Plus Sizes Disappear - The End Of Fictional Reality And The Demise Of Identity Culture

Letty Marshall was a 'plump' girl.  That was how her parents always referred to her even as she burst even sizes three grades too big for her.  

The girl had an insatiable appetite.  'Growing girls need food', was how her father kindly observed as his daughter put away enough food for an army base.  There was no end to requests for more, no matter what was served. She was insatiably omnivorous. Meat, potatoes, vegetables, salads, and deserts were all the same to her.  She was simply unstoppable at the dinner table. 

She raided the refrigerator, kept bags of Pecan Sandies and Oreo cookies under her bed at night, drained carton after carton of chocolate milk at school lunch, and begged and cadged the Salvadoran ladies behind the lunch counter for seconds and thirds. 

Most parents are used to buying new clothes for the children as they outgrow the old; but in Letty's case, the Visa bill was extraordinary.  She ballooned into a caricature of Michelin Man before she was ten, nd adolescent hunger only accelerated her weight. 

 

Fortunately for her, she grew obese at a time when fat-shaming was a no-no and inclusivity was in. Plus size women were no different than anyone else, said progressive advocates, and should be treated with the same love and respect.  Stores like Lululemon were outed for discriminatory sales practices when they limited their selections to Size 12 - 'a normal size for normal young women', said then CEO Charlton French who was summarily dismissed by the company's board.  Plus sizes returned to the racks.  

Lululemon didn't want fat girls ruining their svelte, youthful image. They put the plus size racks near the rest rooms and broom closets and wished they could somehow engineer a special entrance for them.  Image is everything in sales and marketing, and Lululemon resented the social pressures that were trying to force them into a market miasma they had fought years to avoid.  

'We are not for everyone', the Marketing Director announced when the company policy reverted to 'normal' and the fat racks were removed.  He might well have said, 'Fat people not welcome, they ruin the brand'. 

Meanwhile, in a tribute to diversity, Letty Marshall was elected Prom Queen at Lincoln Roberts High. She waddled up the stairs to the podium to give an address to the student body and then climbed down to dance with her partner, Prom King Randall Owens, captain of the football team, dreamboat, voted the most desirable boy on campus.  

Randall knew it was a set up.  He and his girlfriend, the svelte, Hollywood-ready darling of the school, voted most likely to succeed, most likely in the movies, laughed at the proposition.  He, this gorgeous hunk of manhood dancing with a preposterously grotesque Jabba the Hut caricature because the principal, proudly out of the closet, all dykey with butch haircut, suit, tie, and cordovans, a caricature of all lesbian women, wanted to show her true colors and the flag. 

Students were not supposed to notice either the obesity of Letty Marshall or the Bernal Heights tough girl persona of Ms. Weldon, the Principal.  They were instructed to treat everyone as equals, accept their differences as part of the human condition but never the laughable circus performer ridicule to which they would have been subjected in a less tolerant, obtusely ignorant period. 

The school gym was overheated - despite May weather outside, the heat pumps had not been shut down - and Letty because of her size always the first to perspire with even modest effort, sweated like a pig, drenching her prom dress and leaking onto the rented tux of the Prom King.  

The scene wasn't exactly like the prom scene of the horror movie Carrie where the prom queen is set up by a group of catty girls, has pigs' blood dumped on her from the rafters, and then in horror and with violent anger uses her supernatural powers to set the gym on fire and incinerate everyone. However it was on everyone's mind as the chosen couple danced around the floor to the enforced silence of the crowd. 

Then the dam burst and the students couldn't take it any more.  They had been so corralled, trussed, harnessed, and intimidated by school administrators anxious to present the school as the most evolved and progressive of the district, that it was inevitable that there had to be a tipping point.  A shout came from the back row, something about Burger Queen and Big Whopper, then echoed again and again up and down the assembly.  Before the principal was able to restore order, the place was like a bear pit. 

You really can't blame the students.  After all day after day they were told to see things that just weren't there.  The school valedictorian was a dummy from the inner city, transferred to this predominantly white school to make it more diverse.  In his graduation speech, dressed in a dashiki, Rasta braids down his back, a stand out for nothing except his origins, he babbled something about the Mississippi River, Gone with the Wind, and the white oppressor.  Assuming loud and prolong applause, he continued to stand at the podium until the principal gave him the hook. 

The president of the class was a gummy 'little person' perhaps the least likeable of any of the hundred or more students, a pissy little runt who pushed and wheedled himself to the front of the cafeteria line. 

