Does Political Philosophy Have A Face? - The Great Divide Between The Beautiful And The Ugly

Alicia Pemberton was approaching middle age - whatever that was in an era of extended life spans, high-tech makeovers, reversals of aging, and a new, infused spirit of youth.  Yet numbers don't lie and Alicia's biological clock was running down, ticking more slowly as it approached the final click of her reproductive life. 

 

It was now or never, she knew, for although fertility clinics in Tucson and Boise promised pregnancy at fifty, who wanted to be a parent at that age?  Diapers, up all night, and the bloody, wretched medieval gore of childbirth?  Who needed it in the first place let alone at fifty?

She admitted her conflict - marriage or not -  for she was traditional and conservative enough to believe that tying the knot was only right and proper for the legal protection and financial cover for offspring it provided.  On some days she looked hard at the men around her - at the office, on K Street, at the tennis court and the Old Ebbitt Grill, in the loges of the Kennedy Center - and vetted them.  Who might she approach at intermission or by the coffee machine?  Which one of these sexual prospects fit her rigorous requirements? 

On other days she fell into a funk of indifference.  What did it matter anyway in a gender fluid, feminist, New Age world? Spinsterhood, thank God, was a thing of the past-  no longer any old maid schoolteachers.  A single woman could hold her head up proudly and rest on her professional and social laurels, no need for a man in tow. 

 

Yet the biological pull was undeniable.  If God had not intended a woman to have children, why did He give her a uterus? And what was a vagina for if not the route to fertility? Sexual determinism must have its day; and so she kept on the lookout for eligible men. 

 Now, Alicia was a committed progressive, a woman who had fought long and hard for social justice and the reform of a country which had gone mightily bad, had become uprooted from its foundational origins, and foundered in a neo-industrialist robber baron age of greed and insensitivity.  She was not only a supporter but an activist, and one might just as easily find her on the Mall demonstrating for abortion rights as in the front row of a conference on gender equality or civil rights. 

During this period of her reproductive obsession, she paid less attention to the blandishments and political clamor of the speakers and more to whom was on the podium, who were her sisters in arms and who populated this great progressive movement. 

She had always assumed that beauty and ugliness were equally distributed along a bell curve; and regardless of social class, upbringing, education the distribution was mathematically determined.  Of course money helped - spas, sports clubs, facelifts, a designer wardrobe - but all in all beauty was parceled out unequally. 

However, as she watched the parade of men walk up to the podium, she was surprised at their funkiness, not a winner in the lot, not a glimmer of poise, charm, or allure; and when she looked around the auditorium and canvassed the crowd attending the event, she saw virtual clones of those speaking.  Nary a beauty among them. There was a shabbiness and almost deliberate unkemptness among them.  

Could this be correct? Was she seeing some new, heretofore unnoticed demographic variable? She couldn't help fixate on the dourness, the characterless seediness of the group.  She felt out of place, an interloper, an uninvited guest.  While she was no raving beauty she was attractive in a classic American way.  She had a kind of youthful ingenuousness, a softness, a prettiness, a certain sexual something. 

Once the veil had been lifted, she could no longer listen to the screeds about race, gender, and ethnicity; no longer shout hurrahs and hallelujahs, no longer raise her fist in solidarity.  She could only see the mishappen, jowly, thin-lipped, stooped physical unpleasantness around her.  What was going on here? Why was the bell curve not visible in this group?

The epiphany - or at least the long-in-coming realization - that there might be a physical configuration to political preference was hard to fathom. There were a lot of Jews in the progressive movement and always had been.  The Jewish socialists of the early progressive socialist movement were a disordered, unattractive rogues gallery, and because of their devotion, seriousness, and obsession with social reform and the juncture of rabbinical law and justice and indifference to appearance, the movement got off on the wrong axis of physical appearance.   

Seriousness, dedication, political passion was what counted; and in fact anyone paying undue attention to their looks was immediately suspect.  Beauty was for the other side - the side of the privileged, the white Anglo Saxon, the well-to-do, the enemy.  Ugliness was an infection, a viral disease, and unstoppable epidemic. 

