Good Fences Make Good Neighbors - Despite The Political Cant, Keep 'Em Out Is The National Meme

Marfa Potter supervised the construction of a stockade fence around her property, a seven-foot tall perimeter exactly like that around Fort Apache.  Better safe than sorry, and although the Andersons had been good neighbors, they were moving out soon, and who knew what was next.  University Park was one of Washington, DC's most affluent neighborhoods, so there was no danger of undesirable buyers, but still, fate is not always kind.   

The generous loans offered by the District of Columbia to 'less fortunate' families of the city, an affirmative action housing program didn't even come close to the nearly two million dollars these homes cost, and 'affordable' housing was still a thing for the outer suburbs.  No, that was not the issue.  It was just...

Here Marfa paused, for she never could articulate why exactly she wanted to fence herself and her family in. Perhaps it was her mother who hated her next door neighbors and wasn't happy until her father accepted her ultimatum to move 'away from prying eyes' and build her a proper house.  

Neighbors simply couldn't be trusted, her mother said, and there were more cases of bad neighbors than good.  The Phelps' dog - a barker, yes, but not an incessant one - had been poisoned, found stiff and legs up in the rose bushes behind their house; and all signs pointed to the recluses across the street, Arabs of some sort or Turks which was enough in those days to suggest guilt.  Marfa's mother spread the rumor up and down the street, and from then on neighbors kept an even greater distance from the outsiders. 

The Foxes were drinkers, Harold Arlen was a philanderer, and Lou Ann Michaels a tart, and the nightly fights, often from all three houses, could be heard from Commonwealth Street to Barker Road especially during the summer during which, in the days before air conditioning, all the windows were kept wide open. 

The move to the West End did not turn out quite as her mother had hoped.  The next door neighbor, no longer in tooth-by-jowl proximity - she lived across the small road between the houses - had a bulldog and a deaf son, and if she wasn't yelling at one, she was yelling at the other. Her voice carried, loud and clear, and even the traffic on Lincoln Street could not dampen it.  It was like living next to the Madwoman of Chaillot.  

When Marfa accompanied her father to visit poor relatives in New Haven, all living in tenements smelling of garlic, cod liver, and coal oil, the fighting in the narrow hallways or out the windows was impressive. There was nothing Streetcar Named Desire romantic about it. She could never forget the mayhem, the noise, and the sound of shattering crockery.

So, now that she had married well and was living well, she had the means to assure that such memories would not be revisited and that she would have the quiet, secure, and private life she had always wanted. 

Now, the neighborhood of University Park, if residents had been asked, would have been quite happy to erect a walled perimeter around it - a pipe dream of course, but an expression of their concerns about being intruded upon - invaded - by the undesirable elements which were edging closer.  

The high school built decades ago to serve the well-to-do residents of the neighborhood and nearby Foxhall and Cleveland Park had become more fitting for an inner city neighborhood than for wealthy Ward 3. Its nastiness drove homeowners in the vicinity away, property values dropped, and less desirable families moved in. Marfa's far western side of University Park would soon being gradually encroached upon. 

The irony of all this was that the neighborhood was solidly progressive.  'Democracy Matters, Hate Has No Home Here, and Black Lives Matter lawn signs were everywhere. No American flags flew because they were the presumptive banners of Trump supporters.  The progressive meme of Diversity Equity Inclusivity was universal in University Park, and residents were up in arms about the ICE storm troopers rounding refugees and political asylees, locking them in gulag-era holding pens and then deporting them.

Yet when the DC Council declared itself a sanctuary city and unveiled plans to build residences for these foreign visitors in every ward,  especially Ward 3 where a number of old department stores had been abandoned and the owners were looking for buyers or public support, residents were up in arms. 

When Marfa and her neighbors got wind of the city's plans to built a refugee, affordable housing, affirmative action high-rise in University Park, all pretentions, all suppositions of inclusivity and racial and ethnic harmony were dropped, and residents began to meet in opposition to the city.  

A lot of shuckin' and jivin' went on in these neighborhood meetings as residents stumbled over themselves trying to justify keeping illegal migrants out while still promoting inclusivity.  It was a question of architectural and zonal integrity, they said.  Such a building would destroy the architectural fabric of the area, and high rise buildings - other than the luxury condos built along Washington's Rodeo Drive at the north end of University Park - would be disruptive to the historic cast of the area. Etc. etc., all transparently xenophobic arguments. 

