Harpies, Vixenish, Feral Women, And Social Justice - No Goody Two Shoes Wanted In The Fight For A Better World

'I really don't know what will become of her', Bracken Knight's mother said to her father, both worried about their daughter's incorrigible nasty mean streak.  Despite all the love and affection showered on the little girl, she was insufferably ungrateful, and added insult to injury with some unkind, untoward remark. It was as though instead of reading A Child's Garden of Verse, Robert Louis Stevenson sweet and innocent book bedtime poems for children, she had read from the liturgy of some Satanic cult. 

Not once did she giver her despondent mother a hug or even a smile.  It was as though the woman were a leprous, warty crone or the Patient Zero of some hideous avian plague. 

Robert and Priscilla Knight were attentive, caring, and loving parents, and so were beyond belief at their daughter's complete lack of empathy, kindness, or concern.  In desperation they looked at their family tree for some genetic clue to her misanthropy. Her rude dismissal of her parents and older brother was just a warmup for the cruelty of her school years.  Fellow students kept their distance and teachers hesitated to call on her for fear of what she would say. 

Mr. Phelps, the math teacher, had an ever-so-slight lisp.  His S's never quite made it past his lips, but years of childhood training enable at least some sibilance.  When he called on Bracken to explain the mathematical use of quadratic equations, the girl did a sadistic mimicry of Phelps' speech, turning the classroom into a raucous, howling den only quieted by the principal who happened to be in the hall. 

As she grew into late adolescence and early adulthood, she had become even more ambitiously ruinous.  She was shrewish and witchy, and there would be no taming this bolus of distemper and animus.  There would be no Petruchio who saw in her a woman of intellectual means, enviable will, and a heart of gold beneath her Sturm und Drang. 

 

In college - one of the Northeast's premier Ivy League universities - she lived alone in Mather House, one of the few dorms with single rooms.  She had answered Harvard's rooming questionnaire honestly, and even her first few entries convinced the administration that everyone would be better off without her. 

College can be a gloomy affair if one spends one's nights alone while everyone else is either sharing ideas about Kant and Heisenberg or carousing on Dana Street, and even the penitential, meanspirited Bracken had her moments of jittery unease.

And so it was that she joined the Students For Social Justice, a campus group which had become notorious for leading student protests against the school for its racist support of Israel and bloody oppression of the Palestinians. Her classmates in this group were not just protestors but as meanspirited, hateful, spiteful, and insatiably angry as she was.  

There was a viral, feral antipathy to their demonstrations where there was no room for colloquy, interchange, or exegesis.  These women were vixenish harridans who stopped at nothing to vent their vile hatred of anything to the right of Marxist-Leninist Maoism. 

Without a doubt this was the place for Bracken.  She had no interest in Israel, Palestine, the black man, transgenders, immigrants, or Wall Street - the shibboleths of the movement; but the venomous hateful disposition of those marching on Widener Library was appealing.  Birds of a feather. 

One can only imagine what these cabals were like on the inside - a hundred of the nastiest, most rabidly spiteful women on campus all in one place.  What would they say to each other when they were not at the barricades.  'What shall I cook for dinner? Did you turn off the lights before leaving?'

Yet Bracken slept well, like a baby.  Pleasant dreams was not in her repertoire.  In fact she could not remember even one that suggested pleasantness or a babbling brook; so it was an enviable, dreamless, restorative sleep. 

Sex was on her mind as it is for most young women of her age, yet the thought of being slobbered over and penetrated by some man was disgusting, and the idea of dildoing and eating out one of the dykey trolls of Hadley Hall (Harvard, thanks to aggressive lobbying by the Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender advocacy groups on campus decided to create a safe space for 'women of alternate means') was unthinkable. 

During the halcyon years of affirmative action and diversity, the university recruited as many lesbians as possible who could pass the academic admissions standards required - standards that had been lowered to assure minority representation on campus. 

The admissions office, anxious to make a political statement, did not just base admission on stated sexual preference but wanted women who looked, acted, and behaved like men-hating dykey trollops.  The whole nine yards - E-boots, chains, leather, and recent dog-leash experience at the San Francisco Folsom Street fair. Over the top, perhaps, and playing on caricature certainly; but a point had to be made. 