So when she stood outside the White House of Donald Trump and watched the parade of beautiful people going and coming - blonde, blue-eyed, gorgeous women dressed in style and walking with grace and confidence and handsome men in Armani suits, festooned with Rolexes and gold.  

Was it a question of wealth?  Republicans were always the party of conservative, well-to-do New Englanders, captains of industry and finance.  Wealthy families chose brides and bridegrooms carefully with an eye to social status and privilege but also attractiveness and physical appeal.  The genetic die was cast. 

The Republican party of today is a long way from that patrician past, but it does come from cornflower country and the same pattern of physical beauty still prevails.  The conservative ethos of personal wealth and achievement places a high premium on individuality. There is no need to identify with the poor, the downtrodden, and the marginalized.  Beauty is not a symbol of unwarranted privilege, it is the result of opportunity, intelligence, and ambition. It is a good thing. 

All this of course was mere speculation - observation, historical reference, and personal reflection - but there was a bottom line here.  If Alicia was in the market for a husband - as crass as that sounds, that's exactly what she was doing - then she better fish in varied, plentiful waters.   

Easier said than done, of course.  She wasn't about to change her tune just because the ground was more fertile on the other side of the fence.  What could be more venal and self-serving than that?  Yet, what were politics and political philosophy compared to fertility, sexual reproduction, and legacy anyway? 

She was reminded of Shakespeare's 'procreation sonnets' in which he encouraged his 'fair youth' to marry and have children.  It was his duty and responsibility to populate the world with beautiful offspring, to offset those of the less well-endowed, less graced with his special gift. Eugenic hyperbole perhaps, but with a grain of truth.  Procreation was far more important - essential - than any political fervor. 

A conundrum, a moral choice, at best a turncoat decision; but at the very least Alicia might consider a bit of political independence, a move to the center, a gradual shift in approach, ideals, and principles.  Different watering holes, different venues, different congregations. 

'Biology is destiny' - long out of favor, discredited by deconstructionists, socialists, and progressive reformers, might still have salience, Alicia reasoned.  Too much has been made of woman as political and social identity.  Back to basics. 

The Saga Of A Harvard Call Girl - A Woman Who Knew Her Place

Alison Whitfield had been an exceptional student at Harvard – summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and mention in the Crimson as one of the university’s up and coming stars.  Alison had not declared her plans by graduation and intimated that a year off would be a needed respite from her studies and would give her time to assess her life, but assured everyone that she would not disappear.  ‘Watch this space’, she said.

Alison had grown up in a patrician family of proper Bostonian lineage, part of the Davenport expedition to Connecticut that left the oppressive, puritanical Massachusetts Bay Colony for the more tolerant communities and promising territory along the Connecticut shore.  

There were few English settlers there when the Davenport party arrived, trappers and traders who did business with the Pequots and Mohegans, but in a short time the New Haven Plantation prospered.  It had a wide and protected harbor, fertile lands, and friendly Indians.  

The Whitfield family remained in New Haven for generations, although one branch left for what were considered even more ideal reaches in New Jersey. The Whitfields who remained married well,  became deans and deacons of Yale University, and were active in the southern branch of the Newport Three-Cornered Trade. 

Alison’s mother’s side of the family was equally reputable, having come with the first English settlers of Jamestown, settled along Albemarle Sound until they moved to Norfolk and much later to Richmond.  Rebecca Palmer’s ancestors had settled the Northern Neck and were among the associates of King Carter whose vast holdings produced tobacco and wealth for the King.

The Palmers were given especially good land by Carter, and they invested their wealth in the new cities of the Tidewater.  Her great-great uncles fought against the British in the Revolutionary War and later generations for the Confederacy.

In short, Alison’s pedigree was impeccable.  While she was called out for her family’s participation in the slave trade (Whitfield-owned sailing ships had brought slaves to the Caribbean as part of the slave-molasses-rum trade) and for fighting for the Confederacy (Palmer ancestors had served with valor at Chancellorsville), she was nonplussed.  It was the valor of the officers who fought for the South and the enterprise of the merchants who built New England into an economic power which counted, not the socio-political context of the day.

 ‘Racist!’ was shouted so often with such increasingly marginal logic, it became to Alison as inoffensive as Christmas sugar plums.