Photographs of the highly-publicized wedding of footballer Travis Kelce and superstar Taylor Swift in New York's Madison Square Garden went viral - not inside pix which were copy protected and private, but of the phalanxes of New York City police, the extensive impenetrable barriers, and the photo ID security checkpoints. 

Swift was an outspoken critic of Donald Trump and his anti-immigrant, closed-border, punitive policies, a supporter of Defund-the-Police movements, and a vocal advocate of open, ID-less voting so the security measures at the wedding venue seemed hypocritical at best. 

Bernie Sanders, socialist Senator, and espouser of all progressive causes - especially the concentration of wealth and America's mindless contribution to climate change - flies to environmental meetings in a private jet, owns three homes, and as a net worth in the millions. 

So given the universal hypocrisy and NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) American zeitgeist, it is hard to criticize Marfa Potter or the residents of University Park.  Living on two planes was completely normal for them.  They saw no contradiction in preserving their hard-earned rights and privileges while arguing for macro socio-economic change.  Holding two opposing points of view at the same time was a sign of intelligence, after all. 

They would be quite happy to have Barack Obama move in next to University Park and no fences would have to be built because he was one of them - a good black man, a responsible one, married with children, a lawyer. In other words, not just any black man.  This not only showed their racial tolerance, they said, but pointed to the way to a universally inclusive world. 

Not only were University Park residents not unhappy that their tax dollars were being spent on the poor in the inner city, they felt these taxes were a form of reparation.  It didn't matter if the investment did no good - it did not - but that they were doing their part to repay the legatees of slavery for the inhumanity of white oppressors. 

Not one resident of University Park had ever set foot in Anacostia or any other of the persistently dysfunctional, crime-ridden, pestilential slums across the river, but that wasn't the point.  It was the principle of the thing.  

So, Marfa and her neighbors piled one hypocrisy atop another until there was only mountain of intellectual debt.  No one could take them seriously, nor could anyone suffer the larger political insanity of the progressive Left any longer. 

Marfa finished the fence. It blocked the sun so her skip laurels and rhododendrons died, but the privacy was worth it until the new neighbors, parents to two teenage boys moved in.  This couple left the house to the boys on weekends and their parties went on all night. 

She thought up all kinds of devilish things to do to these inconsiderate, intrusive neighbors.  She remembered what her mother had planned to do to Mrs. Helander's rose bushes and Mrs. Phelps' Studebaker - but felt impotent, put upon, and defenseless. Privacy was a chimera; but every weekend her heartburn increased, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and she began to hear noises when there were none.  She triple-paned all the windows, banged pots and pans in the garden when the next door parties began and became a nervous wreck. 

'Harry', she said to her husband just like her mother said to her father decades ago, 'I can't take it', but up and leaving a two million dollar house for a 'better one', even in this wealthy corner of Washington, was not that simple; so Marfa was left to her madness and her hate - which actually stood her in good stead with the neighbors who hated Donald Trump but not with the admirable, vicious, untamed, venomous hatred of Marfa Potter. Hate is fungible.  It bleeds like bad coloring. 

Blowing Things Up On The Fourth Of July - How Sparklers Define The New Anti-Patriotism

Randy Harper always looked forward to Fourth of July because he could blow things up.  Fireworks were available everywhere - Jimmy's Smoke Shop carried cherry bombs and ashcans - but the real McCoy was Mickey Finn's on the Berlin Turnpike.  Mickey carried military grade explosives packed into small packages. He sold something called The Killer a pirated clone of the M-80, an American class of large powerful firecrackers which were originally made in the mid 20th century for the U.S. military to simulate explosives or artillery fire. 

How Mickey got his hands on this explosive which did not hit the general commercial market until a number of year later was always a mystery; but there it was, flying off the shelves for the likes of Randy Harper and his father who intended to blow things up on the Fourth.  

Randy had always liked to drop cherry bombs into trash cans filled with water and watch the simultaneous bulging and bursting of the container and the sky-high geyser of water from the explosion, but now that he had The Killer, capable of a Hiroshima firestorm, he was particularly excited.  This would be a Fourth to remember. 

