OMG! 'I'm A Conservative' - Given Enough Time And A Little Push, All Progressives End Up Right

The political aphorist Lowell Frampton once famously said, 'Give a liberal long enough, and he will become a conservative', and while of course this is not completely true - there are those for whom liberalism has so defined their character, their persona, and their very being, that no dose of reality will cure them of the hopeless idealism which has been their calling card for decades - it is generally true. 

Even the most hardened liberal will take a deep breath, open a history book, look around him, and say, 'Phooey'. 

Addison Taylor was one of these committed progressives who never thought that he would ever change from a profound commitment to social justice, the environment, and the black man.  That would simply be unthinkable.  After all, he reasoned, there are such a thing as absolute truth.  The black man, descendant of the forest and legatee of tribal wisdom, sentience, and native intelligence would always be fit for the top of the human pyramid.  Heterosexuality would always be a bad choice, an outdated, crippling imposition of white straight males.  The climate was warming due to man's obtuse ignorance, etc. etc. 

The life he lived was an immersion into liberal values, liberal thought, and liberal friends.  He had no patience nor time for anyone who did not espouse the canon - those political troglodytes who refused to see the truth or even having seen it, retreat into a defensive ignorance. 

Addison was the Chairman and CEO of Scientists For Humanity, a small liberal advocacy group which had been on the front lines of every liberal cause since the first notice of melting Antarctic ice.  He had marched on the National Mall, delivered fiery speeches on college campuses, written op-ed pieces for The Nation, was a member of every women's organization in Washington, and a fierce champion of black rights. 

'Not this year, Addie', said Artemis Phipps, new President of the Radical Women's Caucus. 'Maybe another time', referring to his taken-for-granted speaking engagements before this group of radical feminists.  His presence had been considered important, for his view - the accommodating, respectful, understanding liberal male view - was needed to complete the inner circle, and show the nation that the fight for women's equality was also a men's affairs. 

Phipps, an imposing woman from Bernal Heights, chosen to lead the Caucus because of her dyke righteousness, high-toned bitchiness, and relentless, virulent, outspoken hatred of white straight men who, she said, were responsible for forcing women to spread their legs while they went off philandering, raping, and sucking the lifeblood out of them. 

 

Understandable, thought Addison, an expected evolution, a necessary radical turn; but at the same time he felt, for the first time in his life, left out.  He was in perfect solidarity with lesbian women, with women in general, and in consonance with their suspicions of men like him; but he had shown them that he was as much of a woman as they, as militant, and as committed. 

He was allowed to attend the annual Caucus conference in Washington, but during Phipps' tenure, the whole atmosphere had changed.  Not that he wanted protest to return to the days of Martin and Ralph, black-and-white, ebony-and-ivory solidarity, but this was a slugfest.  It had turned from a reasonable colloquy of thinking women to a riot.  'Cunts For Castration'...'Twats Forever'...'Bull Dagger Power' were just a few of the signs he saw. 

Now, the women's movement had always been palatable - girls he knew at Yale from Smith, Vassar, and Holyoke refusing patriarchy while marrying well; girls from fine families endorsing the harshest penalties for discrimination in the workplace while remaining caring, thoughtful, and loving wives and mothers. 'Our kind', Addie often said, proud of his and their ancestral tradition of reason and leadership. 

This...this mosh pit, this offensive freak show, was beyond the pale; and it had happened without him realizing the change.  Overnight, it seemed, feminism had gone from propriety and discipline to gang warfare.  

It was that scene that first disturbed Addie's convictions, and when the image of Heather Morgan, blonde, demure, and loving came back to him after many years.  She was a perfect, charming, quiet, intelligent Smith girl who adored him.  Their future - a home on the North Shore, children, an extended family, wealth and privilege within a solidly liberal worldview - was real, possible, and only awaiting graduation. 

 

'You women don't want pricks up inside you, do you?', shouted Artemis Phipps from the podium.  'You want cunts, pussies, hot, slathering FEMALE juices!!!' 

The crowd roared. Women ripped off their shirts, fondled each other, kissed, and shouted, 'No pricks...No pricks....No pricks!!!' until the rafters shook. 

Addie, nonplussed, taken aback, revolted and disgusted, left by the fire door, sat on a bench in Lafayette Park and wondered what the political world was coming to. 

The final loose hinge on what had been a solidly constructed and maintained political framework, came off when his political aide and advisor suggested a trip to Anacostia, the heart of the Washington inner city where he would see first hand the vibrant street life of the black man so limned and championed in Addie's speeches.  In Anacostia he would see first hand the virility, the community, the vital street life that was so absent in white, uptight, hidebound, racist neighborhoods of the city.  He would hear a carnival of music, dance, and effusion. 

Addie readily agreed but rolled the windows up as they crossed the Anacostia River into a potholed, rutted, trash-strewn neighborhood.  The outskirts of any community are always sketchy, he knew, whether tacky strip malls or yet-to-be-developed modern neighborhoods; but as he drove further south, down MLK Avenue to Fernwood Circle, there was nothing vibrant, soulful, or uplifting.  There were only derelicts, Fentanyl addicts, shirtless men with Uzis, and stoops where men smoking dope and drinking Colt45s sat and shouted at his car. 

This was he famous inner city?  This was the community of the prized, cherished, New Man? Where had he been all his life?

If all this wasn't bad enough, Washington had its coldest winter in fifty years - feet of snow, pummeling north winds, and brutal below-zero temperatures...and worst of all the polar ice caps were gaining ice.  For the first time in decades, the Ross Ice Shelf was increasing by a kilometer per year.  

Why was this such a surprise? If he had listened to anyone but the Armageddon cabal of the progressive Left, he would have heard compelling arguments about the cyclical warming and cooling of the planet, the modest if not indifferent effect of human activity on environmental temperatures, and he would have at least been apprised of another view. 

With that the ball of yarn began to unravel quickly.  Suddenly, everything became clear - the militant COVID response was nothing but government presumption and political chicanery; the open door immigrant policy was tantamount to the rapid dissolution of polity and ethos; the gender spectrum was an illogical, twisted, distorted fantasy; capitalism was the engine of remarkable growth everywhere and had raised hundreds of millions out of poverty in China and India.  Africa was nothing but a continental shithole run by corrupt big men, dominated by Paleolithic tribalism, and mired in abject  underdevelopment. 

He was much happier now that he had jettisoned all that worthless progressive baggage, stopped listening to the portentous claptrap mouthed by his former colleagues, and for once in his life said a great big 'Fuck you!' to anyone within earshot. 

Ol' Lowell Frampton, the political aphorist was right as rain when he said that all progressives become conservatives if given enough time.  Some take longer than others to see the light; but they all eventually come around.

A Life Of Social Justice - A Long Haul With Frightful Women

Robert Finley had given his all to social justice. There were the Freedom Rides, marching with Martin and Ralph across the Pettis Bridge, Bull Connor and his dogs, sit ins, protests on the National Mall, and Negro friends. 

Later there was the glass ceiling, the environment, climate change, the gender spectrum and capitalism itself.  There had never been a moment of doubt or hesitation.  He and thousands of others were joined in a political consensus - progress was real, Utopia was not only possible but around the corner, and if there was meaning to life, it was giving to others. 