Much to the consternation of the women in the ranks of Harvard’s progressive caucus – dour, unattractive, short, and remarkably plain – Alison was beautiful.  She had inherited all the best physical genes of both mother and father, and was to every man on campus, stunning.  She was as classically beautiful as Catherine Deneuve, an ironic similarity because of the profession Alison chose – not acting, but the life of a courtesan as played by Deneuve in Belle de Jour.

Alison reveled in the contradictions of Harvard life.  She was hated by the progressive radicals who had become the campus arbiters of status, social posture, and right speech and who was jealously loathed by the feminists who, despite their outrage and righteous gender activism, wanted to be her; and she was loved by all men.

Political radicals swallowed their pride and images of slave ships and Confederate officers, and did whatever it took to ingratiate themselves with her; the few conservatives on campus were far more forthright and forward; and every other creed, race, ethnicity, or political persuasion made some kind of a play.  

She was a golden goddess for affirmative action black men who had always dreamed – again, against type and political advocacy – of making love to a beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed white girl.  She was the final rung of the ladder of assimilation for Jews, Hispanics, and Asians.  Hardcore gay men found themselves looking her way.

Alison’s looks alone could not account for such attractiveness any more than Marilyn Monroe’s universal, lasting, permanent appeal.  Both women had an indefinable allure, a sexuality that defied category or description.  Something they were born with and developed as they came to understand their particular, irresistible sexual magnetism.

In the Louis Bunuel film, Belle de Jour, Séverine Serizy (Catherine Deneuve), a young and beautiful housewife, is unable to share physical intimacy with her husband despite their love for each other. Her sexual life is restricted to elaborate fantasies involving domination, sadomasochism, and bondage. 

Although frustrated by his wife's frigidity toward him, he respects her wishes. Severine learns that a common friend is a prostitute at a high-class brothel and she decides to work there.  It will be the perfect place for her to render physical her sexual fantasies and to engage in the even more unconventional desires of the men she services.

Severine is not, according to Bunuel, a disturbed woman, a frustrated nymphomaniac, a Freudian case study; but a highly mature woman who has never been trapped within the confines of the bourgeoisie. She knowingly and purposefully enters the anti-social world of prostitution and is excited by the notion that she – beautiful, aristocratic, educated – can become a call girl.   

It is both a statement of exaggerated possibility – no one needs ever to be trapped – and one of social opprobrium.  The middle class is by nature neutering, inhibiting, and pedestrian.

It was for similar reasons that Alison Whitfield became a high-class call girl in Washington, DC.  She, like the Deneuve character, felt that her sexual adventure – the prostitution of an aristocratic beauty to the crude desires of anonymous men – would be an expression of will and domination.  In its perversity – hundreds of men lining up to be with her, bribing the madam, pleading their privilege and position; and she doing what she wanted, pushing the johns’ particularly unusual sexuality to its limits – it was supremely validating.

Alison was not a vengeful or vindictive woman, and her decision to keep a call book had nothing to do with the ignorance of her accusers at Harvard.  It was only the most interesting twist of her transformation, of her new profession.

She knew the politicians who came to her, especially those who had publicly condemned the abusive treatment of women, had trashed male libido and sexual pursuit, and verbally castrated every man who refused to endorse No Means No.  They came into her bedroom sheepishly, trying to gin up some self respect and personal cover, but buried themselves in her like rutting hogs and then thanked her and thanked her again.

She liked the White House advisors whose hour with her was simply a for-pay interlude in a diverse and active social life.  No questions asked, no apologies given.  Commercial sex was simply a variation, not an anomaly or perversion.  It fit right in with the sexual agenda of their days. A generous tip, a kiss on the cheek, respect, good will, and no refunds ever asked for.

She never considered holding back the evidence, the names, dates, times and even requests of the liberal johns.  The book was compiled and maintained only for publication.  When the time was right – when progressive sanctimony was at its most intolerable worst – she would make known who had been in her bed.

She was not run out of town when she went public.  She was too smart to get herself tarred and feathered; and she knew that as much as Congressman X or Lobbyist Y might say that they hated her for her treachery, all they wanted was one more roll in the hay before she left town.  Besides, she had plenty of well-paid cover.

