shaped), and the teacher, and said, 'Huh?'.  

The same was for reading, and as hard as Mrs. Perkins tried, she couldn't get Rennie to put any two words on the page together.  She helped him mouth each word separately, and then asked him to read a sentence, but the boy simply looked at her with that vacant, empty stare, and said, 'Huh?'. 

Meetings with Rennie's teachers were unproductive, for there was no way that this lag in reading and arithmetic could possibly mean any serious failing in the boy. It was the fault of the teachers who didn't understand her son's particularly incisive intelligence that made him simply froth at the bit at these elemental problems. 

'I will get a second opinion', Mrs. Burnside said, and consulted Robert Fein, child psychologist, professor at  Johns Hopkins, author of numerous articles on child development, and known for his blunt, matter-of-fact opinions. 

 

After five sessions with the boy, Dr. Fein said, 'He's not retarded, but close. You will have to deal with it'.  Now, this is not what is expected from a medical professional who is expected to have at least some bedside manner, but as noted, the professor was not known for pulling punches. 'There is a bell curve for everything in nature, Mrs. Burnside', Fein went on, 'and your son is at the far end'. 

Outraged and refusing to pay, Mrs. Burnside stormed out of the doctor's office and angrily said that she would get a second opinion.  Of course it would be her third opinion, but who was counting? She had to get at truth of the matter and her son was not, repeat not stupid. 

As she was canvassing the medical directory for appropriate choices - the range was daunting and included everything from herbal healers to brain surgeons - she found herself in a similarly confounding debate at work.  The issue of the black man - his plight, the continuing dysfunction of the inner city, his incarceration and recidivism - was at the top of the week's agenda.  

Everyone in the office knew that these problems were the result of white racism, pure and simple, and there was no need to hector the black man and harp on individual responsibility and adherence to majority norms.  Most importantly, there was no need to get a second opinion.  Facts were facts. 

So, here Marybeth Burnside found herself in a double bind. In the case of her son, she could not accept that he was as dumb as a stone and kept looking for a convenient truth; and in on the other issue, race, she turned blindly away from the inconvenient truth - the ghetto was a sinkhole of moral vacuity, irresponsibility, and social anarchy, getting progressively more so because of its consequential sexual profligacy within a closed system.

  

Unless sexual partners were chosen carefully, like the Jews, the Chinese, and the Koreans, for upward mobility and for consolidation of good traits, the entire socio-moral character of the ghetto would continue to erode. 

'Wrong, wrong, wrong', Marybeth shouted.  'Impossible racist assumptions.  The people of Anacostia (Washington DC's most pestilential slum) are just as capable, intelligent, willing, and responsible as anyone else in the city.  To say otherwise is to continue Jim Crow and big house Yes, Massa' thinking'. 

The next three medical opinions were just as conclusive as the first - Rennie Burnside was as dumb as a bagful of hammers - but offered different options.  One was to shoot him up with Ritalin and a new iteration of steroids which has worked wonders in improving concentration and academic performance. Another by an old B.F. Skinner advocate was to reward the boy at every right answer - a piece of candy corn which he loved for adding two numbers or reading a simple sentence; and a third to do mild electrical stimulation of the medulla oblongata. 

As often happens when you are smacked in the face over and over again with inconvenient truths, you come to your senses, often suddenly; and so it was with Marybeth Burnside who had been walloped on both sides of the face at the same time.  

It might be, as difficult as it was to accept, that a) her son was not the sharpest knife in the drawer; and b) the black man might not be all he had been cracked up to be; and while we're at it, climate change might not be the Armageddon promised, the gender spectrum might simply a cooked-up fantasy, and capitalism  actually had a good side. 

Epiphany aside, it took Marybeth a while to adjust to her new ways of thinking.  The old job just wouldn't do and her son was doing well shoeing horses on a dude ranch, and after a while she regained her footing, joined a country club, applied for membership in the DAR, and baked to-die-for casseroles. 