The very suggestion that Bracken should roll over for one of these women was unconscionable.  As a result, she was a sexual no-show, a state of being which simply wouldn't stand. 

So she did a volte face and channeled Laclos' Les Liaison Dangereuses where she played a feminine Valmont, a woman with no interest in men whatsoever, but for whom conquest, humiliation, and abject repudiation would be worth the effort.  She became Harvard's version of a femme fatale - serious minded, well dressed in a casual offhand way with only a touch of eye shadow and mascara with an outstanding sexual allure, the bait in the trap. 

One might assume that such a ferociously misanthropic woman could not be in the least attractive, let alone alluring; but that would be to misjudge our Bracken who was actually a beautiful woman, Hollywood ready if she had ever set her compass in that direction. No one had ever said that a succubus had to be as ugly as one of Macbeth's Weird Sisters 

And so it was that she seduced Harvard's best and brightest.  Not the Asian geeks squirreled away in their carrels and laboratories until well  midnight, but the aristocratic legatees who were now a minority, but still very much a presence.  Beacon Hill, Nantucket, the Vineyard, St. Tropez, and skiing at Gstaad were de rigeur. 

'Find 'em, fuck 'em, suck 'em, and leave 'em' was the old adage popular even at high-end, socially sensitive universities like Harvard who at alumni insistence kept Deke, DKE, Delta Kappa Epsilon jock fraternity known for drunken football players stirring martinis with their dicks and having their way with any woman brave enough to party. 

Bracken would be the Deke female equivalent.  Nothing quite so crude of course.  One must know one's audience, environment, and prey; but predatory as any jock on campus.  And so it was that she met up to her expectations, had Harvard seniors mooning over her, showing up at her dorm room at all hours of the night, begging for just a goodnight kiss. 

The sex was just what she needed of course, and after a few semesters of this was as full and satisfied with male cock as any woman could be.  Then came graduation, graduate school, and a career in Washington. 

I jump ahead so quickly because Bracken had simply acted true to form in the years after Harvard, and it was only in Washington that she found her home.  The radical progressive wing of the Democrat party was right up her alley.  From the lowest intern to the most senior Senator, these politicians were the most meanspirited, hateful, ignorant men and women she had ever been around.  Harvard was pre-school compared to this vaporous, hysterical animus. 

Her colleagues never demanded anything more than biliousness.  No policy papers, no logical exposition of contrary notions, no thoughtful discussion pieces, no nothing except polemics and apoplectic, political St. Vitus' dances. 

It was the Trump era and no holds were barred.  The most heinous, ad hominem, scurrilous, intemperate accusations were encouraged.  The man and his evil empire must be destroyed and left to fester and rot.  What a riotously good time for Bracken!  She had never been happier - and that was something for a woman who was always thought to have not a drop of happiness in her. 

Eventually she returned to New Brighton, bought an independent pharmacy, catered to the West Enders of the town, and was embraced by a community who had known her when she was an irreconcilably horrid girl.  God moves in mysterious ways, they said, as they waited patiently for Bracken to compound their drugs. 

The Native Gullibility Of Americans - Politics And The Age Old Belief In Snake Oil Salesmen

The 2002 movie Simone starring Al Pacino was the story of a film producer who created a virtual character and through canny marketing and promotion was able to convince the viewing public that she was real. Adoring crowds filled stadiums to watch her on jumbotron screens, each appearance cleverly crafted by the Pacino character to generate interest, admiration, and loyalty. 

Simone was featured on the front page of Variety and touted as Hollywood's next biggest star.  Demands for a personal appearance grew, but the Pacino character, finding himself trapped within the lie, found himself the subject of suspicion.  Was he holding Simone hostage?  A sex slave? Was he a manipulative Hollywood wretch, destroying Simone's life? 

