Crackpots, Tinhorns, And Quacks -The Real America Stands Up For What's Right!

There are many Americans swinging on loose hinges these days - there is no 'there' there to the progressive platform, nowhere to get a toehold, a lot of flopping fish on the deck of a boat whose rudder got tangled in its own net. 

For years Trump hatred was enough.  When the devil is in your midst, it is no time for virtue, compassion, and good will.  Exorcism is first and foremost, and then once the curse has been removed, sights can be turned towards happier, more congenial, more positive things. 

But when pushed for a program, a policy, and an agenda, progressives were at a loss. They never expected to be charged with such an unexpected responsibility. The idea of rational governance hadn't hit.  The fever must first abate and the cold sweats over and done with before any deliberation could begin. 

The howling, the misericordia, the holy passion, however continues. Brown and black people must be served, not just serve.  They must rise to the top not wallow in the mire.  They must be given, not expected to give.  America must become the home to the world's diaspora, and the descendants of slaves should enslave the rich and tear down the shibboleths of wealth and privilege.  

The litany is long, the verses familiar, the songs of the chorus loud and resonant; but still there is nothing holding up the big top.  The tent poles are bent, the flaps have lost their ties.  Progressives have welcomed all with open arms, but now they realize that it is a nasty, airless, feckless, smelly place. 

Yet, and despite all, thousands of Americans are jumping with joy at every federal judge's progressive ruling, every minor electoral victory, every community standing firm against Trump's gestapo's storm troopers. 

It is an example of collective groupthink, or in psychiatric terms, mass hysteria.  The psychologist, Werner Austerlitz, tenured professor at Vienna Friedlander University's medical college,  writing in The Austrian Journal of Forensic Psychology observed this about American progressive, collective angst:

There is an inherently febrile nature to hopefulness - an irrepressible urge to believe despite all news to the contrary.  It is earnest, passionate, emotional, and completely irrational in its composition, direction, and expression.

Perhaps the most significant feature of this paradigm is its infectiousness. While negativism, cynicism, skepticism, and even misanthropy have their influence, they are nothing compared to a belief in a better world. 

Such optimists are unbothered by history, a long, predictable, repetitious series of wars, civil strife, unease, corruption, unholy predation, and wholesale slaughter, all mere anomalies, temporary distortions of the goodness of the human spirit. 

It is no surprise that these progressive optimists want nothing more than a good time - a unifying, solidifying, happy jamboree of like-mindedness.  

 

Recently there have been many such jamborees in the United States, the most recent being the No Kings rallies to protest what demonstrators consider the President's disregard for democracy on his way to a regal throne. 

These protests like those demanding climate action, abortion, No Means No neo-Puritanism, Black Lives Matter, or any of a hundred other passionately held but objectively vacant causes are nothing more than picnics in the park - hot dogs, hamburgers, little children playing in the sprinkler. 

No one has any reasonable proof that the President is anything but an aggressive wheeler-dealer straight from the means streets of New York pushing everything and everyone to the limits of the law.  Nor does anyone have an anodyne, so the whole No Kings affair is a trapeze act with nothing but air beneath.  An aphoristic closed circle. 

 

Now, America has always been a land of crackpots, tinhorns, and quacks.  Con men, Ponzi schemes, and shell games are part of the country's genetic code, in our nature, as natural as a sunset, part and parcel of the ethos of individual enterprise.  

'A sucker is born every minute', said the circus impresario P.T. Barnum who went on to make millions in bearded ladies, two-headed babies, midgets, giants, and creatures from outer space.  His magicians were unparalleled at making the impossible look real, his mountebanks and clowns added to the whole fantasy rigamarole. He was a genius. 

So Bernie Madoff, Skilling and Enron, Rudy Kurniawan, Jim and Tammy Bakker, and a thousand other hucksters are as American as apple pie, so it is no wonder that progressives claim they have found the Holy Grail; and when  hey preach their dodgy vision of a communitarian, happy, just world, millions take their truth for granted. 

 

Brenda Parcells was delighted at having been chosen as Event Organizer for Coulter, Mississippi's No Kings demonstration.  She, no stranger to volunteerism, charm, and town pride, was the ideal choice. She had the right combination of organizational ability, pride in Coulter, and solidly progressive credentials.  Everything would be right and proper from the tea sandwiches to the No Kings tee shirts, and the event would make the papers from Columbus to Jackson. 

Brenda was no intellectual and was never at home with policy or political philosophy, but that was exactly what made her right for the job.  The powers that be determined that Donald Trump was a democratic poseur, a monarchist in sheep's clothing, and who was she to deny that conclusion? Her job was to make all comers joyful - a convention of likeminded, optimistic, happy people united in their ideals and their desire for a better world. 

There was not a naysayer in the crowd, not one skeptic nor one objectivist.  They were all marching to the same drummer, praying from the same prayerbook, hugging and embracing in love and solidarity.  Nothing else mattered. Their conviction, their God-given sense of rectitude and moral right would be felt in the White House. 

Neither Brenda nor Coulter were unique in their expressions of fury at the imperial president.  Hundreds of similar rallies were held across the country, and members of Congress from their districts made special appearances to encourage them, rile them up, and given them an extra boost of political conviction. 

