Mariposa Robbins And The End Of Days - Why Progressives Secretly Hope For Armageddon

Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese's movie Taxi Driver says, 'Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets...I think someone should just take this city and just… just flush it down the fuckin’ toilet'.  Mariposa Robbins agreed, but secretly wanted more - the incineration of the planet in a fiery judgement that would allow new life, a good life, a pure and simple life to regenerate, populate, and thrive. 

Now, Mariposa was mixing her metaphors.  Revelation prophesies a fiery Armageddon but there will be no regeneration.  The world has been a sinkhole of rot, sin, and apostasy for so many millennia that there can be no turning back.  The end of days is exactly what it means - the end. 

Of course given Biblical history, God's past annihilations may simply go awry.  The Flood, his first attempt to rid the world of infidelity, injustice, and inhumanity did little good, for when the waters subsided life returned no different than before - pitiful, abhorrent, and faithless.  He tried again and destroyed the sinful cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.  That too was little more than divine pique, destroying what he could not control, but the lesson was not learned, and the world went on in its sinful, deceptive, godless way. 

Then, realizing that annihilation, total destruction led nowhere, God changed his approach and sent his only begotten son, Jesus, to earth to preach the gospel of forgiveness and salvation.  Jesus would take the sins of the world on his shoulders and die so that men could be redeemed.

That too did not work, for the world is as sinful, faithless, and desperately violent and sadistic than it ever was. 

Be that as it may, Mariposa was not an orthodox Christian who believed in the received word of God, and took the Bible as metaphor, allegory, and principle.  Yet there was something appealing about The Book of Revelation, the thundering hooves of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, the magnificent incendiary end to the world, the cataclysmic final accounting.  

T.S. Eliot in The Hollow Men says that the world will end not with a bang but a whimper, but that lambent, discrediting idea did not appeal to her. She wanted Sturm und Drang. The world as defiling, godless, hopelessly and shamelessly ignorant and arrogant as it was deserved better. 

Now, Mariposa was a lifelong progressive, a tireless fighter for Negro rights, the black man, gender fluidity, refugees, climate change, and the distribution of wealth.  She was a progressive's progressive, a warrior, a soldier in the cause of progress, a crusader for a better, more verdant, more peaceful, and communal world. 

But now after so many decades of liberal purpose, Freedom Rides, days and nights at the barricades, marches on the National Mall all without success, her thoughts turned more to a final solution - end the troubled, pestilential, sick world and start over again. 

A remarkable percentage of Americans believe that Armageddon will come within their lifetimes.  The Bible never specified when the end of days would occur, but said there would be unmistakable signs - natural disaster, war and civil conflict, famine and disease, and moral decay; and who could doubt the appearance of these signs. 

At first Mariposa dismissed such prophecy as religious chicanery - more prayer, more money in the collection basket, more churchgoing - but there was the niggling retainer, the impossible-to-ignore likelihood of destruction. 

After all she and her fellow progressives had talked of nuclear and climate Armageddon with conviction. If the human race were capable of self-destruction, then imagine what God finally exasperated and fed up with his own Creation could, would, and might well do. 

Just when Mariposa thought that there might be progress towards a more gentle, forgiving, and charitable world, in comes Donald Trump, harbinger of disaster, undoer of good, arrogant fool. Every reasonable policy and program put in place by progressives was being dismantled, discarded, and trashed.  Liberal reformers would have to start all over again; but if such reversals had been so easy, as easy as a few votes at election time, then it would be better to scrap the whole electoral system, eliminate the fanatics who put the man in office, and release a virus that would leave America a desert, a void. 

 

There have been mad prophets throughout history, unhinged, mentally untethered zealots who demand repentance before it is too late. Mariposa passed one every morning at Farragut West as she left the Metro for her office.  The man was as wild looking and deranged as could be, the very image of an Old Testament prophet in loin cloth and weeds, shouting Biblical verses and holding signs of extinction and the end of days.  He was gaunt, almost skeletal, fiery-eyed and tireless.  She couldn't look him in the eyes, for the one time she did, he smiled and gestured to her.  Was that a sign?

Meanwhile Mariposa never gave up her advocacy for social reform.  Without immediate action, she shouted at a climate gathering, the human race is doomed.  We were never intended to be mired in heterosexuality...the black man will soon be atop the human pyramid, his rightful place...war is evil...and so on and so forth; but at each outing she looked around her and saw, like Travis Bickle, nothing but filth, scum, ordure, and rot.  Let a hard rain come and wipe it out, wash it down the sewer.