Now in his later years, Bob sat disconsolate and wondering as he watched the parade of beautiful, blonde, young women step brightly down Pennsylvania Avenue to and from the White House - a White House that should have been his and the legions of those who had fought so long and so hard for graciousness, compassion, and harmony. 

He shook his head as he nibbled at his sandwich, shaking the crumbs for the pigeons who clucked and cooed at his feet.  How could this have happened, he wondered?  How could this moral reprobate, this arrogant, divisive, unprincipled man have made it to the Oval Office?  What tear in time-space had let this braggart come to earth?  

Decades of discipline, hard work, patience, and love were gone.  The black man was relegated to the ghetto, the lesbian consigned to Bernal Heights, the farm worker sent back across the border, and every last brake, bit, rein, halter, and trace with which he had harnessed Wall Street gone in a flash, setting free once again the monopolistic, predatory, arrogant robber barons of America. 

'Need a friend?', said a well-dressed man in blue suit to Bob. 'You look like you could use one'. 

Bob looked up from his sandwich and smiled at the man, one of the genteel male escorts who routinely cruised Lafayette Park.  By rights - after all he had fought long and hard for the gay man - he should have offered him a seat; but he was in no mood for the kind of casual intimacy that the man was offering. 

No matter how militantly he had taken up the cudgel of gay rights, he was privately disgusted by what fagg...Here he stopped himself, about to think an unutterable slur.  He revised his thought, composed himself and tried to right his ship, yet the thought completed itself...I'm disgusted at what these (blanks) do with each other. Reaming, water sports, buggery, cornholing, bathhouse sex. 

'You've got the wrong man', Bob said to the young man in  the blue suit, tossed the end of his sandwich to the pigeons and walked quickly away. 

This was the whole problem with social justice, he thought as he walked towards his office - espousing, endorsing, committing to political causes that offended him. Lesbians, dildoes, and scissoring was just as repulsive as the gay thing.  The black man had, despite decades of generosity and support remained in the same stinking, pestilential, drug addled, dysfunctional shithole ghetto he started in. 

Worst of all, he had for all these years been surrounded by nothing but frightful women - short, unwashed, ugly, frizzy haired, Jewish women he had seen before only on Brooklyn subways.  These were his cohorts, his colleagues, his sisters in arms.  Meanwhile all the bright young things he had had squired at Yale before his political days, were things of the past. 

 

Ahh, Heather Morgan, he remembered. Soft, pliant, wealthy, and with a fresh Midwestern blush and in love with him.  Where was she now? Who did she marry? Why wasn't she, still in the full blush of the bloom of the rose not here with him now?

Instead there was Esther Pilchman, finishing a rancid sardine sandwich, smears of mustard and horseradish still on her lips.  'Bob, we've got to talk', she said as he walked through the door. 

This time it was about immigrants, ICE pogroms, and Trump's planned genocide. She howled about Auschwitz, Soviet ethnic cleansing, the barbarity of Union soldiers as they exterminated Native Americans.  'You see?', she shouted, holding last of her sardine sandwich.  'You see??', she said. 'It's Kristallnacht all over again'. 

No, it was Esther's putrid, ugly ranting all over again, overblowing, inflating, inventing, and doing a St. Vitus' dance, wailing and twitching, turning blotchy, smelling badly and as ugly a woman as Bob had ever seen. 'Stop it!' he shouted silently, unwilling to challenge the clearly unhinged creature bouncing around the airless, cramped office. 

'Sorry to run', she said.  'I'm off to protest' and with that grabbed her stained and saggy Hopi cloth bag, and walked out the door leaving Bob alone, disquieted, and unhappily looking at his inbox, an old fashioned relic of the halcyon days, filled with flyers, announcements, screeds, and torn copies of The Nation. 

Bob sat heavily in his chair and stared at the portrait of MLK, the poster of Che Guevara, the stale bagels, dust devils, and bookends holding Marx's Communist Manifesto, Engel's The Coming of the Proletariat, and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. 

A Presbyterian born and raised, Bob still wished that he could go to Confession.  He was having bad thoughts, traitorous, devilish thoughts, and he could live with them no longer.  He hated black people, gay men, lesbians, freeloaders, and especially the unholy ugly women who harped on about them.  

Right now, his Yale classmate Hetherington Adams (Addy) was sitting on a St. Bart's verandah overlooking the harbor, lovely young mistress at his side, not a care in the world, a satisfied life of investment banker behind him, scion of one of Boston's most well-known families, father, grandfather, emeritus and model. 

Had it all happened the way Bob had planned - a progressive revolution which would have turned America into a socialist union of shared values, equal benefit, and harmonious inclusivity- he might be enjoying his later years.  Instead he was still at his cheap steel desk in a third-rate office, pursuing a stale, outdated, hapless agenda. 

'Yes, but it had to be done, and someone had to do it', he shouted, but it was empty valor, a last hurrah, a desperately off tune swan song. 

No one can ever admit that they have wasted their life - that would leave them horrifically empty before death - but Bob came close.  'There's still time', he thought; but of course there wasn't.  He had played his cards, no more were to be dealt, and he was left only with a few scattered dollar chips. 

'Goddamn it!', he shouted.  'Goddamn it to hell'. 

Diary Of A Madwoman - Taken For A Visionary, She Matched Her Madness With The Liberal Agenda And Succeeded Brilliantly

As a toddler Phoebe Nelson had shown signs of the mental ferocity that was to be her calling card in later life, but her parents simply took her seemingly irrational behavior as 'the terrible twos'.  She would wail and flail, tear up her books, spit on the Audubon print in the hallway, throw her food, and smear her face with gravy. 

'Wow, she's really something', said her father, admiring God's creation - such a volcanic temperament in a two year old was remarkable, for it showed the limitless power of the human will. 

Frank Nelson was a Nietzschean who had read all of the philosopher's works, and was convinced that his daughter was an Übermensch, a being destined to ride above the herd. 'The only validation of the individual in a meaningless world is the expression of pure will', Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spake Zarathustra, and Phoebe Nelson was showing the first signs of such willfulness at a very early age.

'Frank, be serious for a change', said his wife, a practical woman who saw Phoebe as a spiteful, intolerable girl who needed a good thrashing. She might have will, but there was nothing philosophical about it. She was obdurate and antisocial. 

As she grew older, she lost that infantile, inchoate rage, but never lost the intent behind it.  For there was, despite the seeming unbridled anger, a purpose - a defiance of the world around her; and she was never at a loss to show it.

'Bobby Nevins is a fat, ignorant, bullying imbecile', she shouted at the principal of her school as she stood before him accused of 'antisocial behavior'.  The school was in the throes of diversity, inclusivity, and equity, and the principal went to great pains to harness youthful energy to communitarian well-being. 

'We do not say such things about anyone', the principal admonished her.  'Ever'. 

'But he is an obese moron', Phoebe went on, 'and an ignorant bullying retard to boot.  Like it or not, you can't deny it.'

The principal thought for a moment about how to be principal-like, temperate, understanding, and helpful; but he couldn't avoid the truth spoken out of the mouths of babes.  Bobby Nevins was indeed a doltish clot, a stupid, vain, and imbecilic piece of work, the offspring of equally backward, moronic parents. 