 

'We are the people', said one Congresswoman from a Western district, 'and we shall rule.  We are America, we are the Republic, we are democracy!' to which cheers and hurrahs went up from the crowd below.  

Not one fact, not one objective conclusion, not one historical reference, not one bit of sense, logic, or serious insight was raised; but of course that was the point.  Facts are like too much salt in the soup. 

Thanks to Brenda the Coulter No Kings rally went off like a charm, and she returned home glowing with pride and satisfaction.  'We must do this again next year', she said to her husband, as usual indifferent and rude, nose stuck in an Ole Miss game. 

And so it was across America, the great shell game, quackery, and and creative swaps everywhere.  Who cared what it really meant or whether it would have an impact?  No one, just a time for sweet tea, watercress sandwiches, and friendship.

Did Genghis Khan Get Congressional Approval? - Trump, Drug Boats, And 'You Talkin' To Me?'

President Trump has been blowing Venezuelan drug boats out of the water on their way to US ports, 'saving thousands of American lives', and that much is certainly true.

'You can't do that!', shout progressives who want the President to seek Congressional approval before sending his missiles down on defenseless boats, wantonly killing their crews. 'An act of arrogant, autocratic rule...another example of wanton, illegal executive power...nothing less than a brutal, untoward act of aggression...'

'Think Genghis Khan', said the President. 

Genghis Khan was a charismatic and fearsome figure.  He and his armies were known for their cruelty and barbarity, and the sight of them advancing across the battlefield in a storm of dust, the earth shaking with the thunder of 50,000 hooves, was enough to send enemies into retreat. 

The thought alone of this terrible, bloodthirsty, and mighty warrior was enough to rout enemy armies. Genghis Khan was a man of absolute will and power, a frightening presence of power and vengeance.  He was a horseman of the Apocalypse. 

Khan had no qualms, moral reservations, or ethical hesitancy.  Wars were for winning, civilians were complicit enemies, and total annihilation of any opposition was his modus belli. Not only would defeated populations be without the wherewithal to mount a resistance or counterattack, they would never dare to incite the bloody, murderous, savage wrath of the conqueror.

Today’s political progressives choose to ignore Genghis Khan as an anomaly, a one-time phenomenon, a primitive throwback to the Stone Age.  There are no lessons to be taken from him, they say, except for his irrelevance to our newly aware, profoundly moral, utopian age.  Social progress will be assured through dialogue, diplomacy, and good will.  

Nonsense, of course.  Wars, violence, civil strife, aggression, and mayhem are expressions of the hardwired genetic code that makes us tick - that territorial, self-interested nature that makes us human.  Wars have been part and parcel of history since the Paleolithic.  Human DNA has not changed, so our penchant for violence has not either. 

Ever since the first human settlements, violence, brutality, conquest, and bloody empire have been the rule; and the acquisition, maintenance, and extension of power at all levels of human society is still our modus operandi.

Yes, conservatives admit, this aggressive, territorial, self-interested human nature will be the cause of future armed conflict between interest groups, regions, and nations; but that is as it has always been.  Arming rather than disarming is the only reasonable, historical move in a hostile world.  Wars will inevitably happen, and victory should always be the goal.

Conservatives are content with the legacy of Genghis Khan and have no issue with the Crusades, the Persian Empire, the Seleucids, or Gao.  Europe, China, Japan, and India were at constant war for centuries, and while there were winners and losers, there was no moral consequence.  History was simply reconfigured. 

All of which is to explain conservatives’ bemusement at progressive utopianism, an ill-conceived, ahistorical, idealistic political philosophy.  There is no doubt, these conservatives conclude, that the current reformist hysteria will die down, progressivism will go the way of socialism and communism, and America will return unabashedly and unashamedly to its Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian principles.

'War is diplomacy by other means', said Clausewitz.  Violence is but one of many tools in the foreign policy chest.  Machiavelli many centuries earlier suggested much the same thing.  War should be undertaken only when a distinct national self-interest is at stake; and if and when it is, then overwhelming force to defeat the enemy is justified and called for. 

Bob Muzelle, approaching his later years but no less of a committed progressive, took to the hustings to harangue the President for his 'brutal, untoward attacks, an expression of arrogant machismo, defiance of international rule of law, and a plunge into the depths of uncontrollable violent xenophobic passion'. 

Febrile screeds were Bob's modus operandi, his calling card, his ethos; and people came less to listen to his political exegesis than to watch this whirling dervish, this man possessed, overcome by righteous anger and vehement opposition.  He was a wonder, a flailing wild man, spittle flying, fists pumping the air, his face turning red and apoplectic with frustration and boiling hostility.  

'Never in the history of American governance have we seen such a bully, such a primitive, bludgeoning, unrepentant ape in the White House.  Our suspicions about the anti-democratic intentions of the man have been proven again and again, and this unconscionable attack on the Venezuelan people is but the latest example'. 

Bob paused for breath, wiped his brow, picked up a dog-eared copy of the Constitution, and not unlike an old time Baptist preacher shaking the Bible before a packed congregation, said, 'This, my good people, is what Donald J Trump thinks of the Constitution', throwing it into a dumpster hauled on stage. 'Yes, a dumpster.  Detritus, trash, leavings, no different than old chicken bones. This is what your president thinks of America'. 

