The Three Faces Of Eve - The Usefulness Of Falsehood In Love And War

Eve Harden never let on what she was thinking or feeling. She had learned that to keep secrets - whispered gossip - was easy, but to keep one's real intentions hidden was mastery. This sense of personal secrecy had worked since she was a child with her doting and credulous parents. Whatever she told them, they had a penchant to believe, and if later found out to be less than the truth, they gave her the benefit of the doubt.  Her sincerity, love, and desire to please overcame any censure or discipline. 

When she grew older this simple disingenuousness became charm.  A pretty girl and then quite a beautiful young women, she quickly understood how a smile, a favoring look, a delightful, light touch on the arm could resolve any issue, achieve difficult ends with little effort, and make her way in the world with ease and impunity. 

Ordinarily a girl who charms boys is hated by other girls.  Jealousy in adolescence is a rite of passage, and the natural instinct of Eve's classmates was to turn on her, claw, scratch, bitch and bite until she was cowed and their way forward was clear. 

In Eve's case, her classmates had no animus, no resentment, no hatred, for Eve's remarkable charm - now called public relations - was so unintimidating, so tame and unthreatening - that she always had her way. Each girl thought that Eve was her best friend, and as a group, they were as docile and following as a flock of sheep, 

Eve knew when to share a bit of gossip or innuendo, at such a right time and place that it gained in intimacy and credibility.  When she started the rumor about Mr. Finchley - entirely unfounded and untrue but cannily crafted and built around his eccentricities - it not only was believed by the girls and not only did it bring the poor math teacher up before an administrative committee, but it gave Eve a reputation for insight, sharing, and friendship. 

She always wondered at the ironic instance of her naming after the first woman, a deceitful, sexually manipulative character.  This Eve - Eve Harden - never thought of herself in such negative terms. She was only using her God-given talents to make her way in life.  

If God had created woman as a seductive, alluring, and irresistible being, then using that endowment was not negative but positive.  And if God created men as credulous beings, longing for adulation, and obsessed with sexual conquest, then they were there to be used as an accessory to profit. 

Now, the Hebrew authors of the Old Testament hedged a bit.  They knew what women were capable of, and how men needed to be on their guard from the get-go, but could not damn God's human creation, so they invented the snake, the Devil in disguise.  

They said he was responsible for Eve's canny seduction of Adam; but they knew that the snake/devil was just an artifact.  They knew that Eve was responsible for Adam's foolish bite of an apple from the Tree of Knowledge and the couple's expulsion from the Garden of Eden. 

Our Eve knew that her way in the world have its pitfalls - that she learned from Genesis.  Eve might have been acting according to her God-given nature, but she still should have known what might happen. Eve Harden would be much more careful. 

God's Eve was to be a model for all women, for she used all her canniness, her observant insights into the nature of men, her natural feminine allure, and her superior intelligence to deceive Adam, the first man.

God's Eve had only Adam to work with.  Our Eve had unlimited possibilities, unlimited sources of wealth, influence, and authority.  It was not enough to have seduced the girls of St. Anthony's High School into believing in her sainthood, to have tempted the boys into treating her like a queen, and to have gotten far better grades than she deserved from each and every teacher.  She would move on to greater successes, greater heights. 

Her success at college was legendary. President of this, chairwoman of that; social and academic honors, etc.; but it should not be assumed that she made her way only through this sexual nativism.  No, Eve was smart enough to lay the foundation for more personal add-ons. Brains plus charm is a heady mix. 

Eve's ambitions were many, and realizing her abilities, she would achieve them all.  She was a voracious lover and picked only the most sexually accomplished men. The same instincts that enabled her to find, see, understand, and use human gullibility gave her a finely-tuned animal ability to sort the most able and potent men from the weak and unreliable.  When she found the right partner, she became an irresistible sexual object and an indefatigable lover. 