Teachers whaled away during each and every class about diversity, equity, and inclusion, banging on about Engel's work on 'Classless Equality' and the plight of the black man.  Even French I had its go at diversity. In textbooks the Cafe des Deux Magots, the Latin Quarter hangout for Beauvoir, Sartre, and Camus, now had Algerians and Nigerians sipping wine at the front tables. 

In other words the school had it coming.  What were they to expect?  A herd of complaisant, obedient sheep?  What was adolescence if it wasn't objection, defiance, and individual expression.  The school with their incessant reminders to respect diversity, their sensitivity seminars, and their public admonishments to hew the progressive line should have seen the prom event coming. 

Poor Letty Marshall.  She was the victim in all this. She was too dimwitted to realize she was being used as a pawn in someone else's game.  She was just as manipulated, used, and abused as the affirmative action students who don't belong in competitive circles, and who are seen for the undereducated and less intelligent social props they are.  

If people were simply left to rise and fall in the same Darwinian epic that has described human and animal society since the first signs of earthly life, everyone would be far better off.  Honesty is the best policy and when fiction is foisted off as fact, the wheels are soon to come off the bus. 

When the diversity dust settled and it no longer had the foothold in American society it once did, Letty Marshal went on a diet, and thanks to Ozempic, lost an elephant weight.  She was much healthier and much happier, especially because she could now fit into those cute Lululemon jumpers. 

American History Redux - Prairie Justice, An End To Protected Groups, And A Return To Laissez-Faire

For anyone who grew up even a few decades ago, it is hard to understand how Americans' skins have become so thin - how insults, innuendos, slights, and insinuating remarks have become such causes célèbres.  Bullying was par for the course on school playgrounds, an element of maturing; a learning process whereby the weak in their defeat learned about the enemy and the middling figured out how to evade, negotiate, compromise, or avoid.

Taunts were expected – racial and ethnic slurs and remarks about disability were common currency, the labeling of ‘other’, the natural signifiers of difference and threat to the community  No one was animated by hatred.  There was no hostility towards Jews, Poles, or Italians.  They, after all, were the furriers, druggists, and clothiers of our communities; those who worked lathes and presses or cut hair, paved streets, or cut hair.

At the same time, it was assumed that in an America still honoring self-improvement, individualism and enterprise,  foreigners would quickly and surely become economic and social players.  It wasn’t long before ‘No Irish Need Apply’ became ‘Only Irish Need Apply’.  Irish Americans quickly figured out the system and within a generation or two ran Boston, Philadelphia, and New York .

The Mafia, perhaps the most powerful and influential organization of civil society since the partisans of radical Republicanism during Reconstruction, was quintessentially American.  Its communitarian, hard-knuckled, authoritarian, and generous neighborhood rule after only a few decades of struggle, expressed the best of the Republic.

In a generation the Jews of the Lower East Side, rag-pickers, pushcart-sellers, and money-lenders came to rule New York and Hollywood.

This self-reliance, individualism, and fiercely competitive spirit was not just an occasional feature or one which applied only to the waves of immigration in the early Twentieth Century.  It came a century before when the new American republic learned of the vastness of the lands that lay beyond Philadelphia and Boston.

In the spirit of Westward Expansion and Manifest Destiny, new Americans moved across the Ohio River and settled the prairie, the plains, the Southwest, and the Pacific coast.  There was no law and order, no government caretaker, no one to tell settlers what to do or how to do it.  Lawlessness was met with force, justice at the end of a six-gun, compromise and contract by standoff, violators shot, rustlers and cattle thieves hanged from the nearest tree.  

It was a time of rugged individualism, self-motivation, optimism, and adventure. Wealth was created, income earned, the market was no different from Paleolithic trading of cowrie beads. According to embryonic market forces, things increased in value and required more defense, will, and commitment to hold. The algorithm had not changed an iota millennia later. 

The West was a violent place.  If it wasn't rustlers, thieves, and outlaws, it was the Comanche, the Apache, and the Piute - all intent on defending their land from white usurpers.  To make the new nation whole, to build it from coast to coast took courage, determination, and purpose.  Settlement by settlement the nation became populated, productive, and wealthy. 

Nobody gave anything to those who settled western lands.  Pioneers, settlers, farmers, and ranchers built their own empires and defended them with resoluteness and defiance. 