The only problem was to decide what to blow up.  Just setting off The Killer just resulted in a loud explosive sound and a small crater in the back yard, but figuring out how to make it really do some damage and send things flying like the epochal scene in Zabriskie Point was another thing altogether.  

A chain reaction was what he wanted - The Killers set off in sequence, blowing up old stumps, flower pots, trash cans and steamer trunks in succession.  A real life battlefield of terror and destruction. 

World War II had just ended and the young boy listened fascinated at stories of how his father blew things up on his way from Normandy to Berlin - tanks, armored personnel carriers, bunkers, and German military headquarters. 

There was nothing more satisfying that sending a rocket into the lead tank in a Nazi panzer division, watching to top hatch blow off spinning a hundred feet into the field, and gunning down the crew as they scrambled up and out. He remembered the smell of cordite, and how the muzzle of his Browning glowed a dull red with the heat as laid down constant fire, eliminating any and all who fled the destruction of the tank convoy. 

When the Fourth rolled around, Bill Harper taught his son how to fight with Roman candles.  These fireworks shot off balls of fire in a shower of sparks and light, and when coordinated, provided a backyard sound and light show the envy of the neighborhood; but when leveled and used as a firearm, they could simulate battle.  Randy loved them and they were sure to stock up at Mickey Finn's weeks before the Fourth to beat the rush. 

The Fourth itself on Commonwealth Avenue was like the Battle of the Marne - explosives going off in every back yard, shaking foundations, singing the bark off of old oaks, and sending curled, blackened leaves floating down to the ground. 

Randy, now a father and grandfather, remembered those days well especially because now the only fireworks available were sparklers - twinkie gay things that did nothing but spark and smoke and wither down to nothing.

Randy, a patriot, a Republican, and a defender of America's glorious history, saw the sparkler as the meme of a feminized America - insipid, tame, inclusive, diverse, and frilly. Risk - the be-all and end-all of manhood was being removed.  Playgrounds offered no challenges, competition was absent on field days, boys were cossetted and silenced by feminist teachers, drugged by complicit parents, and lost and fumbling about with their innate rambunctiousness neutered. 

The homes in his neighborhood - a leafy enclave in affluent Northwest Washington - displayed no flags on the Fourth of July or Memorial Day.  Flags were not only a sign of approval of what had always been a racist, genocidal, misogynist country and a Trump Make America Great banner. 

His next door neighbor, Marlene Flint, wanted no part of this year's Fourth.  Donald Trump had made it all about himself like he has done everything else - the ballroom, the Arch, the Field of Heroes, the makeover of the Kennedy Center - and this celebration of the republic's 250th year would be no different.  It would be the same posturing, arrogant travesty of American history that has characterized his presidency since the beginning. 

  

Besides, what was there to celebrate about a country which had enslaved the black man since 1619, had committed genocide of the Native Americans in its Manifest Destiny push to the Pacific, and had created the world's greatest threat to world peace with its exceptionalism and military adventurism. 

There would be no flag flying from her porch, nor would there be any flags and bunting in her neighborhood, solidly progressive, anti-Trump, and dedicated to a reversal of the current misfortune and the creation of a new, socially generous, verdant, and harmonious world. 

She was quick to call out the very hypocrisy of a country which encouraged the barbarism of enslavement, and went about its Gone with the Wind cavalier ways for centuries - mint juleps on the verandah, hoop skirts, and antebellum magnificence while African slaves toiled under the hot sun in Delta cotton fields.

  

She had no pride in American military victories - Jackson had sold out the Chickasaws and Choctaws in the War of 1812, using them as cannon fodder against the British and then exiling them west of the Mississippi after the war was over.  The victory over Japan in WWII was at the expense of hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese who were incinerated by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were ignoble affairs, carried out with some vague notion of democracy but were actually no more than pursuits of American hegemony. 

She felt no pride in American social history, for it had treated women as slaves until the early Twentieth century, and had closeted gay and lesbian Americans since the dawn of the Republic. 

What in fact, was there to celebrate?  What more arrogant, mind-numbing assumption of greatness could be imagined in the follies of the Fourth this year?

She would light a few sparklers for her grandson, have grilled fish and baklava for dinner, considering the backyard barbecue a bourgeois, faux patriotic tradition, and shut all the windows to block the bombardment of Trump fireworks. 

