The Circus, A Metaphor For Politics - A Lifelong Liberal Finally Finds The Holy Grail At A Side Show

Although Vicki Chalmers had grown irritated and touchy about the increasingly wild excesses of the Left, she remained in lockstep with their causes.  The Gestapo SS troops unleashed by Donald Trump to round up law-abiding asylees, slam them in cattle cars, and ship them back to the oppressive, inhuman regimes from which they admiringly fled were signs of a growing fascist dictatorship in the White House.  

The President's wholescale dismantling of the federal bureaucracy, sending hardworking, concerned civil servants packing, and his demonic, arrogant machismo forcing LBGTQ Americans to scurry for cover were unconscionable.  His loosening the fetters that reined in a predatory, greedy capitalism was tantamount to a perilous consignment of the poor into a dismal, hopeless purgatory. 

Vicki had spent her whole life doing good, engaged in charitable causes, on the faculty of a historically black college, the only white woman to be granted such an honor and a tenured position, and a frequent contributor to The Nation, the Atlantic, and her own Vassar College Alumnae magazine.

Yet at her advancing age the placards, banners, and camaraderie seemed not only silly but comedic. A thousand hysterical, overweight women stomping like bull elephants up and down the National Mall, was a side show. She loved her sisters in arms, sympathized with their cause, but could never bring herself to actually rub shoulders with such an element. 

Despite her fervid liberal politics, she was sexually as straight as an arrow, and found the whole idea of scissoring, eating out, dildoes, fingering, and 'tit squash' frankly repulsive.  She never let on of course, always greeted her lesbian friends with warm affection and solicitude, but felt the need to wash up afterwards. 

 

She hated herself for such apostasy, but there it was.  Nothing she could do about it.  Nature had had her way, so time to buck up and get with the larger program. This wasn't about her. 

This infection - this growing cynicism, these persistent images of a herd of cows mooing and bellowing on the Mall - was becoming systemic; and as hard as she tried, she could not rid herself of the image of these Flossies on top of each other in some Dupont Circle basement sucking to the music of Radiohead. 

Epiphanies are by nature unexpected, and so when Vicki took her grandson to the circus, an independent production touted as the retro event of the century complete with lion tamers, clowns, trapeze artists, and a sideshow not to be missed, she jumped at the chance. 

She had loved the old Barnum & Bailey circuses of her youth, had walked around the fairgrounds after school to watch the tents being put up, the roaring animals assigned to their cages, the flags and festoons placed on the big top, and to listen to the bang of hammers and the rasp of saws.  She couldn't wait for the spectacle, the cotton candy, the festivities, the jamboree of men, women, and animals from another planet. 

She was as excited as a schoolgirl when she stood in line to buy her tickets for her and her grandson, one for each of the big top events, the fun house, and of course the side show which, she knew, given the vastly changed cultural standards of the day would unhappily not have the freaks she remembered. There would be no two-headed babies, ape-men, and bearded ladies.  It might in fact be better this way, for her grandson was a quiet, timid boy whose parents had told him that no one was stupid, 'so please, let me not hear you use that word' and that 'everyone has a place in the world'.

 

The circus was as hoped, a real retro show.  How the producers were able to run the gantlet of animal rights, faux humanist, and inclusivist alderman and come out with a show as authentic as this one, was a minor miracle. The circus grounds even had that smell of hay, urine, and animals that she remembered.  It was all there as she remembered - tightrope walkers, trapeze artists, lion tamers, clowns, and trained seals. The Master of Ceremonies wore a top hat and tails and was as convincing and exciting as those of the old days. 

The fun house, usually a feature of amusement parks, had been added to the circus, and she clung tightly to her grandson as the carts rattled around dark corners, as spooky goblins and witches popped out of nowhere, and as ghouls stood on the tracks before them. 

With great anticipation and excitement, Vicki and the boy entered the freak show.  She held tightly to his hand in case he got a case of jitters and they had to leave. This was what she had come for. 

