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 Jewish 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 mentality 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 social 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 drifting up from 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 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?', he 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 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 mother-fucking 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 box 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 one 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 of the campus? 

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. 

 

Fake News, Donald Trump, And The Fiction Of ' The Truth'

Everyone knows that there is no such thing as the truth.  Christians believe that Jesus is God, while Muslims contend that he was only a prophet.  Hindus' God is an all-present universal emanation in which there are many incarnations, and Buddhists believe only in the sublime philosophy of the Buddha, no god, but enlightened man.   All are truths, as true and indisputable as the sunrise. 

Perception is fallible, subjective, and patently untrue.  Four eyewitnesses will report four different stories of the same event.  Kurosawa, Browning, and Durrell have all written books and screenplays about the impossibility of truth, fact, or absolute knowability. 

Despite calls to listen to The Science, scientists know that there is no such thing as absolute scientific truth; and if there were, we would still believe in homunculi and bad air causing disease, the sun would still revolve around the earth, and that thunderstorms were expressions of divine anger. 

Nor is there an absolute moral truth. Although most societies have hewn to the same code of social behavior, they have done so out of enlightened self-interest. If there were no ten commandments, life would be anarchic, chaotic, and impossible.  Yet even so, there are interpretations to killing - war, self-defense, and now the ticklish and debatable question of abortion.  Fidelity, honesty, and all the rest have their days in court where 'the truth' is sought; but one man's frankness is another's manipulation, Adultery can be a vexing problem, but the rules have been loosened. 

Which is why it is curious that people today still believe that there can be only one indisputable version of events. It didn't maybe happen this way.  It did happen this way; and within the overheated, hysterical politics of the day, it must have happened this way. January 6th was either the folly of a band of disenchanted crazies from the Ozarks and the Idaho Panhandle dressed in Viking helmets and fright wigs, bored as shit and out of their minds to do some damage; or a carefully orchestrated insurrection planned, managed, and led by former President Donald Trump. 

There can be no middle ground, no compromise position, no give or leeway; and given the nature of Donald Trump - as untrustworthy as they come, malignantly anti-democratic, racist, misogynist, capitalist predator, and anti-democratic tyrant - he absolutely, positively had to be behind the events of that day.  This type or assumption is classic and well-chronicles in psychiatric and socio-psychological literature.  Absolute belief, true belief is often the generator of illogical, subjective conclusions.  It is tautology at work.  Donald Trump had to have been behind the treachery of January 6th because he is treacherous. 

The political divide in the country is a difference of opinion, but a difference in perception.  The Left, convinced since the emergence of Trump that he is evil, can only see his every act as evil.  By extension, because he is traitorous, dishonest, and evil, all his future actions will, ipso facto, be evil and must be preempted. 

Shakespeare understood this psycho-phenomenon well, and in Julius Caesar explained and expressed it. Cassius, Brutus, and their co-conspirators are convinced, given Caesar's character and implicitly autocratic intentions, that if named Emperor he will destroy what is left of the Republic and lead Rome to ruin.  They kill him as an act of pre-crime, a pre-emptive move with nothing legitimate or 'factual' on which to base it.  They simple know that the man will be up to no good. 

So, within this epistemological and metaphysical context - that is, understanding that there is no such thing as absolute truth and objectivity is only at attempt to tame the unruliness which results - it is hard to understand how exercised the Left can be about Donald Trump's exaggerations, distortions, and deliberate fantasy.  He knows precisely what he is doing - playing on the naivete and intellectual arrogance of his opponents.  Of course he will not do half the things he says he will and even those will be tempered by the office he will assume as they always have been for all presidents. 

He is a comedian, a vaudevillian, a tummler, a Borscht Belt political Jackie Mason - a provocateur, a nettling pain the ass.  The whole world's a stage, Shakespeare wrote, a tale of sound and fury signifying nothing; and politics in this comedic, anchorless, subjective world is worth the price of admission. 

The truth pales in comparison with the ingenuity, balletic moves, and pure theatricality of invention, fantasy, and clever deceit. Ivan’s Devil in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is a vaudevillian who tells Ivan that the world would be a very dull place without him. Goodness, truth, and morality are very overrated, and if we had to hew to the righteous road every day, we would be bored stiff. “Loosen up”, he admonishes Ivan. There is a time and place for moral rectitude and principle, but Lord knows, not always

 

Everyone knows that truth is an overvalued commodity at best. We all exaggerate, embellish, invent, and out-and-out lie; and today more than ever we get away with our deceit.  Politicians lie through their teeth and deny wrongdoing.  Preachers philander and filch until they are caught.  Husbands look their wives straight in the eye and tell the most outrageous, outlandish, barefaced lies. Children lie about their whereabouts, CEO’s lie about mergers, buy-outs, and downsizing.

