Looking For A Husband - Danube River Tours, Castles, And Eye Shadow, The Feminine Mystique Of Travel

Vicki Brice squawked all the way up to Vassar for the reunion.  'This time will be a charm', she said referring to the Danube tour where she hoped to find her a husband - or rather a companion - for at her age romance was a thing of the distant past.  So dim in fact that she had to dig deep in her reticule of memories to sort out Michael from Phillip, Robert from David - or was it the other way around.  Never mind, doesn't matter. Let bygones be bygones, and let life begin again. 

Her husband of many years was not yet cold in the ground before Vicki began to plan her future.  'God only knows how many years one has left', she mused to her classmates, limning the praises of Lindblad Travel, a savior in disguise, the happy refuge for still-young widows like her.  She was not going to sit on her behind and watch the clock tick her hours away, not on your life, so it wasn't long after Arnold was in the grave that she began her romantic journeys.

The reunion would be a lot of old cows mooing about some bull who took them in the pasture, but old times are good times, and along with the fragments of trips to Yale, the Old Campus, the parties at Davenport and Silliman, reunions were silly, happy, girly things.  

Vassar girls however were supposed to be a cut above Smith, Holyoke, and the rest of the Seven Sisters - a place for the brightest, the future of women and not the usual marriage mills. Yes, the college did arrange busses to take girls down to Yale for the weekend, but that was part of the perks of a school like Vassar - differential calculus and the pick of the litter.  

If a Vassar girl had not found the man she was to marry by the time she graduated, something had gone awry.  God knows, there was no lack of opportunity. 

Now, Vicki was not exactly Miss Universe, in fact far from it.  She had gotten all the wrong genes from her Guatemalan father and Canary Island mother - a pairing which looked good on college applications just beginning to look for 'diversity' but which genetically speaking was a bad hand. 

She tried her best to make up for her genetic misfortune and spent a fortune on cosmetics, hair styling, and Lord & Taylor, but not even a makeover genius could have done anything for those narrow-set eyes, fright wig hair, disappointing nose, and thin as paper lips.  As much as she tried to convince herself otherwise, she was not much to look at.

Yet Yale was a big place, and the bell curve applies to everything; so although the number of chisel-jawed, blonde, blue-eyed Adonises skewed the curve and flattened it considerably, there were bound to be good men, just men, the right kind of men for her. 

She did find one, her recently departed husband, Arnold; and if there is little record of the couple, individually or together, it is because there are people on this earth who barely leave a smudge, men and women who come and go with barely a notice, folded into the run of the mill so perfectly that when they die, it is as though they had never lived. 

So Vicki's squawking was her war cry,  She might have been married to an emotional bookkeeper all these years - Arnold was never able to muster much more enthusiasm than turning a page - but her new life was going to begin, albeit far too late.  

All in all Arnold was a good husband, one of the very few who never strayed - but to be honest, this sexual sedentariness, far from honorable, made him even more unattractive. She had always had eyes for Lance Reventlow, Yale's prize, a Casanova, Valmont, and Lothario even as a freshman; but watched him fall into the spider web of Alexandra Cabot of the Boston Cabots, a tart, une pute, but a girl with money galore and Hollywood looks.  How could anyone compete with that?

There was first the Caribbean cruise, a very pedestrian affair. First Class did not do much to separate the wheat from the chaff, filled as it was with jolly old men from Dubuque more suited for excusing themselves for port and cigars while the ladies retired than anything romantic.  

Not a one of these 'men' was of any interest, the on-and-off stops at hot, steamy places was enervating, and the meals, touted as being prepared by a five-star chef, were as limp and insipid as her fellow diners. 

The second tour - the Aegean - offered more promise. It attracted a higher caliber of client thanks to a team of docents from Columbia University, a whopping all-inclusive price, and luxury accommodations; but the men kept their noses in their Baedekers and took copious notes during all lectures.  Who cared who did what to whom in the Peloponnesian wars, for God's sake? 

So this third tour, the Danube tour, seemed right.  Thanks to AI, Vicki was able search beyond the brochures.  There was no shame in asking ChatGPT anything, so she typed in 'I want a river cruise where I can meet, attractive, eligible older men' and Avalon was at the top of the list. 