'Perhaps we might be a bit more tolerant', the principal managed, 'and a bit more kind'. 

'Give that halfwit an inch, and he'll take a mile', she replied. 'Nip him in the bud'. 

As much as he hated the idea of having been intimidated by a student, he knew she was right.  Bobby Nevins was a disruptive, interfering, empty-headed twit; and the school would be better off without him.

And so it was that before long, Bobby tripped himself up, crossed the line, passed the limits of tolerance and inclusivity, and was sent packing. 

This was to be the first step of Phoebe's political activism, and the principal, long retired and reading about Phoebe Nelson's rise to power, said to his wife, 'I knew it'. 

There were many intermediate steps between middle school and Washington, defining moments in Phoebe's career, moments when her voice became more forceful, mature, and resonant.  

Her classmates at the Brown University Young Progressives Association were in awe at the young woman.  They had many firebrands in their midst.  LaShonda Evans, an uppity, loud, borderline hysterical black woman from Washington's worst slum and admitted to Brown on affirmative action, couldn't hold a candle to Phoebe who combined eloquence, intellect, reference, and determination with brutal, savage ad hominem attacks. 

President Phillips is a cowardly, buggering, idiotic lowlife - a drunk pedophiliac moron in power only because of a craven board of directors on the take.  His administration of university policy has been nothing but a drooling, lobotomized joke. The man is mentally flatulent, a farting, disgusting prick, a gutter-dwelling piece of shit...

She took on every campus cause - gays, black people, the climate, immigration, the gender spectrum, Wall Street - with the same venomous passion. She went from revival tent to revival tent, podium to podium, lectern to lectern without missing a beat. She was the Miss Universe of campus progressivism. 

When she was at her best, she was poetic. 

The black man, descendant of the rainforest, the savannah, and the veldt, home to the wild things and God's first human creation, is the legatee of that native sentience, that natural intimacy, that primordial understanding, that universal brilliance. He belongs on the very top of the pyramid of human society, not on the lowest rung where he has been relegated by generations of white slavers. We who understand his greatness, his superiority, his genius will fight to the last to see him become the model for civilization, the brightest shining star in the human firmament...

She was able to dismiss conservative cavils - the persistent, perennial pestilential slums of the inner city, consistently bottom of the barrel test scores, academic performance, intellectual ability, and lack of socialization, abandoned children, dereliction, addiction, and violence. 

'How dare you?', she shouted at her critics, launching into another fiery, intimidating, brutal reprisal.  She was unbeatable, unstoppable; and best of all she could make the most untenable, historically inaccurate, wild, febrile, nonsensical claims sound reasonable!  She was brilliant, a master, a genius at winning the public.

She believed nothing of what she said.  Everything was a product of her madness - for now even she admitted that madness was the engine that propelled her - and she found the progressive agenda perfectly suited to her rage. 

Liberals hated things, found everything wanting, found despicable, nasty bits everywhere.  They were already a hysterical lot, so stepping in and adding nuclear fuel to the fire was easy. 

Politicos in Washington took note and visited her before her graduation from Brown.  Mightn't she be interested in an internship, or even an associate aide to an influential Democratic Congressman?

And so it was that this Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduate from a premier Ivy League school became one of the House's youngest aides, in the office of the representative from her home district in Ohio. 

She, despite the age-old rules of decorum in the Capitol, became a whirling dervish of passionate conviction for all the Congressman's liberal policies.  He was the most radical of the white members of Congress, never as bulldozing and scuttling as the Squad, that cabal of assaulting women of color, but far left nonetheless. 

'I can help you, Congressman', Phoebe told him. 'I'm the white bitch who'll put you on the map', and so it was that she went after AOC, the Somali, and the Affirmative Action Queen with a vengeance. She was merciless in her demeaning, insulting, scurrilous attacks on these cunts'.  She staked out territory to the left of all of them, uncharted political land no one even knew existed; and before long the Congressman had become the Great White Hope of radical liberalism. 

She felt good at night, emptied of her bile, her virulence, her anger, and her madness.  It was a time for recuperation, regeneration, and rebirth. Tomorrow was another day, a better day, a more bitterly angry one.  The demon inside her must be fed. 

She made the news.  The liberal media gushed with praise.  A woman was not just making waves.  It was a tsunami!  She was written about, featured, and interviewed; so when the suddenly quit, everyone was caught unawares.  There had even  been talk of her running for office. 

'I don't give a shit'', she openly and characteristically commented to a friendly reporter. 'Don't you get it?' 

Of course the reporter had no idea what she was talking about and was unwilling to surmise the worst, the truth - that the whole Phoebe Nelson thing had been a show, a vaudeville act, the Madwoman of Chaillot come to Washington to fret on the stage and then disappear. 

But it was just that - a marvelous circus act, a high wire performance, a stunning trapeze act of glitz and glamour but without any substance whatsoever. 

Observers on the Right saw her act as a metaphor - the whole progressive movement was nothing but a vaudevillian act, a rabbit out of a hat, smoke and mirrors, Sturm und Drang, signifying nothing; and they were sorry to see her go. 

'Wasn't she wonderful?', said the editor of The Federalist, a conservative journal; and so she was indeed. 

After she left Washington, she disappeared. Some reports had her in Tallahassee, others on St. Bart's; but not even the most sensitive surveillance instruments could pick up even a trace of that magnificent, mad voice. 

A Woman's Ivy League College Goes Gay- From Nantucket To Bernal Heights In The Blink Of An Eye

The Seven Sisters - Barnard, Holyoke, Smith, Vassar, Pembroke, Radcliffe, and Wellesley - were in the days of separate but equal men's and women's colleges, the academic equivalent of Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. There were differences among them.  Vassar took Jews, Smith catered to the Nantucket crowd, Wellesley the up-and-coming social register daughters, Radcliffe, the binary, algorithmic ladies who gave up pinafores and Arpege for serious thought, and Holyoke took the rest. 

Yet all marched to the same drummer; all were conformingly upper class, feminist women who wanted it all, wealthy husbands from Yale, boardroom appointments, and Jascha Heifetz and Artur Rubenstein for sons. 

And they realized their dreams.  Abigail Simmons, scion and legatee of the Newport Simmons family, merchants, traders, shipbuilders, and investors in the Three Corner Trade, went to Wellesley.  Patience Morrow, descendant of John Taylor Morrow of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and John Davenport's aide de camp in his expedition to found a new, uber-Puritan colony in New Haven went to Vassar; and Felicity Potter, great great granddaughter of Audubon Potter, Chief Justice at the Salem Inquisition went to Pembroke. 

These and other well-fashioned, properly educated, and socially statuesque women excelled at college, married well, had equally bright and well-behaved children, and reacted well to the new dynamics of the Sixties.  While holding their own as members of the Old Guard, they were quick to adopt the new, progressive ethos of the times.  

'The Other' - the black, the Latino, and the gay - were welcomed members of the new American society.  While the Old Guard still returned to Beacon Hill, the Main Line, and Shawnee Mission for holidays, they were the first advocates for the trifecta of inclusion, diversity, and equity. 

