The Dumbing Down Of Helen Of Troy - Bring Back Vixens, Adulteresses, And Nietzschean Harpies

There has been no heroine in literary history quite like Helen of Troy, 'the face that launched a thousand ships', the mythical woman who either was an opportunistic gold digger, willingly going off with Paris to Troy and the regency of the land; or an abductee, a woman taken from her rightful husband because of the jealous capriciousness of the gods.  Helen either went to Troy as a captive or complaisant prize to Paris, or never went to Troy at all but to Egypt where she waited for her husband Menelaus to rescue her. 

 

Homer wrote of her legendary beauty, and Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides all added to her legend.  In their hands she was either a powerful, manipulating seductress or a women with uncanny will and agency.  Her beauty was unparalleled, but her intelligence and savvy underrated.  

Euripides in Helen created a complex and intriguing character and placed her within a pre-Platonic world of supposition, shadows, and improbability; and in The Trojan Women gave her a willful defiance of received wisdom, a canny legal defense, and a political insouciance of only the strongest, most incomparable women. 

 

Her sister Clytemnestra was no different.  Enraged and outraged by her husband, Agamemnon's sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia simply to get favorable winds to assist him in his casus belli war against the Trojans, Clytemnestra and her lover, Aegisthus, plot to kill the king, her husband and murderer of Aegisthus' father. 

Clytemnestra is the more determined of the two sisters.  She never wavers in her intention to avenge the death of her daughter, to murder her killer, and to become regent of Argos alongside her lover.  She is a Nietzschean hero - amoral, undaunted, merciless in the execution of her designs and ambitions. 

The sisters are unmatched in literary and mythological history - proto-feminists, proud and determined women, unbowed and unintimidated by their male overlords.

Where are the Helens and Clytemnestra today?  Where is such unparalleled defiance to patriarchy, Machiavellian determination and will?  Nietzsche said that the expression of pure will is the only validation of the individual in a meaningless world, but the amoral, willful heroines of the past are done and gone, 

Shakespeare understood the Greeks and anticipated Nietzsche. Goneril, Regan, Tamora, Dionyza, Lady Macbeth, and Volumnia were cut from the same Athenian cloth.  They were indomitable, unstoppable, and defiant.  Today? Women who have ignored the legacy of these queens and pretenders, have shaken their heads at Hedda Gabler, Laura, Hilde Wangel, and Rebecca West, Ibsen and Strindberg creations who have used guile, treachery, and feminine insight to undo the likes of the Master Builder, Rosmer, and the Captain.

Where is Margaret Thatcher when we need her? ask women tired of being told they are a persecuted minority, shielded from men's misogyny and sexual predation; women who cannot stand on their own and must be protected, coddled, and protected.  Thatcher was a Clytemnestra in grocer's daughter's clothes - a defiant challenger to received wisdom, male subordination, and masculine febrility.  She was outspoken, literate, persuasive, and a royal pain in the ass to the liberal hectors of the Left. 

The United States, trapped in a culture of MeToo, 'No Means No' female protectionism, seduced by hopelessly anti-historical notions of gender fluidity and peaceful co-existence, have chosen to be represented by people of color, alternative sexuality, and ethnic diversity - women as far from Nietzsche's Übermensch as a sparrow from an eagle, a compromising, uncertain cadre of phantoms just like the ephemeral likeness of Helen in Troy. 

Diversity un-mans and un-womans, denies Nietzschean will, assumes a passive acceptance of the notions of the herd and encourages posturing - political poseurs who have never faced incoming.  Race, gender, and ethnicity - what are they compared to individual will? Nothing but poster boards, memes, campaign slogans, lawn decorations, banners and festoons? 

 

Goneril and Regan were not nice women. They were ambitious, murderous, and psychopathically driven; but their brand of willful, indomitable will is sorrowfully missed.  This whole color-amalgamated potpourri of gender- and race-associated women is a lark, a child's garden of verses, and a Goodnight Moon childish fantasy. 

Oh, but Goneril and Regan were not nice ladies nor was Hilde Wangel, manipulating the Master Builder to jump from the tower; nor Laura who got her husband committed thanks to an insidious, women-only doubt over paternity; nor Volumnia who engineered her own son's death to accede to power,

Niceness is in vogue especially if it is the inclusive, embracing kind - love for gay men, trannies, and Folsom Street Fair butch-and-leather femmes in Spanish Inquisition drag.  Gay power couples debate who's on top, who's the husband, and who meets the press.  The Clytemnestras - those women who want to do their husbands in - are working two jobs, three shifts and with barely enough time to buy the poison. 

Most American have had enough of simpering, distressed women. The hectoring blandishments of the Congressional 'Squad', discontented women of color with no clue about female reserves or when and how to call them up.  They are old-fashioned Saturday morning cartoon characters in modern drag- Daffy Duck, Goofy, and Porky Pig - without a clue, falling off cliffs without a clue why or wherefore. 

 It's only a matter of time before the real feminism returns.  Perhaps it was because the women of Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Ibsen lived in the patriarchal times they did - such harnessing, rein-and-bit male domination lit their fires - but it's time for these banked fires to be fanned.  Forget MeToo, 'No Means No' and the whole raft of  trans-this and trans-that faux womanhood has had its day, over and done with, ready for the real women to strut their stuff 

Two Old Guys Fighting For The Presidency - One Can't Remember Why, The Other Could Care Less

The good news is that modern science has given us longevity.  The bad news is that we can't remember what we ate for lunch...and so goes God's greatest irony. 

Joe Biden would like to remember what he had for lunch, who is Prime Minister of Italy ('I know she's a pretty girl'), what on earth all the fuss in Ukraine is all about, and why that uppity LaShonda Jackson is always in my face?

In the old days the President used to know what was what, the sinecure days, when he had the easiest job in the world, when representing a small, forgotten state and bringing home the bacon was a snap because his colleagues in the Senate felt obligated to give him a warship or two or a bridge across the Delaware River. 

In those halcyon days Joe could just smile, kiss babies, and attend ladies' teas, and he would always get reelected.  Good Ol' Joe, the voters mused, good for Delaware, good for the country, although it was because of the bacon, the bridges, and of course the good offices and largesse of Dupont that kept his ship afloat. 

Now he could barely remember those days.  It was all a hazy, misty, warm and generous feeling which blended with his childhood days on a sunny Rehoboth beach, the caresses of Nancy Blythe...or was it Carol Frisbee?... and the handshakes and pats on the back from well-wishers. 

Thank God for the teleprompters, admitted his wife and his handlers; but even that was no solution as a sequela to the President's dementia was dyslexia; and no matter how large the font or how simple the grammar, he simply couldn't make heads or tails of it.  To him it was just one big autocorrected mess. 

His staff consulted cognitive psychologists who suggested mnemonic tricks - emotional words in pink, dire warnings in crimson, accomplishments in blue all of varying intensity and intermittence. But to Joe it was all kindergarten again, coloring flowers and trees and the blue ocean, and was more confusing than anything. 

The earphone was no help either.  The voice piped in from the wings seemed to him like some disembodied being, a pesky echo, and with his oral dyslexia he sounded out the words in his ear in the wrong direction. 