 

The audience hooted and hollered and yelled for more, but Bob was spent, energy depleted, resources emptied.  He quieted the crowd, smiling, and shouted La Lucha Continua and walked off stage to waves of applause. 

Of course the President was unmoved and unrepentant. The painting of Genghis Khan on the wall of the Oval Office was not there by happenstance.  It was a daily reminder of his promise to the American people - to restore order, strength, confidence, and ability and to extend the reach of the American republic far and wide. 

 

Venezuelan drug boats? 'Fleas', said the President, 'to be squooshed'. 

Again Bob howled.  How could the President of the United States be so unfeeling, heartless, and indifferent.  Yes, granted, there might....might..be drugs on the boats, but nothing to justify the wanton taking of lives; but of course even if the President had heard Bob's craven squeaks, he would have paid them no mind. His was a mighty mission of historical imperative. He was no gay Jimmy Carter, opining about peace and love, or the vacuous Joe Biden.  No, his mission was pre-ordained.  

When the liberal press got wind of Trump's channeling of the Mongol emperor, they had a field day.  Pictures of bloody heads on stakes, bodies littering fallow fields, horsemen charging down in numbers beheading everyone in their path were shown behind the sad, mournful face of the Reverend Al Sharpton who invoked Lord God Almighty to stop America's Demon of Fleet Street. 

Trump loved the 'fake news' even as he criticized it. Let eunuchs bitch and cavil, he knew what heroes were made of, and he was one.  He indeed was a king, an emperor, a mighty exterminating angel.  Why deny it?

Breaking Through The Glass Ceiling And Finding No Worthwhile Men There - The Travails Of Womanhood

Betty Ann Phelps grew up in a traditional American home.  Her father was a banker, working regular hours, came home for lunch, played golf on Saturdays, went to church regularly, and presided over a Sunday family dinner each week. 

Her mother was Chairman of the Women's Auxiliary, a frequent volunteer at the public library, a good cook, seamstress, and homemaker.

In short, the Fifties were what they had always been touted to be - a time of peace, social harmony, prosperity, and good cheer.  Women and men had their assigned places, and no one questioned the wisdom of the day. Minor bank executive and modest mother of three might not have been Wall Street or St. Tropez but they were indispensable bits of the way things were. 

The Seventies changed all that, and Betty Ann was quick to pick up on the sedate, socially sedentary, and impossibly bourgeois life of her parents. There was no way that she would follow in their footsteps.  The world was her oyster, women were finally seen and respected as the primary genus of the species, and would one day ride herd over the men who had for so long oppressed them. 

She became a feminist firebrand, a woman who knew no solace, respite, or satisfaction.  There was so much to do, so much disgrace to overcome, so much damned male obsolescence, so much still to fight for that the fight had to continue.  La Lucha Continua! 

Radcliffe was the right place at the right time - Jewish intellectual women come to Harvard to sharpen their teeth on the progressivism of Gompers and Brandeis, applying communitarian, socialist principles to the struggle for female equality.  She was as happy as could be, a woman among woman, a young icon of equality, a woman who had found her place. 

After Radcliffe it would have been Harvard Law but the doors were still closed to women, so she headed west to Berkeley where she thrived, law review, top of her class, honors, plaudits, and Woman Most Likely To Succeed. 

Despite the blandishments of her colleagues who urged her to go into feminist law, she demurred and went where she knew she would have the greatest results - not necessarily in women's fight for equality, but in amassing the a personal fortune.

A senior partner at Bear Stearns, unheard of in those early times, would be both an acknowledgement of her talents and a path to wealth. 

At her investiture - fifty men surrounding her, the first woman partner of the firm, responsible for nearly  twenty-five percent of the last year's revenue, a woman worthy of the firm's formal embrace - she spoke kindly but impatiently.  She had other fish to fry, and the Street was only the first stop. 

But where to?  The splinters of the broken glass ceiling were scattered on the boardroom floor, kudos and plaques were now run of the mill.  Why was she so unhappy?

Men had always given her wide berth, leeway, and running room; but what she had missed was male attention.  Had she turned herself into an Amazon, a Medusa, a woman so intimidating and demanding that no man wanted any part of her?  Were there no real men here?!

'Oh, God', she thought.  'Am I becoming my mother?'; but of course she was, for despite all the ambition, the Sisyphean climb, the clawing, grasping, inhuman reach for the top, she had forgotten one thing.  She was a woman who needed a man, who needed his solicitude, his interest, his vitality, his virility and his maleness.  

There, she said it.  It was now out in the open.  The battlefield was littered with men whom she had eliminated with such success that none remained to court her, to love her, to make love to her. 

She had been lied to all this time.  The pursuit of independence, identity, purpose, and success had been a chimera, a febrile dream of queered feminists.  Where was Mr. Right when she most needed him?

Of course she shuddered at the thought, images of daytime television, romance novels, and pop culture running wild through her brain - Archie, Veronica, and Betty in some fantastical universe of romantic love, comedy hour, the delights of courtship.  Was she falling prey to American low-brow bourgeois romantic fantasy after all?

