A Wetback Odyssey- A Salvadoran's Dream Of Meeting Joe Biden

It had been an easy trip north - camaraderie, collaboration, and collegiality - despite the distance from Chiltepe, his hometown in El Salvador.  He was travelling with his two brothers, an aunt, and a whore from the capital who exchanged her favors for safe passage to the border,

Jose did not have to leave Chiltepe. He had a decent enough living repairing mufflers and catalytic converters that couldn't make it over the sierras.  He, his blowtorch, and his soldering iron patched the flatbeds, F-150s, and pickups headed back and forth, empty of one contraband and overloaded to the struts for another - coke, Uzis, dollars, emeralds, and Nayarit terracotta.

His work was quick and easy - he never bothered to drain the gas tank, forewent the expense of a hoist and got underneath on an old warehouse dolly, and was out from under in a half and hour. Yanquis always thought of Escobar, yachts, cigarette boats, and armed flotillas when they thought of the drug trade, but it happened this way, in huaraches and huipils and beat-up Toyotas. 

Jose was a modest man, never greedy for the big payoff, content with parts and labor and a thousand for his silence, not that he would have ever gone afoul of the Obregon brothers; and then after years of pitted exhausts and loose bearings the idea came to him - El Norte. 

In the past the trip would have been risky.  Not every American president had been as generous and welcoming as Joe Biden, and ICE border guards regularly sicked their Dobermans and took pot shots at wetbacks crossing the river.  Now, under the new president, they were no longer sitting ducks but welcome guests. 

'Why bother?' asked Jose's cousin, Adalberto, thinking of Rosalita and the tropical beaches of Las Lajas - ceviche de concha, palm water baths, and maracuja. 

'Because it's there' said Jose, and like every man south of the border he had dreamed of white, blonde women since the first 'Dallas' reruns, pirated and replayed on YSLA after midnight util the tape wore out; and there they would be, available and lovelier in the flesh than in his dreams, waiting for him - that and the air-conditioning and the money. 

 

So he and his crew set out one November day, all five of them in one of the trucks that one of Obregon's runners had left at his garage, that he had patched up with wax and baling-wire but knew would make the trip through Guadalupe and Sonora to the border.  

Now, the road north was nowhere near as bad as the bottlenecks at the summit of Everest but was still a long, inching caravan, busloads of Cholos and deported braceros he could do without.  The only happy one was the whore who made her rounds of the Bluebirds, got paid in dollars, and treated Jose and his brothers to tequila and mezcal.  

Jose never touched her.  He would wait for the beauties of Venice Beach, so sick and tired was he of black-eyed Indian cooch; but he was glad for the schnapps and the company, and they all slept well.  The caravan moved slowly, but Jose was in no hurry.  El Norte would wait. 

They stopped in Chiapas to say hello to the Obregon brothers, and Hermione prepared them a meal of chicharron, mole, quail eggs, and black beans.  

'Stay awhile longer' said Andres Obregon when he returned from Chihuahua with a truckload of cash and a diamond necklace for his wife.  Business is good, he said, and now with the border wide open, it would be even better.  "Leave the caravan", he said, and so it was that Jose, grease monkey from Chiltepe became part of the Obregon cartel - not in a big way, just a carter, chauffer, and mechanic for the jefes; but in a way big enough for him. 

There were always shoot-outs in the border towns, but there was always a rhyme or reason for the killing and gunmen would never target him, a minor player, never more than a private in the Obregon's army, a Caesarean legion in the Sonoran desert.  

So after three weeks of tight quarters, rest stops, and close quarter work by the whore, Jose and his crew arrived at the last stop before the river, a dump to abandon old cars, trash, and everything of no use in El Norte.  Jose was sorry to lose the old pickup and the whore who had decided that she had made too much money to give it up; but cross the Rio Grande he did, was taken into custody by La Migra, housed in a very pleasant Best Western in El Paso, given meal tickets, spending money, and passage to the sanctuary city of his choice.

'I want to meet El Jefe', Jose said to the officer stationed in the lobby of the hotel, but the man said that La Casa Blanca was far from El Paso, maybe three days ride; but what else did he have to do except contact Mara Salvatrucha and start his new life? And so, after paying his respects, he made his way to Washington, stood outside the gates of the White House for days on end, but came up empty handed, disappointed in his new country, and made his way back West. 

Life with the gang in LA was good. Drugs were not necessarily Jose's thing, but the trade and the women were just fine. Before long after dutifully driving, fixing, and cleaning, he was given an Uzi. Every night along with saying his rosary he thanked President Biden, and he had only incidental thoughts about Rosalita and Chiltepe.  

Blowhard - The Nature Of American Business And The Witch Trials Of Donald Trump

Hiram Pickens sold snake oil, laxatives, nerve pills, and aphrodisiacs - a patent medicine pharmacopeia of cure-alls, feel-goods, and balms which, laced with enough codeine, morphine, and alcohol to 'adjust' the system, loosen the ailment's hold, and give a sensational effect, had customers coming back for more. 

 

The snake oil business was a masterpiece of concoction, advertising, and human credulousness. Enough of Dr. Doolittle's Health Tonic, and aches and pains would miraculously disappear - the alcohol and barbiturates did the trick, the natural desire to believe what was bought was worth the money and the potent natural human tendency of self deception did the rest.  The huckster's silver tongue simply shined a bright, glittering light on dull lives and for a dime, the vision came true. 

Caveat Emptor - Let The Buyer Beware - was the meme of post-colonial America, a nation created on the presumption of individual, intelligent authority, the God-given right of independent enterprise, and the natural, ineluctable laws of competition and survival of the fittest.  The idea of today's all-important government, caretaker and guardian of the people was never considered.  At best it would be the arbiter of last resort, the administrator of Constitutional duties, and the armed protector of the nation.