The American character of today is a product of the past. America's recognition of history, pride and cultural patriotism is a living legacy.  Westward Expansion, that heady period of American history where Monroe and Jefferson were determined to create a country from coast to coast, to create a European continent in the New World, to dominate, control, and profit from the remarkable land discovered by Columbus, settled by pilgrims and cavaliers in New England and Virginia, explored and claimed by Lewis and Clark, and settled by new citizens tempted by the unimaginable richness newly settled. 

Wagon trains, the horse-drawn caravans of 'prairie schooners', the Donner Party and the crossing of the Rockies to the promised land of California, the winning of the Southwest, the clearing of the cypress, snake-infested swamps of Mississippi to make way for cotton plantations, the northward expansion to Alaska...all were not simply the ordinary territorial imperative common to all countries in history, but an expression of common character.  

So it is with dismay and disbelief that anyone with even a cursory look at American history and culture sees the erosion of this individualist ethos, the closing of the American mind, the inhibition of free expression, the dampening of an entrepreneurial spirit in favor of communalism, and the attempt to reform and reconfigure the country according to utopian notions. 

The genius cluster - Musk, Page, Ellison, Huang, Zuckerberg, Bezos and others - are called oligarchs by progressives. Wealth and individual success are ipso facto signs of elitism, white privilege, and rightwing extremism. Protected groups - blacks, Hispanics, gays, lesbians, transgenders among others - are deemed off limits for criticism, social satire, inquiry, and doubt. Legitimate inquiry into the nature of intelligence, talent, creativity, social integration and any other socially relevant characteristic can only be carried out within careful, 'respectful' parameters - i.e. not at all. 

The culture of diversity and identity demands an ipso facto acceptance of all racial, ethnic, and social groups as equal and thus beyond criticism or inquiry.  Why the black man still is a product of lawless, dysfunctional, and anti-social communities is a question not to be asked because it has been answered - racism and white oppression.  The seemingly irrational conclusion that biological sex is no proven indictor of sexuality which is a social construct is considered received wisdom.  The redistribution of wealth to create a fictitious state of universal equality is an a priori truth.  

As a result of both trends - the creation of protected, untouchable classes and the assumption that a culture of diversity, equity, and inclusion is the final, absolute, unquestioned final social paradigm, the ethos of America has been seriously challenged.  The individual is not only dismissed but demeaned in the pursuit of social justice.  European civilization is at heart a racist, colonialist, exploitive culture which should be expunged from history, of no relevance to the new America. 

The American Left is most like Pol Pot, the Cambodian dictator who announced that his country was in The Year Zero.  The past existed only to be destroyed.  Every trace of the bourgeois, capitalist, depraved culture which came before his Maoist insurgency had to be erased.  As a result millions of Cambodians were killed in a nationalist genocide. 

With Donald Trump, progressive shibboleths are being taken down one by one.  The redistribution of wealth, the gender spectrum, open borders, multiculturalism, the derogation of private enterprise, the rise of statism and big, interventionist government, limitations on free speech as a means of engineering equality, are being challenged as features of a discredited, failed socialist system.  

Outliers are becoming fair game for satire once again, a sign of the health of free speech, in danger during the depths of the Biden era.  Every protected community has enough strange and curious habits and characteristics to fill a Jackie Mason bill at Grossinger's a thousand times over.  Comedic satire is hilarious because those outlandish clothes, pimp walks, street slang, and faux white talk of the ghetto are funny! And so are swishy, girly-girl, sashaying gay men.  Or the 'I Am Me' waddle of plus-sized woman. 

For very European immigrant group the taunts heard from resident Americans were shots across the bow, urgent messages to shape up, fly right, and act American. Italians, Poles, Irish, and others were not robbed of their ethnic identity.  They just subsumed it within the larger cultural ethos of the times. 

Today's identity culture says, 'Hands Off!' and the journey to full integration within society is slowed, deferred, and made even more difficult.  The 'Other', the outlier has always been suspect since the earliest human settlements. 'Stick to your own kind' has been the rule, not the exception; but majorities have always been inclusive when outsiders join in. 

Progressive 'diversity' and identity politics have encouraged separatism and isolation 

The genius cluster - the billionaire entrepreneurs who have remade American culture through almost unimaginable technological advances - are not oligarchs but seminal Americans.  Schools should not focus on those who will be the least productive members of society but those with the most potential.  Talent, intelligence, creativity, individualism, and ambition should be promoted not discouraged. 

The artificial, politically-sponsored tethers that restrict children's activities and speech should be removed.  Let children figure out who they are by themselves, thus preparing themselves for the adult world. 

Let America be America again. 