When she turned her attention to the long term - a mate, a husband - she was equally calculating.  She vetted, sorted, sussed, triaged with a sense of demography, social dynamics, and a good sense for responsibility, duty, and fidelity. 

'This can't be', one was tempted to say.  How could one woman have all these incredibly useful traits, this inimitable drawing power, this multivariate talent? 

Yet these doubters never looked past the pedestrian and the ordinary. Although all women were God's Eve's descendants and like her had a native, undeniable sexual power, few realized it like our Eve.  They acted by fits and starts, influenced by social norms, feminist advocacy, Sunday School and Christian teaching, patriarchy and pregnancy and did not tap into their roots, realizing their full potential.  Our Eve did and then some. 

Life is not a bowl full of cherries, nor is it quite as bad as Hobbes thought (solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short).  It is to be lived, to be taken advantage of, to be exploited, a fertile field but one full of pitfalls, dangers, mine fields. 

On and on went the homilies, adages, and sane prophecies but the smartest among us, the Eves, disregarded both the warnings and the overblown optimism. Success requires understanding, plotting, determination, will, and guiltless action only. The rest is for true believers and pessimists. 

Eve's record is clear - notable notes in the Alumni Magazine, mentions in the Congressional Daily, New York Times references to her successes, blurbs in her home town newspaper.  A casual Google search will turn up hundreds of sites recording or reflecting her life, thoughts, and accomplishments. 

At one point however, she dropped out of sight, leaving everything behind - her two husbands, her lovers, her career.  All traces of her disappeared; but those few who knew her - really knew her for the complex woman she was - were not surprised. 

She was Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen's character in his play of the same name.  Hedda, like Nietzsche believed that the only validation of the individual in a meaningless world was the expression of pure will.  Her devilish manipulation of Lovborg, encouraging him, driving him to suicide was the apotheosis of this willful, amoral determination. 

So once it was all over, once Eve had left behind a thousand Lovborgs, won innumerable battles in love and war, had fulfilled every ambition, revered as a Colossus but smiling at adulators' credulousness and gullibility, she retired. 

'A remarkable woman', said a former lover. 

Modern Barbary Pirates - How Government Dragoons The People

'Government is not the solution', said Ronald Reagan, 'it is the problem', thus ushering in an era of privatization and reduction of the size and influence of government.  Of course neither he nor any other president has been able to do so, and the bureaucracy - despite the considered efforts of Donald Trump and Elon Musk - is still the behemoth it always has been. 

 

The Founding Fathers never envisaged the new republic this way. Government was to be only facilitator, caretaker, and defender.  It was the enterprise, ambition, and hard work of the individual which would enable his family, his community, and his country to prosper. 

'Rugged individualism' was the meme and ethos of the day.  It was through this determination, this sense of individual enterprise that Westward expansion was enabled, and the dream of Manifest Destiny, an America from coast to coast, was realized. 

It was private enterprise that built railroads, ports, and roads, that built towns and their granaries, banks, saloons, and stores.  Government was there to facilitate this enterprise, to survey and plat the land.  Land ownership was capital on which money could be borrowed, and fair and just settlement of disputes over property rights was the responsibility of the courts. 

Government was small, supportive, and useful; but over time this narrowly conceived role expanded to its present size, and government today is present, like never before, in the affairs of its private citizens.  It is a multi-trillion dollar business, taking money from individuals and with arrogated authority, spending it willy-nilly in their interest and legislating to itself vast, uninhibited powers and the freedom to upset ordinary lives. 

The Constitution envisioned only one role for government - the defense of the homeland - but allowed a certain measure of jurisprudence.  The framers of the Constitution agreed on the principle of private enterprise to be aided, facilitated, and encouraged by a minimalist government. 

According to the Left, the Democrat Party and especially its progressive wing has been responsible for legislative actions on climate change, gender equality, redistribution of wealth, and a policy of 'pursuant peace', and legislators in Congress have long been advocates for a strong, interventionist public sector. 