No Kings? 'I'll Settle For Pasha' - Donald Trump And Dreams Of The Sybaritic Pleasures Of Power

'Those pashas were quite something, weren't they?', the President said to Marco Rubio, his Secretary of State who, like his boss had never visited Turkey but since a boy had always admired the opulence and sybaritic pleasures of the East.  The kings of England had their pleasures - Henry VIII went through six wives and innumerable concubines, but Buckingham palace was austere, all formality, powdered wigs, bustles, waltzes and only a pavane to liven it up. 

 

Cardinals, bishops, and priests were everywhere, gossiping, bitching, and plotting against the king, all under cover of the Vatican and the devious Pope Clement VII, angry at Henry's challenges to his authority. There were all the trappings of royalty - king, queen, courtiers, banquets, caparisoned guards, moats, knights and ceremony - but it was still a starched, squibbed, tight affair. 

 

As a boy Marco read fairy tales about the mysterious and enticing East - the Arabian Nights, stories of Suleiman the Great and his harems of the most beautiful women from the Middle East and the Levant, the opulent palaces of Constantinople, Cleopatra's barges on the Nile - and he dreamed one day being surrounded by Palestinian, Egyptian, and  Libyan princesses. 

'Yes, Mr. President', Marco replied, and nothing more needed to be said, for he and his boss shared the same romantic vision.  What could be better than the life of a pasha, Trump had often remarked to his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. 

Not only did a pasha have complete and absolute power, but he lived in the lap of luxury, choosing a different beauty every night from his harem, dining on pheasant and venison, the most delectable sweets, nectar from the ripest peaches and apricots, clothed in silk raiment, the scent of frankincense and myrrh everywhere. 

What was the White House compared to that?  Even King Charles III of England who recently concluded a state visit to Washington, had it better than he, thought the President. At least he had a hundred liveried servants, the Beefeater guards, a royal carriage, and the magnificent gardens of Westminster.  Yes, he was married to that old bat, Camilla and had turned down Diana, the world's sweetheart for her; but still, the perks of the throne were compensation. 

The days of the pashas were long gone, the President knew.  His nemesis, Erdogan, was in Istanbul now, reversing the last traces of the glorious Ottoman Empire and turning the country into another Iran - burqas, chadors, veils, muezzins and an Islamic caliphate.  What was he thinking? Right there in the Turkish presidential palace archives were paintings of the magnificent harems of Sultan Suleiman and his vizier Ibrahim Pasha; or Rustem Pasha, grand vizier under Suleiman the Magnificent; and he turned this down for a cossetted, doughy, Muslim wife and Koranic rule?

'If only they knew', said President Trump, laughing at the No Kings protestors outside the window on Pennsylvania Avenue, 'how right they were; but right church, wrong pew'.  He had no intentions of becoming a petty dictator, an Idi Amin, Bokassa, Mobuto, Deby, or Kagame; nor a Putin or Xi, men of limitless power and authority recalling and reconstituting the empires and dynasties of the past.  These men all had a certain appeal, but it was to the ancient pashas of Turkey that he looked for inspiration. 

'Goddam this country!', Trump shouted, not at the America of free enterprise, military strength, and vast wealth, but the censorious, Puritanical, hair-shirted America which demanded sexual fidelity and eternal chastity. Melania was a trophy wife who looked great in Balenciaga, Dior, and Chanel, but if he had his pick from a harem? Something a lot tastier.  

For all his talk about reversing diversity, equity, and inclusivity the President had a very eclectic taste in women - at least recently, ever since he was President and entertained beautiful women from the Middle East - in an official capacity certainly, but in his company nonetheless. 

What he would give for a night with Usha al-Noor, Jordanian beauty in the retinue of King Abdullah II, or Emriye Hassan Egyptian princess, descendant of Nefertiti and with the dark, sultry looks of Cleopatra or Maifari Diallo, Fulani princess.  

