The Dame, The Sex Toy, And The Politician - A Washington Tale Of Sexual Obsession

Mrs. Longworth Cabot was descended from a long line of American patriots.  She was the chairwoman of the Washington Daughters of the American Revolution, a member of the Society of the Cincinnati, latter day Pearl Mesta of Georgetown, and a scintillating noteworthy of Capital society. 

Cabbie, as she was called by close friends and family, was of early middle age, a bit doughy but still attractive made all the more so by her elegant wardrobe.  She wore only designer dresses, Cartier jewels, Manolo Blahnik shoes, and had her hair done once a month at Jean-Pierre of Fifth Avenue. 

She had been married twice, both disastrously.  The first to a minor British count, and the second to a Texas oilman, both of whom grossly underestimated her character, fierce loyalty to her legacy, and unquenchable sexual desire. 

So when she met the Congressman from an important Midwestern district, she was diffident.  There was really nothing that a politician could offer her by way of money (her fortune was immense and secure), social standing (she was in Who's Who in America), or glamour.  Politicians are and always have been a dour, lumpen lot.  

But never one to let an opportunity pass nor a chance for a bit of fun, she returned his glances, accepted his offer for a drink, and promised to meet him again - this time someplace not so predictable and ordinary as the the Mayflower Bar.  She suggested the Lady Lay Lounge in Petworth, a gentrifying neighborhood still black around the edges, far enough away from downtown to cover both their tracks and an ideal place for a cinq-a-sept. 

The Congressman was as expected - toothy, earnest, and simple - but there was something in the fact of his willingness to go off the grid with her suggested something more; and when he asked her about her preferences, referring not to Chablis or pinot noir but to something far more delicious and tempting, she was surprised, delighted, and willing. 

One has to keep in mind that Mrs. Cabot was not just anyone.  Bred of impeccable English royal stock, American aristocratic forbears, and with the blood of kings, she was noteworthy - a woman whom one would suppose to be careful about her associations and passe-temps - but her legacy, wealth, and untouchable privilege gave her unlimited license.  Being who she was, anything she did was factored, parsed, and written off as perks of high standing. 

It turned out that the Congressman was as queer as a three-dollar bill - not queer in today's modern, sexual sense (the man was as horny and bull-riding a male as any), but 'unusual'.  'Preferences' it turned out meant any number of sexual curiosities that one might find in the redwood forests of Coeur d'Alene or the San Francisco Folsom Street Fair. 

The kicker is this - the Congressman simply got off on the patrician likes of Cabbie Lodge. He could have cross-dressed, done himself up in rubber and leather, and whipped himself silly for a hundred Marges from Accounting, but the idea of doing the unspeakable with a member of one of America's first and finest families was irresistible.  It was like fucking Martha Washington. 

How the Congressman had gotten this far, given his sandy quirks was a story in and of itself.  Everyone in Congress was diddling someone other than their spouse, enjoying the perks of power; but all were hewing to a rather straight line - an afternoon tryst, a weekend in the Bahamas, a getaway to New York. None, as far as anyone could tell, had crossed that line and gone over to the unheard of side as far as Cabbie's Congressman had.  

It was only because of his patience, discipline, and political instincts that he kept clean and his real desires cloaked and closeted.  Now that he had influence - he had become a member of the powerful Ways and Means Committee - he could afford some outing.  He had the power to consign even ranking members to holy hell if they called him out for sexual impropriety. 

So the affair between Cabbie Lodge and the Congressman was made in heaven - exactly the woman that the representative from _______wanted, and the plaything the lady from Beacon Hill had always imagined.  

Petworth was only the beginning.  Their escapades went far afield, always at the edge of official Washington to give the affair pique, but not too far out to feel cornfieldy and removed. 

He was finding it a bit tricky to explain his absences from office and home - the best philanderers are always caught with their pants down - but Cabbie had no such tying responsibilities and goaded the Congressman to ever more challenging meetings.  Whereas he had always brought the paraphernalia, the sex toys, whips, fetters, and chains, she began to reach out and surprise him. 