The disagreement between Jefferson and Hamilton was profound.  While Jefferson trusted the intelligence and wisdom of the people, Hamilton knew they were uneducated rubes roaming unchecked and following their own self-interest with little interest in the commonweal.  A buffer, said Hamilton, between the mob and true governance was necessary, and the Senate was created.  As everyone knows, ignorance seeps through the cracks of any institution, and before long the Senate, America's Upper House was as infected with the same venality as the crowd banging on its doors. 

So the free-for-all in the public, matched by the same chaotic mess in Washington, was let ride. In fact, opined the political philosophers of the day, such raw competition, such untrammeled buying and selling was a good thing, winnowing the chaff from the wheat, culling the weak, and creating a stronger society.  

Snake oil sale was the best example of the new economic meme.  'A fool and his money are soon parted' said Thomas Tusser in 16th Century England and the aphorism took root quickly and easily in the New World. 'A sucker is born every minute', coined by P.T. Barnum in the mid-Nineteenth Century consolidated the American hold on buyer ignorance, and at all levels of economic enterprise - from the itinerant hawker to the barons of industry - the art of exaggeration, manipulation, and chicanery became the business model of the land.

 

Early Twentieth Century reformers were outraged and the predatory nature of American business, and they fought long, hard, and ineffectively for a modicum of protection; but the business model was too entrenched and too founded on human nature to be changed.  Human beings have bartered, exchanged, and sold on false premises since cowrie beads, and only the savvy buyer worked the system to his benefit.  

After Darwin the idea of caveat emptor became even more received wisdom - raw, unfettered competition, the tooth and claw approach to the marketplace, assured not only the survival of the fittest but the reign of the fittest. 

The great American capitalist empire was built on this principle; and there would be transcontinental railroads, steel mills, oil fields, refineries, and Wall Street without J.P. Morgan, J.D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, or Cornelius Vanderbilt.  Their inspiration was vast, their ambition unalloyed, and their persistence unstoppable.  Sure enough reformers were as insistent on halting the predation and bullish roughriding of the 'Robber Barons', this time with some success; and the foundation of the nanny state was laid. 

 

New York real estate was no different than steel, oil, or railroads, and the city was built on the same principles.  The market was not based on cooperation, consideration, and generosity but on exaggeration, arrogance, and absolute, unshakeable confidence.  Of course land and property values were inflated by sellers and downgraded by buyers, and only after the street fights and brawls were won and lost, was a final agreed-upon value reached. 

There is no such thing as absolute value in economics.  All is relative, and so it is with the selling price of real estate.  While metrics, big data, and sophisticated analytical tools have narrowed the playing field, buying and selling is still an open venture. How can cachet, name, clientele, and design have absolute value? How can the quality of a view be measured? Subjectivity, never an incidental factor in commercial exchange, is as important as facts and figures. 

Enter Donald Trump, real estate mogul, survivor par excellence of the mean streets of New York, king of vaudevillian exaggeration, master salesman, big top blowhard, canny negotiator, and fearless legal battering ram.  'So, sue me', the song of the streets is the first verse of a Trump epic.  He revels in it, plays it, loves it.  Threats, intimidation, and will are the twins of estimated value and subjective valuation.  Together, they are the invincible armaments of real estate warfare.  

Of course Trump exaggerated the value of his holdings, but in the give-and-take of the real estate market, no one cried foul.  Buyers thought they got a good deal, banks loved the borrowers, and Trump made millions.  All as it should be and always has been. 

The New York fraud trial, therefore, is nothing but a witch trial - a political move to discredit the former President during an election year; a transparent, bald-faced swipe at Trump's credibility while fining him crippling sums.  

All this of course is but a side show to the center ring - the electoral campaign and November 2024.  Trump has handily swept all the Republican primaries, is the presumptive Presidential candidate, and tops the incumbent, Joe Biden, in all recent polls. In fact, the more fake trials and false accusations there are, the higher his numbers.  His faithful cannot be budged from their support, and those on the cusp, shocked by the unconscionable political manipulation of the courts, have swung to his side. 

Donald Trump is a real American - low-brow, unashamedly bourgeois, crass, opinionated, and a bare-knuckled bar-fighter.  Americans have finally got one of their own, not the hi-falutin' Pablo Casals, Robert Frost Kennedys, not the insipid, faux inclusive, Biden, not the Eastern Establishment progressive fantasists, but an outsized Colossus.  Of course he is feared and hated, and that animus is all his opponents have.  They harp and whinge and whine to no avail.  Americans are sick and tired of a hectoring, self-righteous party that demeans, dismisses, and ignores them.  

Despite the show trials, the punitive awards against him, and the virulence of the progressive press, Trump is likely to regain the Oval Office, and the gobbling naysayers will be shut up once and for all. 

Climate Change? No Problem - Genetics, Enhanced Evolution, And Man's Infinite Ability To Adapt

'Whew, it's hot', said Elmer Suggins to his buddy Ralph during work break laying tar on a Macon County road. 

'Climate change', replied Ralph somberly.  'Democrats were right'; but Suggins was unmoved and unconvinced. ‘They’ve never laid tar in a Georgia summer', and so the two of them talked climate to pass the time, although they got well distracted when Janey Fitz drove by in her old Skylark convertible.

 'Hot enough for you?', she said as she went past, blonde hair floating like golden silk in the wind, reminding the two men of life's business not this jabbering nonsense from Washington. 

 

Elmer Suggins was a coon hunter, kept three blue dog hounds, a drying and curing shed for the pelts, and a meat locker for the rest.  Years of coon hunting had given him historical perspective.  The raccoon was one of nature's most adaptable animals, and come a nuclear Armageddon, it would be the most likely to survive.  

Coons were not particular about what they ate - leavings were just fine, and they had moved from forest to back alleys thanks to garbage cans, dumpsters, and trash bins.  They were agile, strong, and intelligent, thrived in their new environment, and lived in backyard trees, attics, and basement stairwells. Heat and cold were incidental.  

"Take the cockroach", Suggins said, settling into a groove. "The cockroach hasn't changed in 235 million years, perfectly adapted to every environment, no need for improvement. The roaches on your toothbrush and down your drain are the same that roamed with the dinosaurs."