'Keep the bloody fool off stage', one disaffected aide said to a colleague in private, a view universally shared by the staff; but the press kept clamoring for press conferences, one-on-one interviews, and campaign whistle-stop speeches that made sense.  

Meanwhile his opponent kept hammering and whacking away at the President's programs with bravura and bombast with no concern for accuracy, veracity, or even a semblance of what actually was.  Trump had never cared for 'the truth', and he was popular for exactly that reason.  His supporters were sick and tired of on-the-one-hand, on-the-other econo-speak, charts and up-and-down graphs showing the rate of melting, the heat index, and the carbon whatever of the environment. 

What they wanted and heard from their man was how climate hysterics were depriving them of jobs, taking away their stoves, forcing plug-in toaster cars, turning the country into a queer, black and socialist country, and playing gin rummy with the ayatollahs instead of bombing them to smithereens. 

 

Trump didn't care about logic, rational exegesis, parsing, noting, and reserving judgment.  The man was all about the Borscht Belt, Las Vegas, Hollywood, and the mean streets of New York.  Exaggerate the worth of Trump Tower? Of course he did, bloody fools, and everyone in the market knew it, jawboned, twisted and turned, prevaricated, and did their own financial acrobatics until a mutually agreed-upon price was reached. 

Insurrection? 'You gotta be kidding' the former President said, and showed on the jumbotron the Viking-helmeted, face-painted, wild-ass bunch of Idaho crazies that had come out of the backwoods to whoop it up on Pennsylvania Avenue.  Influencing the election? Phooey, of course he did, who wouldn't up against a nincompoop like Biden who had his own operatives down in Georgia. 

The crowd roared, the band played, and the former President's poll numbers kept rising. 

'Democracy is at stake', shouted Biden at a Canton, Ohio Knights of Columbus hall.  This was the only meme, the only slogan, the only possible line that the President could be counted on to remember and say clearly.  His staff had done a Manchurian Candidate trip on him - once he said those words, the whole ethos about Trump's evil and worthlessness would kick in.  

The President then took out his cue cards and picked one that seemed to make sense.  Again, the staff had been on their toes.  There was no particular order of cards the President had to follow.  Each one had a salient talking point, so he could shuffle away and still make a point. 

The foreign press had a field day. 'A Fools' Jamboree' read the headline in the Corriere della Sera, Italy's paper of record which, after a year of Giorgia Meloni's presidency was used to her sharp, confident, supremely well-prepared press conferences and interviews. She had the facts and figures of the economy, immigration, tax policy, Brussels, inflation, and Putin at her fingertips, and she spoke with a rapid-fire, synaptic brilliance. 

The French were used to the young, blonde Marion Marechal, darling of the Right, deft, canny, as sharp as tacks, eloquent, persuasive, and brilliant.  Outspoken about the curse of Islamization, the raft loads of unwanted immigrants, and the corrosion of the very pillars of European society, her poll numbers jacked up overnight. 

Both women were what every American wanted and needed - not one old, spoon-fed babbling old man and a fat windbag. 'You get what you deserve', said the Italian and the Frenchman. 'Get over it'; and so we did as the campaign headed for November. 

Trump, in irons because of his witch trials, still howled and bellowed just enough not to be cited for contempt but more than enough to make the news.  Biden went from one scripted, highlighted, mnemonically-aided event to another, never making any sense whatsoever, counting on 'the democracy thing' and the demonic caricature of Trump his party had created. 

A Meloni or a Marechal could run rings around both of them - men who have either forgotten where they are or who could care less about it.  The campaign is a hilarious side show of a bumbling and stumbling fool and a wild man shouting and barking, a LaTourette's carny barker, a tummler, and outrageous clown. 

Old age is not fun to watch - we all knew that before this fol-de-rol all started, but we're stuck with them. 

'The country needs you', said Jill comfortingly to her husband before bedtime one night. The President smiled and kissed her on the cheek, not sure why the country did or what he was going to do about it, but Jill knew best. 

Meanwhile Donald Trump entertained a hundred people at a gala at Mar-el-Lago where he flew while his trial was in recess.  He didn't give a fuck about Fanny or LaShonda or any of them.  He had made billions, had been on television, and was known everywhere.  'Fuck 'em', he said, and teed up on the first hole. 

When No Never Means No - The Sexual Education Of A Handsome Young Man

Bobby Perkins had been a very obedient child, always did what he was told, kept his elbows off the table, closed his mouth when he ate, kept his napkin in his lap, and always said, 'Yes, ma'am' and 'No, sir'. 

He had been an altar boy, an Honor Camper, and a good all-around member of the young New Brighton community, a boy any parent would want to have.  He was a Cub Scout, a Boy Scout, an Explorer Scout, and a hall monitor. 

 

It was probably a foregone conclusion that this complaisance, obedience, and dedication to doing the right thing wouldn't last.  How long could a normal, red-blooded boy keep it up?  How many masses, jamborees, and perfect attendances could there be in him until something clicked or cracked or gave way? 

Not surprisingly it was a girl who turned his head.  Nancy Blythe was a Lolita, a nymphet, a young girl who barely out of seventh grade was a siren, an alluring, irresistible, uncannily sexual woman, and it wasn't long before she and Bobby were in the back of his father's El Dorado, and old-fashioned antique great winged thing with a wide interior and soft leather seats.  

At first he didn't know exactly what to do, but Nancy guided him through the first of their many times together. The back seat was only the first.  There was the 14th hole of the Country Club, the hall closet, and once in his parents' magnificent Mallard canopied bed.  

How she knew about Khajuraho positions and Japanese pornographic acrobatics he never knew; but that was what set Nancy apart. She didn't have to study to learn any of this.  It came as naturally as walking or smelling a rose. She wanted to be touched there, petted, kissed, and entered since before she could remember.  Of course she didn't understand what these feelings were all about, but that was incidental.  She knew something was up and that was enough. 

What changed the reticent, quietly obedient Robert L. Perkins into a sexual adventurer was her willingness.  Anything that Bobby wanted to do, she let him do; and even more importantly she turned him into her sexual toy, a plaything, an action figure with erections; a he-man transformer who held her like Hercules, bent her back like the Rape of Proserpina, entered her like a satyr, then turned over and let her suck and stroke him. 

 

Anything goes was Nancy's meme, and Bobby was lucky to have had her as his first love. After Nancy he had not one timid bone in his body, not one moment of hesitation, not one iota of doubt.  He knew from the very start that women wanted sex as much as men did, and were hard to get only as part of an elaborate animal vetting.  Before rutting, the doe sniffs out the stag.

Nancy taught him how to short circuit the preliminaries, how to approach women the way they wanted to be approached but found hard to admit. So many centuries of demure, eye-lash batting, trussed and wigged comeliness were hard to overcome. Unwanted pregnancy was a death sentence, but the right moves could collar and corral the right man at the right time. 

Nancy jumped the queue. There was no male harness that could hold her, no reins that could force her direction, no bit, no whip that could intimidate her.  Her sexuality, her open, uninhibited desire and wonderful, innate ability to whore up or bed down as the mood suited her was defining. 

