Sex And The Liberal Woman - Hidden Desire For The Unfeminized Beast

Bettina Campbell thought she knew what's what until her neighbor flew an oversized American flag.  Putney Meadows, the leafy Washington neighborhood that had been solidly progressive for as long as she could remember, now had an apostate living right next door.  Or course he could simply be expressing his patriotism, his love of country, and solid Americanism, but in these days of Donald Trump and the miasma of right wing political infection, there could be no such thing.  Flying the American flag was nothing more than a Make America Great Again banner. 

Bettina had suspected as much when she met her neighbor taking out the trash and commiserated with him about 'the ballroom', the garish monstrosity that Donald Trump was planning to build in the White House, a travesty of history, an obtuse, bourgeois claim to faux culture, and a gross obscenity.  She was surprised when he did not rise to the occasion, but merely smiled, commented on the weather, and asked Bettina about her rose garden. 

'Silence is complicity' was the sign posted on her front lawn, and here was a clear case of it.  Her neighbor simply by deflecting the ballroom comment and turning to innocuousness, showed his true colors - a right wing zealot, an apostate, and a traitor right here in Putney Meadows. She had been right about the flag all along.

'I had a chat with our neighbor', Bettina mentioned to her husband over dinner that night.  'You know the one, the flag one', and without waiting for his response, she went into her now familiar screed about the idiocy of Donald Trump.  This time, however, there was something more to her usual fluid stream of hatred.  Never in a hundred years did she expect a Trump supporter to live in the neighborhood, let alone next door.  How was she expected to deal with such an intrusion?

Her husband said that he didn't know what the fuss was about. The neighbor parked courteously, was careful to recycle his trash, smiled, waved, and brought over fresh figs from his garden. His political beliefs were his affair. 

This of course did not satisfy Bettina who felt the presence of the neighbor was a blight, as bad as a crack house next door, an unwanted, uncivilized, brutish, brooding presence that destroyed the comity of the block and the neighborhood. 

From that moment onward she hovered, waiting for another chance to confront her neighbor.  She tried to be outside when he went to work and came home, looked out the back window on trash pickup day to catch him in the alley, tended her rose garden when she heard voices in the yard next door; but no dice. She was not up to full frontal confrontation - there was a certain sense of propriety in the neighborhood borne of good breeding and education - but was tempted when all her more surreptitious attempts at contact failed. 

Susie Brandon was the woman who knew everything - who lived where, what they did for a living, how the marriage was progressing, whether children were on the way, what schools they went to, what cars they drove etc.  She wasn't actually a busybody, just an interested, community minded neighbor to whom all went for gossip.  How did Judge Fuller die? Is that Marge Adams' second or third marriage, etc. 

So Bettina went to Susie about her neighbor.  What did she know about him?  Now, Bettina, mindful of the neighborhood ethos of goodwill, was tentative and careful in her questioning, but her intent was clear.  Was the neighbor a right wing Trump supporter or not?

Susie said she had no idea.  The flag and the Lexus parked out front were some indications of Republicanism, but beyond that she was unwilling to say. 'Invite them over', she suggested. 

Bettina had of course thought of that, but was afraid of what she might find out.  It was one thing to suspect or surmise one's political affiliation, another altogether to be faced undeniably with it.  No, invitations would not do. The truth would crack the polity of a well-constructed, politically solid neighborhood and better to let sleeping dogs lie than to rile them up. 

Now, it turned out that the neighbor was actually a charming, polite, and articulate man who clearly loved women.  Even in the first alley-trash encounter, Bettina felt his affection and personal interest.  After so long married to the same man and after years in the progressive trenches, she was surprised at her response to her neighbor's quite obvious sexual interest.  

This of course added to her confusion.  Sexual responsiveness towards a political traitor would be capitulation to the Devil, an insidious and unforgiveable lapse of integrity.  However once the flame had been lit, she couldn't deny that her political interest in outing an apostate was merely a cover for something far more pertinent although inexpressible. 