Donald Trump, his opponents say, is an inveterate liar, a shameless huckster with no respect for the truth.  He tells barefaced lies, distortions, and exaggerations but, to his critics' surprise, his partisans are unconcerned.  They extract the main messages from his hyperbole, melodrama, and Las Vegas showmanship.  They have no interest in the ‘truth’ and could care less about statistical accuracy.  They want no more carefully-worded statements of policy, no considered on-the-one-hand-on-the-other economic wishy-washiness.  They want the meat and care little about the dressing.  

Anyone paying attention can find the meat.  Trump's policies on immigration, energy, foreign affairs, diversity, religion, the size and influence of government, the role of the private sector, etc. have been front and center since he first stepped on the political scene nearly ten years ago.  

All all this about the truth is really nothing but hoopla and fol-de-rol, over-eagerness to get recognized, re-elected, put to rights, and so on.  'Let the buyer beware' is the only good rule for a relative, subjective and therefore meaningless age. Censorship is merely the imposition of one subjective 'truth' and the elimination of all others.

The truth? No such thing. 

'They Ate My Uncle' - Joe Biden, The New Guinea Feast, And The Meal's Pièce de Résistance

Cannibalism is not new, and societies have practiced it for millennia; but it is still shocking when it happens to a family member.  It was one thing for the President's uncle to be heroically killed in a battle against the Japanese, another thing to be eaten and served at a banquet in honor of King Puncak Tua Jaya Rai. 

 

The banquet, according to one Japanese journalist on the island during Japanese occupation, was one of the most festive affairs in tribal history.  A white man, never before served up to king or commoner, was the piece de resistance. 

According to tribal tradition, the meal - like any served to royalty anywhere - would be a fancy affair, served with garnishes and accompaniments, special sauces, reductions, and spices.  Of course the New Guinean fare was far simpler than that of the courts of Europe, but to the natives sumptuous and appealing. There was anaconda and crocodile meat, giant slugs and beetles, monkey brains, and turtle eggs all simmered for a day tended by the most beautiful women of the tribe.  

The meal of the President's uncle was to be overseen by the chief priest of the court in a Kosher-like ceremony of ritual purity and prepared by a skilled 'craftsman', a sub-chief who was a master chef, a virtuoso with a carving knife who never left so much as one bone splinter in the sauce. 

The banquet could not be eaten before rounds of musical ceremony.  Bare-breasted women, and fierce young bucks danced in an orgiastic frenzy, invoking the Lord of the Banyan Tree and the gods of good fortune.  The drums beat for hours as wave after wave of women and their consorts whirled and shouted while a chorus of naked men chanted in precise rhythm. 

Never before had the island seen such festivities.  The King and Queen sat on their thrones, fanned by servants with giant tropical fronds, drinking fermented palm milk and eating roasted wild nuts.  Every so often one of the dancers would approach the King, deeply bow, and recite a poem of thanks and prayer. 

All the while Joe's uncle simmered away in the rich, fragrant broth.  The crowd of commoners who had come out of the forest for the feast, generously invited by the King, were seated in concentric rings around the cauldron, the scent of herbs and cooking meat wafting up and over and up to the top of the highest, most majestic trees in the jungle. 

Of all the platoon of American soldiers killed in action that day and left behind by the Japanese who fled to their deep-woods hideouts, only the President's uncle was deemed worthy of a feast fit for a king. It was unclear to the Japanese chronicler why exactly he was chosen, but from the careful inspection of the body made by the Chief Priest and head cook, he could surmise.  

They spent many minutes inspecting the uncle's tongue, pulling it out and this way and that, and juggling and fondling his testicles.  With a crude measuring bamboo reed they measured him from head to toe, crosswise, and between limbs and body parts.  They opened and shut his eyelids, poked and prodded his thighs, and finally smiled with satisfaction. 

The commoners were lucky if they got a taste of Joe's uncle since all the prize pieces were served to King, Queen, and courtiers, but there were enough scraps and leavings for at least a few.  All who tasted the stew nodded their approval, smiled, and hugged each other in a show of brotherhood - very important because inter-tribal conflict had raged throughout the king's dominion. The feast would bring warring factions together for the first time since hostilities had begun. 