For a moment, she thought that her interest was prurient and shameful.  After so many years of inclusivity and diversity according to which there were no such thing as freaks, only otherly- dimensioned, -statured, or -configured people, she was delighted at the prospect of seeing the deformed, the weird, the barely human. 

Why, she wondered? Was it some kind of final resolution - once and for all looking at human deformity in all its shapes and sizes, realizing that even this menagerie of unusual people belonged to her society and would be welcomed everywhere, invited to the Cosmos Club, and invited to join as honorary members of The Society of the Cincinnati, the DAR, and Patriots of America?

What she saw was at first shocking, then stunning, then brilliant.  There were dwarves, midgets, bearded ladies, and elephant men, but they - in a masterful ironic transformation - had become caricatures of the most exaggerated, fag ends of the gender spectrum and icons of protest she had joined on the Mall.  These tattooed, fat, tarted up cretins were the very images of women she knew. Noses were misaligned, ears were pendulous, and elephantine lips were as large and distended as baboons'. 

'Ah,' said Vicki to no one in particular, 'I get it'; and by that she meant the Holy Grail of human creation.  The horrible distortions she was used to seeing on the Mall had simply been displayed in the nth degree at the circus.  There were cross-dressing midgets, transgender dwarves whose proportions were all wrong - huge, oversized tits, and bulging cocks barely contained by circus cod pieces. They were all painted like harlequins, their hair spraypainted blue, rings and studs from tongue to toe. 

She was unsure how she felt. At first it was hilarity - such a marvelous freak show could never be duplicated, a work of production genius, a one in a million worth the price of admission and then some. Then it was shame - the old diversity training returned, and she should have nothing but respect and humility before these othered people; but finally it was the aha! Eureka! moment.  God's supreme irony, his devilish sense of humor on the Sixth Day before he rested. 

Konstantin Levin, a principal character in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina wonders at God's irony, having created an intelligent, sentient, creative, willful being; granted him but a few decades on earth, and then consigned him to an eternity beneath the cold hard ground of the steppes. 

That was nothing, thought Vicki.  A better irony was that He created a side show and said it was in His image,  a freak show of generous proportions, a menagerie of poseurs, queens, dykes, sexual half-breeds, buggering midgets, and swishy 8-foot giants; let alone the marvelously outrageous pimps and ho's, the barking women of Capitol Hill, the bald-faced liars, cheats, conmen, touts, and snake oil salesmen of middle America, and the hallelujah Baptist preachers, the holy rollers....Jesus Christ, the list was endless. 

Now that she had seen God's humor, how could she not laugh at everything else?  She smiled, hugged her grandson, bought him a chocolate ice cream cone with jimmies on top, and drove home to the exhilarating music of J.S. Bach. 

The next day was a new day, the first day of her life. She scrapped her rainbow Hate Has No Home Here signs, cleared the decks of all iconic tchotchkes - a small, clay bust of feminist Gloria, a Che Guevara poster, images of San Francisco's Folsom Street S&M fair, photos of wild gay boys atop Mardi Gras floats.  It was a clean sweep.  The whole marvelously fantastical progressive thing was dismissed with a brush of the hand, gone, over and done with.   

It was time for sense and sensibility, the literary canon, exegesis, simple prayer, and finally trimming the hollyhocks which were overrunning the back yard.  'Free at last', she shouted out the French doors to the garden. 'Free at last'. 

'War Is The Continuation Of Policy By Other Means', Clausewitz, Machiavelli, And Donald Trump

Former American President Harry Truman was a geopolitical master. The nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not to bring an end to the war (by the time the bombs were dropped Japan was already a destroyed, defeated nation) but to send a message to Russia - 'Look what we've got'. 

Donald Trump follows in his footsteps.  Yes, the ousting of the Venezuelan dictator, Nicolas Maduro removed an oppressive, communist tyrant; but it also secured for the US the vast oil reserves of the country, thus keeping them out of the hands of America's arch-enemies, Russia and China.  