The episodes thanks to his perpetual desire and her irrepressible playfulness remained incomparable.  The two of them rutted like barn animals and came back for more. 

The telling difference was that while Cabbie could care less about Congressman X, he was becoming deeply dependent upon her. She had tapped some underground resources he never knew he had and once discovered, could not do without. 

Why not up the ante? thought the marvelously devious Cabbie, extract some national secret and put him on the rack with threats of full disclosure unless he capitulated and gave her everything.  The lasting, complete sexual conquest. 

Strindberg's Miss Julie is a story about such demanding influence.  The aristocrat Mis Julie is brought up by a proto-feminist, man-hating mother who encourages her daughter to engage and then dominate men.  She decides to seduce and entrap Jean, her valet.  She treats him like a trained animal jumping through hoops while he enjoys - like the Congressman - sexual to-dos with her.  He falls short, cannot resist the age-old call to service, and returns without her to the role of faithful, dutiful valet of the Count. 

 

It was in the oversized bathtub in the bridal suite of the Waldorf, that she grabbed the rubber ducky, brought him to ecstatic climax, climbed out, wrapped herself in a soft, multi-ply bath towel, dressed, and said goodbye. 

The Congressman was disconsolate, disheartened, and felt absolutely alone. What had happened? and why?  Everything was going along swimmingly. 

The story would not be complete unless the denouement - the revealing of state secrets attributed to the Congressman - had not been made public. 'Taking down the citadel of Boston', Fergie says to his crew before their audacious robbery of Fenway Park, 'priceless'; and it was with this same pride and joy that she saw the unravelling of the Congressman happen before her very eyes. 

A true Nietzschean, Cabbie Cabot.  Why did she do it, she might have been asked.  'Because I could', would have been her reply. 

A remarkable woman, none like her, a genius, a brilliant conniver, a one of a kind. 

Sins Of Commission, Omission, And Occasion - The Politician's Seduction By All Three

Father Brophy loved 9 o'clock Mass, for then he was at his best, a fire-and-brimstone prophet of the Old Testament with a messages from the New. His passion was for sins of the flesh, and the moral turpitude of his parishioners that could be seen on their faces every Sunday.  Fornicators, self-pleasurers, adulterers, addicted to unholy pleasures all. 

Father Brophy danced around his interest in young Peter Adams, chief altar boy at Sunday Mass, a fascination innocent enough, but not without desire.  As much as he groped his way up the aisle to the crucifix of Our Savior, begging for forgiveness and release from this seditious, damning passion, he saw only the sweet young Peter before him.  

'I am a sinner, Lord!, he shouted and heard his plea echo from transept to choir in the empty church. 'Hear my prayers.'

That is neither here nor there, for there was enough 'normal' sin in the world for a thousand sermons, and Brophy hammered away each and every Sunday with Sturm und Drang that would have impressed Abraham. 

The interesting thing about sin, reflected Father Brophy in the sacristy preparing his sermon of the week, was its diversity.  There were sins of commission, omission, and occasion - a deadly trifecta, the unholy triumvirate of the Devil.

Sin was everywhere, not just if you lifted a pack of gum or stood by when your friend did it, but the most insidious and dangerous of all - the occasion of sin.  Oh, he knew how many girls, as chaste and virginal as the new fallen snow had entered dens of iniquity with the confidence that God would protect them all the while hoping to be taken, abducted, penetrated.

Here Brophy's mind wandered again, and he could only see images of the ingenue Angela Booth with her skirt up above her waist, moaning in ecstasy as Bobby Perkins thrust himself into her.  'God forgive me', he said, grasping for his rosary and begging the Virgin Mary for moral sustenance. 