Laclos' Marquise de Merteuil was a woman for whom sexual pursuit, conquest, and domination was all there was in a narrowly confined courtly life. She had a Machiavellian will and devious intent - an intellectual prurience and a second-hand interest in sex (she liked to watch) when first-hand had to be deferred.  Nancy's sexuality on the other hand was honest, easily definable, and irresistible. She was simply a woman who was absolutely, impeccably, and insistently sexual. 

 

When Bobby ran up against the MeToo, 'No Means No' ethos of the day, he was perplexed. Not only was the elaborate balletic dance of courtship gone, but a censorious, fearful, legal battleground has been put in its place.  

Nancy Blythe laughed at this dry irritability. She not only knew what men wanted but how make them whatever she wanted - her sexual poupée, consort, or husband accordingly.  

Women, Bobby knew thanks to Nancy, wanted the same uncorralled sex that she had - a wide open Iowa prairie kind of sex.  No fences, no barbed wire, nothing but free range.  'No' was never in Nancy's vocabulary, nor was it in any woman's.  The MeToo movement had spayed women, messed with their minds, and sent them reluctantly to a chaste bed to be awakened by a Prince Charming who did their bidding and treated them like princesses. 

Knowing this, Bobby was a successful as Casanova, Valmont, or Lothario.  Women adored him.  There was no fooling him about their intent, and his was as plain as day.  He was a man who loved women and whose confidence, attention, and unbending sexual desire turned them inevitably his way.  'No' was never uttered, never necessary, never needed, for here was a man who instinctively understood women, who needed nothing but intimacy, respect, and charm to seduce them.

   

Many were like Nancy who needed no seduction, and for whom sex with Bobby was what they wanted; not so much on their terms, for that would be MeToo legalism, but something theirs and their alone.  A woman's desire, after all, defines who she is. 

Bobby lost track of Nancy, but like most older men who turn to their first loves for a second chance at innocence, looked around for her.  She was in Oregon someplace, but had left no paper trail.  Oregon could mean anything, deep woods, Portlandia, hausfrau...If a woman's desire does indeed define who she is, then Bob knew her better than any other woman he had met, so open, distinct, and aggressive had she been about it, and so the search would be worth it. Except for the other undeniable fact - God created men with a lifelong sexual desire, but granted them but a few short decades to realize it.

And so it was that the days of Nancy Blythe-type sexual epiphany were long gone.  Better to leave well enough alone. Given what she had meant to him, it wouldn't pay to see an old lady.  Yet there wasn't a day when the image of young Nancy Blythe didn't pop up in a daydream, that smooth, warm body next to his and her absolute delight with him. 

Much has been made of sexuality these days, but only the alternate kind.  An incredible demission of sexual intimacy.  The individual woman plays second fiddle in a political group. She is a point on a gender spectrum, but only an indistinct, unmeasurable one; a quantum probability. 

Bobby retired well and easily, a happy man. Nancy was not an obsession, he reassured himself, only a young love; but he knew that wasn't true at all.  She was his first love, his only love. 

When Barton's Holler Went Woke - A Biden Operative Goes Deep Hillbilly

Bob Muzelle had been a social justice advocate for decades, as far back as he could remember.  Of course not in Throgg's Neck where he grew up - that part of the Bronx was pretty Italian, lace-curtain Irish, and Orthodox Jew before it became overrun with Dominicans and Puerto Ricans. 

In none of these ethnic enclaves were there seders mourning the passing of Samuel Gompers and the great trust-busting socialists of the day, drunken brawls over Dewey and Roosevelt, and certainly no sympathy for Harlem.  Progressivism was not even a second thought. 

It was a working class neighborhood, hard by, patriotic as far as Fourth of July went, but the ties to The Old Country still bound tightly, and Bob's neighbors raised their glasses to Eire and Umberto II more often to Washington and Jefferson.   The Jews of course had nothing to celebrate, the Holocaust being such a recent memory, and they kept to themselves and their shops in an 'I don't want no trouble' peaceful coexistence with what, let's face it was an anti-Semitic corner of the Bronx.  

Somehow Bob moved away from that conservative, enclave and became engaged in the social causes of the day - the War in Vietnam, women, and the black man.  Over the years, through college and beyond, Bob's commitment to Neo-Progressivism became unshakeable.  Reform was his calling, and Utopia his goal. 

More than anything Bob was a fighter - that was one good thing at least that the multi-ethnic ghetto had given him.  His bloodying of the bully of 12th Avenue was but the first notch in his belt.  He of course gave up street fighting when he left the Bronx, but the spirit of what he liked to call 'aggressive defensiveness' stayed with him throughout his politico days in Washington. 

It was this tough, barroom energy that led his ‘Biden for President’ colleagues to issue him a challenge.  The agenda of diversity, equity and inclusivity had not reached into the hinterland, and there were potential converts and votes there.  Eastern Kentucky was one of the swing districts important to Democrats for the upcoming election, so Bob was dispatched to Barton's Holler.  

Barton's Holler was a nasty, dark, gross place of trailers, mud, coal dust, and the stink from the smelter on the river.  The holler was set in the crotch of two mountain ridges, too steep to farm, all but denuded for firewood, given to mudslides, and high enough to block all but the noontime rays of the sun.  It was a dismal, ugly, hard-bitten, miserable place.  

'Howdy', Bob said to the old men sitting on the front porch of 'Billy's', the general store owned by Billy Thatcher, retail in name only - bootlaces, mops, and 100 lb. bags of cornmeal on otherwise empty shelves. Billy still stoked the old potbellied stove to keep the place warm, but on warmer days like this one, he kept the screen door open and let the customers rest awhile in front. 

The Cowen brothers were playing checkers and never looked up.  Hack Wilson and his bluetick were asleep in the sun, and Billy was in the back room.  Bob just stood there smiling.  Finally Billy walked into the store, heaved the sack of cement he was carrying onto the floor, stepped from the cloud of coal dust, and nodded. 

 

It wasn't just that Bob looked like an outsider, he was suited up in cracker wear designed to fit in.  He had been told in Washington that these good ol' boys didn't like 'furriners' and best he dress the part; but everything smelled too much of L.L. Bean just out of the Amazon box, too pressed and stiff to help anyone fit in. 

Billy gave Bob the once-over, spat into a corner just beyond the sack of cement, and said, 'So?'. 

Bob smiled even more broadly, extended his hand, cleared his throat, and began his spiel.  He was here, he said, to discuss points of national interest, the Biden agenda, and how the President's re-election would promise well-being and reward.  

'Like what?', said Billy, jacking up his overalls and spitting again into the corner. 

Now Bob was on solid ground.  He talked of Bidenomics, energy renewal, a more generous, accepting and tolerant society, and the foundation of civil rights.  He smiled again, paused, and waited for what hoped would be a favorable response.   

'What about all them queers and trans-fucks?', Billy said, 'and them Bolshies'. 

Bob had not heard the term Bolshies since his father's day, but got the drift.  Bolshies, Commies, Socialists, same denominator, and here he was at long last in Indian country but a little nervous, in the maw of the beast. 

Bob explained about his President's efforts at inclusivity, and although he respected the past, one must accept and embrace those of alternate sexuality. 