Yes, the toppling of the Islamic regime of Khamenei and the mullahs is an effort to free the Persian people from nearly five decades of religious oppression, anti-Israel hatred, and sponsorship of Islamic terrorism in the Middle East; but it is also  a means to secure Iran's equally vast oil resources, thus keeping them from Russia and China. 

The American president plays 3-D geopolitical chess.  He has a master plan that goes farther than the obvious, but his short-term objectives are equally important.  Who but the most fevered, Trump-hating Left can object to America's ridding two countries of their longtime, oppressive dictators?  The people on the streets of Tehran are shouting 'USA', American flags are being proudly carried, and pictures of Donald Trump festooned on Israeli-destroyed government buildings. 

Yet perennially ignorant, limited, and hardened liberals are protesting in front of the White House.  Protesting what?  For decades Iranian women have been deprived of their rights, forced to live under hijabs and burkas, denying their femininity and their rightful place in society.  The Morality Police enforced bans on dress, expression, and behavior, and forced millions into compliance with harsh religious law, all of which has been or should be the rallying cry for regime change. 

But progressives sit on their hands, weeping for the wanton destruction of brown people by the American dictator, an arrogant adventurist with only his rise to supreme power guiding his assault on world order. They see the waves of Israeli bombers over Tehran as another example of Jewish hegemony and the might of the international Jewish conspiracy.  Iran was the only militant bastion against Jewish expansionism. 

If there was any more proof necessary of the endemic, virulent anti-Semitism within the ranks of the American Left, it is this outcry - this hysterical claim to Iranian sovereignty despite the regime's continuous, persistent, murderous control over its people. 

'War monger...jingoist, belligerent predator' progressives shout, denying the geopolitical savvy of Trump, America's long overdue entry into the Machiavellian world of Putin and Xi, the world of realpolitik, nationalism, and a fearless use of force. 

For years, especially under the craven Biden years, America was still lashed to the idolatry of moral exceptionalism. America always does the right, moral, and ethical thing.  We toppled the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, but we respectfully declined to impose a harsh, necessary martial law on the grounds of civility and respect for democratic due process. 

The results were as everyone should have expected - the rise of violent militias, turning the country into a fire zone, an ungovernable, Islamic-leaning chaos. 

The Taliban in Afghanistan could have been obliterated by American airpower.  Lessons should have been learned from the Soviet defeat decades before, and absolute military dominance followed by years of American occupation and martial law should have been the policy.  Instead, America in the interest of human rights, respectability, and moral exceptionalism took its foot off the gas, and the Taliban are now back in power. 

All this conciliatory concern, this political myopia, this ignorance of history, this 'hearts and minds' mentality, this overconcern for civilian casualties went out the window with the second election of Donald Trump.  Israel was given free rein to obliterate Gaza and Hamas, remove Hezbollah from Lebanon, and to destroy the Islamic regime in Iran all with American support. 

History has proven Clausewitz right again and again.  The world has known only war since the first Paleolithic human settlements, and will continue to beholden to its temptations. To ignore the use of war is to deny the imperatives of history and human nature.  It is an ineluctable, irrepressible feature of the human condition.  Peace results only if there is military parity - the peaceful Cold War period is the prime example - or overwhelming imperial control, e.g. Pax Romana.  Otherwise territory, influence, supremacy, resources, influence must be assured through the threat or use of the force of arms. 

'Diplomacy...negotiations' insist Europeans who have forgotten the lesson of Neville Chamberlain and his dalliance with Hitler.  'Peace in our time' was nothing but ignorance, idealism, and distorted assumptions of human goodness. 

Iran has never once in the mullahs' near fifty year regime considered negotiations.  They with impunity developed a nuclear program designed to annihilate Israel, sponsored terrorism to promote radical Islam throughout the Middle East and to extend their geopolitical hegemony.  They never once held their fire when citizens protested their actions. 

Former President Obama concluded the worst possible 'Peace' Treaty with Iran. If Iran would promise to cease the production of military grade uranium and desist from its intentions to use its nuclear power to threaten Israel and the United States, America would eliminate all sanctions and Iran would be welcomed back into the commonwealth of nations. 