To take a step back - why did these matronly women possibly think that trolling for husbands on a cruise ship was going to catch them a prize? Vicki had been saddled with her unhappy ordinariness for decades, and in that time not one man other than her bookkeeper husband ever looked her way. In fact Arnold rarely looked up at her at all. He was happy in the relationship because she, unlike most women, never forced the issue.  

Beverly Adams, for example, a woman of some stature in her former profession, married to a man whom she missed when he died, still needed male company.  Who said that women could be complete without men? Beverly wondered.  Probably some lesbian feminist who never needed men.   

So she went on cruises just like Vicki with little more in her bag to recommend her.  She was still attractive in an older woman kind of way, still as pert and vivacious as she was years ago, and while not beautiful, certainly attractive.  However she came up empty handed each and every time.  Divorced men obsessed about their wives, either disconsolate for having been left on the curb or angry that they had been; and widowers were still living in the shadows of the dear departed. 

Beverly was adaptable. Waverly was dead and buried, they had led a good life, but old age is unforgiving and the clock ticks faster than it did when one is young.  Yet for all her sanguinity and enthusiasm, she found nothing but dissatisfaction on board.  

Cruises are deliberately configured to encourage companionship, to make romantic interchange easier, to grease the wheels.  The cruise line membership algorithm was designed for compatibility.  It took the chance out of meeting.  Otherwise why bother? One might just as well cruise the National Gallery of Art or the Corcoran for well-intentioned, cultured men. 

Let's face it.  Most of these women, although hardwired to need men, socially programmed to seek them out and to live with them, were diffident about the idea at best. Decades of marriage only confirmed what their inner voices told them - men really aren't worth it, better to live without them, especially as one gets older and sex fades  as a desirable commodity. 

Vicki squawked all the way up 95, the Dewey Throughway, and Route 9W to Poughkeepsie.  This time would be different, she told her classmates.  She would come back refreshed, invigorated, renewed, and with a beautiful man in tow. 

Needless to say the Danube Cruise was just as much of a bust as the others, and Vicki was forced to regroup.  Maybe she was barking up the wrong tree. 

After the reunion she dropped out of sight, not a peep in the alumnae notes of The Vassar Quarterly, not a sighting anywhere in Washington; so it was anyone's guess what happened to her.

‘I hope she found someone',  one Vassar friend said to another; but Vicki would have been barking and yapping if she had.  No, a singular fate must have awaited her. 

There was nothing really surprising about Vicki's odyssey, regardless how she might have ended up. Women of a certain age are simply too hardwired to the man thing, the social thing, to do anything else.  All well and good for both sexes when both are plump and juicy, not so later on. 

Slave To The Kitchen, Slave To The Job - Why The Outrageousness Of Donald Trump Is So Appealing

Harlan Banks worked two jobs and a little on the side.  There was always something to deliver or dig or fetch, and he made ends meet.  His life in a small town in the Mississippi delta was unremarkable for its regularity and its sameness.  Everyone was in the same boat, paddling in the slow current of the bayou, watching time pass with little to show for it. 

Yes, he loved his children, put up with his wife and his in-laws, enjoyed a week on the Gulf every few years or so, but soldiered on like others in his regiment - born poor, raised poor, and lived poor.  Not colored poor, but poor enough, not trailer trash but living in a trailer. 

He was a complaisant, uncomplaining worker at Walmart and The Live Oak, a popular restaurant where he worked seven till closing. Living on the margins meant he could never complain, act up, or make demands.  He was as much a slave and no better off than Isaiah who had worked the Ottaway Plantation where his great-grandfather had been overseer.  Dawn till dusk in the cotton fields, cornpone and fatback, working his fingers to the bone for nothing. 

His family remained on the plantation during Reconstruction as tenant farmers.  It didn't take long for Harper Middleton, the former grandee of Ottaway, run off his property by the Freedmen's Bureau, to regain his land, and he was quick to hire whomever was still in the county, white or black, to work as tenant farmers. 

