A Most Unpleasant Woman Gets Her Way - The Road To Washington Is Littered With Bodies

Betsy Finch was stolid.  While she never really understood the difference between that and 'solid' she preferred what she thought was a more figurative way of describing her will and indissolubility, another term which  she thought described her perfectly. A woman of stature, imperviousness, and integrity. 

This all was all when she was twelve, a precocious pre-teenager given to a fertile imagination and balletic fantasy. 'Grow up', said her father, a druggist who wanted more from his only child than compounding drugs, selling pressure stockings and cough medicine.  It was a good living, but nothing like what he had hoped for.  

He had failed both medical and dental school, enrolled in the state university's pharmacy program, did creditably, passed the state exams, and began work as an assistant in Zackin's Drug Store on Main Street in New Brighton. 

There was competition from larger, more well-established stores to be sure, but he was confident that the personal touch of an independent pharmacy would stand him in good stead.  He was right, and before long he took over from old Mr. Zackin and went on to build the enterprise into one which perennially received Chamber of Commerce honors. 

His daughter was a handful, a package of piss and vinegar that he never expected, given how patiently common were his parents and the woman he married.  No, there was no moss growing on Betsy, a girl of uncommon ambition, pursuit, and intelligence.  She was not particularly beautiful, although creditably so, interesting to a certain kind of boy, and sure to make her way to courtship and marriage with few problems. 

Yet this simple, conventionally prescribed path was not the one she chose; or rather was chosen for her, nature always winning out over nurture, and that stolidity was just kind way of describing her obstinance, a digging in of her heels, a remarkable inertia. Along with it came a certain preposterousness - a hussy at such a young age not only unusual but a marvel - an absolute conviction of rightness that beggared the imagination of parents, teachers, and classmates alike.  

She hectored, badgered, and humiliated her way to elected office, and once in position ruled with an authoritarian misery that belied her young age. As President of her high school Senior Class she was a terror, defying teachers and administrators alike, showing her understanding of the promise and limitations of school government, and challenging them at every turn.  

She was universally unliked, unwanted, but feared.  She had something on everyone, and more intrusive and scurrilous than J. Edgar Hoover ever was, she compiled dossiers of innuendo and suspicion. 'Information is Power', said the old adage still valid after centuries, applicable from the smarmiest cracker marriage to the halls of Congress. 

She never confronted people with the information she had, but insinuated it.  She found that even the innocent suspected that some forgotten or overlooked misdemeanor of peccadillo was in their closet. Keeping people guessing was more potent than having it out with them. 

The judge in a criminal case involving the Mafia in the movie The Untouchables, is told that his name is on the list of those who took bribes from Al Capone.  He was as innocent as any judge could be, but he lived in such a questionably ethical world, that he supposed he had crossed the line somewhere or somehow.  He dismissed the fixed jury and Capone was found guilty as charged. 

Betsy knew that politics was no bed of roses but wanted it no other way.  For someone of her ilk, a nasty woman without a scintilla of propriety, ethics, or even good taste, a primrose path would have been too easy, beneath her dignity and supreme, Machiavellian conscience, and no fun at all. 

It takes quite a bit to lower the ethical, moral bar in official Washington set at the very bottom of the ladder. Duplicity and downright absurd self-importance not only go with the territory, but are part and parcel of the political character.  Politicians not only are doing each other in at every turn, but every waking hour is spent calculating others' demise.  It is not just a cutthroat game - the neat slice of the guillotine - but a foul, filthy one complete with the rack, the bastinado, and vats of boiling oil. 

Progressives insist that such chicanery and downright wretched behavior is necessary in a crusade against evil, for that was what the fight to remove Donald Trump from power had always been about. The ends justify the means said liberal operatives, and went after the man with every possible scurrilous scheme they could concoct.  

Lawfare, unbased accusations, innuendoes, and blatantly absurd attacks were within the purview of the righteous.  Anything goes when it comes to such a pernicious presence in the Oval Office. 

Meanwhile, others less obsessed with Donald Trump went on with their lying, duplicity and bald infidelities as though nothing had happened.  They cheated on their wives, left them on feeding tubes while they took off to Argentina or Chile to be with their Latin lovers, lied about paternity and paid others to take the fall for illegitimacy, cried great torrents of tears in abject false apologies when found out, and returned to office on the promise of turning their lives around. 