The Japanese journalist who had been invited to the feast by the King of course had to taste the meal, and despite his natural, instinctive reluctance, he did not want to be the next meal, and tucked into the savory meat offered to him.  He took a nibble, smiled, and put the tranche down, but the King shook his head and urged him on.  All eyes were on the journalist until he had eaten every last bit of Joe's uncle put before him. 

Contrary to American popular opinion Joe's uncle did not taste like chicken.  In fact, as reported by the journalist, it didn't taste like anything in particular perhaps because of the overpowering taste of the bowel of tapir and fermented tortoise eggs, 

 

When the Japanese reporter's journal made its way back to the Pentagon (it had been left in a hurry along with the empty cups, bowls, and bones of the feast as an American expeditionary force plowed inland, and retrieved as intelligence by the First Lieutenant), it was read, re-read, and parsed for clues to Japanese strategy, and when cleared was sent to the Biden family.  The Japanese journalist had kept the Uncle's dog tags as a memento of the feast and had enclosed them in the pages of his diary, so locating the uncle's relatives was an easy task.

Joe's family was initially close-mouthed about the events reported and recorded in the text.  They were ashamed that what might have been an account of the Uncle's heroism, was a story of the most ignominious way to meet the Lord.  The Uncle was not eaten or prepared alive, the journalist was quick to point out, just severed, trussed, and spiced after death. 

This of course was only some consolation to the family who would never get over the horrendous circumstances of their beloved relative's end.  The Army gave him full honors and posthumously awarded him all the medals and ribbons it could given regulations and protocol.  A Lieutenant Colonel from Fort Bragg made a special trip to the Biden family house for the presentation.  

The hoopla in the press (April 2024) when President Biden referred to the tragic, heroic, and unusual fate of his uncle, was uncalled for.  The entire story was as true as can be, down in black and white, reviewed, vetted, and approved by the Pentagon in 1943 and whose imprimatur was still as valid as ever. 

'They did eat him', the President said to a doubtful press, 'every last bit of him', which statement of course made its round of every hard copy and electronic press outlet in the country.  'Unnecessary, uncouth, revolting, unpresidential' were only some of the public reaction.  It was an election year after all, and one simply did not make such statements. 

In any case, an empty coffin resides in Arlington National Cemetery, filled with Joe's Uncle's medals, ribbons and an American flag; and the story ends there. 

The Ark Of The Covenant - Looking For Sex And God In All The Wrong Places

Mary Bliss had grown up without a doubt in the world.  God was in his heaven, and all was right with the world.  Her Catholic upbringing had kept her in good stead with an unerring moral compass, an ethical sense of social rectitude, and an absolute belief that through good works she would sit with Jesus at the right hand of the Father. 

Nothing diverted her from a path of righteousness, belief, and divine love.  Her trajectory once aligned and set in motion, would have no deviation.  Nothing in the world’s secular assault would deter or dissuade her from reaching her goal. 

  

Her classmates were not so confirmed in their belief.  Yes, they loved Jesus, obeyed the nuns, and listened to the orations of Father Brophy, but there was always a diffidence, a hesitancy about full commitment to God that Mary could not understand. 

What, in fact, was there to understand?  He had made his will and intentions abundantly clear in both Old Testament and New; and Church fathers from Athanasius to Augustine had filled in the blanks, parsing Jesus and Paul's words in the early centuries of the Church and developing unassailable arguments for the existence of God, the Trinity, and the divine nature of Christ. 

Something happened to Mary along the way.  Perhaps it was her sexual precocity that made her stray; or the badgering, wearying, sanctimony of Father Brophy; but whatever the reason, off she went to Smith, formerly one of the Seven Sisters, the women's Ivy League, bound and determined to find her own way apart from and despite the Church. 

Smith in the days of Mary's college years had become a well-known place for smart lesbians - women who could have gone to Harvard but preferred the secure confines of small college tucked away in the Berkshires where sexual liberty was the sine qua non of a liberal women's education, and where sexual diversity was the imprimatur, the rule of thumb, the ethos, and the brand. 

This place if any would shake the timbers of her faith, help her get over the God thing once and for all or confirm and consolidate her belief.  One way or another she would emerge self-aware from this alternate universe where Catholic chastity, heterosexuality, and piety had no place. 

It didn't take long for the girls at Cutter House to scent new prey; and Jennifer, Caitlin, Amory, and Lizbeth were quick to help her make her bed, fluff her pillows, and take her to dinner.  Such solicitousness, such girlish affection, and such implied intimacy was exactly what she had wanted and expected.  Before she had settled in and gone to her first class, she had made a new 'friend'. 