 

Human beings had indeed been around for a geologically short time, but atop the food chain from the very first.  Not only that, they suddenly developed a brain a million times more powerful than anything needed to hunt wildebeest on the savannah.  Some missing link, some powerful but unseen environmental influence must have been at work; and soon enough, all that computing power would come in handy. If there ever were an adaptable creature, it was man. 

Climate change? A matter of adaptability, not hysteria. New York will become the new Venice, Miami a luxurious city with waterways, swamps, and glades above which thousands will live in high-rise luxury. Agriculture will move north, the geopolitical map will change, but life will go on as productively as before.

  

Climate activists are appalled at what they see as these facile assumptions.  There can be no adaptation to a climate warming at disastrous rates.  Unless such climate change is arrested, the earth will die, burned to cinders in a fiery, universal environmental Armageddon.  No amount of survivalist idealism will change that.

The arguments of people like Elmer Suggins have been lost in the is-it-or-isn't-it debate about climate change. True believing activists have neither a geological, evolutionary perspective nor a futuristic one, for anyone paying attention to the advances in genetic engineering can see that within a few generations at most, human beings will for the first time not resemble their ancestors.  

Recombinant DNA engineering can modify human adaptability in both short- and long-term.  Digestive, nerve, musculo-skeletal, cognitive, and physiological systems will all be in play.  Lungs will be adapted to high levels of carbon dioxide, thinner oxygen, and thicker methane.  Hearts and arterial systems reconfigured to take on newly-moderated blood flow.  Brain power will be augmented to parse the slightest fissure in knowledge and make sense out of it. 

As importantly the interface between the human brain and the computer will soon be seamless. Virtual reality is but the embryonic phase of perceptual evolution.  When the electro-chemical network of the brain is finally understood and the nature of thought deciphered, working at home will take on a whole new dimension.  Computer-mediated minds will have all of the world's information available at a mental click and will have the computing power of a million mainframes. 

A hot, unpleasant 'real' world will become insignificant.  Food will be processed and easily assimilable, health diagnostics will all be done online, and treatment, thanks to genetic modification will be increasingly unnecessary.  Intimate relationships - love affairs of limitless possibility - will thrive in this new, completely cybernetic world. 

'Frightful', said most who heard this theory of adaptability, for it was not just a sci-fi dream of a Georgia cracker, but a profoundly sane evolutionary one. Even the most cursory glance at genetics offers powerful insights into the revolutionary changes to come.  

Who ever said that human beings would not evolve? Of course they will, perhaps not in the environmentally incremental way that Darwin envisioned, but in quantum leaps.  Whoever said that the cockroach and the racoon, and all other species that have navigated their way through millennia of  changing environments should not be the model for human evolution? 

And yet the climate change juggernaut keeps rolling, and with each new ground covered those who are pushing it become more more insistent, less open, and more rabidly passionate.  Even if climate change is happening and is a result of human activity, no one is likely likely to stop it.  Most importantly, man, even more adaptable than ever and part of a dramatic, revolutionary biological alteration, will survive easily and well. 

Man is not the environmental destroyer that climate activists insist.  He is an integral part of the environment as much acted upon as acting.  The world is not as easily divided into villains and victims as many would like to think. Better see it as Hindus do - one universal place of permanent, never ending cyclic change - the world of Siva the Destroyer and Brahma the Creator. 

 'Whew, it's hot', said Elmer Suggins once again, wiping his brow, waiting for quittin' time. Such equations were not that difficult, he reasoned.  Common sense.  Why, the Sugginses had been around for five generations and when you took into consideration the bits and pieces scrambled and reassembled over time to produce Uncle Henry, an old fool but at 100 a man still to be reckoned with, a man millions of years in the making whose own bits and pieces would go into the genetic soup to continue the line for a million more, you just could not get your dander up over yet one more climate doomsday tale. 

The Sad Tale Of Edgar Sommers, The Last Progressive In America

Edgar Sommers was a thoughtful, dutiful, and thoroughly engaged man - a good man, one dedicated to principles and purpose, and one never tempted by irrelevance. That was for lesser men, and ever since he had been chosen for service, he had never once demurred.  The fate of the world was simply far too important for desultory interest. 

He was a member of Americans For Concerned Environmental Action, The Southern Conference for Racial Equality, the League of Professional Women, and many others.  He had walked with giants, tended the sick, fought the right battles at the right time, but now, horribile dictu, the time for social justice was coming to an end.  

As unconscionable a thought as that might have been a decade ago when progressivism was in full flower, and when its advocates and supporters were everywhere in the land in a Je seme a tout vent existential miracle, something had happened.  The oomph had gone out of the movement, the fire out of its loins, the passion, the desire, the absolute rabid righteousness gone with the wind. 

It had to do with Donald Trump, his first and second victories, and the seditious spread of viral conservatism, but the movement had continued increasing, multiplying, and splitting as fast as a chick embryo until it had become the ethos of the nation, a unifying principle, a political oneness.  How could this be, wondered Edgar as he saw the bastions, fortresses, and embankments of progressivism eroded by successive waves of radicalism? 

One by one the shibboleths of liberalism were falling.  Confederate statues were re-erected, forts, streets, and schools renamed for Southern heroes; the Black Man's notice of racial and cultural supremacy removed, the transgender movement stunted, redirected, and consigned away. Biblical injunction replaced Lacanian exegesis.  Churches were built on a monumental scale, Chartres and Notre-Dame replicas, stone books of the new religious age. Raw enterprise, industrial laissez-faire, and the law of the marketplace displaced communitarianism, compassionate consideration, and the redistribution of economic wealth. 

 

Edgar remained in Washington, almost alone, awash in a sea of conservatism, gasping for air in an atmosphere of me-first, whites-only, male idolatry.  He was still among his claques and shills, squads, caucuses, and crews but he felt the tide ebbing.  Soon he and his brothers and sisters would be washed far out to sea.  