Progressivism is itself an unhinging affair.  There are some who have become so addled by Trump hatred that they literally come apart at the seams, become obsessed, knowable to husbands, wives and children.  They cannot believe the visitation, the evil residing in the White House, or that a viral pestilence could spread so quickly through the land.  His every action, every utterance, every policy was antithetical to justice, compassion, reason, and goodness.  

There are others like Mariposa who looked more systemically - the retrograde policies of conservative administrations are more expressions of a universal American sickness - a bourgeois lassitude and bottom-feeding cultural anomie.  It is this cultural obtuseness, this adamantine ignorance which is ineradicable by normal means.  Annihilation is the only answer, removal and regeneration. 

So, by and by Mariposa became just as crazed and unhinged as her Trump-hating colleagues.  Both had gone around the bend never to return. 

Mariposa wondered if Armageddon would be anything like the scenes from Terminator II.  Probably, and about time. 

Image Is Everything - Why The Left Is So Apoplectic About Trump's Ballroom And Triumphal Arch

'What a boor', said Vicki Parsons about Donald Trump. 'A bourgeois clown, a lowbrow dolt'.  The President's new White House ballroom, was in her opinion a showy, tasteless, pseudo-Baroque monstrosity, a garish, overdone monstrosity - just like the man himself. 

And that was just for openers.  His 250' tall triumphal arch, a monument to himself in all his regal glory would dominate the landscape, obscure the view of Lee mansion and Arlington Cemetery, dwarf everything in its shadow, an unnecessary monument to arrogance, self-importance, and cultural obtuseness. 

The 'renovation' of the Kennedy Center, now renamed the Trump-Kennedy Center would be in the same vein - a rococo monstrosity with Italian sconces and chandeliers, Roman statues, reflecting pools, arbors, and canopies. 

The Field of Heroes, Trump's plan to destroy a park overlooking the Potomac and replace it with an array of statues of 'remarkable' Americans was unconscionable, a travesty, a violation of Capital sanctity, a destruction of heritage, and an absolutely lowbrow testament to his own lack of cultural significance. 

Closing the southern border, destroying Iran's nuclear capability and its machinery of terrorism, its removal of a brutal socialist dictator in Venezuela, the restoration of American energy independence, the removal of punitive restrictions and taxes on private enterprise, and his dismissal of insidious, baseless claims of gender neutrality and his outing of the biggest scam of all, climate change all go without notice in the face of the ballroom, the arch, the Kennedy Center, and the Field of Heroes. 

The American Left has never been able to get over Donald Trump, to treat him as a political adversary and enjoin him in debate about the economic, financial, social, and geopolitical future of the United States.  The hated what he represented from the moment he arrived on the scene.  He was nothing but a carny barker, a tout, a cheap vaudevillian, and a bourgeois cultural caricature.  

He was outrageously outspoken instead of following Washington protocol.  He was calling their media shills 'stupid fools', denigrating the press as fake and unnecessary, bellowing faux patriotism and faith when he was actually a money-hungry, graspy, Wall Street robber baron out to feather his own nest and that of his cronies.  He was a Borscht Belt comedian, as politically incorrect as Jackie Mason or Rodney Dangerfield.  He was gross, insulting, and mean. 

Vicki remembered the Kennedy Camelot days - an inauguration poem by Robert Frost, Pablo Casals and the best of America's high culture, the redecorating of the White House with respect to American history and tradition - Chippendale and Townsend furniture, Revere silver, Copley and Remington.  State dinners were elegant, proper affairs with waltzes, orchestral variations, and a sophisticated list of invitees. 

Now, that was America, she said; and he was a true American president.  America loved him for Camelot, a never-never land of make-believe.  Kennedy himself was the son of a mick barroom brawler, a valueless exploitative capitalist, and a Nazi sympathizer.  There was nothing Old England about Kennedy, but he made a good show of it. Americans loved the British Edwardian television series, Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey even though as a nation of Walmart greeters they had no more idea of aristocracy was let alone the high-toned English variety than the Elysian Fields. 

It didn't matter.  No one looked beyond Jackie Kennedy's sophistication and husband Jack's show of cultural wit.  No one cared how he got the presidency, how he bungled the Bay of Pigs, how he got the US entangled in the unwinnable war in Vietnam, and how he turned the Oval Office into a brothel, so indiscreet was he that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover got the goods on him and delayed any passage of a Civil Rights bill in return for his silence. 