Hardly. A woman was created with vulva, cervix, and womb for a purpose, and it was not Senior Vice President of X, Y, & Z.  Her womanhood, her femininity, her femaleness was at stake here, and she was dallying with spread sheets and creative credit swaps. 

She thought of Cousin Rachel who had gone off the rails and married down to some bass boat, gunrack cracker from Arkansas who hunted squirrel, coon, and rabbit and made nothing else of his life, a limbo-man, sedentary, self-assured swamp rat.  Rachel loved the guy, wouldn't trade him for the world, wanted more babies with him, and would stay by his side for eternity.  

Fool, idiot, victim of misprision and social deceit; but Rachel was still happy, and here Betty Ann remained, a virgin in principle, an old maid in waiting, an unhappy young millionaire sleeping alone in a five bedroom Fifth Avenue apartment. 

Yet where should she begin?  The Oak Room of the Plaza?  How predictable, prosaic, bourgeois and hopelessly tacky.  Left Field, that bastard child of Max's Kansas City, watering hole of Warhol and The Factory on lower Broadway?  Sixty-six, illegitimate offspring of Twenty-One, redoubt of Grace Kelly and Rainier?

Or barbecues in the park?  Pork 'n' beans over the coals?  Children, hausfraus, and clutter? Pools, donuts, and chaise lounges? 

She was at a loss, betwixt and between.  Desirous, passionate, virginally susceptible, but out of touch, clueless, and on the curb.  Where was Mr. Right?  And would he find her?

Her biological clock was ticking when all she had thought of was billable hours. What had she been thinking?  How could she be so obtuse.  Was it a simple matter of losing the Armani business suit and donning something frilly? Trading class for rutting? Betraying her upbringing to follow...what? a cock?

How crude and unladylike, she thought, shaking the idea from her head; but there it was in plain English.  Any man would do at this point. 

Freud wrote, 'A woman's desire cannot be measured, but it can be taken', an offhanded psychological meal ticket for all men; but there was truth in the old man's aphorism, and Betty Ann had not realized it until now.  She was finally Lady Chatterley and Emma Bovary all rolled up into one - a sexually hungry woman who demanded nothing and was happy to take men's offerings. 

Betty Ann left Wall Street to the surprise and consternation of her male colleagues who were convinced that they had a keeper not some bimbo who would run off and get pregnant at the drop of a hat; but those who knew her and followed her trajectory reported that she was married, a mother, and living in of all places, Arkansas doing not much of anything except keeping house and keeping her husband happy. 

When A Comanche Decided To Run For President - Washington's Elite, Fearing For Their Scalps, Scurried For Cover

William Black Eagle Hawkins was a direct descendant of White Wolf, the Comanche Chief of an earlier generation who was known for his bravery, his butchery, and his savagery all in the name of defending Indian lands from white settlements.  

White Wolf was the most savage, bloody, brutal killer of whites the Union Army had ever seen. His approach was simple - rape, slaughter, behead, eviscerate any white settlers that squatted on Indian land, and no more would follow. 

Defending his land against foreign intruders, and as bloody a warrior as Genghis Khan, White Wolf knew that a purposeful barbarity would intimidate the enemy.  Just as Genghis Khan posted severed heads on roads leading to conquered villages, gruesome warnings to the next settlements in his sights, so did White Wolf use unconscionable savagery as a tool of war.  He knew that the Christian soldiers would see his tribal, animist, ferocity, understand that they were up against a frightening, unfathomable enemy with no moral restraint and would turn tail. 

 

Jonathan Foreman, writing in The Daily Mail said:

S C Gwynne, author of Empire Of The Summer Moon about the rise and fall of the Comanche, says simply: ‘No tribe in the history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, and American occupations of this land had ever caused so much havoc and death. None was even a close second.’

He refers to the ‘demonic immorality’ of Comanche attacks on white settlers, the way in which torture, killings and gang-rapes were routine. ‘The logic of Comanche raids was straightforward,’ he explains.

‘All the men were killed, and any men who were captured alive were tortured; the captive women were gang raped. Babies were invariably killed.’

‘One by one, the children and young women were pegged out naked beside the camp fire,’ according to a contemporary account. ‘They were skinned, sliced, and horribly mutilated, and finally burned alive by vengeful women determined to wring the last shriek and convulsion from their agonized bodies. Matilda Lockhart’s six-year-old sister was among these unfortunates who died screaming under the high plains moon.’

Not only were the Comanche specialists in torture, they were also the most ferocious and successful warriors — indeed, they become known as ‘Lords of the Plains’. They were as imperialist and genocidal as the white settlers who eventually vanquished them.

When they first migrated to the great plains of the American South in the late 18th century from the Rocky Mountains, not only did they achieve dominance over the tribes there, they almost exterminated the Apache, among the greatest horse warriors in the world.

 

'I want to be President of the United States', said Billy Hawkins one day.  His mother smiled, looked out  over the trailer park to the hills beyond, past the scrub grass and litter, broken bottles of Old Crow splits and rotting chamois, to the pie dogs snuffling in the trash heap, to the naked child of Annie Five Arrows pissing in the ditch, and said, 'You will someday, my darling, you will'. 