The story has a happy ending of course, and after almost twenty-five years filed away in a Burbank film archive it is rarely seen even on TCM or other vintage movie sites.  Yet it was prescient and before its time. Long before the advent of virtual reality and AI, the idea of selling something which did not exist  had already taken hold.  As circus impresario P.T. Barnum had famously noted, 'A sucker is born every minute', and  screenwriter Andrew Niccol and Executive Producer Michael De Luca knew exactly how to translate this age-old American gullibility into a popular movie. 

Con men, shysters, shell games, Ponzi schemes, bunko, and snake oil salesmen have been part of the American landscape for centuries. 

Mackintosh Peters was a snake oil salesmen in the Arizona Territory in the 1870s, and made a good living selling worthless gum Arabic and corn syrup mixtures to the Piute and Navajo.  'Works like a charm', Mack told the Indians, 'take a swig in the morning and one in the evening, and it'll cure what ails you'. 

Which was arthritis, impotence, scabies, catarrh, and suppuration and anything else he could conjure up.  He was long gone before the Indians knew they had been had, but the placebo effect has been around for centuries, so many of his customers told their friend and families how good they felt after only a day's dosage.  If for some reason he found himself back in the same village and was accosted by the Indians he had duped, he had a ready reply. 'Ahh, of course', he said.  'I said two swigs in the morning and two at night, not one.'

'What's a swig?' asked an elder of the tribe. 

'Why, like this', Mack said, swilling a half-bottle down in one gulp. 'Ya see, ya wasn't takin' nearly half as much', and with that, he lit out of town, his racks of phials and bottles clinking and rattling in the back seat of the wagon as he drove. 

P.T. Barnum made millions off the rubes who wandered into his tents.  His freak show was the most popular - two headed babies, bearded dwarves, and half-man, half-woman giants.  The gawkers always came back, sometimes the same day to see the unbelievable creatures assembled in Barnum's side show. 

Along the trail with Mack Peters were scores of shell game wizards and con artists of every kind, fleecing unsuspecting rural folk out of their money.  There were get-rich-quick schemes, virility potions, games of 'chance', temptingly easy card games, and more inventive scams you can imagine.  It seemed that the business of rural America in the early years was the scam. 

Beecham County, Tennessee had been Mack Peters' stomping ground, and he made his first 'million' there before the revenuers had caught on to him and he had to move west.  However he was never forgotten.  Those who had been swindled were so many that there could be no j'accuse moments.  Everyone was in the swindle together and from that community arose The Legend of Mack Peters.  He had made good, the American way, and if he had taken a few good souls' money for a ride, so be it.  He became a local hero. 

And so it was that Fielding Brand, a local politician and aspirant to high office, came to prominence in Beecham County.  If there was ever a man born with a silver tongue, it was Fielding Brand. He was endowed, blessed with the same understanding of human nature and the very American desire to believe in the impossible as was his predecessor Mack Peters. 

Fielding presented himself as a populist, a man of the common people who would represent them against the powerful elite, the inherited wealthy, the fat cats of Wall Street, and the insidious, intellectually lecherous moguls of Silicon Valley. 

 

Beecham County had never in its long electoral history ever voted Democrat.  Its farmers were cut from the same cloth as their forbears who had made their way to the Delta from the East, traipsing through malarial swamps, impenetrable thickets, and Indian country to build a future in the fertile lands watered by the great Mississippi. 

There was no room in this worldview for government and its laws, punitive regulations, and justice.  The first and latest residents of Beecham County were both defiantly Republican, conservative, and men and women of faith. 

Fielding Brand knew this, but he also knew that Mack Peters had made a killing here.  The sheer chutzpah of his claims, the absolute incredibility of his medicinal promises, and the sheer gullibility of his customers gave him confidence. If Mack Peters could fool this crowd, so could he. 

Brand did not just have a silver tongue - the gift of oratory - but a charm, believability, and a generously friendly, engaging way about him.  Men and women flocked to hear him and despite their age-old, rural conservatism, felt that he was speaking from his heart to theirs.  His promises would be their future. 

Some people are born with this innate gift and without any moral principles which would inhibit its use.  The two always go together.  An uncanny ability to convince others, no matter what the issue, and a complete lack of any moral compass. 