How could radical social reform be effected without the presence of federal authority and the allocation of funds from the treasury?  It was the arrogance, manipulation, and total dereliction of moral responsibility of the private sector which held back the country's utopian promise; and only if this maleficent being could be flayed, neutered, and disassembled, could the nation truly and equitably prosper. 

Social activists had no qualms about the size of the federal budget and the increased taxes that made necessary spending possible.  It was the duty of every man and woman to contribute his or her fair share to the reformist, universalist, and profoundly moral purpose of government; and to support the role of government to help the poor, the disadvantaged, and the marginalized with such honestly generated revenues. 

Now, not everyone was happy with this turn of the screw, the complete abandonment of the originalist principles of Hamilton and Franklin, and growing, seemingly unstoppable power and influence of government.  There were those like Harlan Putnam, descendant of the colonial Putnams members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in the evangelizing mission of John Davenport, and later scions of shipbuilding and the transatlantic trade. 

Putnams had made inestimable wealth from these enterprises, and went on to found more than one Wall Street investment bank. The Putnams were confidants, supporters, and advisers to the great industrialists of the early Twentieth Century - Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan.  They not only provided valuable financial and economic counsel, but were the heart and soul of private enterprise.  Harlan's ancestor, Isaiah Putnam had warned Rockefeller and his associates of 'the restive lion in his lair', the sleeping giant of government, and now Harlan saw how right his forbear was. 

'Dragooned', he said speaking of the American taxpayer who was at the mercy of predatory, manipulative, seditious legislators and their progressive shills, and who gave up thousands to the beast in Washington with little say. 

Yes, of course they had some say in principle - their votes counted - but the entire system was rigged against them.  Government was the only American institution without accountability.  Billions could be poured down the sluice of the Treasury with nary a nod to performance.  Progressive governance was one based on utopian optimism and neo-socialist promise. No private enterprise would ever get away with such financial irresponsibility. 

The private sector elite of the country - the new Rockefellers and Carnegies, Bezos, Huang, Musk, Brin, and Zuckerberg - do their best to keep the beast at bay, but viral progressivism still epidemic despite the decommission of Joe Biden and the election of Donald Trump, maintains its pressure.  The private sector, made up of greedy, oppressive, arrogant capitalists cannot be trusted, progressives insist.  Their inventions, discoveries, and innovations only benefit the rich, and if they are allowed to exist their predatory, acquisitive nature must be held in check.

It is not just the Harlan Putnams who are exercised over the unwanted jamboree of public spending, but the American working class who unwillingly fuel with their hard-earned money the follies of big government.  Seeing paychecks winnowed away by government taxation with nothing to show for it, these Americans are as exercised as the wealthy Putnams.  They are taxed at tax time, every time they buy a burger or shop at Walmart, every time they fill up the tank, for every move they make; and the rates keep rising. 

'For the public good', insist progressives who have bigger things in mind than the unpatriotic worries of those who, despite their favored status as members of the marginalized, protected class, are dismissed as irrelevant to national priorities.  These people cannot see the big picture, so focused are they on insignificant concerns. 

'Barbary Pirates', said Harlan to a group of investors considering an infusion of cash in a promising new private enterprise but hesitating while Congress debated new, punitive legislation designed to limit such private investment in favor of increased, 'morally dispensed' public expenditure. 

The Barbary pirates were privateers who operated from the North African 'Barbary (Berber) Coast', modern day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, from the 16th fo the 19th centuries. They captured European and American merchant vessels in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean to steal cargo. They enslaved an estimated 800,000 to 1.25 million Europeans over three centuries or held them for expensive ransoms. They raided coastal towns and villages across Europe—not just in the Mediterranean, but as far north as Great Britain, Ireland, and Iceland.

'The Somalis are petty thieves compared to them', said Harlan, quite impressed.  'Imagine! over three centuries of uninhibited piracy'; and that was exactly the point, he went on, citing the American history of tax piracy. 