To be sure, the most titillating aspect of sin was that of commission - what Angela Booth and Bobby Perkins did in the cloakroom, and what his congregants were doing every other night of the week. What he heard in confession made his ears burn, and it was hard to keep his clerical resolution intact what with the tales of sinful sexual engagement told to him.  He had no idea of the vagaries of heterosexual sex, the infinite variety of lying, cheating, and vulgarity.  

He of course absolved the women who confessed - that was his duty - but only after exacting promises from them to abstain from their sinful behavior.  Privately he hoped that they would continue, for his prayerbook was annotated with the most impossible features of human sexual behavior, and he wanted to chronicle these brands of sin for future reference. 

The Church of the Redeemer of which Father Brophy was the rector, was a stone's throw from the Capitol where five hundred or so politicians debated the nation's welfare; but as far as Brophy was concerned, it was a sinkhole of depravity and deceit.  One had only to read the papers to watch the cavalcade of unthinkable depravity.  Everyone knew about Bill Clinton's fellatio, Mark Sanford's Argentinian fugue, John Edwards' bald-faced lies, and Newt Gingrich's hurried sayonara to his dying wife so he could catch a plane to Atlanta and be in the arms of his lover. 

The current governor of Minnesota sat back and marveled at the canny schemes of the Somali community which was bilking the taxpayer of millions, living off the fat of the land, and building a network of corruption.  'Not my problem', said Governor Walz who saw Somali activity as an expression of diversity and the immigrant's first step to integration. 

What could you expect from gun-running pirates? They needed space to grow and time to mature.  Meanwhile Omar Abdi and his family, friends, and colleagues all brought out the vote for Walz who justified the irregularity of their support by saying that the longer he remained in office, the more good he could do for Minnesotans at large. 

And then there was Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and their Caribbean island.  If there was a better occasion of sin, Father Brophy couldn't think of one; and yet politicians, world leaders, Fortune 500 businessmen, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and world's glitterati flocked there.  

'I just want to see what all the fuss is about', said a member of the British Parliament who despite his pedigree, wealth, and political standing had difficulty with women; and so wanted Epstein's tasty morsels there for the asking. 

Is it fair to judge politicians by a higher standard than the ordinary American?  Or for that matter condemn the Catholic Church for its buggery, pedophilia, and pederasty?  Of course not.  Politicians and priests are just men after all, and it would be unfair to judge the institution they represent by their individual and quite human actions. 

Yet when these men are caught with their pants down, it makes headlines.  After all, an affair between consenting adults is not news, but when the President of the United States gets blown by an intern kneeling under the Lincoln desk, the chutzpah, monumental ignorance, and the crass, gross sense of invulnerability is comic and epic. 

There is a well-known study of obesity carried out by researchers at the University of Texas which demonstrated the psycho-social dimensions of collective behavior.  Men who live, work, and socialize with obese men are likely to become obese themselves; and so it is with Congress. If you spend your time on a daily basis with men who are complicit in the worst forms of deceit, sexual impropriety, and underhandedness, you will inevitably become like them. 

So, Father Brophy's summary dismissal of the Capitol as a sinkhole of depravity wasn't too far off, so much so that theologians from the Vatican would have a field day studying the nature and variety of sin there. 

The irony of it all was that the Catholic Church and Jesus Christ himself were all about forgiveness.  If you honestly repented, the Church had no recourse but to forgive.  Of course there were mighty loopholes in that arrangement, for the perception of guilt is a very subjective affair.  

In Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy Clyde Griffiths plots and plans the murder of Roberta Alden, the factory girl he got pregnant.  He gets her into a boat on Loon Lake in an untraveled, desolate corner, but cannot kill her. Instead, he stands in frustration and anger, overturns the boat and watches while the girl drowns. 

Was he guilty of murder and had a mortal sin on his soul? Or was it an accident compromised only by a sin of omission - he didn't jump in after her?

The penitent leaving Father Brophy's confessional may believe that he has made an honest confession, but how can he break off his love affair with Marge from Accounting without destroying her heart and soul?  Surely a progressive withdrawal would be more considerate than an abrupt departure. 