All this at least partially explains why the American Left cannot look beyond the ballroom, Trump's lowbrow culture, his gross and unpresidential demeanor, and his withering ad hominem attacks.  Image is everything, cultural image above all,  For all Joe Biden's vacancy, the Left says, for all his stumbling errancy, and inability to put two thoughts together, he was a good man, a considerate man, a presidential man. 

There have been all kinds of presidents in the White House from cattle-rustling LBJ to Tricky Dick, and Trailer Trash Bill; but all of them hewed to propriety, acting presidential.  Donald Trump doesn't give a flying fuck about propriety and received wisdom.  He is the young Eddie Murphy in his anything goes excoriating humor; or D.L. Hughley or Dave Chappelle.  He says anything, anytime wherever. 

He is a breath of fresh air after the four penitential, sanctimonious, and censorious Biden years.  'These are my pronouns' expressed the arrogant emptiness of that time, and Trump and America were having no more of it. 

It didn't help that Trump was doing exactly as he promised.  Sending phalanxes of bulldozers down Independence Avenue and razing the bloated, inefficient, self-serving bureaucracies that for too long had sucked taxpayer money and done nothing with it, drove progressives crazy.  His deployment of ICE (Immigration Police) to round up and deport illegal aliens was the last straw.  This tyrant was forcibly removing sincere, needy, refugees from poverty and oppression. 

Of course the Left turned a blind eye to immigrant Somali fraud, graft, and scams in Minnesota, Salvadoran Mara Salvatrucha MS-13 gangbangers, and hordes of criminals escaping justice in their own countries for a more congenial home in the United States.  The open southern border's influx was Castro's Mariel Boat Lift writ large.  The Cuban dictator opened the doors to his prisons and sent criminal outlaws, murderers and dissidents alike to our shores. 

In other words Trump was the worst possible president to sit in the Oval Office - a lowlife bourgeois interloper, a bully, a racist pig.  His image of demonic excess grew every day; but the sly old fox knows exactly what he was doing - he loved to outrage the Left, to give them shibboleths of low culture, fodder for their assumptions about kingship and autocracy, to enrage them with ballrooms and arches while he went about the serious business of restoring America to a position of world authority.

So the ballroom and the Arch will be built, bourgeois is back, and the unpresidential president will continue to go about his geopolitical mastery.  

Will he survive the coming elections? Or will millions of Americans have so bought into the Left's fantastical creation of the President that they pull the wrong lever on election day? What seems clear to many political observers and certainly to the vast number of Trump supporters, he deserves his day, a trouble-free completion of his term, and a congenial and supportive Congress. 

'Now, that's a stupid question', Trump retorted to the CNN White House correspondent asking about the coming midterm elections.  Of course there would be universal Republican victory!  Whether the American people have finally seen through the lawfare, the decade of slanderous, absurd allegations, the drumbeat of Trump hatred is unsure.  It seems as though the conservative juggernaut has finally gained momentum, but the American voter is a credulous, fickle one. 

Finding Love At Walmart - Closing In On Spinsterhood, Any Venue Will Do, The Romance On Aisle 19

Alicia Robertson was pushing fifty and she still had not found the man of her dreams by a long shot.  There was Bartleby, owner of The Second Read, an independent used book store on Dupont Circle, in the family for years.  Bart had shown her the classics, squirreled away in the back, guided her through Faraday, Bleecker, and Ochre.  

‘Nothing doing', she said when he asked her if she needed help, but was pleased at the attention.  The day had been long, dreary, and somehow always behind schedule, so the kindness of strangers was much appreciated. 

She was not looking for anything but old books, but there was an interesting peculiarity about the man, something hidden, literary, even romantic and she smiled warmly at him as he took her to the more straightforward classics of Thackery, Dickens, and Hugo. 

And that was how it began, but it wasn't long before that hidden peculiarity became full blown, obsessive, and off-putting.  He was a treacherous bore - the worst kind - and his lovemaking in particular became kinky and demanding.

‘Let's', he said, codeword for any one of ten Kama Sutra-like sexual games, more suited to the Folsom Street leather-and-thong S&M crowd, to which she first demurred coyly, then insistently, then with a finally slamming of the front door onto a baking hot August afternoon. 