Of course she knew differently.  An Indian, let alone one scrounging for a living on welfare and food stamps had about as much chance of becoming president as....here her imagination failed her, so remote was the possibility.  

They had been living in this same trailer park for two generations, a nasty corner of the emptiest place on earth, not a reservation - the Comanche had never been penned up by the white man - but something as poor and forgotten as Pine Ridge.  Their forbear, Black Bear Hawkins - hobo, vagabond, tramp - had wandered for years before anteing up the first month's rent at Happy Homes Village.  As desperate and benighted as the place was, he never forgot his patrimony and White Wolf's buffalo hunts and his bloody, victorious battles with the Apache and the Union soldiers. 

Billy's mother - his father was long gone, some said to the Idaho panhandle with some renegade Oglala Sioux squaw - had raised him the best she knew how, wanted nothing but a promising future for him, but felt that their lot had been cast - Indian, poor, wampum, beads, feathers, and not much more. 

It is not uncommon in America for a childhood in poverty to bring out the most unquenchable ambitions not only to simply rise up out of poverty but rise to the top.  One had only to look at Bill Clinton, Arkansas hillbilly, trailer trash no better off than Black Bear Hawkins, who became President of the United States. Yes, Clinton was a white boy, and any Indian already had two strikes against him, but this was America, reservations and cheap turquoise jewelry notwithstanding. 

Now, Billy Black Eagle was not one for toadying. The blood of White Wolf flowed more thickly through his veins than in any other of the great man's descendants, and he wanted to take scalps on his way. He not only resented the miserable, plains poverty around him, he hated it.  How had the noble Comanche fallen so far?  

A stray dog trotted up as he and his mother sat enjoying the last warmth of the afternoon sun. Mangy, scabrous, missing a leg, pitiful.  Billy's mother gave him a kick and the dog yelped and limped away.  Never more would he live with dogs, thought the young Billy. 

And so it was that his remarkable ride began.  He cadged favors where he could, took odd jobs for important men, washed their cars, took out their trash, and read at night - volumes of history about the settlement of the West, Manifest Destiny, Lewis and Clark, and the great westward migration of the Indian.  

Yet along the way he learned about the Republic, the Founding Fathers, the principles of the Enlightenment, the genius cluster of Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, and Adams.  His chats with his employers was not desultory but substantive, and they took a shine to him. 

He hated every minute of it. His Yes, Massa obeisance to the white man made him think of White Wolf who refused any accommodation to the white settlers squatting on Comanche land.  He slaughtered them, men, women, and children and left their corpses rotting in the son for Union soldiers to see. 

Yet this was not the Old West, and he took advantage of his patronage - sponsorship to a community college, financial support for university, and promises of employment thereafter. He was accepted to a prominent school in the East, and despite the distractions and blandishments of white students who wanted an Indian as part of their rainbow coalition, stayed the course, graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. 

An Op Ed piece he wrote for the New York Times on nativism, the wooly assumptions of racial identity, and the foundational logic of conservatism caught the eye of a well-known politician in Washington who was looking for just this type of conservative - young, outspoken, and defiant.  Although Billy's words were couched in the most temperate language, their virulent hatred of progressivism was clear.  

Lyndon Johnson, another poor boy President, took many scalps on his way to political importance. Robert Caro's multi-volume biography chronicled the do-whatever-it-takes ambition of the young Texan, leaving bodies strewn on the West Texas plains; and it was with the same resonant, absolute conviction that Billy Black Eagle made his way forward. 

 

He was as smart as Johnson and just as ambitious. He was just as canny as LBJ and knew a man's weakness and buried a blade in it before he could raise his hands to protect himself.  He left many an opponent swinging in the breeze, left on the curb, or lying eviscerated in a ditch on his way to political renown.  

He never once played the race card, the progressive identity card, the Indian/Native American card; but because of his political savagery, he became known as a tribal warrior, lord of the plains to be as feared as his heroic ancestor, White Wolf. 

He got ahead in Washington not because of affirmative action or any petty gay presumptions of victimhood. Without trying, he became as feared and respected as his ancestor. 

As soon as he stepped on deck, the deck was cleared.  His captaincy was by now innate, unchallenged, and absolute.  He had either eliminated his opponents or collected so much damaging information about him that they kept silent. He could write his own ticket and would rule like his ancestor all that he surveyed. 

This, of course, was the way American politics has been played since George Washington - a game of intimidation, information, will, and the amoral use of power.  Yet William Black Eagle took it to a different level, one of unmitigated, vengeful, annihilating power. He was the Genghis Khan of Washington on his way to the Presidency, a brutal Machiavellian, a Mongol genius.  

Not only did he settle some Indian scores, he settled all of them.  He wanted to put on his Indian headdress made of eagle feathers, bear claws, and cougar teeth.  He wanted to dance around the ceremonial fire, summoning Comanche gods and praying for courage in battle.  He wanted butchery, compliance, and respect. 

American progressives treated Indians as victims needing protection, kindness, and care; and as such they didn't know what to do with William Black Eagle.  Indians weren't supposed to be like this, savage disemboweling riders on horseback, slaughtering long knives and their families; but there he was standing before them, proud, defiant, and untouchable. 