Old Flames - The Totemism Of Past Girlfriends Or, Romance Dies Hard

Bob Fielding had just been left on the curb by his wife of many years.  'I've had enough', she told him through the screen door, and that was that.

Bob had never lived alone, although he made a pretense of emotional independence.  His long trips to the heart of darkness were his statements of macho self-assurance; but he was always glad to be back home to his own bed, the New York Times and coffee, a round of golf and some time off on the Bay. 

He never questioned what he wife did during his African sojourns for he took her much for granted.  She had been a devilish little coquette at Miss Porter's, and came into her own during her exploratory college years when 'Who am I?' morphed into 'Who cares?'.  A hot ticket...Queen of Tarts...The Devil In Miss Jones...but all that was left behind after two serious years of graduate school, a Madison Avenue job in publishing, and marriage to Robert Fielding, Yale graduate, World Bank economist, traveler, and man of certain sophisticated tastes. 

Bob had no doubts about his wife's fidelity, felt that she loved him as much now as when he met her, and assumed that on every return from the Dark Continent, she would be there with dinner on the table and the bed turned down. 

Nothing could be further from the truth.  For all Bob's own fidelity and honorable intentions, he was a mistake; but because of sunken costs - he, as a banker could understand that concept - Alison Jones stayed on in the marriage far longer than she should have.

Not that he was a bad husband.  God forbid she should be married to the likes of Brandon Philipps, philanderer-in-chief of Philipps, Locke & Suitland, a man without a filament of moral fiber, a sexual vagabond worth only the notable salary and interest from a private income he brought to the marriage.  Poor Polly was left to weep over her sewing night after empty, soulless, lonely nights. 

No, Bob was a good husband; but with plenty of good years ahead of her, she was not about to languish in the suburbs, tinkering with faucets and spread sheets.  She was still 'Miss Jones', a woman of agency, a tigress, a still attractive belle of the ball with no intention of wasting a drop of her remaining sexual energy.   

And so it was on that cloudy, unusually cool May afternoon that she said her goodbyes to her husband, Bob. Of course divorce proceedings would involve meeting again, but there would always be the insulating layer of lawyers, so when she said goodbye, the deal was as good as done. 

Bob had no interest in finding out where his now ex-wife had gone.  He was not one to cry over spilled milk, and he was feminized enough to never question a woman's prerogatives, so he turned to his own needs, at first licking his wounds but then ginning up the wherewithal needed to meet the brave new world. 

Of course he moped around the house for a while trying to bustle and make himself useful, but ended up in unmade sheets and take-out.  'This will not stand', he lectured himself in the bathroom mirror one Tuesday, and vowed to turn over a new leaf 

His trip to Ouagadougou would be just the thing to clear his head.  A thorny Bank issue to be resolved, money at stake, and the First Minister was to be courted always picked up his spirits, and now that the job was all he had, he put even more life into it. 

The First Minister had heard of Bob's divorce - the corridors of the World Bank always echo with juicy gossip - and he would use the information wisely.  He would treat the newly singled economist to a treat that would make any man forget his wife - a beautiful Fulani woman, one of his consorts, available at his beck and call and assure that his Bank loan would proceed without a hitch. 

Now most men would take kindly to the First Minister's offer, but although Bob thought that getting rid of all traces of his ex-wife would be a simple matter, he did not count on residuals - those nasty, niggling bits of a marriage which stay with one after divorce.  Bob didn't want Mlle. Sekou, but a partner, someone to fill his life not just his bed. 

He thanked the First Minister for his consideration and generosity, guaranteed him the approval of the next tranche of money due to him from the World Bank treasury, and assured him that his credit would always be good in Washington. 

 

Separation does many things to a man, not the least of which is a re-assessment of life and sexual ways.  After the divorce, Bob examined his life of rectitude, civil temperance, and doing the right thing and wondered if he had squandered his youth. 

Bob had not been unhappy as a married man. Marriage gave one a needed center, consolation, commiseration and last but not least, sexual intimacy.  All fairly pat and predictable but not so bad, a kind of needed architecture with familiar walls and carpets to make forays into the outside world less threatening.  He had not squandered anything.  He had willingly and happily married Alison, and their days together should not be measured by the last one when she walked out the door. 

Men in Bob's position all act in the same way. Their first step towards putting their life back together is contacting old girlfriends.  The elision into singlehood, 'dating' and the difficult search for a marital partner would be far easier with someone known, a former lover whose inner rooms had already been explored. 