'We don't want no butt-fuckers and cock-suckers down here', Billy said, 'so tell Joey we ain't buying his bullshit'. 

Bob knew he shouldn't have worn his Biden/Harris campaign button, but it was too late to take it off. 'I understand, Mister....' Here Bob stopped short.  He should have found out Billy's name before even stepping into this foul-smelling, cracker shithole. 

'None of your goddamn business', Billy said, spat in the corner, hitched his overalls, and walked away.   

There weren't many other places to schmooze in Barton's Holler.  Billy's store was just about it, but there was the church, always a meeting place in these backwoods places.  Had he come on a Sunday he could have heard a Bible-thumping, hallelujah, Praise the Lord, holy rolling sermon, a real sermon and far cry from that of his own Reverend Barker Phillips of the Westover United Church of Christ in Bethesda, marvelously secular in intent with Jesus only a backdrop. 

The door to the rectory was open, so Bob let himself in.  A place of worship welcomed all visitors. Pastor Bridges, a young, distracted-looking man, saw Bob and waved him to the old wooden Remington Carbine crate at a Victorian, cracked, engraved coffee table.  

'Sorry', the pastor said, 'Looking for my glasses', and at that swept around the room, half-blind, stumbling, arms out, until he finally found them, hooked around an empty bottle of horse liniment. 'Knew they were here somewhere'. 

The response of the pastor to Bob's spiel was no different than that of Billy sans epithets.  He hated the idea of...here he looked for the proper terms to describe the disgust he had for homosexuals...men who did it with men, and all the combinations and permutations of normal sexuality that God forbade in the Bible; and given that he hadn't seen a black man since twenty years ago when he attended a Baptist conference in Louisville (where he was surrounded by them), he was nonplussed at the idea of this racial summitry in the White House.  Of course he didn't put it quite that way, but Bob translated dialect into intelligent metaphor and understood. 

Two for two.  Two strikeouts in hillbilly land, cracker-town, the dismal hollers of Kentucky.  Should he try the school? Nah, why bother? And so, as a parting shot at this miserable, backward place, he left a bag of Biden/Harris buttons on the front porch of Billy's under the rocker where some old toothless bastard had nodded off. 

'How'd it go?', asked a colleague when Bob returned to his K Street offices.

'Pretty darned good', Bob replied, and tucked in to his outbox. 

Yale's Swan Song - The Pathetic Demise Of Excellence

Harper Fielding's father and all forbears had gone to Yale - the old Yale, that is.  Skull and Bones, Fence Club, the upper crust, Gentlemen's 'C', summers on the Vineyard, winters at Gstaad, a sinecure at Bear Stearns, and a wedding with a Cabot or Lodge on Nantucket. 

Things had not changed much over the years since Great Grandpa went there, interrupting his education to fight the Hun at Ypres and receive a Distinguished Service Cross; or since Granddad spent four years there, shuttling between New Haven, New York, and Smith College in a happy Fitzgerald-esque whirlwind of social affairs; or even since his father, stellar student of Maynard Mack, Harold Bloom, and Vincent Scully, all stars in the academic pantheon, illuminating the likes of Blake, Hamlet, and the great temples at Cnossos. 

 

The erosion of that idyll which had continued since the days of Elihu Yale and John Davenport, had begun when Inslee Clark, new Dean of Students, opened the floodgates to all comers - the best and the brightest were no longer from St. Marks, St. Paul's and Groton, but from Stuyvesant, Thomas Jefferson and Carver High.  If its social viability went down, its academic reputation went up.  Always a place of seriously higher learning, Yale with the matriculation of these smart Jews from Crown Heights and Italians from Bay Ridge, became a magnet for achievers.  Out were the days of a 'well-rounded' education, and in were the days of all-nighters in the laboratory or in the carrels of Harkness. 

Even that halcyon of high academic interest and rigor, however, had its day. When the university opened its gates not to the best and the brightest, but to anyone who had a gripe - victims of white supremacy, patriarchy, homophobia, and economic exploitation - down crashed the ivory tower.  In its place was a hodge-podge of comers from every closet, ghetto, and Appalachian hollow.  It was a jamboree of the 'newly privileged', the leftovers and left-outs who finally were having their day. 

Out too were the classes of Bloom, Mack, and Scully and in were a wide range of offerings dealing with the same oppression, victimization, and alienation experienced by those students recruited and admitted under the university's new DEI policy. 

So, when Harper Fielding stepped up to carry on in the footsteps of his father and his father's family, he was greeted not with the generous welcome he expected - after all the Fieldings had contributed tens of thousands to the university - but with suspicion.  As a white boy from a wealthy, privileged Boston family, he was immediately suspect.  How would this legatee of racism fit in to a university in the process of expunging white privilege from every nook and cranny? 

The names of residential colleges which had been in place for centuries thanks to the preeminence, historical prominence, leadership, or early American patriotism of its founders, were being changed to those of minor characters as 'diverse' as the student body.  It simply wouldn't do for LaShonda Jackson from Anacostia to have to live in a residential college named for a bigot. 

Just as the overt signs, indicators, and memes of racism were being erased; and just as the academic offerings were reconfigured to reflect the interests and personal backgrounds of students, so did the nature and quality of discourse.  Gone were open inquiry, intellectual debate, logical exegesis, and analytical parsing, and in their place a gooey mix of expected outcomes.  Classes on the evils of slavery were paired with ones on the greatness of African culture.  Sociology courses on the white pathology of oppression were paired with those on the environmentally-attuned consciousness of the African and the higher order of his tribal religions. 

 

Logical inquiry, the very heart and soul of American higher education since the founding of Harvard and Yale centuries ago, was replaced by tautology and received assumptions. Slavery need not be studied as a socio-economic and historical phenomenon, dating back to the first Paleolithic human settlements, because it is, ipso facto, an evil institution.  In an ironic reminder of George Orwell's Animal Farm's meme, 'Four legs good, two legs bad', the University's 'Black is good, white is bad' was chilling but universally endorsed. 

Students of color had to get the lead roles in theatre productions, campus media, sports, and social clubs.  It wasn't just that the university was still trying to redress former wrongs, but to elevate one race over another because of its clear, unequivocal, absolute superiority.  

The same was true of gay men and lesbians.  They were promoted to the top of the heap not because of former insults but because they represented the new reality of fungible sexuality.  Gender was a choice, not a biological or genetic given, and those who chose to defy the patriarchal, homophobic, Bible-thumping ignorance of the past were heroes to be feted, honored, and respected. 

It gets worse. On the day that Harper was to visit Yale, the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic protests were in full swing in Beinecke Plaza. It was another Orwellian nightmare, with logic, precedent, and history inverted.  The Israelis were the genocidal murderers, not Hamas who for decades had preached nothing but anti-Jew hatred and called for the elimination of Israel and the extermination of the Jews.  

 

The Israelis were overlords, maniacal occupiers of sovereign territory, not self-defensive, legitimately protective national sovereigns who had to occupy, extend settlements, and create defensive perimeters. 

Despite thousands of years of the existence of the Jewish homeland, Jews had no claim to residence there because a few Arab goatherders were scattered in the Sinai.  Despite Israeli calls for peace and prosperity with only one proviso - that Hamas admit Israel's right to exist - the Palestinians have used every dollar of foreign aid, every Iranian rial to build an aggressive military infrastructure. 