What had happened? How had the heady vision of Utopia faded so quickly, tarnished by insult and innuendo - 'falsity, claptrap, Dodoism'.  It was a time of insular patriotism, xenophobia, and Mighty Joe Young primitivism.  No one seemed to want even the crumbs of what Edgar and his fellow reformers had worked for for decades.  It was every white man for himself, lord of the manor, patriarch, pasha, and grandee. 

 

It wasn't so much that conservatism had made a comeback after so many years in the anterooms of power as second fiddles, acolytes, intellectual drifters, and lost boys. Conservatism had become the ethos of the land.  Where Edgar and his like had been championed in years past, progressives were now paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue like slaves to the new Emperor.  He was a voice crying in the ever-widening wilderness. 

Glitz and glamour were in.  Comfortable, broken-in shoes were replaced by Italian leather; and rumple gave way to silk suits, cheap chic, and the Las Vegas, sequined look. 

Americans scrambled for it all like Jews at a wedding buffet, so much to eat and so little time.  It was a cultural grande bouffe of major proportions.  There was no polite bites of the salmon mousse and Quiche Lorraine, but a wholescale gourmandize of the pastrami, lox, and bagels. 

Edgar was blindsided.  He should have seen it coming with the successive conservative victories following on the Trump presidencies.  President after president came from cracker- and MAGA-land, the bayous, backwoods, and cypress swamps and sagebrush of America.  Conservatism became no less the secular religion that progressivism had.  Right and wrong were filtered through a political prism.  A new litany of God and country was recited as often as race, gender, and ethnicity had been in Edgar's day.  The turn of the screw, what goes around comes around, the Dawn of a New Age. 

Progressive numbers dwindled, but Edgar's staying power was still intact although fraying at the edges. His commitment had never been deeper or more intense; but whereas in the past he would have been attacked and censured for his political fantasies and obtuse intentions, now he was laughed at.  He had become a clown, a freak, a bearded lady, a dwarf.  

Yet he felt himself still Jesus on the Potomac, the savior, the prophet, the Chosen One.  Cassandras have always been ignored, so be it.  Cultural heroes must ride insolently above the herd, Nietzschean Supermen, God's anointed; and so it was that this, the last progressive in America, kept his footing till the last. 

 

Of course the end did not come quickly, but slowly and painfully.  Give me 'a soldier's death' says Marcus Aurelius to his assassins.  It was hard for Edgar to watch the conservative juggernaut, a new Sherman's March to the Sea, a Genghis Khan-like sweep from east to west until the entire country was under its yoke. 

Of course Edgar was disingenuous at best, naive and credulous at worst.  He of all people should have seen the revolution coming.  Liberal progressivism, a nouveau political philosophy based on European deconstructionist idealism, Socialist cant and Communist inspiration could never take hold in the Wild West, Robber Baron, Gunfight at OK Corral individualism of the United States.  Hippies, free love, communes, and the let-it-be ethos of the Sixties were not the avant-garde of the new America, but a sorry aberration. 

So Edgar rattled on until he was too old to stand, bullhorn in hand, fingers on the Internet, on the pulpit, the podium and at whistle stops; but he was increasingly a cartoon figure, a distorted side show escapee.  Progressivism had had its day, and it was pitiful to see this poor old codger hanging on with his nails. 

There were Trumps galore after the real Donald Trump.  His show was just the beginning.  America had finally had enough of the Left's cant and faux logique and looked forward to generations of burlesque, vaudeville, and big top governance. 

 

As far as Edgar was concerned, there were plenty of old people's homes around where he could spend his final years with like minded troopers - a kind of veterans lodging - and go out with fond memories of the way it was.  Only occasionally when news of the new conservative president filtered into the game room did Edgar wonder if it all was worth it.  That is, if decades of tireless effort, good will, and serious commitment to a righteous cause could be swept away in one fell swoop, how important could it have been?

Not at all said the young conservatives who were were no sitting in his chair.  Not whatsoever at all. 

The End Of The War Between The Sexes - Thanks To Transgenderism, Men And Women Are History

Perhaps the most famous literary work about the war between the sexes is Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, an excoriating play by Edward Albee in which George and Martha 'flay each other to the bone' and destroy every last bit of the ego and identity which has made their married life sheer hell. 

The play in unremitting in its harshness, its slashing wounds, and its mercilessness in its attack on the assumptions of marriage and their wicked falsity. 

At the end of the play, George and Martha, spent and empty, say that they now can start again, but the theatregoer wonders if after such a life of bitter vindictiveness, reconciliation and love are really possible. 

Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew is another acerbic look into sexual relationships.  Kate is a shrewish, bitter woman who hates the idea of men and the presumption of female complaisance.  She is crude, angry, and dismissive of them all except Petruchio who sees that her misandry is simply an emotional defense, a cover for the treatment she received as a child from her father.  

Petruchio sees in her the very spirit, lively intelligence, and independence he has always sought in a woman, and she sees him as the one man who knows and appreciates her.   

The battle between the two equally matched opponents is engaged, and after tearing at each others vanities, they come together. 

Shakespeare's Comedies are all about women who run rings around men.  Each of them, Rosalind, Viola, and Portia are far superior to the troupe of courtiers who come to the gates; but each woman, given the nature of the times, must marry for status and money.  All's well that ends well is the comedic meme for marriages that are sure to fail once the happy wedding celebration is over. 

The literary list of sexual dramas is endless.  Every deception, resentment, hope, disillusionment; every drab, tired bedtime, every pound of flesh has been chronicled, dramatized, and replayed. Men and women simply do not get along, these authors, poets, and playwrights say; accommodation is the rule, and only the weak submit to it. 

This is all background for the real story - the coming revolution in sexual affairs that will remove the millennia-old canker between men and women.  When society is pangender - that is when most former men and women have given up assigned-at-birth sexual identities and become androgynous, sexually fluid, and of indistinct sex, the world will be a less contentious, more congenial place. 

This revolution has nothing to do with gay pride.  Two men in a couple can be just as bitchy, demanding, and controlling as a man and a woman.  Gay cat fights may be only scratching, biting affairs but they are just as deadly serious.  Hell hath no fury like a woman - or gay man - scorned; so looking to gay marriage as an anodyne, is simply whistlin' Dixie. 