The President was known for bimbos - tarty blondes and runway queens - but his heart lay in the darker versions of feminine beauty.  Not too dark, he admitted to himself.  He could not imagine himself in bed with a Nigerian woman, no matter how hard he tried;  or with an American ghetto queen even less.  He was neither prejudiced nor racist, just the idea of that nose, those lips, that hair....He knew the brothers loved booty, but that put him off even more.

The President had met Dominique Strauss-Kahn at G-7 meeting during his first presidency.  He knew of the Frenchman's reputation for being a latter day Lothario, Don Juan, and Count de Valmont, a man of many women, delighted with all of them.  When accused of being a procurer and frequenter of prostitutes, he said, 'How was I to know they were prostitutes?  All women look the same with their clothes off'. 

Strauss-Kahn's philandering never hurt his chances for the French presidency - the French had no American hang-ups on that score - and Trump wondered what would happen, now that he was in his second and final term as president of the United States, if he were to do a European turn?  And why not a harem?  Of course not a real Turkish one with thick drapes, incense, grape arbors, and balms; but the principle of the thing?  

There was nothing in the Constitution about a president having mistresses. Censure had only come from the public. Kennedy, Johnson, and all the first executives before them had to keep their affairs quiet.  So if a president had served his two terms and would return to an active, glamourous private life regardless of public censure, then why not?

'Look at them', the President said to Marco Rubio as they both looked down at the No Kings rally - an assortment of the most unattractive, obese, hectoring women in one place that he had ever seen.  'I wonder where they get them?', the President asked. 

Of course the President admired Putin and Xi and even had a grudging respect for the ayatollahs of Iran who, he had to admit, had ruled without opposition for fifty years.  Any man of supreme power wants absolute power.  Who wouldn't? Suffering fools was almost more than he could stand - Chuck Schumer, the Squad, the screechy bitches of the Left, the uppity black Congressmen harassing his Cabinet members.  The whole lot of them should be put on a slow boat to China, and if he had imperial power that's exactly where they'd be. 

Just look at Bukele of El Salvador.  He swept the streets clean, jailed tens of thousands of gang members without trial and is cruising along with an 85 percent approval rating.  'What about the rights of honest Salvadorans to live in peace?', he said, criticizing the Left for championing the rights of criminals and dismissing their victims. 

This concentration of power was one thing, thought the President; but to live in sybaritic pleasure was another altogether.  Why should Suleyman the Magnificent or Rustem Pasha be the only ones to rule in splendor? If I have to go to war with Iran, the President thought, I want to come home to a silken, cafe au lait Alexandrian princess. 

The irony of all this of course was that the No Kings protestors were exactly right.  Donald Trump did want to be an emperor, a sultan, a pasha, but just not for the reasons the fools on the avenue thought.  No, he would always rule justly and in accordance with strict conservative principles.  It was just the after hours perks of Supreme Leader that appealed to him. 

In Praise Of Promiscuity, Infidelity, And Sexual License - Men Were Not Made To Live In A Cabin In The Woods

Abel Ferrara directed the movie Welcome to New York, the fictionalized story of Dominique Strauss-Kahn (the film Devereaux), a libertine and leading candidate for the presidency of France.  When accused of prostitution, bawdry, and procuring he said, 'How was I to know they were prostitutes.  All women look the same with their clothes off'. 

 

Sexual libertinage, promiscuity, or addiction – whatever it was called by Strauss-Kahn's accusers – in his eyes was morally neutral.  Prostitution has always been tolerated if not legal in France, and women are as much commodities as those he has always traded on world markets.   The fact that his sex drive was more insatiable than others was not the point.

The final scene of the film shows Devereaux staring blankly at the camera, perhaps the only suggestion the director makes that despite his arrogance, defiance, and ability to survive and profit, Devereaux is chastened, vulnerable, and aware. 

However the  penultimate scene – that of Devereaux propositioning the maid – is the real moral closure of the film.  He is virile, irrepressible, contemptuous of the bourgeoisie and its myopic values, and is subversive of them.  He is reminiscent of Fyodor Karamazov, the father of the brothers of Dostoevsky’s novel, who is as sexually driven, condescending, and irreverent.  Both men are attractive in their will, defiance of the meek, timid, and sexually repressed. 