A wild, feral mob. This was Yale? 

Indeed it was.  A cabal of students, teachers, and administrators had successfully promoted a woke culture on campus - a culture that determined admissions, courses, and school policy - and once in place, adopted, and endorsed, there was no turning back.  Nothing but the dismantling of the system would set things aright. From Board of Directors to students, a reversal of policy and nothing less would stop the ridiculousness, inanity, and downright destructiveness of the current situation. 

Harper's father was initially disappointed that the unbroken legacy of Yale attendance would now end; but he was no Old Blue codger.  He saw what was happening to this once storied institution, withdrew his substantial financial support, and cheered his son's matriculation at a far more sensible place. 

Pro-Palestinian Hysteria - Anti-Semitism And Feel-Good Victimhood In An Intellectual Void

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had'

Bob Muzelle's father, a minister and a good man read these lines from The Great Gatsby to his young son, hoping that he would follow suit.  The Muzelles were not wealthy, nor even well-to-do, but they were descended well.  A Muzelle had been one of John Davenport's associates in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and later in New Haven where he founded the New Haven Plantations as a more doctrinally pure settlement far from the growing apostasy of Boston.  A Palmer on Bob's mother's side had come with the second English ship to sail to Jamestown.

Neither side of the family had ever lost a sense of duty and responsibility instilled in them for over three hundred years.  They had a moral compass, unerringly pointed along the path of service, honor, and respect.  The elder Muzelle had gone ashore at Normandy, and his father, Bob's grandfather had fought at the Marne.

 

All of which is to say that any errancy on the part of Bob would never have been expected; but as a young man, first at Yale and then in Washington, he became isolated and indignantly righteous.  The causes he was fighting for - civil rights, peace, and the environment - were simply too important to give ground.  There was, he found, such a thing as absolute right; and once in one's grasp should never be let go. 

Of course most people have never believed in such absolutes.  The world has always been one of moral, self-justifying ups and downs. The Crusades, often condemned for their Christian imperialism and geopolitical intolerance, have turned out to be, at least for the time being, right.  Muhammed unleashed a virulent, obsessive, implacable expansionist force on the world and he should have been stopped in his tracks in Palestine just as his armies were at Roncesvalles. Would have saved the world a whole lot of trouble.

Views on everything from favorite colors to abortion have their indicators, justifications, and history. There is no absolute, indelible, ineradicable right to abortion, and the very conception of life will soon change as the human genome will be engineered to offer infinite possibilities for the human design of creation. 

So why was it that Bob, child of centered, morally certain, Christian parents could have fallen so far off the rails?  How was it that no analysis of antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction history could persuade him that the whole affair was not just about slavery but about the nature and value of labor and, the unique indivisibility of capital and labor in the system.

Nothing could change his mind that despite the tribal, primitive nature of the African slave and the economic vetting system which valued reproductivity and physicality over any other trait, the black man should be at the very pinnacle of human society. 

 

The answer comes from the idea of victimhood, the conviction that anyone who has been a victim of racism, misogyny, homophobia or any one of a hundred other common prejudices, has a right not only to be heard, but to be raised to prominence.  The black man simply because he was the victim of slavery is ipso facto superior to the white man who enslaved him. 

Conditionality - the millennia-old history of slavery, the burgeoning inter-tribal African slave trade, the cultural dominance of Western civilization, the trial and error of economic systems (viz Communism, slavery, socialism, Utopianism et. al.) - must be discounted in a universe of absolute right and wrong. 

How victimhood came about is not a tough puzzle to solve.  The sedate, stable, primly conservative Fifties - pinafores, cocktail dresses, church, and Sunday dinners - and the demographic bulge of privileged post-war babies with few concerns about well-being, caused a restiveness, an unsettled sense of ill-defined purpose.  So, borne out of social history, demographics, and boredom came the Sixties.  Victims were its heroes - the little men in black pajamas and a bowl of cold rice bombed by Nixon's B-52s; the black man beaten, clubbed, and bitten by Bull Connor, George Wallace, and their thugs; women, suffering under the persistent legacy of patriarchy and male prejudice. 

By time the Sixties were over and done with, the ethos of victimhood was now in place, and everything was to be observed through its lens. 

Bob swallowed all this hook, line, and sinker. Victimhood was the only way to look at human crises.  Jesus Christ himself dedicated his ministry to the poor, after all.  Compassion for the downtrodden was ordained, not invented. 

Of course, Jesus aside, the world since the amoeba has been ruled by tooth and claw, competition, territorialism and every other hardwired, innate trait of human nature.  A human history of victors and vanquished, winners and losers, never oppressors and victims.  

'Bullshit', said Bob in a moment of pique and frustration.  For years he had perfected a calm, professorial demeanor, one meant to hide the screeching, howling anger seething inside him.  Reason, he said, was the way to compromise.  Of course he meant nothing of the sort.  Reason would lead his adversaries to the truth, his truth.  He was just a big, pompous windbag. 

After decades in the trenches fighting for peace, civil rights, and the restoration of the black man to his rightful place atop the human pyramid, Bob was now an older man; but the fire of righteous anger still burned brightly.  Yet there were no real causes he could sink his teeth into.  No Freedom Rides, no Pettis Bridge, no Selma, Hanoi, or the Castro.  

He was at loose ends until Hamas struck Israel and Israel responded in a once and for all, never again assault to rid the region of a genocidal, anti-Semitic hateful regime.  Victimhood now had a name, a place, and a cause. 

Bob was the first at the barricades, first in solidarity with Yale, Columbia, and Harvard students spewing long pent-up hatred for the Jews.  Now, they could be as violently anti-Semitic as they pleased because they were condemning the State of Israel, not Jews themselves; although anyone on campus could see the seething rage at any Jewish student in their way. 

The Palestinians for no other reason than their supposed victimhood were heroes to be championed, defended, and honored.  It mattered not that Hamas and its mentor Iran have called for the elimination of Israel and the eradication of the Jews; or that Muslim states have called for the destruction of Israel since its founding; or that the billions of international foreign assistance has been spent on tunnels and armaments to attack Israel; or that Islam itself has within its code, an implacable righteousness and Jewish mistrust. 

Bob was ecstatic, blissful, as happy as he had ever been.  Entering surely the last decades of his life, he had found his real calling. 'Death to Israel' was his mantra and he shouted it at the top of his lungs with the throngs of young people around him.  Victimhood had never been more satisfying, the self-purifying, self-actualizing hatred of the Jewish oppressor epiphanic. 'Death to Israel', he shouted over and over again. 

Anything less would have meant a chaise lounge on a Florida beach, but this....this! was more than Bob could have ever hoped for.  He was young again, vital and vibrant again.  He was whole. 

Goin' Cracker - Yale Just Ain't Worth It

Jonas Philby had all it takes to get into Yale - top of his class, student athlete, artist, and bon vivant of the modern, justice-first generation.  St. Albans, an elite private school for Washington's elite had always been a feeder for the Ivy League and had groomed generations of young men for a life of privilege, wealth, and importance. 