Claudia was from Chillicothe, had had her choice of New England schools, and chose Smith because....well, girls from this steel town like anywhere else aspired to the lesbian mecca of the East, and what a feast, a smorgasbord of the most talented, beautiful, and ambitious women from coast to coast there would be! 

Mary’s friendship was more than just sexual.  It was emotional and intellectual.  Only at a place like Smith would there be that marvelous amalgam of brains and sensuality.  So between sexual escapades they talked of Kant, Lacan, Friedman, and Freire.  Thanks to their relationship which added energy and intellectual zeal to their years at Smith, they both did well academically and excelled at sports. 

Surprisingly or not, they both had been brought up Catholic, and Smith was the first secular school they had ever been to. They missed the daily masses, communion, and the Sunday school feeling of parochial school.  Claudia had fallen in love with Sister Marie Joseph, a young novitiate from the Sisters of Charity who taught European history, and thus began her, Claudia's, first foray into that intriguing, satisfying double world of love and intellect.  Thanks to Sister Marie Joseph, Smith was a foregone conclusion. 

The problem with Smith, however, was that God was missing.  Going off on a sexual tangent did not mean that Mary was abandoning God.  In fact she had hoped to find him in other guises like the 99 names of Allah or the 100 incarnations of Brahma, or the unknowable, diaphanous spirit of the Buddha. 

Bed and board were not enough, and the more Mary drifted from one affair to another, half-satisfying, never complete, and always half-full, the more she wanted to find her God. She had been warned by Father Brophy about such Protestant apostasy - one did not accept Jesus as one’s personal savior in Catholicism - but sussing out the nature of God was a different story, nothing personal. 

Smith had not only been a sexual idyll but a training ground for liberalism.  Not unlike most universities, Smith was a locus of radical progressivism, a school which took diversity, equity, and inclusivity seriously.  It was the lens through which all texts were read, the academic context for learning; so after graduation, Mary naturally gravitated to Washington.  

She had been accepted as an intern at one of the capital's most prestigious progressive think tanks, and because of Smith's reputation for alternative sexual orientation, she was assigned to the Department of 'Sexual Readjustment', a tightly-woven ultra-feminist lobby group for lesbian and transgender affairs.  'We make a difference' said the head of the Department. 

For Mary is was the perfect nexus - a group of women who loved women who promoted the cause of women and women's love for women.  An unmatched solidarity, a unique union.  She was in the right place at the right time. 

Just like at Smith, however, there was something missing.  The women for all their secular intensity, reformist ambitions, and sexual bonding, had no real raison d'etre - no ethos, philosophy, or something more universal. God perhaps? There it was again, that niggling issue, that peskiness, that sleep-interrupting nettle.  

What were these women really after? Sexual license was now given freely, so would badgering a conservative public give it any more currency? And women's value had never ever been questioned despite claims of suppressive patriarchy. Whether mother, wife, matriarch, queen, consort, or tart, her fundamentalism was absolute.The Women's Rights Movement had a hollow ring to it; and when looked at within a more existential context, it clanged and banged with emptiness. 

 

These women for whom a day job had become a religion came home to an empty house.  The sisters were all there, happy as birds on a line, happy enough if gloating was included, but the clanging and banging drowned out everything else. 

The longer Mary stayed with the program, the more she felt like a ghost ship in irons, rolling with the waves and drifting with the current with no direction and no progress. Sex with women was as dry as Namibia, a few spiders and mites but miles and miles of barren infertility, God's empty quarter. 

The meme of women for women with women, etc. was scripted, but women without men should have been the first scene. Men - the rooster's contribution at worst, a Lawrentian complementarity at best, can't live with them, can't live without them made a bedroom of undies and frilly things no better than Goodnight Moon, a child's bedtime story. 

So Mary looked for God with men, gave up her sisterhood, got pregnant, and was immediately dunned and exiled, rejected and left on the curb by the sisterhood.  However, like Tolstoy who for his whole life wondered where God was and studied till the day he died to discover the truth about his existence, came up empty but concluded that if millions believed and billions before had believed, Mary agreed that maybe there was something to it after all. 

She never regretted her dalliances, life's a journey not a destination and all that, changed diapers and went to PTA, and never looked back. God was in the details, just not the ones she had been advised by Father Brophy or the Bernal Heights dames.

The Ark of the Covenant, the most religious relic of the Israelites, where God himself resided, the earthly residence of God on earth, has been sought for millennia.  The search was apt and appropriate for the likes of Mary Bliss.  God can indeed be found in the Ark, and you only have to look for it in the right places.