Now, same sex institutions being what they are - closed, intimate, shared showers and bedroom havens - it is not surprising that some gender infidelity occurred; but women who were of that particular sexuality were tired of sexual adventure behind closed doors.  Instead, they became members of activist groups, political cabals, and well-funded interest groups to put pressure on the administration to both admit more gay women and to welcome a cultural move away from a traditional, formal, and increasingly outdated social milieu, 

Amanda Parsons, graduate of Smith College, on her way to an advanced degree in bio-physics, and a well-known Bernal Heights lesbian, was particularly outspoken about the need to change direction and for Smith to become not only welcoming to lesbian women but to transform itself into 'Lesbian Central'.  This was the niche that would separate Smith from the rest of the Seven Sisters, all foundering after the Ivy League became co-d. 

 

Making Smith a gay Mecca would place it at the forefront of modern progressivism, and would give it a cachet and recognition that the other Sisters could not match. Amanda wrote this to the President of the college:

Dyke Heaven, Queersville, Bernal Heights East, Wet Pussydom....This is the new Smith, the forerunner, the avant-garde, the first in line.  A new redoubt for brilliant non-binary women in solidarity and with political purpose.  A primus inter pares women's institution which would combine academic excellence with sexual license, the New Wave of higher learning, the model for the New American woman. 

At first the President, a straight woman, PhD from Harvard, noted economist, and advocate for 'accommodating feminism' was taken aback by the letter,  Yes, same sex partnerships were not uncommon at Smith or any of the other Seven Sisters, but to make it into the go-to place for lesbian women was another thing altogether.  Her passionate commitment to diversity was antithetical to the idea of sexual monopoly.  Gay women were welcome at Smith, but to make it a dildo, pussy eating haven was another thing altogether. 

'Wait a sec, Madame President', advised one of Smith's board members. 'Distinction and cachet are the sine qua non of financial solvency.  Market placement, a unique selling principle, and cash flow dominance are what college development is all about.'

The President grimaced at the thought of the Development Office's promotional materials. 

'Smith is an all-embracing, all-encompassing place of sexual diversity.  Within the highest standards of academic excellence, the student body is free to enjoy the company of likeminded, seriously intended sexual others; and in fact the college endorses and promotes such alternate lifestyle preferences'

 

This of course accompanied by photos of undergraduate women doing things together, sharing intimacies and belonging. 

When asked to approve the new promotional campaign, the President demurred.  Her past - a wild heterosexual bacchanal interrupted by periods of scholarship, her serial partnerships with Princeton quarterbacks and Yale rowers - could not be either forgotten or denied.  Turning Smith into a cunt fest?  Never on her watch. 

But once the genie is out of the bottle, there is no putting him back; and the cry for a more sexually unique institution continued to gain currency. 'Who cares who does what to whom if their grades are kept up?', said the most positive activists, indifferent to the likely job interview where, 'Ah, you went to Smith, I see', unmistakable reference to sexual oddity, would be the defining moment in the hiring process. 

Of course in these days of inclusivity, no recruitment officer was supposed to think querulously about sexual orientation, but such an item could not be dismissed. In the case of McLarty Enterprises, LLD, a Washington think tank, there were far too many sexual hijinks during working hours, added to which was the increasing discomfort of the binary employees under whose notice these alternate affairs were happening. 

Nevertheless Smith went whole hog on the lesbian thing, and much to their surprise, the applications far exceeded supply.  It was a gold rush, and many thanks were given to the foresightful administrator who thought up the change of direction, 

An example of the applicant enthusiasm was evident in this essay:

I am queer, I am lesbian, I am a pussy hound, I am incontinent, indissolubly gay, and look forward to passing four years with my sexually alternate sisters.  Together we will form a cabal of queerness, a redoubt of same sex intimacy, a sexual unit of personal satisfaction and political weight...

'Smith is the New Shining City On A Hill', said one Admissions officer proud of his and the college's efforts to relegate heterosexuality to the dustbin of history, to create a brave new world of gender-affirming, inclusive sexuality.  He couldn't keep his delight quiet nor keep his own counsel and in an impromptu meeting with the President said, 'We've done it! Eighty percent gay and counting.'

The President, still despite herself with disgusting images of buggery and sexual excess on her mind, and longing for the days of cotillions, masked balls, Nantucket weddings, and grandchildren, smiled and thanked her colleague for her work and enthusiastic commitment. 

Privately she thought that Smith was going down the shithole.  Imagine! she thought, how perverse, how untoward, and how perfectly...unacceptable the whole idea was, 

'I quit', she told the Board of Directors and went her way to her retirement condo in Tampa, Trump country.  Better bass boats and gunracks than vaginal insertions and lower lip sucking. 'There, I've said it', the President mentioned to her husband, quite glad indeed to be out of that hell hole that miasma, and back on God's green earth 

The Tart, The Altar Boy, And The Defrocked Priest- Small Town Values Gone Very Much Awry

Father James J. Brophy was the pastor of St. Maurice Church, and had been seen as the likely replacement for the Archbishop who was now in his early nineties.  

 

Father Brophy was one of the few hardline Catholic prelates in the archdiocese and had taken a very critical stance on ecumenism, homosexuality, graft, and moral corruption.  He was an old time fire and brimstone preacher, more Protestant evangelist than Catholic priest. 

 In fact he and Pastor Ebenezer Johnson of the Third Baptist Church of Ames City challenged each other very Sunday to see who could raise more Hell and shake the faithful to their roots for their sinfulness and godless indifference to the Lord. 

They had each peeked in on each other, marveled at each other's eloquence and ability to corral even the most faithless into the embrace of Jesus Christ.  They tried to one-up each other, calling upon  more and more fearsome Biblical references, causing sinners to weep with repentance, and raising the newly resurrected from their pews and shout 'Amen'. 

Of course this last was not done in the Catholic Church. Such born-again tomfoolery was verboten, especially after Pope John Paul II condemned Protestant fundamentalism as a sect, promising as it did salvation with a few shouts and hymns.  Only faith and reason, said the Pope, the vision of both Aquinas and Athanasius, could lead to heavenly bliss. 

So no one in Father Brophy's congregation stood up and said, 'Praise the Lord', or 'Praise be to Jesus', but kept their seats in quiet contrition.  Father Brophy had reached them, touched their grief and their sorrow, and they did not have to proclaim their submissiveness to anyone.  

Father Brophy was at his very best when he railed against the gender spectrum, that godless and Satanic revulsion, that twisting of God's creation, that blatant pie in the face of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, that abhorrence. 

'Go forth and multiply', shouted Father Brophy from the pulpit, 'and as for the rest of you, be gone!'

Now, hypocrisy is the stock-in-trade of the clergy and the politician, especially when it comes to sex.  Not a few politicians who ran for office on moral rectitude, sexual propriety, fidelity, and traditional Christian values, were found in bed with some tart, admitted their sin, vowed never again to stray from the path of righteousness, and were re-elected. 

Perhaps the most famous was Congressman ____from a district in Father Brophy's home state of Ohio, who was caught in flagrante delicto with a harem of hookers procured by Washington's most reliable Madame, Mrs. Esther Kleinberg. When questioned by the press, the politician channeled Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former candidate for the French Presidency, a known Lothario and obsessive 'sexualist' who when accused of a similar sexual jamboree, said, ‘How was I to know they were prostitutes?  All women look the same with their clothes off'. 