 

Jonas' father and grandfather had gone to Yale, both members of Fence Club, captains of the baseball team, and Merit Scholars.  They had spent weekends at the Plaza, summers on the Vineyard, and winters in Gstaad.  It was indeed an Old Boys' Club, one of special breeding, taste, and gentrified living, and no one of either generation had any interest in living beyond its walls. 

When Inslee Clark came to Yale and became the Dean of Studies and got it into his head to dip into an 'alternate' gene pool for a newly qualified 'best and brightest', the Old Yale disappeared like a wisp of smoke.  It was never the same place and gone was the oak and mahogany, Revere silver, Townsend chairs, and solid, unflinching Calvinism. Yale quickly and inexorably had become a redoubt of the unwashed. 

 

Jonas' father had attended Yale on the cusp of the Clark revolution - an interregnum with a few Jews and random Italians - but he could see the end of one of America's last bastions of white privilege.  He and his classmates wondered exactly what exactly these Himmelfarbs, Bernsteins, and Palumbos were doing at Yale, but were courteous and respectful to them.  It was one thing to take Bloom's Romantic Poetry course with them, another thing altogether to spend time with them on Nantucket. 

Once the floodgates were opened Yale became no different from any hodge-podge public university of the Midwest - a plebian East, first come first serve campground for anyone with high SATs and an application essay which highlighted their personal courage. 

The university changed colors within a few years.  Bladderball, weekends at Smith and Vassar, tailgate parties, and courses taught by by Scully, Bloom, and Marshall were gone in a flash.  The Sixties began the descent into academic populism, the Seventies accelerated the fall, and the last recent decades completed it.  The Yale of today resembles nada of the past. 

Jonas had of course applied to Yale and gotten early acceptance.  The university was always glad to have legacy students even though under the current rubric inheritance mattered less in the selection process.  After all, the Philbys had donated thousands to Yale, and no administrator would want to shut off that particular spigot. 

Jonas arrived for a look one May Saturday, accompanied by one of the soon-to-graduate senior class volunteers who took him around; but the Harkness and Beinecke libraries were idle distractions to what the guide wanted to explain to the new recruit. 'Yale is not your grandfather's university', he said. 'Gone is the old boy, privileged elitism of the past.  The university has become a diverse, activist, engaged place of excellence'. 

 

The Old Campus was chock-a-block with tents and temporary shelters for student protestors who demanded disinvestment from child-killing, Jewish genocidal occupying Israelis.  Drag queens, Folsom Street Fair-ready transvestites, tough chick Bernal Heights dykes, and butch bikers were at the ready, waiting to tear down the palaces of privilege unless the university capitulated to their demands. 

Where were Wordsworth, Shelley, Blake, and Coleridge in all this, Jonas wondered, remembering his father's stories of Harold Bloom, only thirty-five but intriguing and engaging to his crop of ingenue Yalies in his fabric of mythic Romanticism?  Where was Vince Scully and his thrusting, potent, masculine peaks of Crete?  The lambent, metaphorical verses of Shakespeare? 

The Old Campus was as littered and outhouse-smelling as the streets of San Francisco, a disgusting mélange of castoffs, academic derelicts, and Goodnight Moon idealists.

This, said Jonas' guide, was the new Yale; and so it was that Jonas Philby went South and unapologetically applied to the Universities of Mississippi and Alabama. 

'What on earth are you doing?', asked his father. 'I know that Yale has changed, and it is not the same place I and your grandfather went to, but it is still Yale after all'.  Mory's, Fence Club, Skull and Bones were still extant and viable, the old man said, so don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. 

Yet Jonas had his mind made up. South it was, and not just to any Southern university, but the motherlode of all cheerleading, girly-girl, white fraternity party land  - Tuscaloosa. 

'We don't get many Yankees down here' observed the blonde, blue-eyed co-ed in his welcoming committee; but that was the whole purpose of his fugue from New Haven. He wanted to be in a white place, an old-fashioned comfortable place. No woke bullshit. Just cunt, bass boats, and football weekends.  

'Heretic, apostate', shouted the elder Philby when he heard of his grandson's decision; but there was a certain epiphanic delight in not only reversing the course of family history but in saying fuck you to the bottom-feeding woke nonsense of Yale and the Old Campus. 

Jonas loved 'Bama, never looked back, had the time of his life, graduated with honors and was engaged to a prom queen. 

He couldn't help checking in on the news to see how Yale kept disassembling, becoming a caricature of its former self - trannies on the Yale Fence, Upper West Side Jews  and Brooklyn Italians elbowing aside patrician Lowells and Lodges, and shaming the legacy of John Davenport who centuries before came to found the New Haven plantations and to form a new, more God-fearing Puritan colony. 

'Disgusting, revolting', he said to his wife. 

'What's wrong, Daddy?' his two young children asked. 

'Nothing, my dears', Jonas replied from the verandah of Bridges, his 1840 antebellum, fully restored, plantation home at Chretien Point.  The live oaks needed trimming and the magnolia cut back, but life was good as a modern Southern grandee. Yale? What was that?

Can Space Aliens Be Saved? Christians And Muslims At It Again

The Reverend Barkley Peters, pastor of the Westover United Church of Christ began to think about Jesus, God, and his Creation, and it bothered him.  Would Jesus be Lord and Savior for all beings in the universe? Did he die on a hundred million crosses on a hundred million Calvaries? And if so, what if these alien civilizations were without earthly form, but simply emanations of a highly developed, formless intelligence. Who would be talking to whom?  Would Jesus once again be spat upon, tortured, and crucified by whatever means this civilization had? Or would he be ignored as a bit of space detritus that happened on Alpha Centauri?

 

Not idle speculation, the Reverend told himself, because if God was the universal, all-powerful, being that Christians said he was, he would have to be the God of all beings not just human ones.  He stopped for a moment, deleted an irrelevant paragraph from his Sunday sermon written because of his distraction, and prayed, hoping the answer would come to him. 

Reverend Peters was of course not the first or only cleric to have thought about first contact and the religious implications thereof, and the range of reactions among the religious communities of the world was not surprising.  His evangelical brethren had already organized conferences on the subject - how and by what means would the word of the Lord be passed on to an alien race? 

Who would be chosen to meet the new arrivals with which version of the Bible, and in what language. It might be a kind of reverse exorcism wherein the Devil is repelled and cast out by the cross and the Holy Book - shown a crucifix and the King James the spirit of the Lord might be passed to the aliens only through the miracle of divine enlightenment. 

A hundred scenarios were broached at the most important ecumenical conference to discuss the subject. Perhaps there was an infinite number of Jesus doppelgangers in the universe, each one bringing the same message of redemption and salvation in a different form, different language, different state of being.  

If aliens were to visit Earth, the Muslims would be sure to horn in, push to the head of the line, promise vestal virgins and paradisal bliss with the threat of the sword transparent, a thinly-veiled exhortation to Christians to be ready. 

 

Of all the interactions possible between an alien race and our own especially if the visitors were more intelligent and more advanced, God should be first and foremost.  Whereas curing cancer, enabling an indefinite life span, or revealing the mysteries of the boson might be of interest to some, the only inquiry or exchange worth the effort would be the nature of the divine. And horribile dictu if the visitors were formless but universal, extant, influential, and all powerful, then they would have to be considered godlike or perish the thought, be God himself.  And by the way where would Jesus fit in this extraterrestrial scheme?