And then there was Francis, an accountant, the perfect anodyne for her somewhat dangerous dalliance with Bartleby.  Francis was quiet, demure, reserved, and a gentleman.  

Still waters run deep she thought when his tentativeness began to become irritating, but there was no still or flowing water of any kind in this timid, shapeless man.  She took the lead, but his 'May I's?' and 'Would it be OK's' once they got started was an importuning, childish game; and so it was that he too was shown the door. 

There were many others...well, not that many. 'I'm not a slattern', she said, 'nor a tart'. 

She wondered if she was doing things right, in the right venues to catch a desirable man. Used bookstores and the Accounting Department were obviously blind alleys.  She needed to brighten up her search, go upscale; and so it was that she was often found by the Sargents at the Phillips, the Calder mobile in the East Wing of the National Gallery, and at intimate art seances in Bethesda. 

These last were arranged by a Vassar classmate Vicki Barnes, a woman who had also been unlucky in love but shelved the whole idea and turned to social justice.  There wasn't a progressive cause that Vicki did not embrace, and she was scene at every climate conference, gender seminar, and socialist workers councils.  

Such advocacy displaced - to use the Freudian term - her sexual desires, and while never entirely happy or satisfied, it took away the heartbeat, the flame of romance. 

This month it was to celebrate a local poet, a native Marylander who had written verse since she was ten, but never progressed much beyond her little girl's fantasies  - moonlight, sunsets, a summer breeze - but Vicki found her endearing and hoped that her 'Tea And Poems With Adela' evening gathering would do wonders for the poet, who was finally flagging after so many years of garden variety verse.  It would also be a chance to meet some fascinating people, she told Alicia. 

It was the most painful, penitential evening she had ever spent, two hours of puerile, insipid, treacly nonsense, and only out of respect for her friend and classmate did she hold out until the very end. 

Worst of all, there was no truth in advertising - there were not only no interesting men there, but those who did attend were as colorless and dull as sheet rock and without an ounce of charm.  

Barking up the wrong tree again, Alicia said to herself as she drove home.  'I must vet, suss, and choose more carefully', but for all her planning, all her GPS precision, and her AI reach, she struck out time and time again. 'I don't want to die an old maid', she said dismally. 

Serendipity, that was what did it. Unplanned, out of sequence, totally random and out of the blue came a chance encounter with Avery Phelps on Aisle 19 of Walmart where both were looking for lightbulbs.  'I am not a Walmart person', she explained as they both picked up and tried to rearrange the 100w incandescent bulbs that had come toppling down when they both reached for the top shelf. 

'Neither am I', said Avery, and that pride in dissimilitude did the trick, and soon the two were an item. 

Now, anyone who has been to a Walmart knows right off that it is not the place for romance.  It is a desperate, low-end junk store.  The poor shop there, the ones with two jobs of their own, straitened circumstances, and no time for affairs.  Overweight, dour, plodding, and determined, not a one gets a second glance, and admiring look; so the stars must have been aligned just right for Alicia, or a shooting star over the shopping mall, for there he was, and there he would be in her life. 

Mirabile dictu! the affair lasted into the Fall and the following Spring.  Neither his two ex-wives and four children rained on their parade, and they were seen everywhere together.  

Yet, there is a reason why there are spinsters - old maids, single older women - and that's because they are picky to a fault.  There were plenty of Yale men who came a-courting while she was at Vassar, men with pedigrees, promise, and hefty bank accounts; but Alicia always found fault - fibs became lies and the lies became congenital issues.  

Honesty became a cause celebre in her life and all things were judged according to it; but of course honesty like every other moral principle has a lot of give in it, and most tend to accept variability as a given not a game changer. 

Such judgmental attitude in such proportions exhibited by Alicia suggested something deeper.  Men were the problem.  Men by nature were irremediable liars, cheats, and brigands.  Untrustworthy, morally groundless, and not worth having.  This absolute denial had been neatly covered in pretty dress.  It surely seemed that she liked men, but nothing doing.  She was as misandrous as they come, an old maid for life and proud of it. 

Once this realization hit her, she was again a happy woman.  No more cruising the East Wing, no more brutally pretentious seances at Vicki Barnes, no more men. Why had it taken her so long?  So many tedious hours wasted, so much faux male idolatry, so much...bullshit.  Now she could retire gracefully from sexual pursuit, and do whatever pleased her, happy as a clam.