How A Very Unattractive Man Found His Political Niche - Beauty Has No Place In Doing Good

Henry Towson was ill-favored in the genetic luck of the draw.  The child of attractive parents, he came out with none of their distinguishing, notable features.  He was, for lack of a more generous and forgiving term, misshapen.  Nothing seemed to go where it belonged, so misaligned were his features and so exaggerated.  He had none of the classic facial symmetry which has characterized beautiful men and women and featured in the sculptures of Ancient Greece and Rome.  

 

His hair was untamed, a bit of the warlock, neither fully curly nor straight, but a nasty whorl.  His nose was long, but not aquiline, graceful, and Roman, but serrated and casting a long shadow.  His ears, while not exactly pendulous, were noticeable for their unusual size and oversized lobes. 

This was all bad enough in a world which prized beauty, but his parents were not just attractive, but Hollywood ready.  His mother in fact had modelled as a young woman, and his father chosen to represent his firm in their national brochure; so when they went out in public with their son, it was an embarrassment.  Of course they loved him and wished him well, and would give him all the social and financial advantages they had had, but still felt uncomfortable when friends and neighbors met them on the street, peered into the baby carriage, and could only manage a, 'Wow, what a baby', unable to gin up the usual fawning words. 

He soldiered his way through school, did his best to swallow the taunts and ridicule of his classmates, kept his head down and mind straight, but could not help but feel hurt and hopeless.  As he grew older, he watched his friends charm and win the most beautiful girls while they gave him little notice.  Many of these boys were as dumb and clueless as apes, but still were put in the front row, favored, privileged, and honored by teachers. 

There was something about physical beauty which prevailed and superseded any other more substantive characteristic or talent. 

The bias in favor of physically attractive people is robust, and has been proven again and again by researchers, most notably Pierce, Hendriks et al with attractive people being perceived as more sociable, happier and more successful than unattractive people   Attractiveness biases have been demonstrated in such different areas as teacher judgments of students, voter preferences for political candidates, and jury judgments in simulated trials 

Recently researchers at Harvard investigated the “beauty is goodness” stereotype in U.S. films and found that attractive characters were portrayed more favorably than unattractive characters on multiple dimensions across a random sample drawn from five decades of top grossing films.  

The authors also found that participants watching a biased film (level of beauty and gender stereotyping) subsequently showed greater favoritism toward an attractive graduate school candidate than participants watching a less biased film.  In the area of employment decision making, attractiveness also influences interviewers’ judgments of job applicants. 

Just as there are bell curves for intelligence, talent, and athletic ability; so is there one for beauty.  The marvelously beautiful and the pitifully ugly lie near the asymptotic ends of the curve, and are small percentages of the population. 

Unfortunately Henry Towson fell very close to asymptotic end of the curve.  He was definitely not grotesquely ugly or even moderately so, but no amount of finagling, fancy dress, or hours at the spa, could move him up and out from the awful penumbra of brutal unattractiveness. 

He was stuck with his his genetic legacy - attributed to Great Uncle Lawson who no matter what the pose, the lighting, his outfits, or attractive, modifying backdrops of his photographs came out as ugly as sin with the same lack of symmetry, misshapenness, and naturally glowering looks of his descendent. 

At some point, Henry decided to accept the bad hand he was dealt, and still find ways to win at life's poker table.

At his university, the protest movement was in full swing.  The progressive faction of the student body had their fingers in every social disorder.  They were at the barricades demonstrating for social justice just like their parents and grandparents had been in the Sixties.  They were outraged, angry, and full of hatred for the oppressive, racist powers that be.  The world was a viperous nest of malignity - a population which dismissed the coming climate catastrophe, which consigned the black man to perpetual dysfunction, which marginalized the gay man, lesbian and transgender, and which demanded closed borders to keep out deserving asylees. 

Curiously and surprisingly, Henry found that the most radical student organizations were represented by men and women like him - sorrowfully unattractive - and yet there was something heady and happy about the gatherings, the marches, and the protests.  Ugliness disappeared in an atmosphere of joyful purpose.  Young men and women hugged and kissed, embraced with love and unity, sang songs of protest but with love and emotional power.  

When they returned home from Washington and the National Mall, they reverted to form -  dowdy, disheveled, and brutally ugly.  The meandered through the days, an undesirable breed apart, and only when it was time to show their reformist colors were they transformed into happy couples.

They were dismissed and marginalized by the elite of the university - those attractive, desirable, privileged classmates with classically handsome and beautiful looks; the young men and women who, observed by the researchers from Harvard and Duke, would always be the first to be chosen, feted, honored, and obeyed.  To these Adonises, members of Harry's group were little more than apes in the monkey house. 