 

The press and the American politician's constituents did not find this funny at all, and he had one hell of a time extricating himself from the mess, but he did, bawling and beating his press in a nationally televised press conference, and claiming to be born again.  His district forgave him, and he was again reelected. 

Father Brophy, despite his fulminations from the pulpit about the gender spectrum, was fascinated by it, especially the idea that one could pick and choose and move easily between and among the offerings.  No one had to be sexually hidebound, progressives said.  Heterosexuality was only a choice and a bad one at that, and the gender spectrum was the sexual offering long awaited. 

Father Brophy studied the daunting array of options on the spectrum and was drawn to the bi-sexual.  Of course, there were more divisions and subdivisions of this category that one could possibly imagine, and together they formed their own mini-spectrum, but the priest quietly and quickly concluded that he belonged to all of them.  

His sexual desires were eclectic to say the least.  He was attracted by Billy Baxter, angelic altar boy who served at High Mass, gracefully moving across the altar to serve both priest and God.  Billy was a charming, delightful boy - blonde, blue-eyed, lithe-limbed, and profoundly faithful.

But he was also attracted to one of his parishioners, Mrs. Althea Albertson, reputed to be of illicit sexual bearing - a tart, to be quite honest, and just the thought of thrashing around with her, doing unspeakable things, sent him to the confessional. 

 

Now, Ames City, like most small towns in America, had its share of sexual deviancy.  Mrs. Hermione Phillips, President of the Women's Auxiliary, charming hostess, and country club golf champion, routinely entertained men in her home while her husband was away. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker didn't begin to describe the eclectic mix that came to 145 Harper Road every afternoon. 

There was Hennessey Phelps, a City Hall administrator, lawyer, accountant, and upstanding citizen who spent his lunch hour in his basement pleasuring himself with the raunchiest, most twisted, and vulgar pornography ever assembled.  When finally arrested for mail fraud - Phelps had naively used the USPS for his obsession - the FBI admitted they had never seen such an assemblage of filth. 

And Blanchard Tompkins, Fitzsimmons Archer, Gladstone Pinkus, and Dido Marks and a hundred others doing unspeakable things. 

So in some ways Father Brophy should not be faulted for his own eclectic mix of sexual partners.  It was par for the course in Ames City.  Of course the priesthood was sacramental - being ordained meant that he was in a line to Jesus Christ himself - and so such sexual deviance should be looked at differently 

 

Yet, in the light of God's merciful forgiveness, and his warm embrace of all sinners, he knew he was doing no wrong. 

Not so, concluded the Archbishop who investigated the rumors that were circulating in Brophy's parish.  In the old days he would simply have transferred the priest to another domain with a lecture and a warning; but in the new days of transparency, he would have to take more decisive action. Brophy was brought before the archbishopric magistrate in Cleveland, investigated, and found guilty of apostasy.  After a rather lengthy appeal, Brophy was defrocked and sent packing. 

Now Brophy was just an ordinary john, but one who had been most generous and kind in his ecclesiastical days, so when he decided to say a fond goodbye to Mrs. Albertson, she felt sorry for him, offered him a temporary place to stay, and a few hours of her earthly delights, gratis. 

Brophy was pleased and touched by the woman's kindness, accepted her offer but did not overstay his welcome, and eventually made his way to Portland, where, he had heard, anything goes. 

The Ladies Man - How Charm, A Silver Tongue, And Understanding Women Won The Female Electorate Hands Down

Langston Barry had been attracted to women from a very early age.  He was in love with Mrs. Thomas, his English teacher, a woman of class and cultured beauty. It was hard for Langston to pay attention to conjugations and syntax when Mrs. Thomas taught, for all he could think of was her.

He was too young to imagine anything more - he was only in the seventh grade - but he sensed that something far more lay behind her Lanvin and Arpege. 

 

He peered over the top of the stairs when his mother had formal dinner parties, and watched as her beautiful wimen came through the front door.  Sybil Bernstein, was his favorite, a woman of Middle Eastern beauty, a princess of a Sultan's harem, a wife of Solomon or Saul.  

She wore diamonds in her hair and emeralds in gold pendants and bracelets.  Her low-cut dress was inviting. Her make up highlighted her cheekbones, gave her eyes mystery, and her cheeks a glow.  She was magnificent. 

Langston was not just drawn to older women.  Nancy Blythe who sat next to him in math class wore sleeveless blouses in the Spring and left the top button unbuttoned. The light breeze blowing through the classroom windows, mixed the scent of the lilacs, wisteria, and apple blossoms from the orchard across the road with her own. 

 

Algebraic equations added up to nothing. Nothing added up to anything except the impossibly desirable Nancy. 

This precocious appreciation of women was but a preamble to the real story of Langston Barry, but also the foundation for his success.  A man who truly loves women - their femininity, their sexuality - and understands their needs, will always have women who love him. 

The sexual equation is not a difficult one to solve.  Women are irresistibly attracted to men who find them interesting, beautiful, and worthy, men who have a confidence that derives from that understanding; men who know that they do not have try to seduce women, for they have already been seduced.

Women's natural, biological reluctance to mate until their partner has been thoroughly vetted - a man with a profession, from a good family, with solid earning potential, and a significant inheritance - disappears when they meet a man like Langston Barry.  No amount of prestige, respect, or promise can trump that profound understanding of them as women.  

Thanks to all of which Langston was never without a loving, desirable partner.  Yes, he was fortunate to have Great Uncle Foster's Hollywood looks.  Foster was an Errol Flynn lookalike and family history had it that he was not unlike the screen idol always surrounded by beautiful young women; but good looks for women who were attracted to Langston were only the frosting on the cake, nothing more.

So, it was natural that Langston was drawn to politics.  Why shouldn't the natural allure that attracted women, that dissolved their reticence, and made them pliant, complaisant lovers, be as effective in electoral affairs?

He found that after speaking at workplace gatherings, community affairs, and ceremonial events, women gathered around him, eager to know more about him.  The art of conviction came easy to him, and he was a natural at weaving intimacy, interest, and appeal in everything from mutual funds to urban development.  There was something so genuine about his appeals, so considerate and promising about his manner, that women lost sight of substance.  

The head of the Republican Party of Ohio, a canny kingmaker who had supported successful candidates for office from school board to Senate, saw the political potential in Langston, and approached him with an offer to join him in the upcoming Congressional campaigns in the state. He did not have to be a rabid partisan, but a reasonably convinced voter, and his natural ability would do the rest. 

'Speak to the women', the political impresario unnecessarily reminded Langston. 'They will get our man elected'; and so it was that Langston Barry, unschooled in politics and the policies of the party became the most important and influential campaigner on the campaign trail.  His name was rarely mentioned by the press, for his speaking engagements were low key and he was a virtual unknown; but these appearances were held to standing room only crowds, each member of which told ten others were had not attended; and before long, Republican polls were in uncharted territory. 

It was not long before the Party deemed him worthy of his own electoral campaign, and decided to groom him for a seat in a wobbly district whose incumbent had become increasingly crusty and disliked.  The speeches, appearances, informal gatherings, meet-and-greet assignments he had willingly undertaken as a volunteer were excellent warmups for the next round.