Hayreddin Barbarossa was the most famous of all Barbary corsairs. He and his brother captured Algiers for the Ottoman Empire, and Hayreddin later became the Grand Admiral of the Ottoman fleet after major naval victories.  'There was no one like him before or since...unless you look on our shores'. 

Harlan's colleagues laughed at the simile - Harlan knew his history - but to him it was no laughing matter.  Federal taxation was piracy, no bones about it. 'Taking money from someone who earned it and giving it to someone who didn't'.  A corruption of moral justice. 

There were those who lived off the grid, deep in the woods of Humboldt County or the Idaho panhandle.  No Social Security card, no drivers' license, existing without a trace, living off the land and their wits, originalist Americans, but too fringy, deliberately disenfranchised, and wayward to make a difference, but at least they stood on principle. 

Harlan's hero was White Wolf, a Comanche chief who raped, disemboweled, hanged from trees, and burned men, women, and children in defiance of white intruders to Comanche land and a bloody lesson to them.  He was a true American - proud, native, defiant, and indomitable, a symbol of honor, strength, and courage. 

'I'm sure he paid no taxes', Harlan said to his colleagues, and so ended a toast to him. 

The Political Saga Of Fanny Farmer - How Victimhood Became Drollery, Alexander Hamilton, And The Unwashed

'I am so sick and tired of these Podunks', Fanny said to Claude, her partner for the night and fellow activist in town for a meeting of Scientists for Social Justice, the progressive lobby group to which they both belonged. 

Claude was not her love nor anything close, but she was old enough to remember the 'love the one you're with' posters on her mother's bedroom wall, and having inherited enough of her Sixties love thing to be unconcerned about incidental affairs, she rolled over.  Besides, Claude was a good worker, a good colleague, and a good traveling companion.  They had gone to Cleveland together to protest ICE storm troopers; to Lewisburg for a No Kings rally; and to Atlanta for an abortion rights demonstration. 

'I'm too old for all this travel'.  It was not time to hang 'em up, but ready for a more suitable desk job in Washington.  'I know that sounds bad', she said to Claude, taking the bogarted joint from him, kicking him to attention, 'but I haven't enough steam'. 

'There are no desk jobs in our business', said Claude.  'Its barricades or nothing'. 

What about Bob, she said, referring to Robert Muzelle, Managing Director of the organization, as happy and satisfied as could be, resting on his laurels, sit-ins, freedom rides, Bull Connor and the Pettus Bridge 'with Ralph and Martin', fat windbag, full of himself, never once getting out of his chair except for a a tribute to himself, an honorary title for his meritorious and tireless commitment to progressivism.  'He has a desk job'. 

'I'm getting on in years', Fanny said.  True enough but certainly not over the hill.  Just enough years to give her second thoughts.  Not whether it all had been worth it - activism was what had always counted - but was that all there was?  Was there no Act II?

It was the ten-dollar bill that did it, or at least that was the epiphanic moment of truth.  Alexander Hamilton, reviled patrician lord of the Old White Guy Constitutionalists who argued with Thomas Jefferson about the fickleness and cow shed ignorance of the majority, and insisted on an intermediary legislative body to protect the commonwealth from the tribalism and venal interests of the mob, suddenly made sense. 

All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born; the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second.

God forbid such a conversion, she said, blessing herself, making the sign of the cross, a reflexive gesture learned as a child and never gotten rid of despite her adopted secularism and radical progressivism.  Even granting Hamilton the benefit of the doubt - Shakespeare was neither the first nor the last to pillory the mob for its gullibility and capriciousness - was apostasy, a heretical venture away from the moral plumb line of her political faith. 

Yet, there he was - a handsome, chisel-jawed man of wealth, status, and influence expressing his anti-democratic sentiments to proto-liberal Jefferson, the man who understood not only the tenets of democracy but its ethos, its moral center, and its enduring legacy, and winning the argument. 