Washington was the perfect venue for the up and comer Betsy Finch - a place that couldn't have been more suitable for morally untethered, free-and-easy with the truth, soul. Ivan's Devil in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, says that he exists because without him life would be a thudding, church every day, holy bloody bore.  'I am a vaudevillian', he says, not the dark, demonic evil that Christianity has concocted.  'I play tricks.  I playfully deceive.  We need each other'. 

'There is no fun in rectitude', said the aphorist Ogden Nash in one of his ditties, one of many catty observers of human nature who can only enjoy the folly.  Betsy was delighted in what she found in Washington, a marvelously suspicious, underhanded, greedy lot.  The whole city was a jamboree of excess, an uber-Barnum & Bailey circus, an empty frolic of greedy ambition. 

Everyone in Washington wants to be liked but few are.  Take the howling banshee dyad, Tlaib and Omar, two rabid political wolverines shouting bloody murder and racism across every platform, arrivistes of color - loudmouths, screaming meemies, braying jackasses with no shame. 

'I like them', said Betsy, admiring their circus act at the President's State of the Union address.  It takes considerable self-importance, lack of dignity, and opportunistic trough-feeding to to what they did.  They were the examples of progressive politics, marvels of bottomless ignorance. 

'And I love Washington', Betsy went on to say as she made her way up through the ranks, up and down Independence Avenue, Capitol Hill, and the West Wing to a position of prominence and renown.  All the while chuckling and chortling at the Sarah Bernhardt operatic charade she put on, Queen of the Town, sought after by men and women alike. 

'We are looking for a few good men', said the old Marine Corps recruiting poster, a copy of which had been framed and posted in an office in the Ronald Reagan building, seat of bureaucratic excess and next on the DOGE docket.  'Fat chance', said Betsy, and went on to sell her snake oil to a line of expectant customers. 

The State Of The Union And The Unhinged Hysteria Of Caged Wolverines

'It is what it is' goes the viral meme; a bit of existential pop wisdom, accommodating to the common man inundated with AI, the screeching harridans of Congress, a bevy of incomprehensible medical options, a short, dreary life, and hectoring wife. Better to let go, to recline in the chaise longue, take life easy because the alternative is nothing but headaches. 

Of course Epictetus and the Stoics came to the same conclusion, but framed their opinions in tightly-woven philosophical treatises having to do with free will, cognition, control, and emotional equilibrium.

The revaluation of external objects brings with it a tremendous sense of confidence and inner peace. Grief, fear, envy, desire, and every form of anxiety, result from the incorrect supposition that happiness is to be found outside oneself. Like earlier Stoics, Epictetus rejects the supposition that such emotions are imposed on us by circumstances or internal forces and are largely beyond our control. Our feelings, as well as our behavior, are an expression of what seems right to us, conditioned by our judgments of value.  If we correct our judgments, our feelings will be corrected as well. 

 

The idea of philosophical resignation predates the Greeks.  The Aryans, settled at Mohenjo-Daro after a long journey from the steppes, and extending their influence throughout the Indian subcontinent, preached the same doctrine.  The caste system, a social organization designed to limit secular, worldly expectations and free the mind for more spiritual endeavors, has been central to Hinduism for millennia.

Although often criticized by Western observers who see the system as a limiting, exploitative mechanism of elite control, the caste system is fundamental to Hinduism's core belief in spiritual evolution.  Right, disciplined behavior according to well-defined rules is not incarcerating but liberating.  The world is maya, illusion, and tempted by it will only lead to continued penance and inability to achieve spiritual enlightenment. 

There is nothing more antithetical to this philosophy than today's American progressivism, no better on display than at President Trump's recent State of the Union address when two members of the far Left, unhinged, wild, and bellowing like caged animals, tried to shout him down.  They yelled and howled, called him names, shook like St. Vitus' dancers, spat insults and threats. Politics for them had gone beyond the pale.  With Trump in office, the world was a place seething with hate, animus, and terrible ambitious lust.  They had gone overboard, crossed into a devilish, Satanic world of demons and dark, horrible figures. 

Vicki Adams had been brought up properly in a world of decorum, respect, tradition, and legacy; and would never devolve into such screeching, intemperate, crazed behavior.  Her father had been a judge and her mother a professor, both professions which rely on thoughtfulness, careful analysis and exegesis, and rational results.  They had been progressives of the old school, raised with the conviction that the poor, the marginalized, and the forgotten had a place in America; and that social and economic reform was the way to righting the wrongs of capitalism.  