Langston was not sure about politics.  As a spokesperson, he was fine, unencumbered, and richly rewarded.  He had his pick of the women who found his appeals irresistible.  He had been right from the beginning - women's natural attraction to him thanks to his honest charm and simple interest in them had easily transferred to politics - and he profited from both. 

In fact the more lovers in this credulous crowd he had, the more other women wondered what it would be like to be with him.  Another truism - women, rather than put off by a man with numerous lovers, want a) to see what the fuss is all about; and b) to tame him, corral him, and harness him. 

So in a political sense he worked both sides of the aisle - his natural appeal to women gave him political currency, and that currency afforded him new lovers, whose love in turn became the currency for more lovers and more political appeal. 

Why should he trade this in for serious Washington politics?  He had a good professional job, made even more profitable thanks to his new visibility.  He was provided generous perks and entitlements as recompense for his political efforts, and he had the pick of any of the Republican women gathered to hear him speak. 

He demurred, and insisted that he was better suited for being a behind-the-scenes man, a loyal operative helping others further their political career. 

Besides which, thanks to his public acclaim and newfound general appeal, he - like thousands of politicians before him - had profited mightily.  Investors were eager to invest, lenders happy to extend their courtesies, and before long Langston had made millions through the creative financial instruments, credit swaps, and innovative investment partnerships made popular by Jeffery Skilling and Enron, which had come under intense SEC scrutiny for a while, but emerged again in new, legal garb. 

'What could be better?', Langston thought, watching the sunset from the bougainvillea-filled terrace of his home on St. Bart's, 'and I did nothing to get it'. 

Yes, Langston was one of the fortunate ones, the ones endowed with a natural sense of appeal to women, a simple, basic understanding of their needs.  They were no complex equations to solve, no differential I calculus, no imaginary numbers and reverse algorithms.  Plain, simple beings, that was all; and it was amazing how many men still struggled with figuring them out.

'Ahh....', sighed Langston sipping the last of his pina colada. 'Women, can’t do with 'em, can't do without 'em'.  He signaled the boy for another drink, set his glass down, and said, 'Nonsense. I can do with both’.

'You're Stupid!' - The Politically Incorrect President And The End To Engineered Fantasy

'You're stupid', replied President Trump to a reporter who had asked him a stupid question, one with no substance and only asked to try to make him look bad. 'You are a stupid person', he went on, 'a very stupid person', after which he made a few desultory comments, and proceeded to the next questioner. 

Now, this language was shocking to the progressive Left which for years had chosen to ignore the truth, to revise English to be as gentle, inclusive, and welcoming, and to foist on the American public an airbrushed version of reality.  There are no fat people in America, they said, only 'otherly statured'.  There were no dwarves or midgets, only 'little people', and most importantly no one was stupid.  The bell curve no longer described the human equation - a cluster of very dumb people at one end, a cluster of brilliant people on the other, and the rest falling under the great arc of the middle. 

Children who used the word 'stupid' were quickly corrected and disciplined. 'We don't use words like that', one mother was overheard saying to her young daughter in Turtle Park. 

'OK', said the little girl, 'but he's dumb...a retard', an accurate, precise, absolutely correct description of Johnny Paluka, a clod of a boy who didn't know left from right.  The boy was indeed on the far asymptote of the bell curve. 

'Oh, Dottie', said her mother. 'We don't say things like that'; but the little girl, too young, untried, and innocent of any far-flung notions of false propriety, insisted that she was right.  'He belongs in the broom closet'. 

Now, this little episode was not unique - children observe objectively, judge intelligently, and respond truthfully until they are hammered into some fantastical adult image. 

'Who did you play with, today, Jamie', another mother in another park asked her son. 

'Billy Farnham', responded the boy. 

'I don't think I know him.  Is the the one who lives on Randecker's Lane?'

'No.  He's the fat one'. 

His mother recoiled in shame.  'We don't say things like that', she warned. 

'But he is fat, Mommy', her son replied. 'The fattest boy in the class and the fattest boy I have ever seen'. 

 

Despite the school's attempts to encourage inclusivity - to be sure that the 'mentally challenged' and the 'otherly statured 'boys were included in playground activities - they were shunned, laughed at, and ignored.  The children were acting like every member of every society has since the very first human settlements - ridding the group of the outsider.  The bell curve was no different in Paleolithic times. Homogeneity, the integrity of the majority, the purity of the masses have been bywords of human communities since we came down from the trees.

No amount of socialization, engineered harmony, or prescriptive behavior can change this basic, inalterable, ineluctable fact. 

Much has been made of bullying in these days of social justice; and yet it has been another persistent aspect of growing up and beyond forever.  Children learn how to deal with bullies.  Either you avoid them, kowtow to them, or fight them; and each reaction describes very telling psycho-social behavioral traits and anticipates how you will survive in the adult world.  

'Sticks and stones' are warning signals - life after childhood will not be a fairy tale, and the savvy child will learn to react either in kind with a well-placed, well-timed counter insult, stony indifference, or avoidance. 

 

Shaming works wonders.  Fat girls under the catty pressure of their bitchy classmates quickly lose weight.  Boys under peer pressure shape up, lose their annoying tics and habits, and become part of the group. When challenged, dummies try their best and reach the upper limits of their native ability. 

Calling out horrendously poorly chosen dress, shoes, or hairstyle works like magic.  The accused for the first time looks in the mirror with conforming eyes, and the next day looks like everyone else. 

Uniqueness, individuality, a well-defined personality expressed by words, appearance, and action are not affected by this call to conformity. There is a measure of suppleness in social criticism.  The masses recognize a special person of merit despite some cloying inconsistencies.  Charm can overcome ugliness, respect and deference can quiet catcalls, intelligence overwhelms social ineptitude.  Not always, for suppleness too has limits to its extension, but often. 

Political correctness is nothing less than an Orwellian attempt to deny reality.  What you see before your very eyes is not as it seems.  An obese woman in a bikini is not an oddity, a self-indulgent, arrogant misfit, but a beautiful person the equal of any Hollywood starlet.  Yet since Ancient Greece and Rome, the standard of female beauty has not changed in the least.  The statues of Aphrodite and Athena resemble the most beautiful women of today.  The features of both are symmetrical, perfectly aligned, and balanced.  Their bodies are long, lithe, and graceful. 

 

The Orwellian reformists insist that such standards are themselves false, created by a misogynist men who can see no further than a woman's exterior.  Yet the truth speaks loudly.  Look at the cover of any men's or women's magazine and see the same classic beauty. 

Beauty is definitely not in the eye of the beholder. 

So, why not accept acknowledged standards of intelligence, beauty, and behavior and be tolerant of those who fall far from them? Why call out the less intelligent, less beautiful, less endowed as 'stupid, dumb, retarded, clumsy, fat, short, and ugly'?

Because such outspoken honesty is the best way to encourage adherence to the norm - to standards of human beauty, intelligence, and physical ability and most of all encourages the less endowed to perform to their maximum, always trying to achieve the highest standards while knowing they will always fall short. 

The Left cannot get over Donald Trump's aggressiveness and his refusal to accept its Orwell-speak.  The progressive agenda - insisting that there are not two sexes but many, all arrayed on a fluid gender spectrum; that inner city black is the inheritor of African sentience, intelligence, and environmental awareness and should be placed atop the human pyramid; that all cultures are equal and none should be assumed better or more developed than others - is contrived fantasy, anti-historical, revisionist, and ignorant of the foundational makeup of society. 