The politician's life, a raft of sins of commission, omission, and occasion, is compounded by the most devious self-justification, shameless apologies, and quick return to infidelity, rutting, and misbehavior.  Politicians' bread and butter is Barnum & Bailey-esque. A sucker is born every minute and you can fool most of the people most of the time - the mantra of the talented politician.  Why the surprise when he is caught with his pants down and insists that they are not actually down, just that he is incompletely dressed? 

Father Brophy was a voyeur at heart.  He loved smarmy confessions, rumors of infidelity, images of Angela booth in the cloakroom with her panties down, and the imagined delights of Peter Adams.  He was lucky to have been stationed in the Washington area, the Nation's Capital, the heart and soul of America.  He wouldn't have it any other way, and to reach his audience with more relevance and insider know-how, he peppered his sermons with political wrongdoing.  His parishioners fidgeted and squirmed, so he knew he had hit home. 

Making Mountains Out Of Molehills - The Progressive Malady, Creating Problems Where They Don't Exist

'If it bleeds, it leads', has been the mantra of American television since the first grainy black and white images of the Fifties; and if nothing is bleeding, then something needs to bleed. 'Catholic Mass for Shut-Ins' will never have a large audience. 

'All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way' said Leo Tolstoy who understood the art of storytelling, the art of dramatizing unhappy differences.  The Greeks were the original masters at melodrama, the art of making human nature in all its jealousy, rivalries, suspicions, plots, greed, and violence the only show in town.  Greek audiences already knew the stories of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Helen, and Oedipus, but filled the seats of the Athenian amphitheaters to watch them unfold in all their gory glory. 

Artists did not invent these smarmy, twisted scenarios.  They simply took what they saw around them and gave them stage presence.  Aeschylus was a master of timing - he knew when to reveal the truth that everyone but the main character knew, and when to tease, tempt, and hold it back for maximum interest. 

The best Turkish soap operas are cut from the same cloth.  The producers are geniuses at timing, suggestion, and manipulation.  The central premise is that the audience knows of a character's dishonesty and murderous intentions, but the victim never does until it's too late.  The audience becomes partisan, urging the victim to see the plot unfolding around her, to open her eyes, to see what is happening; but the producer, writer, and director keep up the naïveté, the innocence, and the disingenuous belief. 

The audience is on the edge of their seats - when will she learn? and so it goes, episode after episode of the most devious trickery and bad intent. 

There is enough melodrama in human nature for a thousand tragedies.  The playwright never has to hold his head in his hands and wonder what next.  It is all there for him to choose.  

The literary critic Jan Kott noted that if one were to lay all of Shakespeare's Histories down in chronological order, one would be struck by their repetitious similarity - palace intrigues, murders, jealousies, family squabbles, the arrogance and ignorance of power and much more.  

But the particular and fascinating ways that all this is played out is what fascinated Shakespeare.  Richard III, Iago, Goneril, Regan, Dionyza, and Tamora are all villains, but each in their own mesmerizing way. 

There is nothing new about human nature.  It is hardwired, permanent, and ineluctable and as long as there are human beings on earth there will be murder, war, devilish plots, dishonest, and cruelty beyond belief.  And there is nothing new about the transformation of those human instincts into melodrama. 

What is new, or at least a modern twist to the obvious, is the creation of horrible things where they don't exist. As if there were not enough problems in the world. 

Progressives have made an art out of inventive fiction.  The world was quite happy with its blizzards and hot spells, floods and droughts, and the natural vagaries of the climate.  It was the way things were, ups and downs, surprises and catastrophes, and the way things would always be. 

Then climate change came along - an invented, seditious idea of political brilliance. If enough people believed that it was man who was causing atmospheric turbulence, provoking an early Armageddon, then billions of dollars could be spent out of public coffers to right the wrong. 

Capitalism itself was on trial, for what could be more polluting and environmentally destructive than corporate greed passed on in manipulative marketing to encourage more fossil fuel use?