Recent history has given three of the most canny charlatans ever. Jeffery Skilling made billions at Enron before he helped the entire financial system collapse. Bernie Madoff suckered tens of millions out of Jewish admirers, but the genius of it was when it was all over and discovered, there was not one penny to be found.  There never had been.  All built on smoke and mirrors. 

Rudy Kurniawan was a young Indonesian wine fraudster, and before he was caught he had bilked millions out of credulous, arrogantly presumptuous connoisseurs.  He bought surplus French wine, bottled, corked, and labeled it as the most sought-after French vintages, convinced investors that there was no top to the fine wine market, and made a fortune. 

The 'connoisseurs' never drank the wine but traded it as a commodity, so the fake wine passed from hand to hand without ever being opened.  Every aspect of the scam had been carefully planned and executed - he learned how to 'age' labels and corks, and find bottles that defied provenance - all this helped by buyers who had been snookered by Rudy's exquisite palate and business acumen. 

Fraudsters aside, there are two legitimate ways men use this remarkable native ability to sell a bill of goods. One is advertising where the genius of Mack Peters is mined and applied on a national scale.  The job of the advertiser is to sell a product which consumers don't need and to convince them that they do.  To do so, they use every popular meme, every cultural metaphor, every Freudian principle and every brilliant technique of P.T. Barnum. 

Those who do not head for Madison Avenue enter politics, for there their native ability to charm, engage, convince, and sell works wonders.  Anyone tuning in to today's Congressional hearings where Senators grill administration officials in a harping, demeaning, and insulting way and offer not one whit of sensible criticism, can see how politics is for charlatans and poseurs.  

The quacking, bullying, hectoring, and masquerading of these circus clowns was not Fielding's thing.  They were deformed politicians whose election conferred a sense of illogical invincibility.  Eventually their supporters see through their absurdity and blatant, fraudulent chicanery, and they are gone.  

Fielding was different.  Through his native charm, physical and emotional allure, and his unmatched brilliance in framing promises, he would be far more successful and would become wealthier than Croesus. 

 

It took Fielding no time to move up the ladder - alderman, state legislator, state senator, state Democrat Party chairman and the man most talked of for Congress.  

How he managed to blend his party's most exaggerated claims - the fluidity of the gender spectrum, the natural brilliance and forest sentience of the black man and his place atop the human pyramid, peace at any price, open borders, and the neutering of Wall Street - with his eager populism was a thing of beauty.  It was snake oil salesmanship at its very best.  He would have been the envy of P.T. Barnum and Mack Peters, and was the clandestine hero of ad men on both coasts.  

His electoral victories at every level were never squeakers.  He won handily each and every time he ran for office.  He was a shoo-in, a guarantee, a man to be watched - all on the basis of nothing but a silver tongue, a generously engaging personality, and a universal charm that won the hearts of women and recruited the most obdurate men. 

At this writing he is poised for a Washington run, has the backing of the wealthy and the passionate, and when a Congressional seat becomes available he is sure to occupy it.  A truly American success story. 

Marfa Potter Goes Shredding To Meet A Guy - Whatever It Takes, A Marriage Made In A Parking Lot

Getting to Parking Lot 8 of abandoned RFK Stadium in Southeast Washington was not easy, especially for Marfa Potter, a young woman who had grown up in a secure, privileged family, gone to the best schools, and now lived in Georgetown, one of Washington's most exclusive residential neighborhoods. 

The trip required GPS and because a wrong turn could take her deep into the heart of the inner city, she doubled and tripled up - Garmin and a highly recommended Space X geo-satellite app.  Shades of the Tom Wolfe book about a white couple who get off the wrong exit; or Cousin Benny's Milwaukee wedding where Hyman Frank took a wrong turn and stopped for directions at a Seven Eleven, deep int the nastiest city ghetto. 