His run for President was surprising to everyone but him.  He knew it from the beginning, the moment that mangy, scrofulous pie dog snuffled at his feet by the trailer.  An American success story. 

Duck And Cover - When Commies Were Really Commies, The Mamdani Vaudeville Act

Back in the Fifties, when the United States and the Soviet Unions had nuclear missiles pointed at each other, primed and ready to fire, elementary school children were taught to 'duck and cover'.  When the air raid sirens blew, they were to crawl under their desks, duck, and cover their heads with their arms. 

This of course would be of no use whatsoever.  A direct nuclear strike on Boston, for example, would incinerate everything from Back Bay to Charlestown and then some.  Nothing would be left but a pile of cinders.  Duck and Cover - practiced daily - was never meant to offer protection, but to generate a universal, nationwide anti-Communist solidarity.  The Communists were capable of the worst malignity, the most horrific destruction, and their intention was to take over the world. 

Duck and Cover coincided with the Army-McCarthy Congressional hearings during which Senator Joseph McCarthy named names, revealed supposed Communists in Hollywood and New York, and intimidated witnesses to inform on their colleagues. 

 

Anything to the left of Uncle Joe's fiercely right wing mania was assumed to be Communist inspired, and the whole country joined in the witch hunt.  Communists were everywhere, warned McCarthy, and they will look just like you, but catch them unawares and you will find them insidiously plotting to overthrow the nation and make way for a Soviet empire. 

Ironically the Cold War period was a pax Romana - the threat of 'mutually assured destruction' kept itchy fingers off the nuclear trigger, and although Americans feared for their lives, the likelihood of a nuclear showdown was remote.  Richard Nixon in fact subscribed to 'the madman theory' - one designed to make the Russians think that he was capable of a first strike, that he would be proud to go out in a blaze of glory. 

 

The nuclear threat was gradually defused, with both the Soviet Union and the United States engaged in the SALT (nuclear disarmament) talks after which both countries reduced their nuclear arsenal.  A nice gesture, but each country retained enough nuclear weapons to destroy the other ten times over. 

Ronald Reagan took another approach, and during his administrations built up America's nuclear and conventional military force, forcing the Soviets to match it, driving the economy to ruin, weakening the regime, and ending with a geopolitically dominant America.  The Reagan policy worked, and with his famous, 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall', he forced the Soviets to concede.  The wall came down, and a new era of peace and collaboration ensued. 

Sort of.  Anti-Communism is part of the American ethos, and has been driven deep into the national psyche.  There is nothing worse than a Communist, for they are out to destroy, conquer, and rule.  It matters not that there is only one nasty Communist regime left - North Korea - and it is not in any nuclear parity with the United States which could turn it to rubble before Kim Il Sung knew what hit him.  China is a Communist country in name only.  It is really a capitalist powerhouse, a burgeoning unstoppable economy, a financial master, and a geopolitical force. 

Yet the bugaboo of Communism remains. A presumed Communist is running for mayor of New York City, Zorhan Mamdani, a Ugandan-Pakistani naturalized American who wants to give away the store. 

The poor, the marginalized, the oppressed, and the forgotten will be ignored no longer.  If I am elected mayor, I will reverse the trend, undo the unholy concentration of wealth at the top and transfer it to the bottom.  No New Yorker will be without food, affordable housing, health care, and economic benefits.  New York will no longer be an oligarchy of the rich and powerful.  It will be a people's city, an equal city, a kind, considerate, and generous one. 

This of course is not communism.  Under Soviet rule the private sector was abolished, freedoms curtailed, economic activity determined by the state, and supply and demand discarded in favor of dirigisme  nd complete state control - an extreme distortion of natural, normal, human activity valid since the Paleolithic and a means of governance doomed to failure. 

What it is is an adolescent, fanciful, irrational, unhinged political promise of aggressive socialism. It is no different than what Biden, Harris, and their Congressional claques promised for the last decade - programs to make services free, open to all, with no conditions.  Being poor, black, gay, or Latino was deserving of public largesse.  Wrongs had to be righted.  The eras of robber barons, economic elites, Wall Street predators, and capitalist con men had to end.  A new order of economic equality, justice, and parity would soon be in place. 

 

Social distinctions and prejudices would be no more, said Biden, and no longer would people of color be left as detritus on city streets.  The police would be defunded, kept in their barracks, and deployed only as social agents to work with local communities to become better.  The American educational system would be transformed from a hopelessly hidebound, discriminatory place to an inclusive one, acknowledging multiple intelligences, promoting the demise of elitist and patriarchal heterosexuality and raising the black man to the pinnacle of human society. 

So, Mamdani is simply more open and forthright about his intentions. Biden and Congressional progressives wanted the very same things as the New York mayoral candidate; they just couched it in different terms, sugarcoated the medicine, spoke in terms of diversity, equity, and inclusivity when what they really wanted was a revolutionary upside downing of the free market democratic system. 

Mamdani talks about free things, but so did Biden.  What was more socialist than forgiving student debt? or expanding already generous welfare packages, or affirmative action. Recruiting, hiring, admitting unqualified blacks simply because of their race was a giveaway.  These individuals did not have to compete in the marketplace, but were given something for free. 