'Conservatives make good lovers' was the meme on the street, a happy-go-luck t-shirt logo worn on the tennis court or mowing the lawn but as in most hyperbole and fancy there is some truth.  Liberal men fall over themselves to respect, honor, and defer to women.  Lovemaking is progressive method acting: 'May I? Can I? Would it be OK if...' and all the rest of the mile markers set up by No Means No women.  There would be no male forwardness in the bedroom of sensitized women. Men would be brought to heel and kept there at women's beck and call. 

Of course most women were sick and tired of such sycophantism and faux demeanor.  They wanted to fucked royally not mollycoddled and deferred to like the Virgin Mary.  It was conservative men who had never bought into the feminist cant, gender inquiry, and pedestal thinking of their progressive colleagues, and who believed that women were to be had, no different from any other desirable item in the marketplace. 

Although women like Bettina publicly raged at such insensate, bullying, intimidating behavior, they privately wanted men like this....men like Bettina's neighbor. 

The cat-and-mouse game continued for a month or two.  Both parties knew the outcome but were willing to play dutiful suitor and coy maiden.  As they grew closer Bettina, began to see that her neighbor was 'not that bad' - his radical conservatism, under the soft lighting of the Jefferson Suite at the Fairfax, did not seem quite so noxious; and it was that joyous epiphany which changed her mind.  She was no longer a one-issue woman.  Not everyone had to pass muster, pass through her political filter, to be acceptable. Political anger was draining, debilitating, and counter-productive.  Politics described but did not define. 

It is hard to keep up let alone leave off a sexual liaison with a next door neighbor, but Bettina and her lover were civilized people; and when the affair was over, they still managed neighborliness and good will. 

Every so often, when she saw his wife leave for work in the morning, she was tempted to slip in the back door and rekindle the affair, but she demurred.  Better leave that one in the rearview mirror.  There would be others now that she had rid herself of the limiting political sieve through which men had had to pass. 

Rain Dances, Cowrie Shells, And Witch Doctors - A Conservative In Liberal Country

Parker Hammond lived in Fairmont Park, a leafy enclave of Northwest Washington, DC, a white, upper middle class, professional neighborhood, uniformly progressive and home of No Hate Resides Here, Black Lives Matter, All Are Welcome banners and lawn signs.  There were no chinks in the neighborhood’s armor, no doubts or second thoughts about the gender spectrum, affirmative action, redistribution of wealth, or the evils of capitalism. It was a homogeneous, hermetically sealed, committed place to live.  It was no different than the bland, plump, and prosperous suburbs of the Fifties.

The cars in Fairmont Park were all the same – Prius, Volt, Tesla, or hybrid Toyota.  The dinners were all ethnically eclectic, locally-sourced, and organic. No flags flew on the Fourth  of July or Memorial Day, no floats down Mass Ave in honor of the fallen.  Church on Sunday was desultory and prayer a parents’ thing.  If ever there was a neighborhood of surety and one that slept well, it was Fairmont Park.

For a conservative like Parker Hammond life was as simple, ordinary, and uncomplicated as that of his neighbors as long as he observed decorum, and respected received wisdom and political propriety.  His neighbors never suspected his radical leanings because the ethos of political homogeneity was so universal that they talked to him as openly as if he were one of theirs about the devilishly misogynist, homophobic, demented Donald Trump; about the rise of The Black Man, the heroism of the Transgender Woman, and the solidarity of the Congressional women of color.  They assumed tribal conformity and fidelity to tribal laws, and never expected a contrary word.

Parker had a number of friends whom he had known for the many years he and his family had lived in Fairmont Park, and during those happy years of pre-school, kindergarten, and elementary school talk of children, teachers, playgrounds, and trash pick-up was enough to fill a raft of chicken dinners; but when the birds had flown the nest, little convenient social glue remained, and the cracks in the friendships began to show.  Although Parker had been determined to keep his own counsel and to express his conservative views elsewhere, he was put upon. His neighbors caught the scent of contrariness, of a conservative in the guise of a liberal, and were not content until they had outed the outlier.