Finally and at long last, reality is seen as what it is, not what it should be.  History is back, the record of human settlements, empires, and civilizations again open for objective inspection, and the difference between individuals, societies, cultures, and religions there for inspection. 

Trump is not 'presidential', progressives say as if there were such a standard.  They only mean not behaving as they would like; but Trump, for all his outrageousness is both quintessentially American and presidential.  The days of fear-of-the-dark presidencies and the faux compassionate, idealistic years of fairytale land are over. 

Small Town America And The Ghetto - Only The Trash Is Different

Pharoah Jones was the King of Anacostia, Washington's deepest inner city - a neighborhood of endemic crime, drug abuse, single parenthood, truancy, gangs, and violence.  Yet, there is money to be made everywhere in America, and it only takes enterprise, ambition, and intelligence.  There is a bell curve for every population, and Pharoah Jones was on the bright side of it.

Jones' empire was impressive, a large conglomerate of drugs, prostitution, extortion, trafficking, and money laundering.  He had partners in the Sinaloa cartel, the Kingston crewes, MS-13, and the Gambino family.  He was Washington's version of Frank Lucas, the Godfather of Harlem who a few decades ago ruled as vast an illicit empire.

Both men never hid from the law, so secure were they in their protection, their cover, and their network.  Police, judges, magistrates, city council members, federal agents all were either on the payroll or intimidated into silence.   

As such Pharoah Jones was never seen without his full-length white ermine coat, 24 karat gold chains, South African diamonds, Angolan emeralds, and Indonesian cultured pearls.  His ride was a Cadillac Escalade, chopped and channeled with silver spinners.  It was an armored lowrider, triple enameled black with red and purple trim, tinted glass, wet bar, and complete quadraphonic hi-tech sound system. 

He had houses on Washington's Gold Coast, Palm Beach, St. Barts and St. Tropez.  His millions were secure in offshore accounts in Aruba, Bimini, and Antigua. 

He had two wives, three consorts, and Fulani and Egyptian concubines.  His children were too numerous to count, but when he did, he showered them with gifts, promises, and gold.  

Now, the rest of Anacostia was a shithole - a pestilential, god awful, miasmic slum - but the perfect address for a man of Pharoah Jones' enterprise.  Even SWAT teams were reluctant to go there, so well-armed and fearless were the street gangs.  The last time that the forces of law and order went in to Anacostia, they were ambushed, encircled, and fired upon with the most modern Soviet, Israeli, and South African automatic weapons, grenade launchers and rockets.  They were forced to withdraw after taking many casualties. 

An emissary from Anacostia sent to the Mayor's office and the FBI, warned against any such intrusions into what he called 'sovereign territory', and offered generous gifts to both to encourage compliance. 

Pharoah Jones, through a combination of intelligence, street sense, business savvy, and canny risk analysis, was one of the most respected and feared men in The Nation's Capital. 

Seymour Babbidge, Senior Vice President of the Chillicothe (Ohio) Savings and Loan was not unlike Pharoah Jones in that he managed a not insignificant empire.   Although small town America was limned as the heart and soul of the nation, the repository of family values, propriety, rectitude, probity, and social harmony, it was nothing of the kind.  

While there were enough proper merchants, doctors, teachers, and farmers to maintain the image, the real Chillicothe was in the hands of Seymour Babbidge who built a billion dollar financial empire with the same savvy, instinctive sense for weak links, gullibility, credulousness, and greed as Pharoah Jones.

Years ago he saw a lucrative opening - his bank had profited from one of Jeffery Skilling's Enron creative financial instruments. It was the ideal cover - as were a hundred other small, independently-owned institutions across the country - for Skilling's ingenious schemes; and thanks to that interest, Babbidge, selected as point person for Enron, was the first to benefit.

Skilling quickly realized that he had a diamond in the rough in Seymour Babbidge. Babbidge quickly understood the ins and outs of the Enron 'creative' network, and was to be the 'facilitator' with other independent banks affiliated within the Independent Bank Association. 

There were men like Babbidge throughout the system, men willing to take a few risks and unprecedented steps to make unaccountable, tax free money, and they formed 'the network of the willing' as Skilling had called it. 

Before long hundreds of millions of dollars were passed first through semi-legal institutional channels and then through the hands and offshore bank accounts of Babbidge operatives.  Like any good scam, investors were paid off, but lightly, while the bulk of the profits went into the pockets of Babbidge's men. 

Now, just like the residents of Anacostia, the good people of Chillicothe knew - or certainly suspected the goings on behind closed doors at the Chillicothe Savings and Loan. The remarkable returns on their investments, as small as they were, were indicative of something bigger. 

This complicity was based on a more fundamental moral corruption.  Behind the scenes of Midwest propriety, faith, and fidelity the same disregard for social mores found in Anacostia, existed in Chillicothe. Husbands and wives cheated on each other with regularity.  

Infidelity was so brazen that after church on Sundays, husbands virtually strolled into the arms of their lovers under the transparent cover of 'playing eighteen holes' while their wives entertained their paramours in the rooms of the Farmington Arms. 

Druggists cheated a little here and their on their taxes, lawyers overbilled, butchers kept their thumbs on the scales, and furriers sold otter as mink. 

On the surface, Chillicothe seemed as it was supposed to be - a place of courtesy, bonhomie, and good faith.  Men tipped their hats at ladies walking by, opened car doors for them, smiled broadly, and wished them well.  Children were all well-behaved and if not scholarly, at least good students. 

Daniel Goldhagen wrote a book about Germans' complicity with the Nazis during World War II.  The Germans had to have known about the concentration camps, the gas chambers, and the ovens, Goldhagen said, but they kept quiet.  The Nazis were doing what they had wanted to do long ago. 

The principle behind the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was based on the assumption of complicity - no regime can stand without the support of the people.  There are no such thing as innocent civilians in warfare.  Dresden was incinerated on this assumption. 

The people of Chillicothe were no fools, and as mentioned, many made out quite well at Seymour Babbidge's bank.  They, like the Germans, had to know but did nothing. 

This is all to say that while family values are not exactly a scam, they are a convenient cover for a society which since the age of snake oil salesmen has had scams, cons, and Ponzi schemes in its blood. 

This is not exactly a bad thing, for American capitalism is based on the same credulousness, consumer ambition, and social dynamics used by crooks.  'A sucker is born every minute', said circus impresario P.T. Barnum, and how right he was.  Everyone wants to believe that the freak actually has two heads, that the promise of fifty-percent risk free return is real, that the stock broker is your friend. 

'Caveat emptor' does not apply just to dry goods, but to American life in general.  The ethos has not changed, just the marketplace.

It is unlikely that either Pharoah Jones or Seymour Babbidge will see the inside of federal prison, but Skilling, Bernie Madoff, and Rudy Kurniawan have, so you never know. 

Meanwhile Babbidge is enjoying life skiing at Gstaad, wintering in the islands, and treating his mistress like the princess she really is. 

And Pharoah Jones?  Same deal, different venue.  Both real Americans. 