Immigrants coming to the United States were let in with no questions asked.  They did not have to meet competitive standards and requirements and meet strict criteria for entry.  They were let in for free. 

Everywhere, in every sector of the American economy, in every corner of American society, progressives have promoted free stuff.  Mamdani just says it loud and clear.  The days of a free lunch are back. 

New Yorkers will quickly see what happens when the housing market is further distorted by what will be a fierce rent control,  They will see the results when wealthy New Yorkers - the engines of private development in the city and its primary taxpayers - abandon ship and move elsewhere,.  They will watch the education system fall farther into dysfunction and disrepair, and will see what happens when in a police-free environment crime rates soar, and the city becomes what it was in the Seventies - a trash-strewn, graffiti-defaced, lawless place fit for no one.  

Economic and social socialism has never improved the lives of anyone but the oligarchs in power.  Scandinavian socialism was touted as the world's only legitimate form of governance, all well and good in a uniformly white, Christian, traditional world; but when 'diversity' became part of the socialist package, the countries quickly began to fall apart. Giveaways, social buy-ins, were no longer valid. Public treasuries were being emptied and 'normal' Scandinavians wondered what hit them. 

New York under Mamdani will become an exaggerated caricature of the Biden years - the same ideas and policies, but  ferociously unleashed.  New Yorkers will see a city as ungoverned and chaotic as the Seventies, a place where no one wanted to live, a cacophonous, discordant, miserable place. 

Mamdani, Commie? Far from it. Unreconstructed socialist? Absolutely and by all means.  If you thought the Biden years were an example of unhinged socialist fantasy, you ain't seen nothing yet. 

No Kings! In The Deep South - A Descendant Of A Southern Grandee And Lord Of The Manor Ignores The Irony And Protests

Brenda Harris couldn't wait for Saturday, the No Kings rally day in Coulter, Mississippi a small town not from  he Alabama border  She and Jimmie Sue Perkins had been planning the event for weeks - the signs, the placards, the sandwiches and sweet tea, the trappings and of course the invitations. 

'Why, it's just like Pilgrimage', said Jimmie Sue of the fine show the owners of White Oaks gave the visitors, dressed up in vintage antebellum hoop dresses, tressed wigs, heels, and finery.  Old Hiram Barkins looked very much the Southern grandee, elegant and imperial in his outfit, a real Cavalier. Two hundred people visited White Oaks at last year’s Pilgrimage, and this year they hoped for more. 

 

Pilgrimage was the high point of the year, a time to show off the many well-preserved and -appointed mansions of the town, many more than Columbus, nothing so grand as Natchez of course, but certainly a rival to Vicksburg and Aberdeen.  Jimmie Sue lived in Cedars, a home that had been in the Perkins family since before the Civil War.  

The Union Troops had not come this way.  Grant destroyed Vicksburg, Atlanta, and Charleston but had passed to the north of Coulter, and so the magnificent homes of the planters of the Black Prairie, those acres of rich bottom land and cotton fields were spared. 

Pilgrimage was a time of celebration of the Old South, Cavalier traditions, and a more settled, peaceful, sophisticated and cultured way of life. Thousands of visitors came to Coulter every year from every part of America, some from as far away as Oregon and Maine.  

They came not only to visit the magnificent homes of Coulter, but to enjoy Southern hospitality.  Visitors were treated royally, honored guests who chose to visit the town and the South.  

Choosing to come to Mississippi was no simple affair, since the North still condemned the entire South as an unrepentant racist, Jim Crow region whose residents still treated black people as chattel, honored soldiers of the Confederacy with statues in the town square and Stars and Bars flew in every cemetery. 

'You mustn't go there', one visitor from Pennsylvania had been told.  'A visit is tantamount to giving support to a vengeful, hateful, racist, recidivist empire'.  His Main Line neighborhood was no different than its liberal counterparts in Washington, New York, and Boston.  Residents there hated the South, spat on cars from Alabama, shouted 'Liberation Now!' at Black Lives Matter rallies, waved defaced Georgia and South Carolina flags at every car from south of the Mason-Dixon line. 

Of course Brenda knew this, and was proud of those Northerners who had defied censure and hate to visit Coulter and appreciate the grandeur that was the antebellum South.  Yes, slavery existed  then, but those African migrants who worked faithfully and uncomplainingly as agricultural workers were treated well. 

Any good capitalist knows that care and shepherding doubled when labor and capital were combined, and a slave was just that. Records from archives of White Oaks showed exactly how much was generously spent on clothing, food, medical care and shelter for the newcomers from Angola and Ghana. 

In any case, preparation for the No Kings rally reminded Brenda of Pilgrimage.  One might have expected Republican sentiments from Brenda and her colleagues.  However years of teaching at the local college, a smaller version of those Northern universities with solid progressive credentials, gave Brenda an even greater commitment to Black Restoration - the meme of the college and a sign of seriousness about the oppressed.  

She, like many Southerners , however, was conflicted.  They revered the old ways, old Southern gentility and manners, the sophistication of plantation life; but at the same time rejected their ancestors' treatment of the African enslaved.  Depending on the time and the place, Brenda changed her colors.  Pilgrimage was a time for historical pride; No Kings Day was a statement of vibrant Southern populism. 