Ferrara’s film is particularly interesting because it was produced in a very politically correct time and dealt with subjects– accusations of rape, infidelity, and sexual ambition -  which are reported in only predictably correct ways.  

Devereaux’ legal proceedings and acquittal do not interest Ferrara.  The film is as ambiguous on this score as the claims and defense of the case on which it was based.  Ferrara is only interested in showing an absolutely confident, determined, willful, unapologetic, and unrepentant man in the face of sanctimonious social censure.

The film is especially important because it is an indictment of today’s increasingly Puritanical American culture.   Sex in the name of civil protections and women’s rights has been confined, sanitized, and nearly considered off-limits unless it is between two consenting, married adults.

Sex for Devereaux was necessary and absolute.  As in the case of most older men, sex with younger women is their only hope of regaining the potency and vitality of their youth.  Although sexual conquest is enough for most men, Devereaux could not stop there.   It was the sex act in all its twisted diversity that mattered.  And what was wrong with that?

Infidelity, always the object of derision in America, is only a sidelight in Ferrara’s film.   It is of absolutely no consequence in the arranged marriage of the Devereaux and no consequence at all within the context of individual will.  

Nietzsche is famous for his Superman; but he was right in his statement that the only validation of the individual in a meaningless world is the expression of his will.   Devereaux is a perfect Nietzschean Superman.  

Men always cheat on their wives because sexuality is the defining characteristic of human nature; and lovers, the variety of sexual experience, the roll call of conquests, and the loosening of the traces, make us – especially men - what we are.

Fyodor Karamazov is often dismissed by modern critics as an unduly authoritarian father, for his emotional dismissiveness of them, and for his all-consuming selfish desires.  Yet Fyodor is the most attractive character of all the Karamazovs.  He wants no part of Alyosha’s religiosity or of Ivan’s academic atheism.  

Dmitri is weak, susceptible, and morally suspect.  Only Fyodor – like Nietzsche’s Superman and Ferrara’s Devereaux – follows his own instincts as an expression of will, a scorn for bourgeois society, and an understanding that dismissiveness and pleasure are all that count in a world that amounts to very little.

Sharp edges, moral imperfections, and stubborn sexuality are all universally condemned in American progressives’ desire to reform the world.   Great statesmen– FDR, LBJ, MLK, Thomas Jefferson, and many others – are now judged more for their personal rectitude than their political leadership.  

Jefferson’s sex life with slaves; Martin Luther King’s Lothario lifestyle, Roosevelt’s longtime mistress; Clinton’s dalliance with an intern are now judged alongside of war and peace, social reform, justice, and equality.

Of course ambitious and intelligent men will do just about anything to get what they want; and since power breeds even more  marital and social infidelity, no one should be surprised at their stretching the truth, evasion of accountability, and amoral pursuit of their goals. 

Our lenses have become distorted by sanctimony and idealism.  The world is no different than it was in the days of empire and long before.  Men and women are just as territorial, protective, violent, and ambitious as in the days of Henry VI or Elizabeth I.  Humanity is not progressing, but acting as it always has. 

If anything America has become even more censorious since the debut of the film over twelve years ago.  The MeToo movement declared the inviolate sanctity of women and put men - all men - on notice.  Men, they said, were genetically predatory, sexually ambitious, and fueled by hormonal excess were dangerous and threatening. 

A firewall was put up between men and women, and men were to be the trick dogs of the circus.  Just as Miss Julie in Strindberg's play of the same name made her valet Jean jump through hoops to prove her female dominance, American women said enough is enough. Women must be restored to the pedestal on which they have always belonged, and sex will be at their command, no one else's. 

MeToo followed on the heels of No Means No, an even more telling Strindberg-esque movement to bind men to a check list of 'may I's', an emasculating and sexually depressing exercise of feminist fantasy

Of course one does not have to read through many volumes of literature to find examples of men’s frustrated pursuit of women.  A woman’s ‘no’ was part of her allure, ‘playing hard to get’ was part of an elaborate pas de deux, a mating dance of sexual demurral, passion, and conquest. 