The Tart, The Archbishop, And The General - The Taste Of Power Is Very Sweet Indeed

Lucinda Flanders grew up in a small town in Ohio in a classic rural district with more cows than people. The family farm raised pigs, had two milking cows, and small fields of corn and wheat. They lived modestly but well, were churchgoers, Republicans, and charitable neighbors. 

As such, her parents were unsure what to do with their daughter who had none of their rectitude and social probity, and at a very young age was spending more time with boys than on her duties at home.  There was something devilish in her, something unexpectedly different, desires and ambitions which did not match those of her parents or the community.  

She was seen in the back seat of cars, in the Toller's barn, in the cornfields, and in the gymnasium in spectacular contortions that reminded Mr. Adams, the history teacher, of Japanese Edo pornographic woodcuts where the subjects, like Lucinda were straddled, arranged in athletic positions, and performing calisthenic sex.

 

Talk of expulsion ran through the school administration; but because Lucinda was an honor student, a basketball star, and budding mathematician, the authorities could do nothing.  She was indeed a blot on the spotless reputation of the school, but given her talents and reputation - Billings Senior High was put on the map thanks to her athleticism and championship at the statewide math competition - they decided to look the other way. 

It wasn't until Mr. Cartwright, the French teacher decided to try his luck with Lucinda, was immediately successful, but was unfortunately caught in flagrante delicto with the delicious young girl and summarily fired. 

'The Billings Brothel' shouted the Chillicothe Times Herald, and soon after the first edition hit the newsstands, both Mr. Cartwright and Lucinda Flanders were told never to return. 

At his point Lucinda could have gone in any one of three ways - to Ohio State on a basketball scholarship, to Los Alamos Center for Advanced Mathematics, or the street and a life of languorous, sybaritic sexual pleasure. 

She didn't have a choice really, for those girls who are born with such sexual precocity cannot possibly deny it. In Lucinda's case, with her combination of intelligence and sexual ambition, she soon realized that she could capitalize on both.  Men were easy marks, and why not use her canniness and sexual appeal for profit?

It was at this point that she had the good fortune to meet the Very Reverend James J. O'Connor, Archbishop of Bolivar County, a man of ambition and rising prospects.  The Vatican had taken notice; but O'Connor, one of the few remaining straight prelates in the archdiocese, had a particularly strong attraction for young women.  Perhaps it was being surrounded by gay priests in the rectory, on the altar, in the sacristy and in the church refectory that the ordinarily careful and abstemious priest stepped over the line as soon as he saw Lucinda Flanders. 

Even if her reputation had not preceded her, he would have been drawn to this succulently delicious morsel. Sex shouted from every pore, from every strand of her carelessly tossed hair, her perfume, and her undulating, seductive walk.  It was a done deal from the moment she walked into the nave, knelt in a pew, and started saying the rosary. 

 

This piety was nothing of the kind - she had her eye on trouble, and her mind had set its sights on the archbishop, a man of God but known as a gentleman, a courtier, a man whose admiration of women was no secret. What a star to be hitched to! What a conquest! Washington, Rome, the Vatican itself. 

If it hadn't been for the buggery in every nook and cranny of the Church, Archbishop O'Connor might never have taken the step, the one that led to a Garden of Eden sexual paradise; but fed up, angered, and frustrated at the diddling and twiddling of priests, acolytes, and altar boys, he decided to express a manhood which had long been repressed. 

God would understand, for His church had become such a den of iniquity that a return of good Biblical (Joshua begat Esther, etc.) values would be condoned if not championed.  And so it was that the affair began and continued through the Archbishop's rather unusual recognition and invitation by the Cardinal of Washington, DC to take over the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a local branch of the same Vatican office formerly run by then Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI. 

 

'Come with me', the Archbishop said to Lucinda, and so the couple moved across the country - he to the archbishop's elegant residence on the campus of Catholic University and she in a Dupont Circle townhouse, paid of course by the Archbishop from his inheritance.

It was to their credit that the illicit affair was kept secret for so long.  Washington is a porous, information-hungry, seditiously catty society and such a dalliance would have been front page news; but the assignations between the two lovers was always done far from the spotlight, often in uncomfortable quarters, but just as often as trysts in the Shenandoah as Mr. and Mrs. Jones. 

The affair remained secret and the Archbishop was being talked of as the replacement to the Cardinal who, now in his late 80s was said to be considering retirement to a villa in Tuscany.  O'Connor was doing quite well for himself, and saw himself as a Renaissance man, a Roman priest with a mistress and a fortune. 

At about this time General Abraham Lockhart Pender came into his life. Pender, a three-star general who served his country with distinction in both Afghanistan and Iraq, had been troubled with existential doubts.  He felt he was losing his faith. 

Brought up Catholic, educated at Georgetown, the country's premier Jesuit university, and a faithful congregant at the mystery of the Mass, he was at spiritual sixes and sevens.  No amount of prayer, introspection, or reflection could shake free the increasingly mordant questions of faith that kept him up at night. 

 

And so it was that the General sought and was granted an audience with the Archbishop, a man of suitable and comparable rank; and in a series of private meetings, his spiritual uncertainties began to fade. 

It was at one of these meetings that the General met Lucinda Flanders, hired by the Archbishop as his aide-de-camp, accounting advisor, and ecclesiastical factotum.  He needed nothing of Lucinda's services, but wanted his lover close by for comfort, pleasure, and companionship. 

Now, the General, long restricted by the Army's strict code of moral behavior, had grown sexually restive and, just like every man who had preceded him, was immediately attracted to the young and still nubile Lucinda Flanders. His overtures were obvious, and she took notice.  The archbishop's promised transfer to the Vatican was still far away, Rome was now just a fanciful dream, so the fortunes of a man of political power and influence looked very attractive. 

When the archbishop found the note on his pillow informing him of Lucinda's departure, he was at first disconsolate - at his age he would never again have such a young woman in his bed and would have to return to the celibate life of cold, hard emotional penury; but God provided.  He accepted his fate, upped his devotion, and led life as it should be led, a bit cold and stony, but rewarding nevertheless.  

As luck would have it, the General was transferred from Commandant of Fort Mead to the Pentagon, and his political future was bright.  He, still a youngish man of strategic battlefield brilliance and military intelligence, would make an ideal candidate for high office, and so he became a Republican Party celebrity, showered with attention, favors, and promises. 

Now, America is not France where the President can install his lover in the Elysees Palace without raising eyebrows, and before Sarkozy, Francois Mitterrand had longstanding affair with his mistress with whom he had a daughter, again to no particular public criticism. 

No, America is still a Puritanical, censorious, prurient society, and so the affair between the General and Lucinda had to be kept particularly quiet.  If and when his political future materialized then and then only would he jettison his wife and consider marriage with Lucinda. 

By this time, Lucinda's interest in men, Washington, and power had faded.  Her coffers were full, her offshore bank accounts rich with unaccountable equities, and her privacy still intact. Even as profligate, libertine, and sexually excessive as she was, she could return to Ohio without having left a trace on Pennsylvania Avenue. 

Her parents were delighted to have her back among the cows and chickens.  That fol-de-rol when she was a youngster was long forgotten, and she was just plain Lucy again.  The old song verse, 'You can't keep 'em down at the farm once they've seen Paree' didn't apply.  She was happy to be back.