Not only were they insignificant and irrelevant, they were so ugly they were avoided, shunned, and disregarded.  As a result they banded together even more, and became a cluster of unattractiveness. 

None of this mattered to Harry who like everyone else, wanted to feel at home someplace; and this progressive cabal was just it.  So generously inclusive was it that he forgot his misfortune, and felt accepted, happy, and positive. 

He had been so convinced of the rightness of the political causes espoused at the university, that he continued on this path of social justice after graduation.  Not only would he still be a member of a particular, if peculiar social group, he would be working for social betterment. 

In the progressive movement both ideas merged.  Not only were the objectives of social reform existentially important, but that beauty was a symbol of the settled, ignorant, idle bourgeois class. Those classmates who had summered on Nantucket and wintered in Gstaad, those blond airheads of inherited wealth and privilege were the faces of the enemy.  Ugliness was a symbol of commitment, political honor, and righteous belief. 

The life of a progressive was the mirror image of the Mount Olympus of physical beauty.  Unattractiveness was the ticket to political and social success, but just the opposite of that of the rich, talented, and beautiful.  Henry's life was to be one of significance, not airy indifference. 

And so it was that he made his way with what he had - or more properly exploited his physical misfortune like a savvy miner.  He found the seam of gold in a society of black coal...Or so it was that he thought of himself. 

He made his way up through the progressive ranks, being more and more recognized as a liberal's liberal, undaunted and outspoken on every social issue, eloquent, persuasive, and insistent.  So much so that his audiences forgot his miasmic ugliness and only listened to his words. 

He had found his home.  He married a girl from the movement, and unlike his parents who had produced a physical outlier, they produced one of their kind, a 'Wow, what a baby' boy who if he was lucky would follow the same anointed trajectory of his parents. 

The Bliss Of Ignorance - Life Is So Much Easier With True Belief, The Saga Of A Credulous Woman

For Vicki Samuels there was not a scintilla of doubt that each and every item in the progressive canon was true and undeniable.  As such there was no reason to doubt or to question. It was all received wisdom - the climate, the borders, the black man, transgenders, capitalism, and racism. These were the philosophical pillars of American society, deep, strong, unimpeachable, and eternal.  It felt good every morning to know that God was in his heaven and all was right with the world. 

Yet everything was wrong with the world - the black man continues to be oppressed in a world of white supremacy, the climate shows no signs of healthy reversal, the gay man, the lesbian, and the transgender are still marginalized and hated, needy refugees are turned back at the border or rounded up and deported once here, and Wall Street keeps up its predatory, acquisitive behavior favoring the rich and well-to-do; but everything is on the right path for renewal, transformation, and return. 

Vicki used to be a voracious reader, but the more she read now, the less she learned or discovered.  The world was exactly as forecast, on a downward spiral of hate, incineration, and misery.  There was no need to read about sea level rise and the barrage of Atlantic hurricanes because global warming was a fait accompli, an undeniable, unquestioned phenomenon.  Whatever the vicissitudes of weather, the trajectory was the same - a disastrous, violent, destructive climate Armageddon. 

Every day white, privileged men exerted undue power over the vulnerable, fomented hatred of all other races, genders, and ethnicities. Gestapo SS storm troopers were rounding up legitimate asylees, loading them on cattle cars and shipping them back to the concentration camps of origin.   Gay clubs and the lesbian beer halls of Bernal Heights were raided, and men and women were sent to far northern reservations far worse than Soviet gulags. Black men were hanged from sycamore limbs as often as during the days of Jim Crow and segregation. 

Vicki knew this absolutely and needed no confirmation for her beliefs.  The time for inquiry and investigation were over. 

Now, of course none of these assumptions were true, vetted, parsed, and studied. Vicki took them all on face value, matters of principle, divine injunction, and an almost Biblical faith.  

How did this viral possession of an ordinary, reasonably intelligent, uninspiring but good woman happen.  As a child she believed in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy; but as she got older forgot them, relegated them like old dolls she played with as a toddler, kept them in a favorite, soft part of her memory but never once looked at them as anything more than enduring myth. 

She was tricked by older children - stones collected from a giant's lair, a space alien's tooth, and the magical potion of wild berries and pine root - but those too were dismissed in normal childhood evolution.  

She believed boys were actually interested in her although she had none of the charm, beauty, and sexual allure of her classmates.  She primped in the mirror seeing only Helen of Troy, not the rather unattractive offspring of unattractive parents.  She believed it when class activists told her that she had a mission to reform others, and that the world needed young women like her. 

There was no indication that she would necessarily fall off the rails or into the deep end.  For a long time she retained her equilibrium, chose and acted sensibly; but as she grew older, it was as though all intellectual reserve had crumbled.  She had become a credulous, naive, and totally vulnerable woman. 