Fanny had spent months in fetid homeless shelters, on squirrely food lines, in nasty public housing gulags, beside in clinics with new transgender women, at the barricades with fierce lesbians, and it was beginning to show.  These were not America's best  and brightest, the Musks, Brins, Huangs, Bezos, and Zuckerbergs, at the top of the phylogenetic pyramid, a genius cluster never before seen, but on the lowest rung. 

And the masses she and her fellow activists were promoting so aggressively?  The foul, crime-ridden, endemically dysfunctional 'inner city'?  Pimps, ho's, Fentanyl dopers, crack-smoking losers? What was she thinking?

Again she blessed herself and again said, 'God forbid'; and yet these niggling, insidious, traitorous thoughts kept piling on, all because of one, fleeting, desultory, accidental glance at the ten dollar bill and the engraving of Alexander Hamilton. 

'Who's going to Anacostia tomorrow?', asked one of the assembled group.  Fanny groaned at the thought.  Another trip across the river in a caravan of three armored Chevrolet Suburbans bought second hand at a Defense Department auction, to meet with 'the community', local women demanding reparations for the city's indifference to the squalor and violence of the streets.  Anacostia, Brentwood, and any number of other communities in the blighted black wards of the city had done nothing but accept walkin' around money, entitlements, and a free pass and sit in their sinkholes waiting for more. 

Now, Fanny would never have thought that way before her epiphany - that startling revelation produced by one incidental look at the first Secretary of the Treasury. Before that, she would have gone across the river willingly and happily to join with the community in condemning racism and white privilege, marching with them to demand equal rights and justice.  Pharoah Jones, the self-anointed King of Anacostia, would have been her hero, the Black Odysseus of the ghetto; but now he was little more than a caricature, all fitted out with bling, grilled teeth, ermine coat, and snakeskin boots. 

Was all of this hatred, meanness, and vile assumptions always there, brewing and festering inside her, tamped down by her own idealism, her sunken costs, her Skinner-esque behavioral training?  Had she been a hypocrite all along?  Or like all epiphanies, did the truth simply sing out and she heard its chords?

'The latter, I hope', she said to herself as she demurred, claiming a conflict.  Anacostia would have to wait. 

Hamilton, as Secretary of the Treasury would never have agreed to or even considered such entitlement cash poured out in unaccountable sums on the basis of victimhood alone - a financial travesty, a consummate waste of valuable taxpayer monies, money that could be used to facilitate individual opportunity, create the infrastructure for wealth creation, and pave the way for private enterprise. 

Her advocacy group Scientists for Social Responsibility shamelessly took money from donors and earmarked federal funds and gave it away without a second thought given to accountability, performance, or positive outcomes. A virtual open sluice gate of dollars which would never be seen again in cash or in kind, misused, diverted, lost. 

When her masters shouted 'redistribution of wealth...Occupy Wall Street...from the haves to the have nots...to each according to his needs...' she had always raised her arms in solidarity.  The American economy was built on the backs of the poor and only the one percent benefited.  Now, thanks to that Augenblick of Alexander Hamilton on the ten dollar bill she had been about to use for a tuna sandwich and a diet Coke, she could only shake her head at her mindless credulousness.  How could she have?

An apocryphal tale, baldly untrue, said those in her former camaraderie who couldn't believe that a social justice warrior of Fanny's reputation, credential, and red badges of courage could be such a turncoat, a traitor.  But they were the blindered ones who had never had Fanny's revitalizing vision.  They were the ones still stuck in the mud, floundering but thinking it was only exuberance.  

Fanny had made her bones and her public image as a progressive, a liberal activist, and a professional harbinger.  Now that she was out of that particularly limelight, it was hard for the camera to pick her up.  By now in any case she is probably retired someplace warm with both her early life and her conservative reincarnation long recessed.  When sitting on a balcony in South Beach overlooking the Atlantic on a bright January day, nothing really matters anyway.