So it was with a grimace and a shameful recognition that these two harridans were spokespersons for her party.  They were advocates for inclusivity and diversity and resented Donald Trump's insensate and violent attacks on their people - the brown and black newcomers to America who had an automatic, unquestioned right to remain. 

While everyone has a right to question the use and extent of Executive power, these women had, thanks to their ugliness, become caricatures.  Images of their outbursts at the State of the Union speech went viral and images of them as howling baboons, fat, rooting pigs, hyenas, wolverines and sideshow freaks, half-woman, half-banshee were on every social media platform. 

Yet Vicki could not deny the sentiments behind the women's outbursts. The President had indeed gone beyond the bounds of decency and responsible governance.  His ICE agents were nothing but SS storm troopers, latter-day Gestapo, Stasi thugs, rounding up and herding legitimate asylees into cattle cars and shipping them off to concentration camps, gas chambers and ovens. 

She looked at herself in the mirror, a trembling, shaking wreck of a woman, hair in straggles, eyes wide and feverish, face contorted and twisted; and took a deep breath. 'I am going off the deep end', she said. 'I must recalibrate'. 

The infection, however, had become systemic.  There was no room in her remade organism for quiet reflection and temperance.  The man in the White House had descended upon America from some desperately evil place, a Miltonian Devil, a horrific Satanic creature.  These were not ordinary times, and as such demanded extraordinary action. 

While she watched clips of the bellowing cows, Tlaib and Omar, again and again; and each time wished that they did not look so simian and ugly, she couldn't deny their passion - her passion.  If Trump were not stopped, democracy itself would falter, and America would turn into an autocratic dictatorship. 

Vicki took a deep breath, fixed her hair, put a dash of rouge on her cheeks, touched up her lipstick, adjusted her dress, and left for tea. 

She tried temperance for a while - crafting editorials, speeches at garden parties, calm resolution and logical insistence - but it never took.  She felt bottled up, strangled, speechless.  While that man, that...

And here as always words failed her as the bile rose in her throat, as that old familiar feverishness returned, and as her venomous, irrepressible hatred came front and center.  That evil presence that demon...and her voice became loud, ferocious, and insistent, a wild Cassandra, a wolf howling at the moon.  She had been transformed, irrevocably changed.  The hinges had not only come loose, they were undone, and...and....'The Crusade is waiting'. 

Brown University Professor Emeritus Harrison Levitt Perkins had this to say about what he called 'the febrile infection of political hysteria. Writing in The American Journal of Forensic Psychology, he said:

The Haitian descendants of Dahomey practice voodoo in which hysteria is a sign of demonic exorcism.  Possession is normal in a world filled with evil spirits, and few souls have the will, resources, and psychological barriers to resist.  Without these wild, untamed outbursts, howled to the sound of tribal drums and eviscerated fowl, the demons would have congenial homes from which they would continue to pervert and destroy. 

Political hysteria is no different.  Although the possessions of secular reformists might be thought rational, secular, and justified given the state of world affairs, it is as tribal, demonic, and irrational as the voodoo ceremonies in the hills above Kenscoff. What Americans witnessed at the  President's State of the Union speech was no different than tribal primitivism at its most primeval.  

 

If Vicki could have been so transformed from proper Main Line Philadelphia debutante, Vassar graduate, and serious professional, then one can only imagine the epidemic proportions of this 'febrile infection'. 

'Nutcases' was how one observer saw the display of Omar and Tlaib.  He had no truck with Epictetus, theories of intellectual virality, or political parsing but knew what he saw.  Unkind perhaps, but not without merit. 

When Politics Defines, Politics Destroys - The Dehumanizing Of America

The common meme today is that America is a divided country. We are divided every which way, by race, ethnicity, gender, religion and a hundred other sub- and mini-categories. 

It is not enough to simply be - a unique, irreplaceable, irreducible being unlike any other, made up of a special complex of emotions, perceptions, humor, artistry, talent and intelligence - but some additional signature is required.  

Moreover, each category has its ascribed values, assigned by political philosophers.  Being white to some automatically signifies racism, white supremacy, and intolerance. To others in means inheritance of European civilization, heir to Greece and Rome, empire, advanced learning and creativity.  Being black indicates primeval intelligence, the wisdom of the forest, a natural supremacy derived out of tribal instincts, and native evolution since the first homo sapiens. To others it means that this native tribalism is the very cause of perennial social dysfunction in the diaspora. 