When sexuality is floating, fungible, and not harnessed and bound, there is far more give and less take.  Sexual demand - the central issue in straight marriage - is gone. Men want sex constantly and irrevocably while women are diffident. For them the rooster's contribution is enough. 

Laura in Strindberg's The Father who dismisses her bullying, weak husband, good only for reproduction and nothing else, is the model. Of course even with such desultory sexual interest, women demand some sexual attention; and knowing that they have become little more than a bag of laundry to their husbands, they have ways of shaming them to their beds and out of other women's. 

  

Easier said than done, for the dalliances and errancies of men are the rule.  Men for whom God's greatest irony is condemning them to sexual desire and frustration for their four-score-and-twenty years, can't help tomcatting, and when eventually and ultimately caught, are in the dog house. 

None of this will happen when society is pangender.  Once untethered from the two old, tired, useless sexual categories; when there are no such things as men and women but everything in between, a million combinations and permutation of sexual identity, all available, and easy to engage, marriage will be less of a pain.

While some men who have transformed into women will hold on to that transgender identity with purpose - high heels, pearl earrings, and perfume - they will soon realize that once natural sexual identity has been replaced, one size does not fit all, and many sexual shoes are in the shop.  

In other words, why not be fluid and pick and choose on the gender spectrum as the mood dictates?  The new sexual revolution is all about fungibility - if you can identify as a woman, then you can identify as any one of a hundred gender options on the spectrum.  If sexual identity is a matter of will, not biology then anything is possible.  To the point, if you are never sure who will turn up in your bed, you have no reason for gall. Love the one you're with takes on a whole different meaning. 

How many husbands are tired of the hair-in-the-sink, toilet seat, you're-not-listening-to-me routines? And how many of them sneak their way to Annette from Accounting, 'stay late at the office' or extend their business trips with a stopover in Copenhagen?

All of this tiresome stereotypical sexual behavior will be out the window when the new, true sexual revolution becomes universal.  The commercial implications are of course staggering. Unisex shops will be things of the past.  For each men's or women's shop there will be fifty come-as-you-are, go-as-you-please fashion smorgasbords, high-end gender novelty shops catering to the new fluidity

All the now unnecessary signage will go - Men's, Ladies', Laddies, Lassies, 'M', 'F' nothing will be gender specific, and gone will the questions and political divisiveness.  One nation, indivisible will take on a whole new meaning. 

What about reproduction? Oh, that...Well, in this brave new world fertility, an inconvenient necessity will be handled the new way - in vitro with genetically engineered embryos.  Fluid couples will opt for starter babies of more predictable genders, but when older, they can and will be as sexless and gender-optioned as their 'parents'.  Parenthood, too, will be completely redefined and will be more like a sexual kibbutz.  Again, the choices will be delightful if at first somewhat bewildering. 

So, for all those gender stick-in-the-muds reading this, get over it.  The sexual genie is finally out of the bottle, and the new sexual age has dawned. Try it, you'll like it. 

January 6th - Diary Of A Deep State MAGA Crazy

Henry Lofton lived in a cabin in the north woods of the Idaho panhandle.  He and his three friends - Billy Bob Frank, Kissy Marden, and Upton Blair - had lived there since Sleepy Joe Biden had stolen the election from their man in 2020, and since then had plotted and planned and conspired to do whatever they could to see that the faux president would never stay in the Oval Office. 

Henry was a Westerner, born and raised in Livingston, Montana, an old railroad town turned quiche and post office box income. His father had worked as a telephone lineman and part time on the cattle cars when the Union Pacific needed extra help.  His mother, originally from Wyoming had come to Montana with Henry's father whom she had met at a Cody rodeo.  

Henry had worked since the age of eight when he swept out the barber shop on Saturday mornings when the cowboys came in to get a trim. Life was hard, especially in winter when it was hard to heat their railroad flat by the tracks; but he never resented it, and in fact felt it made him the tough hombre that he was now.

Billy Bob was a Georgia cracker and proud of it, native of the backwoods hill country, Southern as shit, Confederate to his boot tops, mad as a bit cougar at the Washington fools who had been after him and his family since the War. His father was a moonshiner who had upped the ante and got into crystal meth, got busted in Macon, spent eight years at the federal pen at Baldwin, and got right back into business, this time armed and ready. 

  

Kissy was a groom on a Central Florida horse ranch owned by his uncle.  The uncle had done two tours in Nam, came back completely fucked up, took his army pension and disability and put a thousand down for three horses and five acres in Ocala.  Kissy had been on his own since his own father had been killed in Khe Sanh and his mother ended up in West Texas with a trucker. Ever since the government repossessed the ranch and evicted his uncle, the stink of horses, old leather, and rat poison were the only things he remembered - that and a visceral hatred for Washington. 

Upton Blair was the son of itinerant street preachers who had moved from North Carolina to Philadelphia with the notion of converting the North Philly slums into havens of God; but after beatings, robberies, and years of insult, they returned home to piece work, tarpaper shacks, and chicken feed. 

The four of them just happened on each other at Pete's Bar in Coeur d'Alene, broke, drinking cheap beer and looking for the shit, but it was an alliance made in heaven.  Four rejects with nothing to lose and an abiding hatred for the government that had wronged them all independently decided to migrate north. 

Trump was their man, their hero, their Achilles, their surrogate who would not only drain the swamp but build a bastion of righteousness against the socialist bottom-dwellers who had spawned and bred there; and here he was, robbed of a second term and determined to get his job back and save America from the buggering fools trying to take it over, and needed all the support he could get to make America Great Again.

 . 

Henry had heard of some kind of march on Washington, and without a second thought decided to go. They would ride the rails, cadge their way East on big rigs with American flags, and come hell or high water make it to the so-called Capital. Money was no object because they had none, but the Deep State was a community, and would take care of its own. 