Marlene Flint was not alone in her silent protest of the excesses of American exceptionalism.  Other residents of University Park flew gay pride and Palestinian flags, deployed Hate Has No Home Here and Democracy Matters lawn signs, and shook their heads in dismay and disgust at the military aircraft flyovers - the very same bombers which had reduced Gaza to rubble and were killing Iranian patriots. 

Sparklers, 'inclusivity', compromise, compassion - signs of the end not the beginning of American culture.  The United States had just defeated an oppressive colonial regime, declared independence, and founded a country based on unequivocal principle - individualism within an ethos of polity; military strength to defend freedom; economic power to grow the new republic into the world's most productive. 

Many viewers heard Bill Maher's rant about our feminized society. Fewer have listened to Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism? and The War Against Boys, and a critic of modern feminism.



Progressives for years have worried about the war against women, how it has not been won, and how society must cleanse itself once and for all of the scourge of predatory men.  Men are retrograde, illiberal, and irremediable. They are obsessed with guns, violence, and competition; and are social throwbacks.  Only women have evolved to a higher state of being; and are the only bulwark against male social anarchy.  Their caring, compassionate, collaborative, and participatory ethos has saved us all.

As paraphrased by Dana Antiochus, Maher believes that

The inversion of nature that we have experienced as a culture, and the subversive aspect of flipping traditional roles, with its subsequent destruction of society, serves as a signal that we live in a dying system.  It has led to a pussified, sissy, pathetic, lovey-dovey/touchy-feely country of wimps, who put emotion over logic, feeling over reason, in our nurture-heavy/nature-deprived, culture

That and more, thought Randy. His old M-80 was still intact, on his desk along with other memorabilia. He thought that this would be the year he would finally blow it off, created one hell of a crater in his back yard or better yet that of his next door neighbor, set her squirrel-proof bird feeders a-swinging and putting a crack in the birdfeeder; but he had too many sunken costs to gin up what it takes to send a message which, given the universal tenor of the neighborhood would only strengthen their resolve. 

So to the consternation of his daughter-in-law, Randy sat down with his grandson and told him about the good old days of Sturm und Drang; but that just made him feel old. 

Romantic Fiction - Why Are Otherwise Intelligent Women Reading Soppy Stories About Love?

Belinda Carter borrowed sappy, treacly, impossibly romantic novels from the library - along with books on Civil War history and the plains Indians as cover. If any of her friends - professors, lawyers, doctors, and social activists - had seen what she was reading, she would have been immediately and irrevocably thought of as soft, a girly girl romantic who couldn't be trusted with the truth. 

Belinda lived in University Park, a leafy corner of Washington DC, solidly progressive, unbending and unflinching in their hatred for Donald Trump and his right wing, MAGA cabal, and committed to the rise of the black man, the gender spectrum, and world peace.  Books like The Flowers for Antoinette had no place in the pantheon of right ideas.  They were inane, anti-feminist, idealistic fantasies unworthy of anyone embracing the fight for equality. 

Yet half the women of University Park were reading books like this, hidden among more serious non-fiction, kept under wraps, and read late at night. These women were hopeless romantics who had never gotten over their adolescent fantasies of marrying princes and living in castles.  Most were careful to choose only those novels which had a historical link.  Flowers was set in revolutionary France but had nothing to do with Robespierre or the guillotine but the torrid affair between the namesake of the queen and a British nobleman caught in France like Dickens' Charles Darnay. 

If called out for her girlish fantasies, she could always say that the book was not a romance but a historical novel; yet every night she sobbed and sniffled as she read of the loneliness and rejection of Antoinette, her poverty, and her misery.  Belinda knew that the story would turn out well - they all did - but she couldn't help empathizing with the young heroine, so much like herself, destitute in love. 

'Turn the light off, please, dear', said her husband rolling over to the dark side of the bed - the husband of many years who increasingly paid her no mind, had been unfaithful, and was mindless and unconcerned about her happiness. 

This was the fate of many women in University Park whose bright memories of young love persisted well into late middle age and drove them to fictional romance.  At least there was that, Belinda, thought, putting down The Chalice of Love. 