Being male or female needs distinction, disaggregation. Regardless of your genetic profile, where do you fit on the gender spectrum?  Given your family history of mixed races and ethnicities, with which do you identify? Are you black or white?

There is another, more pernicious aspects to identity - regardless of who you are, you are judged by your political allegiance. From a liberal perspective, being conservative is grounds for cancellation. No  amount of intelligence, humor, fatherhood, or faith can compensate for your insular, uncharitable, harsh and intolerant individualism. 

Eric Fox and Robert Lake first met when they were twelve, both students at a small country day school.  They liked each other, played together, roughhoused, made pizza, wandered in the woods behind the school, and tracked rabbits and raccoons deep into the Southington mountains. 

They didn't know why they liked each other, and never gave the question a second thought.  Of all the boys in the seventh grade and all the permutations possible, Eric and Robert became friends.  Was it intelligence? Both boys were at the top of the class. Playfulness? Risk? Defiance? All the above?

No one can account for friendship at that age.  There are no easy markers - excelling at mathematical reasoning, sexually adventure, high-end athletic ability, or common social graces.  At twelve, you are simply children, boys of a similar social milieu but not yet with the trappings of commitment, belief, or allegiance. 

Eric and Robert remained friends after country day school, were classmates at Lefferts, one of New England's most recognized preparatory schools, and were residents at the same Yale college. Their lives increasingly diverged - their academic and social interests were quite different, and their career paths went in opposite directions, but they saw each other in the dining hall, on the quad, and at the bookstore. 

After graduation they lost touch - military service, international travel, marriage, children; but they always considered themselves friends. 

College in those days was an apolitical time, and political identity was far from the thoughts of either boy.  If anything they were conservative at heart - both young, attractive, intelligent, and wealthy, and with the early adulthood confidence in their abilities and bright futures.  Yet a number of years later, Eric had a political awakening.  He became angered at the world's inequality, poverty, destitution and the indifference of political elites to do anything about it.  

The black man was still suffering under the yoke of white, segregationist racism, women were still second class citizens, and the country was still ruled by an Eastern urban elite. In short, Eric got religion, a liberal secular version with no less passion and true belief as the real thing. 

Robert never changed from his earlier college conservatism.  He only became more politically articulate and was able to express his foundational belief in individualism and free enterprise in political terms. 

When he and Eric met at a college reunion, Eric wanted to talk politics and was surprised that his friend held none of the same convictions that he did.  How could this be? Eric wondered.  After all they were products of the same social and academic environment.  How could his friend have been so infected, so inalterably intellectually elite, so indifferent to the plight of the many?

After a time, and an increasingly desultory friendship, Eric cancelled his friend.  Political philosophy defines and expresses worldview, he said.  It is what you are no matter what you were.  He could not conceivably be friends with someone who saw the world in such harsh, uncompromising, unsympathetic ways. 

Robert objected.  If they were friends at twelve before politics, society, and environment made any difference and only natural, spontaneous friendship was at play; and if they liked each other then for no other reason than spontaneous affection, then they should always be friends. 

Eric was adamant. There was no such thing as 'natural affinity', only environmental determinism he said, quoting Lacan and Derrida.  We, political animals now in our prime, formed by variables beyond our control but accepting them as definite, cannot revert to some faux idealism of natural law. 

This ending of a friendship for political reasons, this cancellation of a true bond, explains why progressive insistence on identity is so pernicious, denying as it does 'natural law', innocent affinity, and most of all individual character and personality. 

A black man will always be black first and foremost and will always be seen through that racial lens. Identity makes it even harder to know people for who they are - blinders on a horse, enforced vision, categorization without exit. 

Eric spent his years a social justice warrior, a progressive's progressive, an indefatigable reformist until, surprisingly, he changed direction.  There is an old adage - give a liberal enough time and he will always become conservative - that has always held true.  Life and its circumstances have a way of intruding on true belief, and maybe the world is what conservatives have always believed - a Darwinian, competitive territorial enterprise.,

 

That might have been what turned Eric around; but more likely in his later years the boy returned - or rather had never gone away but was only waiting for the right moment to reappear. Eric was back, reverted to essentials, 'givens' as he used to call them in his Ayn Rand days, and he called his friend, Robert. 

A gift of old age, Robert said, one of the few.  Facing the end of one's life, politics no matter how securely held, is not all that important; and it is definitely not the defining quality that determines friendship. 

Both men are much more limited than in years past, and a whole continent now divides them, each on a different coast; but the friendship is anew, and both men thank God for it.