Life as a tenant farmer was little different from slavery.  Harlan's forbears managed a living on the fertile bottomland recovered by Middleton, but were as beholden to him as former slaves were to him as Massa. 

Life went on for succeeding generations of Banks until the present day when Harlan Banks reflected on his history. For how many generations longer would Banks be owned, tethered and tied, beholden and corralled? 

The election of Donald Trump changed everything.  Not that he expected to be a guest at Mar-a-Lago or at the White House, nor even that expected prosperity to come his way.  That might come once attention turned towards people like him - patriotic, hardworking, Americans of faith who asked nothing from government but opportunity - but the real reason for the fresh air was the personality of the President, a man who had nothing to do with the pedantry, sanctimony, and righteousness of the Left. 

He was a Super Hero, a comic book action figure come to life.  He was an Ubermensch with no patience for small minds and infantile idealism.  He was a Colossus.  It wasn't so much that Harlan would ever be like Donald Trump - his yachts, mansions, and arm candy - but that thanks to him he might regain his dignity.  

After years of being told he was a white supremacist, a racist cracker, a fundamentalist fool, an airheaded swamp rat, he was suddenly his own man.  After years of the configuration of society around the assumption of the black man's native superiority, the white man was once again in focus. 

He was again told that his Scotch-Irish roots were noble, that the European civilization from which his ancestors had come was valorous and built the foundation for liberal democracy; that there was no such thing as systemic racism; that there was no distinction between the working man and the leader of government. 

Most importantly, Trump was outrageous. He bulldozed his way down Independence Avenue and got rid of the do-nothing hangers-on in one bureaucracy after another.  He was building a grand ballroom, an Arch of Victory, and a Field of Heroes.  He was wielding a mighty Christian sword crushing the infidel and razing his cities.  He was reprising Joshua in the battle of Jericho, ridding the Holy Land of the heathen enemies of Israel. 

Professional wrestling matches would be held at the White House, and tinsel, sequins, and sparkle would return.  The days of ugliness, faux propriety, and absurdity would be gone and forgotten.  Harlan's America was back!

This of course was exactly what drove the Left to distraction.  It wasn't so much the President's conservative policies - lower taxes, freer enterprise, less regulation, a more muscular foreign policy, an embrace of capitalism and Wall Street investment - but his embrace of what they saw as a lowbrow, cheap culture.  

After years of progressive promotion of gay men, lesbians, transgenders and the black man, the beautiful people were back - the blonde, blue-eyed women and handsome, chisel-jawed men.  It was the return of a much maligned culture that they thought they had thoroughly disparaged and dismissed that rankled. 

The President didn't just change the cultural ethos on little cats' paws, but like gangbusters - with an in-your-face, fuck you braggadocio - and it was this that Harlan cheered.  The explosive anything goes ethos of the old America. 

Why, the Left asked, would anyone like Harlan Banks vote for Donald Trump, a crony capitalist whose policies would only benefit the rich and the privileged?  Their policies and programs would be designed for the marginalized, the disadvantaged, and the poor.  

Yet as Harlan knew these programs were fictions, enabling charades for minorities, giveaways in the name of equity but nothing more than posturing.  During the Biden years Harlan hadn't seen one dime of the purported equity money so widely promised.  Trump made no fictive promises, but only pledged to recalibrate and reconfigure the American economy to do its job, to spread prosperity.  

Harlan would wait but in the meantime was energized, spirited, and awakened by the President.  Every time he called out a reporter for their dumb questions; every time one of his Cabinet members refused to toady up to Congressional committee members and snapped back at their preposterous sanctimony, he cheered. 

This is what the Left missed.  America is not a progressive, serious, compassionate place.  It is lowbrow, simple, and honest about its lack of pretention.  It is a country of Las Vegas and Hollywood, con men, pimps, and charlatans, catfish noodlers and alligator hunters.  It is a country of men like Harlan who have limits - and they have had enough of the Biden progressive freak show. 