Similarly human beings had gotten along just fine with two sexes - all that was required to keep the human race going - but then people were told that they should be suspicious of a heterosexual theory that has its roots in male patriarchy, bourgeois limitations, and white supremacy.  

There is no such thing as sexual normality, all is possible and all is available.  One need only pick and choose from the array of choices on the gender spectrum.  Reproduction is incidental, not necessary, and in fact the very cause of environmental destruction, war, and civil unrest. 

The movement did not just champion gay and lesbians, but showered the most attention and praise on transgenders, individuals born of one sex but emotionally, psychologically, and socially the other.  Identity, freedom, and individuality are not just constitutional protections.  They go to the heart of human sexual nature. 

Anyone who lived through the much more serious Hong Kong flu did not suffer the shutdowns, punitive regulations, and vigilantism of COVID. People got sick, recovered or died. Life went on. The Biden government however said COVID was The Big One, health Armageddon, and exploiting fear and deliberately concocted uncertainty, they expanded the reach, authority, and influence of the state. An invented crisis.

The fol-de-rol is quieting, and most people are no longer edgy and politically sensitive about being straight.  There are two sexes, male and female, and everything else is a freak show, two-headed babies, bearded ladies, dwarves, and midgets replaced by deep-throated runway queens, swish, and costume jewelry. 

Donald Trump is an aggressive, decisive, politically incorrect president who fits no mold of presidents past. He has changed the way presidents operate, disregarded old nostrums of proper behavior and prescriptive notions of right action.  He has no hesitation in using presidential power and is willing to run the risks and take the consequences.  It is not for nothing that he earned his stripes in the bloody battles of New York real estate. 

It is not enough for progressives to call out his questionable policy initiatives - his wars, his dismantling of the Washington bureaucracies, the opening the country up to unrestricted energy exploitation, and the rollback of social programs.  They have invented the concept of an evil man as an all-purpose mantle of irresponsibility.  The US has had presidents that stretched the fabric of the body politic - Warren Harding, Richard Nixon, and Ulysses S Grant were no sweethearts and dealt with summarily.  The system of American governance worked just fine. 

The idea that Donald Trump is evil is something new, not particularly unexpected from a political movement which likes umbrella covers (e.g. climate change=capitalism=exploitation=disaster), but still surprising from those who have disavowed religion.  Philosophers from Aquinas to Kierkegaard to Sartre have pondered the nature of evil, but none have been so pedestrian and insular in their attributions. 

Parsing evil has always been a pastime - was Hitler more evil than Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot who also murdered millions? Is human nature particularly given to evil given its bald self-interest, territorialism, and defensiveness? Etc. 

Few, however, have so distorted the concept of evil, whether religious or secular, as much as American progressives. 'Evil' in their politically disingenuous hands is nothing more than a catch-all for unacceptable political behavior.  An intellectual charade, a mighty boondoggle. 

The evil Donald Trump is a problem that does not exist.  It is 'if it bleeds...' tomfoolery, a fabulist creation from a party which still can't absorb the enormity of its electoral defeat and is fighting shadows and inventing goblins in its hysteria. 

Hindus have it right in one - the world is Maya, illusion, a place of false promise and hopeless dreams.  The sooner one realizes that the world is but a perennial, predictable vale of tears, the easier the path to enlightenment becomes. The Stoics said the same thing in essence - the world and all that it encompasses will forever more be a random succession of events, and each individual within it acts according to the way he has been buffeted by them. Nietzsche notwithstanding, individual will within a deterministic world is folly. 

Yet, progressives simply can't help themselves.  There is something in the air compelling them to do good where no evil exists, to reform what needs no reforming, to act where action is unnecessary. 

What's all the fuss about? Epictetus might well ask; which is why conservatives have more fun. If the world is the way it is and attempts to improve it is just whistlin' Dixie, then why not just enjoy the great human jamboree?