The debate went on for days and through many iterations, not unlike the many deliberations of the Early Church Fathers who debated the nature of Christ, the Trinity, and the relationship between and among the three expressions of God for three centuries until Constantine put a stop to the bickering and said this is it, no more and at the final Council of Nicaea all debate was put to rest 

But Athanasius and his colleagues didn't have Muslims to deal with.  The heretics were bad enough with all their challenges and postulations about this or that, but Muhammed really stirred things up and look at the world today.  No, it was time to assure Christianity's place first in line. 

'Maybe there was an infinite number of Muhammeds', said a deacon from Chillicothe, 'performing the same evangelism as our Jesuses'.  Then the aliens might already be Muslim, perish the thought. 

Not possible, retorted the chairman of the session.  Since Christianity is the only true religion here on earth and Islam only a Johnny-come-lately derivative fake, then how in God's name could anyone believe in an uncountable number of Muhammed incarnations in the universe?

'We are forgetting our Jewish brothers', said another conferee; but although they might well have gotten Christianity started, they had long given up any mantel of authority given their....Here Pastor Unsworth was about to launch into one of his famous Christ-killer screeds but held back for once. His colleague wondered how the Jews would react to an alien arrival.  'They are not evangelical, they do not believe in the risen Lord, and they have other business to attend to. We won't have to worry about them' 

And so it went.  What if the aliens were on a space crusade to spread their religion whatever that might be, not unlike the armies of Muhammed slashing and burning their way out of Arabia and across North Africa, pushing their way into Spain and finally, thanks to Charlemagne and God's grace, defeated at Roncesvalles?  Or the Papist conquistadors who tortured, cheated, and burned the heathens of the Americas until they professed allegiance to Rome?

 

Onward Christian Soldiers was played at every one of these conferences.  Militancy not compassion or understanding was the meme.  It was bad enough that Christ and his disciples had to fight and claw there way among godless heathens and Jews in order to establish God's Kingdom on Earth; it was another to cede ground to pointless, well-armed religions. 

Not a few of the conferees, thanks to the lurid comic books of their youth, were afraid of what the aliens might do to Earth.  Images of The War of the Worlds were never far, and the idea of soulless, predatory, ghoulish creatures from outer space was always on their minds.  ET, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Cocoon were incidental distractions to what they knew was coming. Intergalactic war. 

Yet, no matter how intelligent the alien foe, nor in what form he might appear, the Word of God would be sufficient to drive him back to the outer reaches from which he came.  One could only hope that he carried the Word with him when he went. 

The Reverend Peters finished his Sunday sermon, 'Diversity and the Love Of Jesus', a theme far more important to his socially aware congregants than the obviously peripheral issue he was contemplating. If aliens did come to earth the secularists in his pews would only be ashamed of the Earth that they would find - a racist, homophobic, misogynist, predatory capitalist world of hate - and if anything would ask...beg....the aliens for some anodyne, some panacea to injustice. 

Of course they would just be whistlin' Dixie. Seriously, what alien coming such a long way just to be here, would be interested in such frippery?  They're either coming for our rice or our women, so forget the rest, the Reverend Peters thought. 

Running The Country From A Prison Cell - President Trump, Pharaoh Jackson's Bitch

Former President Nixon, deeply embroiled in the Watergate scandal in which it was alleged, and later proved, that he was instrumental in obstructing the course of the electoral process, looked straight in the camera, shook his head, and said, 'I am not a crook'. 

Of course he was, and that bald lie will be forever remembered.  'Tricky Dick' had been his nickname ever since he entered politics, a man who would do anything to get and stay elected.  His dirty tricks were part of the Watergate affair, spreading lies and misinformation, breaking into a psychiatrist's office to get personal information on an enemy, the actual break-in to the Watergate Democratic Party offices by 'the plumbers', and much more. 

He finally was outed for the crook that he was by Woodward and Bernstein, investigative reporters for the Washington Post who, relying in part on information from a Nixon insider code-named 'Deep Throat' exposed the entire, smarmy affair. 

When the Watergate Senate hearings were aired live, millions of Americans tuned in. The daily sessions were no different from good soap opera - tales of innuendo, deceit, self-interest, shady dealings, black money, jealousy, and palace intrigue.  We couldn't turn away. 

Nixon threw one intimate advisor under the bus in an attempt to deflect the blame from himself, and one by one Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Dean and others were history.  None of this housecleaning did any good, for it was only a matter of time before the finger was pointed squarely at the President.  He resigned, boarded his helicopter, and went off into the sunset to be pardoned by his successor Gerald Ford and then spent years trying to rehabilitate his image. 

Now we have another Presidential crook in the dock - or at least that is what the prosecutors in the series of trials up and down the East Coast would like us to believe.  The former president covered up hush money paid to a hooker, tampered with the Georgia election, purloined and secreted Top Secret documents, and incited, oversaw, and managed an insurrection against the United States of America. 

Trump, never shy, rails against the prosecution, the judges, and the Democratic cabals which engineered this transparent attempt to discredit him and worse, to hogtie him during the campaign months preceding the Presidential election.  Rather than the sanctimonious, transparent, bald-faced denial of Richard Nixon, Trump is outraged, nonplussed, and absolutely unrepentant. 

'Bullshit...crapola...nonsense...misericordia...scum...clowns..', he shouts from the dock and on the steps of the courthouse, tweets on X and his own social media platform, howls and yells until the black-robes hold their ears. 

Everyone knows that the trials are witch hunts no different than the Salem cock-ups of two hundred years ago, prelims only to the main event, the burning at the stake.  Cotton Mather and his Puritan brothers cared little about due process. When the Devil was involved, there could be no shilly-shallying. He must be cast out, exorcised, and sent back to his demonic reaches before he could possess anyone else.  

As the fires burned and flesh crackled, Mather prayed to the Lord, thanking him for divine guidance and recognition for doing his will.  It was a sorry, lunatic affair, with every bit of sense and reason thrown to the winds - a hysterical, universal madness; a crazy, twitching, twirling St. Vitus' dance. 

 

'Burning at the stake is too good for him', announced the Reverend Blandish Owens from the pulpit of the Westover United Church of Christ in one of his patented secular screeds against the former President spiced with verses from St. Paul.  There was no room in Christianity, the pastor said, for such an apostate, heretic, and traitor to all good people. 

'This man...this man...', Owens began, stuttering from anger at this insolent, godless...thing.  He regained his composure, adjusted his tie and straightened the Bible before him, and went on.  'May justice prevail', he said, 'and may this heathen, this spawn of Satan, this....'.  Again he was flummoxed by his own righteous anger.  He raised his eyes to the roofbeams of the church, and said, 'Let us pray'. 

Now, with all his judicial hoopla, the former President will have to be convicted somewhere.  The Democratic Party will be walloped at the polls in November if after years of badgering accusations of miscreance, criminality, and immoral intent, he gets off Scot-free. 