It wasn't that the progressive canon was so new, revolutionary, or existential. Far from it.  It was as fantastical as any other utopian movement, filled with aspirations, dreams, happy hopes for an impossible paradise of harmony, universal justice, and love but with no foundation, no historical precedent or relevance.  Vicki's immediate, whole-hearted, absolute embrace of the liberal canon was not based on logic, objectivity, analysis, or exegesis.  Something else was the matter. 

Professor Howard Rubenstein of Harvard, noted social scientist and bio-ethics researcher, had this to say about the nature of true belief:

True Belief, the passionate embrace of a utopian future, the jettisoning of rational doubt and in its place installing an altar to hopefulness is a common phenomenon, rooted somewhere in the dimly remembered events of childhood, maturing in the fiercely hostile world of adolescence, and growing inalienable in the heady atmosphere of political righteousness.  True Believers, unlike the normally skeptical and patient, wait for the illogical epiphany which will finally release them from the confines of the real world and let them gambol in fantasy. 

 

Vicki lives in a leafy neighborhood of Washington, DC, a politically uniform, universally liberal enclave of the city.  Each and every resident is of the same political absolutism.  No one needs look any farther than the mirror to confirm their hatred of Donald Trump and his MAGA followers.  There are things in the world that need no inquiry.  There is no need to deconstruct to discover political cadence, meter, or tone.  To a man and in complete lockstep Vicki's neighbors march to the same drummer. 

This unquestioning neighborhood of foundational belief was the perfect home for Vicki who by this time had rid herself of any niggling, residual doubts of progressive righteousness.  It was time to rest from debate and animus and lie back in the knowledge that history had come to an end. 

A few years ago the political philosopher Francis Fukuyama had concluded that with the fall of the Soviet Union, the world had come to 'the end of history', that is that it was now united in democratic principle, and would never more be subjected to tyranny and political evil. 

Where he got his news has always been a mystery, but for a few years after the demise of Communist Russia, the world believed him in a wave of idle hopefulness.  It wasn't long before the idyll ended and the world fell apart in a miasma of territorialism, religious fanaticism, and political hatred. 

So the residents of University Park should have known better.  History will never end, human nature will continue to drive territorial ambition, self-interest, and aggressiveness.  If there is such a thing as received wisdom it is the absolute ineluctability of human nature. 

Ignorance is indeed bliss for the True Believer who has chosen to escape the hurly-burly world of political difference and to reside in a world which needs no confirmation.  And who can blame them? Who would not want to live in an unencumbered, uncontested world? The happiness principle, the new ethos of political absolutism. 

Meritocracy - The China State Dinner Guest List, Not A Black Face In The Crowd

There they were surrounding the Presidents of the United States and China - Musk, Bezos, Brin, Huang, Ellison, Page, and Zuckerberg, America's genius cluster, neo-industrialists like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan of a hundred years ago, the men whose intelligence, creativity, ambition, will and insight have confirmed the country's premier position in high-tech, media, and business. 

China is the second biggest economy in the world, America's most formidable adversary, a country of remarkable achievement, in only a few decades rising from the poverty of the Maoist years to one of the world's wealthiest, most ambitious and best militarily prepared. 

Xi has made China's intentions clear. With its Machiavellian world view, its Confucian ethic, its imperial history, and a Communist system which insists on cultural integrity, patriotism and national pride, a deliberate, single-minded drive for international superiority, and a program to elevate millions out of poverty to wealth, it will preside over all nations. 

It owns much of the United States' debt, is on a path to control the natural resources necessary for modern, high-tech technology, to command the attention of Third World nations as it continues to make mutually favorable deals for mineral wealth and energy.  There are none of America's conditionalities applied to African nations, insisting on judicial and electoral reform as conditions of foreign aid.  The Chinese have negotiated an agreement with Angola - guarantee oil at a fixed, below-market rate, and we will rebuild your failing infrastructure.  

Morality and exceptionalism have no place in the Chinese geopolitical worldview  Every country is bound to further its national interest first, foremost, and exclusively.  It is up to recipient countries to reform if they see fit. As such, and guided by such a simple ethos, the Chinese have managed to assume political and economic hegemony over Africa and much of the rest of the developing world while the United States has dithered, mired in self-referential moralism. 

At the core of Chinese dominance is a socio-philosophical culture which values hard work, discipline, single-minded attention to excellence, and an indefatigable practicality.  One has to look no farther than the Chinese diaspora in America to see this ethos at work.  Chinese students are the majority at specialized high schools like New York City's Stuyvesant which takes students based on a highly competitive exam.  They predominate to such a degree at America's top tier schools that a Supreme Court case had to be fought to ensure that programs of diversity did not discriminate against them. 