It was a thing of passion, this ride East, and the first time they had felt anything like eagerness, let alone hope; but there it was, picking up steam and comrades every hundred miles, men as angry as they were scuttling about, picked on, forgotten, and resented their whole lives.  They were the true bottom of America.  Forget the inner city.  That was a place of order, and purpose.  Women, dope, bling, and power; and the communists in Washington gave tax dollars to them? while Henry and his buddies had gotten nothing but swill and leavings, shit from straw bosses, and beatings from railroad bulls.  If there was a disenfranchised, beset upon, relegated group of Americans, it was them.

Henry, his crewe, and the pick ups from Boise eastward had no idea about the workings of government, the tripartite division of powers, the Constitution, or the machinery of government.  They knew nothing about interest rates, debt ceilings, or the stock market.  They had no clue about enterprise, start-ups, or the working of the economy.  They were headed to Washington with nothing but a rabid, inchoate anger in their heads.  A colony of losers, a nation of incoherent, unfortunate semi-beings.

Like the doped-up child soldiers of Sierra Leone, they dressed in fright wigs, crinoline, and stockings and added Viking helmets, Irish shillelaghs, and Vatican robes.  They had raided dumpsters and trash heaps and found wild treasures, and by the time they had reached Pennsylvania Avenue they were decked out in discards from tattoo parlors, brothels, dance halls, and pawn shops. 

The rest is history.  This wild bunch of crazies marched on the Capitol in their wigs, Viking horns, clown suits, and Frankenstein masks and they called it insurrection.  Insurrection? Revolution? Where had 'they' been hiding? Where were they when Jonas Savimbi took on the Angolan military, or when the Right Wing death squads in El Salvador disemboweled the entrenched bureaucracy, or when the Sandinistas ran amok, or when one African tribe after another slaughtered each other? 'They' - the whole lot of government shills and do-good wannabees who had never been outside the Capitol or their safe districts - ran at the first sign of a crowd.  

Henry, Billy Bob, Kissy, and Upton were in the middle ranks of the clown parade on the Capitol on January 6th. They got pushed to the curb by Alabama hillbillies with dildo clubs, lost in the shuffle of ten-gallon hatted bullies from Abilene, and kicked aside by white hoodlums from Gaithersburg. They had done their bit, the Capitol was a long way off, and there was still no money to be had. 

By the time the affair was over, and the campus police had jackbooted their way into the crowd and locked up the front runners, Henry and his crewe were on their way back to Idaho; but their interest in returning there was nil.  They had shot their wad and wanted to fish someplace nice and quiet, maybe have a girl and some home cooking. Someplace flat.  

And so it was that they stopped in Bolivar, Ohio, made a go of farm life and as far as anyone knew, had given up politics altogether.  

The Vacuity Of Joe Biden - How Banging On About A Thing Makes It True

The world is an increasingly complex and complicated place, and it takes more than a Delaware politician to figure it out let alone to make any sense at all.  Geopolitics for him is a matter of good guys and bad, white hats and black, good vs. evil, and not much in between.  

Vladimir Putin is not the product of an Imperial and Soviet past - long generations of princely rule, authoritarianism, and a storied history - a man whose talents were honed through Cold War espionage, nurtured by an ethos of suspicion, tribal and ethnic internecine conflict, and universal rule, but a bully, a murderer, and an exploitive dictator. 

 

Xi of China is not the embodiment of Imperial China, the emblem of Confucianism, Mandarin authority, and Han cultural enterprise but a resurgent Maoist, a man with hegemonic designs and a few billion people behind him. 

The Iranian ayatollahs are crazed religious zealots, fueled by a brutally violent religion and nothing to do with the Persian empire, Persepolis, and the spread of science, art, and literature.  The Ayatollah Khomeini, the driving force behind the Revolution and the ushering in of endemic terrorism and political mayhem was little more than a wild prophet playing on resentment of the Shah and his own Western imperial designs. Koranic fundamentalism and the ambitious spread of radical Islam are no more than geopolitical aberrations, side issues to the centrality of liberal democracy. 

All cattle in the pen - a roguish group of pests who haven't seen the light, greedy men with a lack of compassion, sensibility, and reason, all to be gotten rid of. 

The view of American conservatives is as myopic, historically ignorant and self-centered as that of our international nemeses.  It is a brutish, backwoods, cracker mentality gone public - a dangerously misogynistic, racist, homophobic rubes and ignoramuses.  

Of course Biden and his progressive supporters ignore the origins of American conservatism - the core Hamiltonian values embodied in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, adapted and honed from the Enlightenment by Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin to form what they saw as a perfect Union. 

The freedoms embodied in the Bill of Rights were God-given, not desultory add-ons to a document which spelled out the administrative and legal duties of government. They are the essential America, honored and recalled by conservative Americans who prefer historical reference for guidance and inspiration; and who kwant and intend to conserve the insights of the Founding Fathers, not replace them with facile adaptations of an imagined universality. 

So Biden, his political handlers, and followers in Congress, seemingly incapable of learning from history or looking disinterestedly at world and national events, bang on about the whole Satanic lot of Putin, Trump, Xi, and the Ayatollahs. 

The election of Donald Trump will ipso facto be the end of democracy, they say, the return to Jim Crow and the predatory laissez-faire capitalism of the Robber Barons.  Trump will quickly and surely consolidate power and join the club of autocrats.  Democracy will die.  

Biden and his Administration have a lot to answer for - a draining of the national treasury for made-for-corruption 'infrastructure' projects and discredited social welfare boondoggles; the divisive campaigns of diversity, equity, and inclusion; the chaotic non-policy at the southern border; the helter-skelter in-and-out inchoate foreign policy; insensate debt relief, and much more. 

Yet these missteps, lack of governance, and fairy tale promises are gone from public debate.  The President, under water in the polls, teetering and wobbly at every public appearance, incoherent about anything except his boyhood summers at Rehoboth, has been told to hammer away at Donald Trump. 

All else requires some degree of analytical thought, careful parsing, and objective reflection, so talk only about the likely demise of democracy as we know it, the visionary importance of the Black Man, and the rightness of social change. 