 

'They don't like no white folks up in here', a black cop who  happened to stop for donuts and coffee advised, but Hyman, deeply committed to civil rights and the black man's righteous scaling of the social heights, kept on taking wrong turns, stopping for directions and by another stroke of good luck - no dope should have been so lucky -  made it back to the hotel 

In any case Marfa decided to make the trip to Anacostia and RFK.  Her lawyers and accountants handled all the heavy lifting when it came to taxes, investments, and trust management, and just about everything these days was online, but she managed to stuff a few boxes full of scrap paper and incidental memos to justify a trip to the shredding center, and at the appointed hour, she headed off. 

Why, you might ask, would she even bother with such a penitential trip to the ghetto?  It was certainly not for privacy and financial security, nor to clear the basement of clutter.  It was to meet a man. 

As unseemly for a woman of her pedigree as it might seem, it was her last hurrah before resigning herself to spinsterhood.  She had cruised the National Gallery, the Philipps, and the Corcoran; had canvassed the intermission crowd at the Kennedy Center assembled for Swan Lake; had joined runners clubs, skiers events, and even joined the Potomac Rowing Club - all in the hopes of meeting a man. 

When she looked in the mirror that Thursday May morning about to undertake the journey to RFK, she didn't like what she saw.  Despite her relatively young age - forty wasn't that old - she was getting saggy, a bit jowly, lined, and a bit pasty looking. Nips and tucks were so bourgeois, and all-day luxuriant spa treatments were simply too Hollywood, so the face looking back at her from the mirror was hers to keep for better or worse. 

'The inner woman', she kept telling herself as the days and months went by without a single serious suitor; but most men were never bothered with looking beyond T&A.  Her inner rooms were to be forever closed if the key were to be in their hands. 

Last week it was the Gardner lecture on T.S. Eliot, the week before a DAR tour of Winterthur, the week before that owling on the C&O Canal, but nothing came of it. A wash, a sexual no-show, an idle venture, a total waste of time. 

The problem was this: the sexual dynamics of the day being what they were and not much evolved from a thousand years before - men, as ugly as sin, because of wealth, family, and professional promise could get the girl while women had to scrap for purchase - were still in play.  

Ever since the catty, claws out, bitchy days of high school when women were their own enemies, women had to marshal and assemble resources men had no idea about and no time for. 

The men on these tours, looking interested at Delacroix, or listening intently to talks on the spotted owl and snail darter were leftovers.  Men who despite the fact could have any woman they wanted if the price were right, were on the mating trail, pretending sexual agency when they had none at all. Pitiful. 

So why Marfa even bothered to make it down to RFK for the twice a year shredding jamboree was surprising even to her; but a woman who feels at the end of her rope, has to cling to it and try to pull herself up no matter how tenuous the haul. 

According to her friends who had ventured across the Anacostia to Indian Country and the shredding bonanza at RFK, it was a great opportunity to meet men.  The hundreds of Washingtonians who lined up for shredding were not from the ghetto. 

The Washington inner city was off payroll. None there had any investments to speak of, were not registered on the tax rolls, and lived day-to-day.  Their basements were cluttered with dilapidated baby carriages, Chevy manifolds, and empty malt liquor cases - not IRS forms, trust fund records, or business contracts. 

So the drivers of the Lexus, Mercedes, Volvo, and Infiniti SUVs snaking around the pilons to the shredding trucks were all of a higher order, and many of them marriageable. 

This time DC's classic inefficiency, disorder, and completely chaotic management was a boon for Marfa, for while she was standing around waiting for her files to be shredded, she met interesting men. These were not the pretentious intellectual wannabees at the Corcoran but working professionals who were their own men, confident, secure, and always on the lookout. 

At first glance - this chaotic, undisciplined, poorly-organized and -managed affair - would not seem to be the ideal meeting place for prospective sexual partners, but to assume so one would be guilty of social myopia and preconceived notions.  Amidst the clutter, mayhem and spilled cartons of paper were great guys, only waiting for the opportunity to meet women. 

And so it was, Serendipitus Victor!, that Marfa Potter met Lincoln Addison.  'Over a bin of trash', they both laughed over glass of Moet Chandon. 

'The ghetto has some advantages, after all', said Lincoln, happily alone with Marfa and planning their live together, 'Who would have thought that the slums and shredding would have given us this?'