To keep calm and to preserve the familiar light chatter of childhood days, he became adept at deflecting pointed remarks about Critical Race Theory, black empowerment, the gender spectrum, and Wall Street greed; and turned every reference to the innocuous. 

“Speaking of curriculum reform”, he said, “what do you think of the new French teacher?”  Language studies were safe, neutral ground, or so Parker thought; but his friends pounced on even that.  “French”, they laughed, “the language of Bourbons, Louis XVI, and the colonialist post-Napoleonic hegemonists.  Why should we impose that language on our children?”

“Nice weather we’re having”, turned into a diatribe against conservative ignorance about global warming.  The unseasonable warmth was but the first step into an environmental Hades, a final, universal conflagration that conservatives not only did not accept but had caused. 

His comment about the beautiful new gym teacher – young, lithe, runway ready, and Hollywood primed, biding her time until her inevitable trip to the West Coast – was dismissed as antiquated, misogynist, pseudo-patriarchal abuse.  Her declared Hollywood ambition, her proud sexuality and vital sexual spirit she had translated into the grace and enthusiasm of acrobatics were ignored.  Her beauty was to be overlooked, dismissed as irrelevant, and inconsequential – despite the fact that all the girls in the school wanted to be her and all the boys wanted her.

Finally, and long overdue Parker spoke up.  He had had enough of his friends’ cancelling dismissal of the Tudors, the Romanoffs, and the Pahlavis;  their revisionism and historical dimness.  He was magnificent, a Williams Jennings Bryant or Frederick Douglass. He was a demon, a man possessed.  When he drew breath and looked around, he was satisfied.

The Fieldings were nonplussed.  They had, like all Fairmont Park neighbors, thought that science and politics were settled.  How could such unexpected, crude and antagonistic sentiments come from a friend? And how could they not have known or even suspected his true colors?

For his part, he had become increasingly bored with the Fieldings, their rattling on about old political saws, their intellectual insularity and lack of curiosity, their morass.  At his age, far nearer the end of life than the beginning, he was increasingly impatient with the chatter that had occupied him in the hot tub while the kids played on the swings but which the Fieldings continued.  Better a solitary life without meaningless interruption than a nattering one that passed for friendship.

All is supposed to settle as time goes on, find its proper level, which is what retiring and doing nothing is all about.  Reflection, re-consideration, a prayer perhaps; but nothing disruptive.  Life is supposed to end on a glidepath, not a rutted runway or foundered in a tangle of mangroves; so what was all this scrambling of progressive eggs all about?  Why the glee in upsetting apple carts? Or re-rearranging knick-knacks on the coffee table?

In such a community of closed doors, it felt good to slam them.  

Where political belief has become an article of faith, disagreement is a sin.  There can be no more difference of opinion about the rightness of climate action, gender fluidity, or the rise of the black man than there can about the nature of the Trinity.  No questions about whether Jesus was God and Man, all God, sometimes one and sometimes the other, borne of he Father, co-existent with the Father, or any of the other apostasies debated during the Second Century.  Life in Fairmont Park was like Christianity after the Council of Nicaea.  Right and wrong had been settled, inquiry and debate were unnecessary and tantamount to heresy.

So Parker was branded an apostate, a heretic, and an outlier.  He was no longer welcome. This isolation had a kind of purity – shedding snakeskin, the histogenesis of a moth, becoming someone neither defined by others nor by opposition to them.

It was initially hard to adjust to this new life, and each time he passed a front lawn festooned with rainbow signs or matrons still wearing COVID masks the old orneriness returned.  It was definitely orneriness since he had enough of a Tolstoian perspective of history to expect repetitive cycles of political fol-de-rol turned into true belief, territorialism, and war and not to get exercised either way.  Diffidence pissed people off more than deeply held belief ever did.