The American people, implies Biden, are a bunch of gullible fools, and will swallow anything if said loud enough and repeated often enough; and he has gathered around him a Cabinet and staff cut from the same cloth.  Gone are the days of JFK who insisted, no matter how credulous and uneducated the masses, his government would be one of intelligence, thoughtful political philosophy, and the best of European and American culture.  Some of it at least would be heard and appreciated in Dubuque. 

Not so the Biden Administration where because of the increasing weakness and of their leader, the absence of sound, proven ideas, and the zealous hysteria of progressives, only hammering, banging, and harping matter. 

Conservatives, however, are unaffected by the tripe, pick on Biden for his specific, identifiable, recorded failures.  Where have the billions in taxpayer monies gone? Why has the President let in thousands of immigrants willy-nilly with no policy whatsoever?  Why is spending billions on an unwinnable war in Ukraine, and backing off from unconditional support of our only true, loyal partner, Israel? 

Why, other than the color of his skin has the Black Man been raised to the pinnacle of human society? And what are the logical premises on what is this gender-twisting program of spectrums and sexual idolatry based?

The man can't help it.  He can't help his mind or his political complaisance and willingness to play the front man for programs of social 'reform' and 'justice'.  He has been a willing dupe for the progressive agenda which he thought seemed like a good thing, contrary as it was to his predecessor's radical Republicanism.

Best of all, it required no eloquence, no thoughtful parsing a la Bill Clinton, no Biblical or historical reference, no algorithms or political calculus - just hammer away at the foulness of Donald Trump and the coming Utopia. 

There is good reason for Biden's numbers to be as low as any recent President's.  He has done nothing but spend money like a drunken sailor, back the most divisive programs in memory, trade logic for dreamy promises, and stumble about looking for a way out.  God help him. 

Keep Those Nasty Immigrants Out - Biden's Craven Election Year Volte Face

'Let 'em in', said the President to his senior staff on Inauguration Day 2021. 'Diversity is good for America', and with that fell swoop, the doors to all comers on the southern border were thrown open. 

It seemed like a good idea at the time.  The President had been elected on a rush of good feeling - at last the country would be out from under the yoke of The Demon Of Fleet Street, the bloodletting barber of Washington, the former President, Donald Trump. It was not only Joe Biden who was being inaugurated but  a new era of compassion, ethnic and racial collegiality, and a bright new future. The country would be filled with brown- and black-skinned people seeking a new home and a new life in the land of opportunity. 

 

It turned out to be a bit less of a rosy state of affairs when tens of thousands of free riders crossed the Rio Grande to El Norte where, their cousins had told them, accommodation in four-star hotels, all expenses paid, and the finest amenities awaited them. 

The Border Patrol was incidental as all conditions, codicils, and caveat were lifted by presidential order.  A few bad apples might be rolling around loose in the bottom of the freedom busses headed north, but how rotten could they be? All in all, the waves of immigration would flood the land with deserving people, eager for a chance to live life as it should be led, not in the abject poverty forced on them by corrupt political regimes. 

Of course this was all nonsense.  Immigrants from the worst, rat-infested, drug-running, pestilential slums, ex-combatants from bloody civil wars, gang-bangers from Managua and San Salvadoran slums, on-the-run Amazon terrorists from Brazil, crooked Argentinian Bernie Madoffs, and Quechua Indian thugs all came running. The Biden policy was the best thing that ever happened to wannabee wetbacks who could now cross over without fear of La Migra.  It was a free lunch with all the fixin's. 

The mayors of sanctuary cities called foul.  We never intended to be everybody's soup kitchen. Compassion has its limits.  Few New Yorkers wanted to house Mara Salvatrucha gang members, and when tacos, beans, and rice were elbowing out pastrami, lox, barley soup, and onion rolls, enough was enough.

The economy showed some upward blips - fast food chains had a limitless supply of cheap labor, and upscale neighborhoods saw prices drop for nannies, leaf-blowers, and house-painters - but the cost of housing the undocumented thousands far exceeded the minor economic boon to the service industry. 

Then came the election year, and the President was hurried to the border.  The American people, in a shameful display of retrograde right wing behavior was turning its back on the needy, the desperate, and the hopeless, and they needed their president now.  Even dyed in the wool Upper West Side Jewish liberals were having second thoughts. They now wanted no more brown-skinned freeloaders in their necks of the woods. 

'We love you', the President said, waving his arms in an air-kiss gesture from El Paso across the Rio Grande to the Latino homeland.  His closing of the border was only temporary to give time to prepare more properly for new arrivals.  It had nothing to do with tacos or enchiladas, but logistical order.  

'You will always be welcome here', the President went on, 'today, tomorrow, and forever'; but nonetheless the border doors once again clanged shut, KEEP OUT! signs replaced rainbow ones, and Dobermans and Pit Bulls patrolled the lines in place of Labs and Portuguese Water Dogs. 'We mean business', the President said, 'but not necessarily you'. 

 

Politics is a venal business in the best of times.  Promises are made and never kept, assurances go by the wayside, and good intentions are left on the curb; but this volte face, this complete turnabout in policy was stretching the limits of disbelief.  Was the most enthusiastic, committed supporter of open immigration now ready to turn the Pit Bulls on the crowd? let them founder and drown, turned back by jackbooted American storm troopers? 

Anything to get re-elected; anything to turn the tide and to reverse abysmal poll numbers; yet this time the American electorate was not falling for such bald election year tomfoolery.  The man is nuts, more and more Americans were saying.  Time for the old coot to go. 

Biden's handlers knew that spinning the border reversal would be a challenge, but after all, 'temporary restraining orders' were well known to abusive husbands and stalkers, and so in play here.  Good people in need of some vetting, they said, sifting the best and the brightest from the chaff, finding the diamonds in the rough.  

The Vice President, named by the President to be his chief interlocutor and Border advisor on immigration policy cackled her way to a park bench while she dithered and demurred; but his advisors thought that now was her time.  A Biden re-election meant an automatic Harris presidency no more than a year into office, so all the more reason to tout her credentials.  