Northern liberals are proud of the fact that they have never set foot below the Mason-Dixon line, for to do so would be giving support to the racist, proto-segregationist, perennially Jim Crow cracker South.  They have never met a Harlan Banks and never wanted to do so.  Anyone born and raised as he was would not be worth their time. 

Progressive arrogance plus Trump outrageousness is the perfect political storm for continued conservative victory.  Americans like Harlan want their country back.  Let it become more 'diverse' but on Jeffersonian terms, terms of integration, patriotism, and subscription to a core moral ethos.  Not the progressives'  arrogant, politically expedient, absurd, and divisive 'inclusivity'. 

'Fuck 'em', said Harlan, catching the President's drift. 

What Makes A Progressive Or A Conservative? - The Tale Begins In Childhood

Progressives believe that with the right investment, continued commitment, passion, and a sense of righteousness, the world can become a better place.  Despite the lessons of history - perpetual, perennial wars, civil strife, palace coups, family jealousies, and the seeming ineluctability of human nature - Utopia is indeed possible. 

Conservatives claim that exactly because of these predictably similar millennia of history, and the hardwired, innate, unchangeable human nature within us, there is no such thing as progress.  Change, yes and by all means, but changing to something better, never.

While the two sides may quibble about superficialities - life expectancy, economic opportunity, social mobility - they differ fundamentally on the nature of human enterprise.  Conservatives say that faster cars, the Internet, medical advances simply mask the fundamental core reality of human nature.  That human conflict, competition, is not only fundamental but is the only way that the conditions of life - not its ethos or central purpose - can improve. 

Progressives dismiss this argument as self-serving.  Faster cars are indications of a better world, and that eventually the noble human spirit will find a way to harmonize ethos with material progress. 

These contrary beliefs do not simply define politics, but the way one behaves. One's  understanding of man’s relationship to God, secular institutions, society, and the geo-ecological environment are profoundly different. Our reactions to and sympathy/empathy for others is determined by a moral philosophy which either blesses and anoints others as brothers and sisters; or sees them as evolutionary competitors struggling for survival, dominance, and genetic longevity.

How did we become so different? We are both from the same socio-cultural milieu.  We both went to elite preparatory schools and universities; and although our immediate socio-cultural heritage was indeed different, there should be no reason why our political philosophy should have so dramatically diverged.

Some researchers have suggested that political philosophy has a genetic basis.  Although society, culture, education, and upbringing certainly have a role, it is bits of DNA which align in certain ways to produce conservatives or liberals.  John B Judis writing in The New Republic says:

Over the last two decades, political scientists, and psychologists have used genetics and neuroscience to claim that people’s political beliefs are predetermined at birth. Genetic inheritance, they argue, helps to explain why some people are liberal and others conservative; some people turn out to vote; and why some people favor and others oppose abortion and gay rights. The field itself has a name—genopolitics—and it is taking political science by storm. In the last four years alone, over 40 journal articles on the subject have appeared in academic journals 

Children are remarkable little creatures.  Before they are out of kindergarten they already have a sense of how the world works, not in any detail of course - no exogenous and endogenous variables, social conditioning, genetic predisposition, human nature - but the combination of inborn personality and character, a sharp perception, and native, uncomplicated intelligence are enough. 

It is clear from even a casual observation that children - too young to have been influenced by environmental factors differ significantly, and many of their emotional responses correspond to adult political philosophy.  Some children are born with both high intelligence and a well-defined sense of self.  They come to believe at a very early age that they are superior to other children and that they can do anything they want. 

Others are born with a sense of empathy - they are social beings rather than independent engines of activity.  Accommodation, consideration, collaboration are important elements for fostering and preserving this worldview. 

Progressives deny any such innate characteristics.  We are nothing more than the product of nurture which begins from the moment we are born; and yet no parent, no matter how progressive in outlook can ignore the indomitable will, demands, and insistence of young children.  They have come out of the womb combative, territorial, and self-defensive. 

There is a bell curve for everything, and within this central, inescapable paradigm, the reactions to it vary. Some, the highly intelligent children with a naturally highly honed sense of self are at one asymptote. Those less intelligent and with an inborn 'outer-ness' fall on the other end. 