And then what?  Only jail time will suffice, and not in some minimum security, country-club facility with trimmed hedges and flower pots on the perimeter.  No, only hard time will do for someone who tried to overthrow the government of the United States on January 6th and during the runup to the 2020 election in Georgia. The Top Secret documents he kept at Mar-el-Lago were CIA reports of his collusion with Russia to assure re-election; and the hush money paid to Stormy Daniels, hooker-turned-spy for the Iranian mullahs was no less than icing on the cake. 

The President should be sent to Angola (Louisiana) prison, a maximum security prison for serial murderers, rapists, and child violators, all serving life sentences with no chance of parole.  Angola is everyone's worst nightmare - a place without any vestige of moral rectitude.  Why should there be?  Once convicted of murder and sentenced to life, what did one more killing matter?  The President would on Day One be Pharoah Jackson's bitch. 

 

There were not just a few in Washington who thought Angola a fitting end to the Trump saga. Of course it would be like the days of the Mafia when every big goomba sent to federal prison did easy time, lobster and foie gras time, and ran the rackets, the dope, and the murders from behind bars.

‘He will be treated just like any other prisoner', the warden of Angola announced when rumors reached him of the possible incarceration of the President; but he was just whistlin' Dixie and much, much money would be made once the big man arrived. 

Trump's press conferences would be impressive with bars and billy-clubbed trusties as backdrops.  The sound would echo with the banging of cell doors and the yells of inmates in the background, but with each appearance support for him would increase, and no one would doubt his early release.  And what a release that would be - a scorched earth policy of vengeance and retribution that the country has not seen since Sherman's march through Georgia and South Carolina.  Not one of his accusers would be left standing, all tarred, feathered, tortured, and burned at the stake. 

Of course none of this may ever happen.  An ankle-bracelet, a monitoring implant, and a hefty fine at worst if that; and the Democrats behind their failed coup?  Burning at the stake is too good for them. 

Surrogacy, In Vitro, And Designer Babies - The End Of Natural Reproduction

Virtual reproduction has been an idea in the making for decades, made possible by the deciphering of the human genome, the precision of in vitro fertilization, and the burgeoning market for surrogate motherhood.  Thousands of poor women in America and the Third World are quite anxious to be indisposed for nine months for a generous stipend.  Besides, most of these Indian and Pakistani women have been barefoot and pregnant for generations, so one more load to carry is nothing given the promised rewards.

 

Ten years ago the price for surrogate motherhood was $10,000 for bringing a baby to term plus room, board, medical supervision and attention, medicine and supplements, and social care; and it has more than doubled since then.  The stipend was three times what a woman would have made in Bihar and almost double that in more prosperous states.  

The Indian clinics are state-of-the-art, attractive, congenial and professional.  The women who are treated there have never seen bright lights, chrome, white surgical gowns or anything resembling a clean room, so not only would they be paid a maharajah's fortune, but they would be interned when their time came in a heavenly palace. 

Everyone is happy.  The surrogate mother  is paid well, the donor parents are delighted - Mrs. Jones is spared from the inconvenience and hardship of pregnancy - the clinic reports record profits, and both governments are willing to live and let live and let technology and the free market take their course. 

So why should there be any debate?  One investigative journalist suggested that the owners of such birthing clinics were  being disingenuous at best and misleading at worst because they were dressing an exploitative practice in pretty clothes. Women who become surrogate mothers have no freedom of choice in the matter and cannot refuse this staggeringly lucrative opportunity. Furthermore, they are illiterate peasants who cannot understand the nature of the contract.

Nonsense of course. Freedom of choice means exactly that. No woman is forced to become a surrogate mother, and if the choice is made perfectly clear – that is, if the woman understands exactly what she will be contracted to do – then there is no question of unethical coercion. Although some religious critics might share the sentiment that motherhood is sacred, and that God’s intentions should never be ignored or his laws violated, most economists would agree that children have economic value and that surrogacy is but one expression of this valuation.

Children have always been first and foremost economic units. Children have provided the additional labor required to sustain the family, to provide for the welfare of aged parents, to add status and privilege. 

That hits the nail on the head.  Children have always been economic units, whether to collect firewood, draw water, or till the fields; to provide security in old age; or simply to assure legacy and the continuation of a family line.  In fact, it is curious that in the United States and Europe where these advantages are gone, couples are still having children.  Why, when the cost of rearing them far exceeds the benefits realized?

Only in today’s modern developed societies have the costs of raising children exceeded the benefits.  There is no logical reason why families should continue to have children. The countries of Western Europe, faced with severe drops in fertility rates among native-born citizens, have offered bonuses and other benefits for each additional child.  In other words, they have acknowledged the economic nature of children and have intervened in the market by way of subsidy.

A negative expression of this valuation of children is the high abortion rates in the developing world, especially for girls. When the number of children exceeds their economic value, women abort; and in male-centered cultures, abortion becomes gender-specific.  Abortion is no less common in industrialized countries where well-off women abort because a child would interfere with their professional careers and increasing income.

Unless one is mystical, religious or both, procreation is essentially an economic matter. While the value of each individual child may vary, their fungibility does not – every child is a commodity to be managed for the greatest return.  The value of a surrogate child in India is $20,000.  In the US it is $200,000. The incremental value of an additional child decreases as family income rises. White children have more value than black ones on the adoption market. White eggs have more value than black. Eggs donated by Harvard students have more value than those from West Appalachia Community College. 

 

The market for Harvard eggs is booming, and girls have lined up to provide this resource.  Not on a first come, first served basis, however; since prospective parents want brains and beauty, only the eggs of attractive, smart girls are in demand.  Marketers have tried the reverse - going to southern universities where the proportion of beautiful girls is high but IQs are low - but have been unsuccessful.  The chances of an attractive Harvard girl from an unattractive lot are still higher than the other way around. 

Another market, however, will soon overwhelm the eggs-for-sale one - recombinant DNA, gene-splicing, and genetic engineering.  The DNA from the most beautiful Hollywood starlets, the best professional athletes, and the smartest and most talented mathematicians, scientists, and artists dead or alive will soon be for sale.  A couple will be able to choose from an online catalogue and mix and match Taylor Swift with Michael Jordan and Robert Oppenheimer.  The estates of those deceased will be parsed in ways to enable non-invasive disinterment for gene harvesting and the living stand to make millions. 

There has been surprising little outcry from the religious community about all this.  Their focus has been entirely on abortion and the removal of an unborn human life is murder; but the transformation of a natural, normal heterosexual reproduction into a test-tube, laboratory-based, surrogate, genetic cataloging affair should be even more concerning.  The whole Biblical applecart is being upset.  The very essence of the most intimate of human activities - reproduction - is being neutered and claimed by secular forces.

This brave, new world is not close enough yet for protest.  Once it becomes more common and more approaching the norm, the outcry from the pulpit will be loud, angry, and clear.

Yet, who would turn down a designer baby?  A baby natural enough because it would come from a woman's own womb and would contain at least some if not most of her and her husband's genetic traces, but a more ideal, perfect one. 

The genie is out of the bottle.  Just as AI is transforming human exchange, the nature of knowledge and information; and just as virtual reality is replacing 'the real thing' as the first choice of existence, artificially engineered human beings will replace random offspring. The future is here.