So it is no surprise that Donald Trump brought out the big guns of modern industry at his state dinner.  America has been and will always be a world leader in economic influence.  China may be a worthy competitor, but these men sitting around the formal dinner table are not to be taken lightly.  They will engineer America's supremacy in AI, robotics, and the introduction of ultra-high technology throughout the economy. 

'Racist', said Bob Muzelle when the read the guest list in the Washington Post. 'Not a black face among them', but no comment could be more irrelevant.  Presidents Xi and Putin of Russia have had a good laugh at the circus of diversity, equity, inclusivity, and identity politics dividing America, focusing on irrelevant, historically ignorant, and febrile fantasies.  The more the United States is consumed by such idiocy and turns its vision away from the far more important if not existential geopolitical issues of the day, the better it is for the Machiavellian, determined regimes of the world. 

There was no politically driven, enforced mandate of diversity promoting the men of the genius cluster.  They rose to the top of the industrial pyramid and to untold wealth thanks to brains, ambition, will, and ingenuity.  There is no room for the less qualified in their intellectual aerie; no room for hopeful but intellectually laggard hopefuls. 

All formal White House events under the Biden administration were examples of diversity run rampant.  Guests were chosen to show off a 'rainbow coalition', an assortment of races and ethnicities with little regard for excellence, ability, or promise.  It was enough to show the world and assembled dignitaries that America was a cultural haven, a humane, considerate, compassionate place. 

There were no black faces around the formal dinner tables at the Trump dinner because the black community still lags far behind in educational performance, professional success, scientific achievement, intellectual brilliance, and uncommon character. This all may be in the cards, but not now.  

The head table at one of Biden's last state diners was a circus act, a side show, a collection of every possible variety of race, gender, and ethnicity - and not just tame, Armani-suited, examples of business demeanor, but the most exaggerated versions of each.  Not just gay men who looked like every other American man, but the swishiest, most outlandishly cabaret-ready ones.  Such diversity was far more powerful, telling, and indicative of geopolitical superiority than any collection of Silicon Valley and Wall Street so-called geniuses. 

To Bob Muzelle and his progressive colleagues, the guest list at the Chinese state dinner was a travesty, an expression of America's deeply-rooted sense of elitism, aristocracy, cultural separatism, and raw Darwinian competition. They howled when they saw the limousines pull up to the White House gate - billionaires and their white trophy wives - tall, elegantly dressed, stunningly beautiful consorts to the world's most powerful. 

And yet, all Bob could do when he made up his own diverse guest list was to come up with old, hackneyed retreads - Al Sharpton, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cornel West, and Henry Louis Gates - men known more for their social media sites and public showiness than any real substance.  Of course there were hundreds of black athletes who dominate American professional sports, but all these men can do is throw or kick a ball, and would add nothing to the high octane fuel of state dinners. 

Progressives like Muzelle were stuck within the  confines of 'diversity' a political agenda which stopped at the surface and had no interest in the real high qualities of a nation.  He was hobbled by an irrelevant algorithm.  Given his political party's insistence on the superficial, insisting that race, gender, and ethnicity alone gave agency, respect, and title, he was forced to come up dry. 

Of course there were plenty of Asian Americans at the Trump dinner.  What would Silicon Valley be without them? But they don't count and don't belong in the racial pantheon of the liberal Left.  They are not victims, and that is what filters them out of the equation.  Diversity is not static, but a first step to raising the disadvantaged out of social poverty. No Asians, by and large successful, intellectually driven, professionally outstanding, and wealthy, fall into that category. 

'Your time is up', said a Yale classmate of Bob as kindly as he could, 'and about time', he added to himself; but to Bob the fight was now enjoined at the highest level.  Donald Trump was a maleficent, dangerous, opportunistic interloper who must be defeated, replaced, decommissioned and sent packing before he did any more damage. 

Yet, in his quieter moments, Bob, now a man of advanced years reflected on his life and saw only his shabby office, his split-level in the low-end suburbs, his penurious income, the failing public schools his children had attended, his exclusion from all the perks and advantages a Yale education should have afforded him.  The classmate who called him out for his penitential politics was about to head off to Nantucket for the summer in time to sail in the Yale-Harvard Alumni regatta.  He was to be joined there by other members of Bob's class of 19__, patrician, wealthy, influential men and their families of beautiful wives and children. 

He quickly shook off the awful vision and returned to the social activism which had sustained him for so many years; but there was that guest list, in indelible ink before his eyes.  America's best and brightest shown off to the world while his ragtag, motley diverse assemblage of racial, gender, and ethnic caricatures was nowhere to be seen.