Obama asked only for a ten year moratorium on the refinement of fissionable material and said nothing about state-sponsored terrorism; so the mullahs went deep underground, kept building just enough to stay ahead of international inspectors, increased its support of Hamas and Hezbollah, and emerged after ten years stronger than ever.

'Basta!' said Donald Trump and with Israel destroyed Iran's underground nuclear bunkers, and now with Israel has launched a full-scale air assault on the country itself. Policy by other means, said the American President, eliminating a world threat and a national, shameful, regime. 

Like Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Gaza, and Venezuela, this military response to Iran both addresses immediate social and geopolitical issues, but also sends a message to Russian and especially China - 'You're next'.  No more clear statement of American resolve concerning China's avowed expansionism could be made. 

Progressives, the party of appeasement, conciliation, and idealism, cannot help themselves. The wailing, breast beating and rending of garments continues while a new world order is being established. 

Gone are the days of internationalism and world compromise.  The United Nations is dead.  Woodrow Wilson's dream of a league of nations only a footnote in history.  In their place is what the world throughout human history has known - force. 

This is not a setback, a retreat into xenophobic militarism; but reality of a world where the force of arms backs up policy but which in a world of either parity or empire will not be needed. 

The Machiavellian triumvirate - Xi, Putin, and Trump - are at the core of this new world order, all understanding the need for military power and not hesitant to use it.  Yet the world, with the exception of a few holdouts - the European and American Left - understands this quite clearly.  Competition is hardwired, innate, indissoluble, and permanent and only through an understanding of countervailing power can it both assure progress and encourage parity. 

Marge From Accounting - How The Sexual Bar For Older Men Is Set Very, Very Low

Harry Bond worked for a mid-level law firm, not the best and certainly not la creme de la creme, but creditable and familiar to those in the business.  None of the partners went to Harvard, Yale, or Stanford  - it was more of a Florida State, Tallahassee crowd; but the firm never lacked for clients given the litigious nature of our era.   

 

Harry was a divorce lawyer, on the smarmy side of the  legal profession -  innuendoes, false claims, sorting out one scurrilous untruth from another, wallowing in the shit of miserable, hateful marriages and having to keep one's composure - but it more than paid the rent, assured better than a duplex in the suburbs and a place at good, if not top-tier college for children. 

If the truth be known, Harry's marriage was nothing to boast about except for its longevity.  Harry and Louise had been married for donkey's years, and were settled into the usual, predictable, not unpleasant but certainly humdrum routines which characterize those of most couples.  

Over the years they had moved from infrequent sex to desultory, to almost never, to sexual barrenness. For Harry's wife it was a removal of an incommodious duty - she had never been one for sexual enthusiasm and after the children were born claimed 'uncomfortability', and so transitioned to her new sexual abstinence without disappointment or remorse. 

Harry on the other hand was as sexually desirous as he ever had been - more actually, for politics and social activism had eaten most of his free time in college, and slogging billable hours until partnership had taken its toll - and a pretty girl turned his head every time.  

There was that new girl in the gym, a sylphic Japanese beauty, right out of an Edo woodcut, so elegant, so classic, so sloe-eyed and magnificent!  Or the newcomers to Washington - blonde, blue-eyed, flaxen-haired young women from Iowa and Kansas for the presidential term, delectable morsels, sweet, innocent things, as desirable as Christmas candy or lemon drops. 

Konstantin Levin, a principal character in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina lamented God's irony of having created man, an intelligent, sentient, creative, person of humor and charm, given him but a few decades on earth, and then consigned him to an eternity beneath the cold, hard ground of the steppes. 

Harry felt a worse irony - that God had created men with a lifelong, desperate interest in women, but with a very early sexual pull-by date. Most men were either unaware of the irony or ignored it, and doddered into old age with the same prune-faced hag they had married decades before and with only faint silhouette memories of sexual pleasure. 