With her considerable earnings and the private income left by both her mother and father who had never suspected the truth about her ‘K Street job’ she moved to Montana, bought a ranch in Paradise Valley, raised cattle and sheep, joined the Livingston Players, and lived to a ripe old age.

The Saga Of A Savvy Milkmaid - How Diffidence, Intelligence, And Ambition Undermined A Good Democratic Socialist

Amanda Jones had never had dreams of anything more exotic than the farm, the back forty, cows, and tending chickens.  She was a good girl, a Presbyterian, a pretty milkmaid, and a dutiful daughter, and only through a lucky break and homegrown gumption did she cause a stir in the corridors of Washington.  

 

Carrie Underwood - the Sister Carrie of Theodore Dreiser's novel of the same name - was a homespun girl with ambition, and she left her small rural community to find her fortune in Chicago.  By chance, she was noticed by a traveling salesman - a man polished, charming, and with a way with women.  He prided himself on his dapperness, his attentiveness, and his sincere love of women.  He had had many lovers in his day all of whom he treated well but left when greener pastures appeared. 

Charles Drouet approached the young Carrie and spoke to her about Chicago, the prairie, and the luminous life he led in the big city.  Carrie, a simple farmgirl without pretense or worldliness is attracted to the man, his clothes, his manner, and his suave but respectful demeanor.  She has been warned enough about the temptations of the big city but she had an innate sense of risk and reward, the calculus of life the poor folk of her town never had the opportunity to apply; and although she suspected Drouet of desirous intentions, she was willing to listen. 

 

The story of Sister Carrie is one of sense, sensibility, confidence, and ambition - how a young innocent from the farm negotiates the demanding world of the city, its opportunists and those offering opportunity, calculates investment and return and goes on to become a theatrical star. 

And so it was that Amanda met Isaiah Plummer at the farmers' market in Chillicothe - she there to sell fresh milk from the family's prize Guernseys and he with nothing to do but wander on a sunny May morning until lunchtime with colleagues from the Midlands Bank and Trust where he was a financial advisor recruited from Cleveland to provide high-priced advice on positioning and market share. 

The same chemistry between the fictional Carrie and Drouet - pursuit and eager complicity - characterized the meeting of Plummer and Amanda.  He lingered, she smiled.  He offered, she accepted.  Promises were made and kept and Amanda was soon companionable company to the well-to-do banker. 

Dreiser was a Naturalist who believed in the ineluctability of human nature and the inescapability of environmental influences. Will and desire were simply catalysts, necessary to set off the chain reaction of cause and effect; and so the story of Sister Carrie is one as much of circumstance and variables as it is determination.  

 

Amanda Jones was a simple girl of modest means but sharp intelligence and with a gift of innate savvy and moral diffidence.  She like Carrie understood that right and wrong are conditional, that the balance between them tilts one way then the other, and the job of the individual for whom survival is paramount, is to figure out how to tip the scales to advantage. 

Plummer was indeed a sexual opportunist and saw in the pretty Amanda a delectable prize, easy for the asking, and like the fictional Drouet was neither abusive or demanding.  He was simply a man who loved women, who saw opportunity everywhere, and who had the confidence to act upon his instincts.

The relationship, however, was more than incidental; and the more time that Plummer spent with the young farm girl, the fonder of her he became.  Would she consider coming to Cleveland? He would help her get settled, secure a position for her at the bank, and ease her way into life in the big city. There were no strings attached, just courtesy and good will. 

She accepted without reservation, said goodbye to her family and friends, and - again like Carrie - headed off by train to the big city. 

There is in some women an uncanny sense of purpose. If life was a matter of circumstance, innateness, and possibility, then all was largely determined. She liked Plummer well enough, and was savvy and morally diffident enough to accept the sexual part of the relationship without demurral or complaint.  Moreover the relationship helped clarify and frame the very qualities that so attracted Plummer to her.  

She saw the way men looked at her and noticed the deference paid to her by her female co-workers. She was irreducibly woman, and despite the cant and canon of those who insisted on 'the inner self', she knew that her femininity - her femaleness - was what would govern her and others. 

It wasn't long before Cleveland, the bank, and Isaiah Plummer faded in interest and possibility. She had come into her own.  In a short, compressed academic program both in-person and virtual, she had completed an undergraduate degree in economics and was on her way to an advanced degree.  She had moved up in the bank and had become a loan officer and then financial advisor.  Plummer had moved on, and there was nothing more holding her in place. 