Time however had not been kind to Laura Owens.  From pictures posted on social media, she was still appealing in New England socially mature way, but when he explored further, he found that she had become fat, un-comely, yenta-looking and far from the ideal woman she had been decades earlier.  

What was he thinking?  She had three adult children, an early Teamster retiree as a husband, a home – of all places – in Mantoloking, home to ‘Jersey Girls’ and Mafiosi from Newark, and an interest in ‘gardening,, self-help, and autism’.  Needless to say, he never called, wrote, messengered, or texted.



The aborted search and the discouraging discovery of a woman transformed, through Bob off the trail, and Alison returned to his thoughts with a vengeance. The problem wasn't with her leaving or her recurring memories, but with the past and reconciling it with the present.  

He was past-due on sexual attractiveness.  Although men his age routinely had lovers thirty years their junior, they had come to these affairs knowledgeably.  Women, whether young or old, are attracted to maturity, sexual confidence, financial security, and maleness – the savoir faire of an older man – but Bob had none of these.  His only hope was pairing with a woman of his own age,  someone like himself who had made wrong early choices, realized too late that it was time to change, and had to settle for what she had agreed to. 

There were such things as bright beginnings; but where to look?  In his day there were singles bars, library reading rooms, and alumni seminars; but virtual dating – more controlled, more efficient, and more cost-effective – had taken over.  How could he possibly navigate this new electronic universe; and would the output be worth the input?

So, he continued to mine the alumni resources as far back as country day school.  He had heard that Nancy Boothby – his eighth grade love - had moved to California; and that had possibilities; not like resettling in Iowa or Nebraska, and might signal a sexual and emotional freedom that had lasted since the Sixties; but she had died of breast cancer many years earlier.

There was Belinda Dandy who was from solid Chicago stock – the Dandy family had built a paper empire to rival Scott – and Belinda had hoped that Bob would marry her and join Daddy in running the company; but rumors were that she had married an Italian and was living on the Riviera – or a Mexican with a Cancun villa; or a Serbian with holdings throughout the Adriatic and the Black Sea. Bob saw that he had no hope in this company of international gentlemen, chose not to renew contact with Belinda, and closed the book on her, Smith College, and weekends at the Taft.

After two years of this, Bob realized that his old captain’s license was no longer valid.  Navigating these new sexual waters but so dying for sexual encounter with another human being that he might look the other way in the morning was not an easy task.  So much had happened over the decades since he and Alison were married that he felt that he no longer even had a toehold in the market. 

Of course there were women as sexually dépaysée as he was – adrift in sexual waters, hoping for a familiar buoy, but grasping more than getting purchase – but where were they? Finding the right woman would be like finding a needle in a haystack unless the gods intervened; and pray he did for divine guidance  if not resolution, to no avail.  He was as alone and lonely as he had ever been. 

He continued to mine the Internet for old loves, even marginal ones like Lacy Birnbaum whom he had taken to the Lefferts prom and who had been laughed at because of her gimp and misunderstood because her father had short-changed customers at his clothing store and in a very Republican town campaigned on behalf of ‘the little man’.

Resignation to old men’s bathrobes and Chinese take-out was on his horizon because it already had happened to many men of his age.  Watch out, he told himself, but with no words of self-encouragement.

The list of old girlfriends had dwindled to nothing.  They either had died, persisted in bad marriages, were divorced and living on generous personal incomes, or were resigned like him to incidental contact.

It would be nice to report that Bob eventually found his soulmate; but he did not.  He was simply too inflexible, too fixated on ideas and principle, and too stubborn to give an inch.  There were plenty of women who would gladly have had a fling with him, married or not, but he was too sexually inept.  He had never had to rely on clues and suggestion – if progressivism is anything, it is not subtle; things are either right or wrong - so he was lost with women who react first on instinct and intuition, and only second on fact.

There are no particular lessons in this story.  Marriages are doubtful things but with remarkable shelf life.  Most people get married, either put up with it or end it. A few are happy and a very few murder their spouses - Turkish soap operas are particularly good at that - but all in all it is one of those things that one does and finds out the consequences when it is too late. Fortunately there are few George and Marthas Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf affairs;  and thank God there are very few Goneril and Regans around to murder their husbands, but marriage is usually not a pretty thing to watch.  

Bergman's Scenes from A Marriage is perhaps the closest to reality - a tough-going slog - and Anna Karenina is a great proto-feminist story.  There are thousands of marriage stories, one overlaid on every other, so there's a lot of experience out there. 

Bob was just one of many who fit into a classic subcategory - Looking For Old Flames which have died out.