Diffidence – a layman’s nihilism – was the soft pillow of Parker’s later years.  We all die alone, said Tolstoy, so better get used to the idea, contemplate mortality and leave lunacy behind.  A hard prescription to follow but clarity would come, an ‘aha’ experience like that of Ivan Ilyich; but not yet, by no means not yet.

Toy Soldiers - Peace At Any Price, The Fanciful Dreams Of A Hopeless Idealist

Artemis Jones was a child of the post-war generation a woman who grew up in the heady times of American political hegemony.  The world was American in spirt, philosophy, will, and ethos.  Germany and Japan had been roundly defeated and the Soviets shown what would happen to them if they overstepped their geopolitical interests.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the war with Japan to a consummate close, but more importantly they showed the Russians what to expect if they got out of line. 

 

Fourth of July parades meant something.  They were exuberant expressions or native patriotism.  There were few dissenters in post-war America, a few residual socialists in Wisconsin and on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, but by and large the Fourth was a universal celebration of national pride. 

Of course that nationalistic euphoria could not be sustained - the world has a way of intruding on idealistic hopefulness - and soon America was mired in an unwinnable war in Korea, followed by a disastrous misadventure in Vietnam, on the heels of which came the half-hearted military excursions in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

After the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled in Baghdad Square, George Bush, tricked out in flight suit on the decks of an American aircraft carrier, declared victory, and time for the Iraqi people to determine their own, particular path to freedom and democracy. 

Whistlin' Dixie it not unexpectedly turned out, as Abolhassan Banisadr and his Islamist militias took to the streets to fill the power vacuum.  Leaving the political future to 'the Iraqi people', meant turning the country over to venal, self-interested terrorist groups, but the hard lifting had been carried out, and was time for Iraqis to man up. The result - political chaos. Extended military rule was proposed - stay in Iraq until true structural reform had been effected and all seeds of Islamic intent neutered - but America was having none of it. Time to move on. 

The same was true in Afghanistan - after years of a punishing, unwinnable war against the Taliban, let the people decide, American troops were withdrawn, and the country went back to a medieval caliphate. 

So, Artemis Jones, despite her earlier pride in America's defeat of fascism and imperialism, changed her tune.  War was no way to solve disputes, and was only a regressive return to Paleolithic barbarism. She had become a Neville Chamberlain 'Peace at any price' pacifist. 

 

It was hard for her college friends, all of whom had become conservative over time  - the old adage, 'Give a liberal enough time and he will become conservative' was never more true of her Seven Sisters, privileged social elite who had had their dalliance with progressivism but who had returned to the fold - to understand how Artemis, icon of intellectual brilliance and philosophical insight at Vassar, had come so beholden to a faded, discredited philosophy. 

'It's the right thing to do', Artemis said, 'the only thing', and she joined with her Yale colleagues in following the Reverend William Sloan Coffin in his One World peace movement - disarmament at all costs, reductions in force, and a return to civil sanity.  A failed incentive of course, given history's lessons of persistent, perennial aggression.  The Hundred Years War was just a trifle compared to the bloody military escapades of Genghis Khan and his hundreds of thousands of brutal-minded cavalry; and an afterthought to Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot, responsible for millions of deaths of innocent civilians in mindless attempts to establish communist hegemony. 

One would have thought that Artemis and her fellows would have come to their senses by the end of the Twentieth Century, one of the bloodiest in human history; but no, such is the persistence of idealism in the human breast - a simple, unproven belief in the natural goodness of Man and the ultimate outing of a verdant, compassionate, considerate, harmonious world. 

But no...she was as deeply committed to pacifism and the eventual coming of Utopia as fundamental Christians are about The Second Coming.  The world would see, sooner rather than later, that war, warfare, armed conflict, hostility, and competition are only social artifacts placed erroneously in the way of social and moral progress. 