'I must act and act now', Harry said to himself one morning after a particularly rancid-smelling night - the king-sized bed had become nowhere near wide enough for reasonable distance; but he was soon to find that intimacy with a stranger was not as easy as it was in the old days, the days of love-the-one-you're-with, the singles bar pickup days of the East Village.  At his age he was not even  given a second glance. 

Yet, he was not old, not irrelevant, and certainly not past his pull-by date.  If only there were opportunity and good measure, he might be once again in his sexually emotional prime. 

The chance came with Marge from Accounting, a young woman with a father-fixation, an oddly receded hairline, a tendency to run to fat, but with a blonde vivacity which she adopted and husbanded from Cosmo, Elle, and Vogue. 

It was this father fixation that was the trigger.  Now, Mr. Pappas was no great shakes, no entrepreneur, scion of industry, man of arts and letters, but a simple typesetter turned computer programmer.  His influence on Marge was of the simplest, most basic variety - he loved and doted on his daughter, so much so that she thought he was the lover of her dreams.  Old, nose-hairy, clotted and insignificant Artur Pappas would be her male model forever. 

And so it was that when Harry, desperate for female attention, and impatient for the sexual satisfaction that would come with successful mating, met Marge, equally on pins and needles waiting for Mr. Right, the relationship was destined for fruition, 

Martinis and oysters at the Mayflower, two Quaaludes in the taxi, a delirious night in a second story walkup in Adams Morgan, and the deal was sealed.  They were a couple - an illicit, unusually paired one, but necessary.  If either one ever bothered to think beyond the bedroom, the Piper Heidsieck and the take out, they would have known that this was an affair of unfortunate necessity and not romance. 

They grasped and clawed each other, both thanking God, both as delighted as schoolchildren with a new toy, a new teacher, or pizza for lunch.  The affair lasted for months, each lover more involved and obsessed with each other every week. The inevitability of its finale - he going back to his yellowing wife and Marge to a life of celibacy, dildoes and increasingly unsustainable fantasy - was ignored at all cost; and their weekend trysts were all the more intense and gratifying. 

December-May marriages have been limned for centuries - the rejuvenating, transforming, existential love of an older man for a younger woman is the stuff of dreams, legend, and psychology 

In fact Harry's physician when discussing the affair and its ultimate end asked him whether he was ready. 

'For what?', said the besotted, live-forever patient.  'Coming down from such a love affair is worse than heroin', said the doctor. 

The literature was filled with accounts of suicidal depression.  The end of the affair for older men signifies finality; and worse, the end of the reliving of the glories of the past. The older man is easily seduced into thinking that this idyll will last forever, that he has indeed found the Fountain of Youth. 

'It's almost worse than if you never had it', said the doctor'. The combined pain of the burial of youth, the finality of one's last love, and the irreducible return to a dour, unpleasant reality is too much for many men.  'Be careful what you wish for'. 

Duplicity, infidelity, and faithlessness are easily forgiven by women in one's elder years - too many sunken costs, too much history, too much too lose to make a fuss about men behaving badly - but there will always be a price to pay.  Infidelity always comes with strings. 

In the waning months of the affair with Marge from Accounting, Harry wondered if he could trade up. Now that a line had been crossed and he was on his own, why not Bettina from the Front Office, a Paraguayan beauty? Or Usha, Palestinian queen of the Seventh Floor?

But the variables of The Perfect Storm which had come together so felicitously with Marge, were not guaranteed to be universally operative, and after his first sallies in these women's directions, he had to face facts.  

So, the affair with Marge from Accounting ended, Harry once again became a considerate if not dutiful husband, and he looked forward to his remaining years with grim fortitude. 

The Coleman Silk character in Phillip Roth's The Human Stain', an older man in an affair with a much younger woman, far out of his social class, says to a critic, 'Granted, she's not my first love, and granted she's not my best love; but she is certainly my last love. Doesn't that count for something?'

Of course it does. The Coleman Silk character is murdered because of his affair, but Harry only soldiers on in a soggy, barely palatable but necessary marriage.  Ah, the ways of the heart.