As they grow older, these children do not lose these innate, inborn traits but express them in adult ways.  They become conservatives or progressives. 

Such evolution is not just political but philosophical.  It goes far beyond partisan politics.  A philosophical conservative will look at social dysfunction, harsh traditionalism, inequality, concentration of wealth and ability as natural expressions of human nature and human dynamics.  All revolve around the essential, unchangeable foundation of competition, territorialism, self-defensiveness, and aggressive demands for wealth, resources, and security. 

A progressive insists that there is no such thing as hardwiring.  These social characteristics are products of the environment and can be changed, modified, or eliminated. 

Kevin Fells was a very intelligent boy who mastered numbers, reading, and the chess board with ease.  He was impatient with the classmates and teachers who slowed him down, got in his way, impeded his development, kept him from understanding and achievement. 

From a very early age he instinctively understood the bell curve.  Some children were smart and others were not, and the way for the smart ones, like him, must be kept clear.  

He grew up at a time when cooperative learning had been introduced into primary school education.  The more gifted children were to help the slower learner even at the expense of their own progress.  Keven saw the unfairness of this.  Why should the scales be tipped in favor of those who would always be behind when students like Kevin - students of ability and promise - were held back?

In middle and high school, he saw the same imbalance; but now it was not simply unfairness but injustice.  The high standards of the private school he was attending were being eroded because of the admission of unqualified students simply because of their race. 

The school was devotedly liberal, proud of its long tradition of opposing racial segregation, and committed to educating students not only in advanced theoretical concepts but in moral posture.  To demonstrate this commitment, a black student was chosen to open every colloquy, every assembly, every graduation, and every matriculation. 

Neither Kevin nor any of his middle school classmates had parsed the issue.  Its antecedents, Quaker abolitionism, pacifism, and One World advocates were distant, unquestioned elements of their affirmative action stance; but all the students could see was disparity, unfairness, and injustice.  More importantly it consolidated the residual racial biases they already had. 

The community from which most students came was decidedly liberal and most parents accepted the school's policies without question; but affirmative action was an important milestone in his evolving conservatism.  The point was that despite an almost universal embrace of black-first preferential treatment. white guilt, and colonial shame, Kevin' natural, inbred, inborn, and undeniable political philosophy had never wavered.  The environment - nurture - had done nothing to sway him from his instinctively finely tuned perceptions. 

The same was true of those children born with liberal sentiments - those for whom compassion, empathy, sympathy, and unquestioning inclusiveness were hardwired.  These children considered the Kevins of the world arrogant, selfish, and proprietary. Kevin's accusers absorbed the liberal ethos of their parents, the school, and their neighborhood as received wisdom. 

The dynamics of adolescence - the primacy of belonging, the importance of conformity, and fear of censure - are hard for anyone to resist.  The liberal cast of the society at large is one thing, but when the neediness of adolescence is factored in, independence is rare.

Which is why Kevin was unusual.  His instincts, as valid as a teenager as they were as a young child went counter to such group censure and opprobrium; but such defiance had its price.  Being a conservative in a deeply-steeped liberal environment is not easy. 

As he grew into adulthood in the present day, his situation was even more precarious. It was hard for such an intelligent, incisive, compelling man to live within a culture of identity - one which not only did not value intelligence, will, ambition, and ability; but championed the reverse.  Idealism and Utopian conviction made objectivity impossible.  The country was not so much divided by Left and Right, but by idealism and fact. Progressives saw the world as what it could be, conservatives as what it was; and never would the twain ever meet. 

Was Kevin devoid of compassion and social concern?  Far from it; but because of his absolute conviction that all efforts must be calculated and planned within a competitive, natural selection, he shed no tears.  It was that which expelled him from the liberal community in which he lived more than anything.  No tears meant no love, no compassion, and no understanding. 

Kevin could not help being a conservative any more than his liberal colleagues could help their idealism.  It was a matter of character and personality - the particular configurations of the same human nature expressed in radically different ways. 

There are conversions - given enough time liberals will become conservative - but few and far between.  Nothing as hardwired as political philosophy - the very way one sees the world - is likely to change.