When asked about WWII - after all a world dominated by genocidal, autocratic, hegemonic regimes could not in any way be acceptable - she demurred, happy with the outcome but retrospectively hopeful that a more peaceful solution could have been found.  She remained resolute that violence, no matter how appealingly logical it might seem at the time, only leads to more violence.  

It was her goal in life to assure that such world wars would never happen; but when questioned about powerful, unconcerned, and unintimidated regimes like those in Russia and China and whether military force could ever by contemplated, she once again demurred.  If we worked hard enough with enough moral authority, war would never be needed. 

The world is at war - Ukraine, Iran, Palestine, and the racist, Islamic incursions in Nigeria, North Africa, and the Middle East.  Western Europe, thanks to its ignoble assumptions of diversity, is awash in separatist, militant, radical Islam - a movement which if not deterred and neutered, will most certainly end in violence.  China is ready to unleash historic aggression against Taiwan if it continues to refuse re-integration with the Communist mainland.  Russia is as vigilant for an Islamic resurgence in the Caucasus. 

Yet and still Artemis held firmly to her principles of non-violence. Unless some stood up against the persistent and increasingly violent aggression everywhere, it would go on unabated.  Only she and her pacifist colleagues stood in the way between world mayhem and international civil order. 

The American Left in its increasing use of the term 'Hitler' to describe any conservative policy or political stance has done more to distort historical reality than any academic revisionist. The war against Hitler and Naziism was a just war - not only because it defied Hitler's overt attempt to create a thousand year Reich which extended from East to West, but because of his genocidal desire to rid the world of Jews.  Now that everyone with views opposing the progressive Left is condemned as a Hitlerian racist, evil and satanically destructive, the war to destroy Naziism loses its existential validity and makes 'peace at any price' acceptable once again. 

Artemis had trouble justifying the 9/11 terrorists - Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people and their denial of civil rights was certainly the root cause for Islamic frustration and anger, but such a bold, blatant attack on a civilian target was questionable at the very least. 

She never once withdrew her criticism of Israel for its armed response to Hamas terrorism or its attempts to eliminate Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.  Israel was and always will be seen as the racist aggressor.  The war in Gaza was entirely and unequivocally Israel's fault. 

Jesus was a pacifist and so were Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King - saints in the liberal pantheon, prophets of right, justice, and goodness - and their portraits were place above the mantlepiece in Artemis' living room.  Their spirit of universal brotherhood should never be forgotten. 

The best that can be said of all three is that their influence at least mitigated the horrors of war; but history shows that they had no influence whatsoever.  Not only were the Crusades sent to Jerusalem to kill Muslims in Jesus' name, but India was home to one of the most bloody communal violence the world had ever seen before Rwanda.  Millions of Hindus and Muslims were slaughtered in the name of religious equity.  Islam is not the religion of peace but the religion of violence.  Death to the infidel rings loud and clear now more than ever. 

Conservatives know that peace can be achieved in only two ways - armed standoff such as that in the Cold War where mutually assured nuclear destruction kept missiles in their silos for fifty years; and Pax Romana when one empire, the Roman, held absolute, complete sway. Peace as a concept is only academic, a result not of goodwill or best intentions but the result of geopolitics. 

Artemis sat in, knelt, marched, and protested for all her livelong days without one whit of impact or result.  Despite her many decades of peace at any price, the world has continued without interruption its violent ways.  Conflicts are still resolved in violence.  As Mao Tse Tung famously said, 'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. 

There are special plots in every cemetery for deluded, ingenuous, fabulists - idealists who no matter what the evidence or chronicles of history keep on believing that peace has a chance, that it can be the prevailing ethos of humanity, that it is possible.  The rest of the graves are for those who soldiered on in war and peace, taking life for the 'nasty, brutish, and short' sojourn that it is.