"I am one of you", the Vice President said to that invisible caravan coming north to the border.  "I am a woman of color, child of immigrants, a person on the march, a doer, a shaker, and an American of the people".  Here she spread her arms in an airy embrace of all those comers, still in the Sonoran desert but soon to arrive. 'Solidarity! Solidarity! Solidarity', she shouted, laughing, smiling, and nodding.  "La lucha continua" and with that she was shuttled off stage and back into the anteroom of power 'where she belongs' said one advisor, suspicious and disbelieving of her airhead performances and disingenuous people talk. 

So the Kammy and Joe Show lit up the lights for a while until he stumbled and she veered and wandered into some melancholy, diverse landscape.  'Get them both out of sight', another handler suggested with more vim than ever before; but like battery-powered toys they kept on talking, making no sense, fooling no one, and paving way for a second Trump presidency 

"They are not immigrants", said the President.  "They are already Americans in hope and spirit, and we welcome them....although not right now and not immediately, but certainly" and before those last words had drifted off into the soft Texas breeze, the election was lost.  The doddering old fool was history. 

No To The Other Side Of The Tracks - Diversity Is Just A Casual Affair

'What's over there?', Betty Jane asked her mother about Wofford Square, a no-no neighborhood across the tracks of the B&O railroad.  "It's not for you, dear", her mother replied. 'A lot of ticky-tacky, ramshackle houses, all cinder blocks and unpleasant things.  Stay on this side'; and so it was, of course, that Betty Jane in time crossed the tracks and met up with Angelo Pozzi, son of a factory worker and because of him spent nine months at the Convent of the Little Sisters of Mercy in Middletown until her ratty, dark-haired baby was born. 

'I told you so', said her mother.  'Now, what are we going to do with it?', meaning the baby whom nobody seemed to want.  Perhaps if it had been blonde and blue-eyed like her daughter, she might feel differently, but this...this darky...was unconscionable.  'Her wonderful husband is fighting the Japs', was the mother's story, and one day he would be lost in Mindanao and Betty Jane would begin her life again. 

The other side of the tracks was not a bad place, lots of garlic and yelling, people trying to make a go of their new life in America.  There were of course good reasons why it was a no-fly zone for girls from the West End, country day school girls off to Miss Porters and Vassar. They would never find their Paddington Harris III of the Vineyard Haven and Beacon Hill Harrises there, have blonde, blue-eyed children, and live on the North Shore. 

As it turned out, the child turned out all right.  There must have been some decent Etruscan genes in Angelo's DNA to match Betty Jane's patrician, English ones.  She had found good social cover for him in a marriage to a confirmed bachelor, a good man happy to be free at last from a hectoring mother and maiden aunts, and indifferent to the nature and origins of young Potter. 

It all should have never happened in the first place.  'Stick to your own kind' were the wise words of Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, and had young Betty Jane realized that there was no future across the tracks, no possible cross-cultural accommodation in the cards, and no reason whatsoever to leave her people, she would have been better off.  There is always trouble brewing when you stir someone else's pot. 

The remake of Bernstein’s original, faithful to theme, music, and lyrics attempted to make the story one of today – all traces of racial and ethnic stereotypes removed and the upbeat, happy ending emphasized.  Although we may cling to outdated notions of cultural and racial separatism, we will eventually realize our common humanity and such divisions will disappear.

Nor in a coon's age – history records the persistent identity of tribes, clans, religious sects, communities, states, and nations. Although recent DNA analysis has shown that homo sapiens did interbreed with Neanderthals, the two ‘racial’ groups tried to kill each other off.

Why is this lesson so hard to accept? Don’t birds of a feather flock together? Don’t they peck at the intruder until he leaves?

American Indian tribes fought each other to the death. African tribes slaughtered each other and used captured warriors as currency. Chinese dynasties rose to power after battles with pretenders and likely enemies.

Yet stirring the pot and sampling the soup has always been tempting.  Thomas Jefferson was not just anxious to get out of the hen house for while, but was curious.  What would sex be like with a girl who just a few years ago had been toting water in an African jungle and sold on the block for more than able field hands because of her native charm and beauty.  Who wouldn't jump at the chance? 

Romans loved the taste of Nubian women, Louis XIV favored peasant girls from Bretagne, and the alliances of Imperial Europe were not just for political reasons but sexual curiosity. A little on the side has been a staple forever - a tasty smorgasbord far more inviting than coq au vin no matter how well prepared. 

 

Yet these kings, courtiers, and American presidents, for all their dalliances and sexual curiosity, stuck with the program, followed the script, and assured the purity of their line.  We think of Martha Washington and Abigail Adams, not the concubines and mistresses of the Low Country and New Orleans. 

Of course such sexual libertinage has never been a one-way street.  Women have been just as tempted by sexual curiosity and appeal as men.  Adulteresses are common literary fodder. Emma Bovary married well but unhappily, and yet she only thought she knew the balletic moves of the aristocracy.  Lady Chatterley's desire for sexual mutuality was satisfied by Mellors, but it was their milieux that divided them in the end.  Anna Karenina got her comeuppance for straying, as satisfying as the relationship with her Don Juan had been. 

 

The point is of course not that well-to-do-women find sexual allure in strange places, but that all women do, and they are only more limited than men in their adventures because of a persistent lack of social countenance for their sexual energy.

Everyone sticks together – white people, black people, gay people, professionals, wealthy people – but as long as they are productive, responsible members of the community at large, there is no reason to disrupt this natural, millennia-old tendency of likes to group with likes. There is no demonstrable advantage, profit, or gain from forcing socio-cultural integration.  Too much has been made of sharing experiences of unlike people – encouraging white, wealthy residents to look into the lives of dysfunctional black ones makes no sense at all. 

Raves were popular in the 90s because they brought all types together.  Private school girls from Georgetown and Spring Valley danced with yobs from Gaithersburg but married boys from Yale. Diversity is only a casual affair.