A woman’s currency was her honor and her chastity. Her marriage might be arranged and her final worth a matter of dowry, family name, and ancestry; but the ballet was still her way of testing the interest and resolve of her suitors, exciting them with her demure sexuality, and promising much more.

So, what has happened ? Why has the age-old sexual ballet turned sour, nasty, retributive, and punitive? One would have thought that with the final liberation of women, the game would remain the same, but the rules of engagement – pursuit and submission – would be altered.  

There would be no need for shy demureness, reticence, or chastity on the part of women; and instead of a playful hand-slap men would get a firm ‘No’. In other words women would have no reason whatsoever for refusing sex other than lack of interest or desire; and men, now appreciating women’s new sexual authority and seeing a wide-open field, would not bother to persist.

Coyness, flirtation, perfume, décolleté would not disappear; and if anything would become more provocative; and it was up to men to negotiate with new sexy-cum-defiantly independent women. Most men I know have learned quickly and well.  

Women are just as interested in having sex, bonding, mating, and marrying as ever before; and just as in Abelard and Heloise’s day, the only conquest that counts is the mutual one. A lady’s voluntary and passionate submission is a tribute.  Force makes no sense at all. If you can’t win a woman’s heart with charm, confidence, and patience, then it isn’t even worth trying.

So the current crisis about rape is a mystery. What has happened to the beautiful game? Have men forgotten that women have not changed and still respond to respect, male confidence, and sexual interest? Have women read only half of the new sexual charter and not bothered with the part about sexual maturity and responsibility? Have men gotten caught between the sexual expectations of a libertine age and the new authority of women?

It is surprising that men need to be told “No means no”. Of course it does, and is expected in any relationship; but as true and honest a declaration it may be at one moment, a firm ‘No’ may turn into a warm ‘Yes’.  That’s how the game of mutual conquest is played – figuring out just when ‘No’ becomes ‘Yes’.  There are no absolutes in sexual gaming as any sexually successful man – or woman – knows.

And so it is that Ferrara's film resets the compass and returns sex to its proper, uninhibited place in human affairs.  The sexual libertine - Strauss-Kahn, Valmont (Liaisons Dangereuses), or Lothario (an Italian name used as shorthand for an unscrupulous seducer of women, based upon a character in The Fair Penitent, a 1703 tragedy by Nicholas Rowe where Lothario is a libertine who seduces and betrays Calista) - is simply on the asymptote of sexual behavior on the bell curve which ranges from zero to the uxorious, to the timid and bashful to the confident, limitlessly ambitious and equally limitlessly attractive. 

God's greatest irony as suggested by Konstantin Levin in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is that He created an intelligent, sentient, creative, humorous, and marvelous being, gave him but a few decades to live, and then consigned him for all eternity in the cold, hard ground of the steppes.  A far greater irony is that God created men with a lifelong desire for women but granted them but the same few decades to fulfill it. 

Men like Strauss-Kahn, JFK, MLK, LBJ and ten thousand other men of power and influence have the means and wherewithal to live out their lives in the manner intended; and many others with will, ambition, and a dismissal of risk do the same.  These are men who have rejected women's harping, religion's warnings, and society's opprobrium and lived their lives to the fullest. 

While Henry David Thoreau might have thought that a life of solitude and contemplation in the forest was one's true calling, and while sadhus climb the Himalayas to contemplate The One, hoping for enlightenment, most men have intimations of Strauss-Kahn.  If a man was created with a lifelong sexual desire and granted but a few years to fulfill it, then isn't the libertine the Nietzschean hero?

Most men, alas, are far from that ideal, sexually sedentary, complaisant, and muddling through.  Perhaps this censorious, feminized, Puritanical ethos will retreat one day, and life can be led without women's j'accuse, but not for a while.  In the meantime, let us fete the Lotharios and Valmonts of the world and cheer them on...and maybe harvest our own field of delights.