She smiled at the other patrons of the library looking for books in the 'Adult' section, a parceled off corner of the library for romantic fiction.  Adult fiction usually meant pornography, but the head librarian, herself an aficionado of romantic fiction, knew that what women wanted was cover.  No professional woman wanted to be seen interested in the treacly stuff usually reserved for housewives in trailers. 

The women perusing the Adult section were together in their desire for romance - they were all women who resided in boardrooms, management consulting, or superior court but who could not give up their hopelessly romantic interests. Smiling at each other as they roamed the shelves said, 'We're sisters' another cover for slightly misandrous women who would rather be in a Bavarian palace then next to their husbands. 

'Oh, he's gorgeous', said Betsy Farquhar to Belinda over sherry at the Russian Tea Room when a graceful, beautiful young man walked in and sat at the bar.  'I would roll over in a minute for him'. 

'No you wouldn't', said her companion.  'Someone always gets hurt'; but that circumspection carried no weight with Belinda whose eagerness for the real thing had built up to a crescendo after emptying the shelves of Little Falls library.  Maybe it was time for some romance of her own for a change. 

Easier said than done of course, so locked in was she to a high-toned version of Kinder, Kuche, Kirche. Woman was the keeper of the hearth, responsible for family, worth, and happiness.  Far be it from Belinda to wander when her children and husband needed her. 

The tea room incident only whet her appetite for more imagined romance.  If she couldn't find true love herself, she would enjoy reading the stories of women who did. 

Professor Hyman Isaacson dean of the psychiatric faculty of the medical school at the University of California, Berkeley had been fascinated by this persistent phenomenon.  How could otherwise intelligent women be so drawn into the greatest moneymaking mill ever? Millions of ghost written, predictable tales of impossible romance flew off the shelves and not just to the low end reader.  In 2022 he wrote a monograph on his findings:

The mature professional American woman is a rare bird, psychologically speaking.  She was brought up by a strong, loving father and had the usual and predictable Freudian sexual attraction to him.  The onset of feminism changed the calculus and concluded that these fathers were oppressors, deniers of female legitimacy.  The liberated woman must seek her own, independent, sexually confident way. 

The conflict arises when this woman seeks adult love.  She wants the attention, comfort, and security of men like her father, but has been told to be wary of them; and frustrated, denied, and humbled finds solace in romantic fiction

 

'Nonsense' was the expected rejoinder from feminist critics who argued that Isaacson was a perfect example of the controlling, misogynist male they had always warned about.  He was the immature one, looking for the ideal woman but trapped within his narrow academic carrel. 

Yet no matter how much angry women decried the observations of Isaacson and rejected any of the assumptions he made about romantic desire, the shelves of romantic fiction remained stacked, and over half of the borrowers were like Belinda Carter.  Businesswoman by day, sobbing, sniffling, vulnerable woman by night. 

It was not unusual, the Professor went on to note, that fact and fantasy become indistinguishable.  The romantic novel set within a distinct period of history with all its trappings becomes reality, a complete suspension of disbelief.  To Belinda the lovers of Antoinette were real French aristocrats who realized her inner worth and rescued her from the streets and loved her forever. 

As such Prof. Isaacson continued, romantic fiction for the mature professional woman becomes an addiction, something she cannot do without; and even when actual romance might be in the offing, she turns to fiction instead.

 

It is no surprise in the academic world that men look at pornography and women read romantic fiction; and if there were ever a cloture to the debate about the differences between men and women, this would be it.  Women are desperate for love and romance.  Men want only sex. Those crossovers - men who have subscribed to feminism and have been dutiful, responsible, respectful husbands and women who try every position of the Kama Sutra to achieve a Lawrentian epiphany - are few and far between.  The record is clear. 

Belinda's husband never got the picture and was as dismissive and indifferent as ever despite the growing pile of romance novels by his wife's bedside.  He grunted and rolled over on top of her once and a while, she put up with it, and both thought of someone else, she her Prince Charming, and he the busty blonde from Accounting. 

Reality bites to be sure, and Belinda eventually slackened off the romance novels and made the elision back to actual history.  That righted her ship, and her coordinates were much better aligned.  Her professionalism and her emotional interests were in harmony. 

However again predictably and common, as she got much older the regrets of a loveless life hit hard, and for comfort, solace, and refuge, she went back to the Adult shelves of the Little Falls library.