Once again, Naturalist circumstance - another chance meeting of an important Ohio politician, a member of the state legislature and slated for national office.  His picture had often been in the paper, for he had announced his affiliation with Democratic Socialism - a philosophy which, based on the progressive principles of Lafollette, Gompers, and Brandeis but expanded to include the even more important tenets of diversity, equity, and inclusion and a determined policy to redistribute the unconscionable concentration of wealth in the country. 

Blanton Pierce was a man on the way up, on no one's coattails, a political force in his own right and someone to be reckoned with.  More importantly, he had his eye on Amanda Jones and was stricken with the same desire as Isaiah Plummer and more. 

Men are inconsolable romantics, Amanda had learned, never happy with what they had, always assuming that the grass was always greener somewhere else and that the future held limitless opportunities of love and affection.  The heroines of Shakespeare's Comedies - Rosalind, Viola, Portia, and others - all ran rings around their besotted suitors who fell over themselves in love. 

And so it was with Blanton Pierce.  Politicians whose bread and butter is chicanery - or at least deft marketing - were not supposed to have a soft, vulnerable, open side; and Pierce was an open book when it came to Amanda Jones.  There was something irresistible about her - a combination of sweetness, physical beauty, and sexual allure that was as potent as any scented flower - and even an ambitious, decidedly morally diffident and fatefully ambitious politician like Pierce could not resist. 

A woman like Amanda was not content to simply be a woman.  She wanted to play the lyre until her victim was charmed, seduced, and hers.  Her libretto was one of social justice, her score filled with socialist staccato and crescendo, her orchestration jubilant.  He had found a soulmate, and she another stepping stone, another rung on the ladder. 

When he moved his offices to Washington to prepare for a Congressional bid, he invited Amanda to join his team.  He would see that she was settled comfortably, met the right people, and led a privileged life.  He asked nothing from her but her consideration, affection, and perhaps later, love. 

Sex has a way of addling the most principled men, and under the baton of Amanda Jones the symphony was re-written.  Like Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen's willful, Nietzschean character in the play of the same name, the only validation of life in a meaningless world is the expression of pure will; and the complete control of an other is its best moment. 

 

Amanda, never forgetting her humble, American originalist upbringing, the value of hard work, enterprise, self-sustaining independence, patriotism, and family, felt that the canon of Blanton Pierce was nothing more than a febrile dream - fantastical lines from a political A Children's Garden of Verse, marvelously naive idolatry of an imagined past - and she would unravel, disassemble, and dismiss it in turn. 

He couldn't wait to see her after a tiring day defending his increasingly weakened positions at progressive caucuses and gatherings.  He stumbled up the stairs to her Dupont Circle townhouse, took her in his arms and said he loved her more than the world itself. 

The bait had been taken, swallowed hook, line, and sinker; and all that was left was to reel him in. 'Tell e what to do', he implored, and she as comforting and consoling as ever, told him that he was a remarkable man, a champion, and a future President; but that he had to come to his senses, listen to reason, and come with her to the farm.  

Of course it would be a confabulated fantasy of its own to assume that a girl like Amanda was the only reason that Pierce fell off the rails and was dismissed from consideration for high progressive office. It was not her native conservatism foundational values that did the trick, it was the sex. 

As Nathan Zuckerman, friend of Coleman Silk in Phillip Roth's The Human Stain says when told of the older man's affair with a much younger woman, 'It's all about the sex, isn't it?', that was the inescapable conclusion regarding Pierce's fall from grace.  Amanda's words had not pushed him over the edge, it was her marvelously adept, practiced, seduction - more enticing and irresistible than any beauty of a pasha's harem. 

 

Amanda loved being a woman, heart, soul, and body.  She was Cleopatra, Nefertiti, Venus de Milo, Artemis, one of many in the pantheon of strong women.  

Blanton Pierce was never heard from again.  His spirit had been broken, he was the embodiment of weltschmerz.  He was a double victim - victim of the sodden, reproachable, fantastical propositions of socialism and of the indescribably potent will of a farmgirl.