Brenda saw no irony in the fact that she lived in Harper's Grove, a home built in 1845 by her great grandfather Aloysius, a modest home compared to White Oaks or any in Natchez, but a manor house nonetheless.  Old Aloysius, although living more quietly than his neighbors, was still one of the wealthiest men in the state and was in fact always referred to as 'a prince of a man' or 'Southern royalty' or even 'A king among mortals'.

Donald Trump was no Aloysius Harris - a man of class, culture, and fine sensibilities - but a usurping monarch, a regal poseur, a devilish imposter, and a dangerous man out to take down the bastions of democracy and replace it with his own monarchy.  As she walked down the polished mahogany staircase of her home, past the portraits of her forbears, into the grand hall, out the front portico where carriages used to come carrying fine ladies and gentlemen, and down the steps, she thought only of Donald Trump, his megalomania, his entrenched wealth, and his appetite for power. 

If the truth be known, her ancestor Aloysius was one of the most territorially aggressive, intemperate, slave-driving plantation owners east of the Mississippi.  To his credit, however, he cleared thousands of acres of cypress swamps and alligator-infested bayous to make rich, productive, arable land; and his investments fueled profitable industries along the Louisiana Gulf coast. He was indeed a king, a royal master, and an icon of the Old South. 

 

This lack of irony, perspective, or sense of balance was what characterized the modern American progressive.  A belief in the progressive canon - climate change, the supremacy of the black man, the broken glass ceiling, homoeroticism and transgenderism on an open ended spectrum - had become integral to liberal identity.

And so it was that the splendor of her antebellum surroundings, the social propriety of her forbears which excluded anyone of color, and the cotton empire of which Aloysius was king was simply an irrelevant background in her passionate defense of the black man, democracy, and an equal partnership of all Americans. 

'Isn't this fun?', remarked Jimmie Sue. 

'It's serious business', Brenda replied, although she wasn't exactly sure what to be serious about.  A few matronly ladies sitting on camp chairs along Main Street, holding No Kings signs and wearing No Kings tee shirts, and waving to cars passing along the way wouldn't do much to slow the Trump juggernaut of hatred, racism, and homophobia.  

She chased any thoughts of 'Why are we here?' from her head, fixed a loose curl on her forehead, and pitched into the sandwich-making. 

'Don't make too many more ham', said Jimmie Sue. 'You've already overdone it'; and indeed Brenda had, so preoccupied by the niggling doubts that kept popping up.  As she looked at the gables of her home, seen just beyond Main Street, on an avenue lined with live oaks, magnolias, and camelias, she dreamed for an instant of being a belle of the ball, the queen of the manor, receiving guests from Charleston, Atlanta, and Richmond. 

 

Donald Trump the king? Hardly, she admitted to herself.  Aloysius was king, royalty, monarch, and lord of all he surveyed.  Trump was a commoner, a plebian, a pedestrian lowlife, a bourgeois interloper.  What on earth was she doing here? 

But community mattered, the ham sandwiches were made, and the ladies were assembling, so despite this late, welcome epiphany, she stayed the course.  'No Kings!' she shouted to a passing Buick. 

Why Is Dostoevsky So Complicated? - Americans Want 'Fun With Dick And Jane', The Best Book On The Shelf

Indianola, Mississippi is a small town on the bayou with nothing much to recommend it except home cooking, a repository of antebellum archives collected from two of the most important plantations of the South, and Archer D. Moran, the most outrageously outspoken Mayor the town had ever had.  

He was the spitting image of Donald Trump, said the Indianola Clarion, expressing their hope that Moran had higher ambitions, national ambitious; for the Mayor was solidly conservative, as patriotic as any proud veteran ever was, and a believer in the restoration of traditional, originalist American values. 

'Why, my life is right here in Indianola', the Mayor said to a group of supporters at Thursday's weekly meeting of the Kiwanis Club, 'and I ain't got no hankerin' to change it.  The Mississippi Delta suits me just fine', but in his demurral, the men around the table knew he was just being modest.  The man clearly had higher ambitions than just cotton fields, catfish, and the bayou. 

Now it just so happened that Archer D. Moran was not just a good ol' boy, bass boat fisherman, hunter, and Republican, he was the town's intellectual, a man whose bookshelves were filled with the world's greatest literature. 

'I aim to improve myself', he said when a visitor remarked on his library, 'and I intend to read every single one of these volumes you see there'. Volumes he had bought in bulk, The Great Books of the World, The World's Most Famous Authors, and A Compendium of World Literature. 

He had already had a go at the collection, beginning with Mark Twain, a Yankee who wrote knowingly about life on the Mississippi.  Moran felt he knew Huck Finn, felt he had some of the boy's gumption and sassiness, and read the chapters of Huck and Jim on the raft with the Duke and the Dauphin many times.  Twain had captured the feel of the river and the borderline between Free and Slave States.  Twain's vernacular was familiar and so were the towns up and down the river. 

When it came to anything a big farther afield, Moran had trouble.  He got tangled in the thicket of Dickensian characters and gave up on A Tale of Two Cities, perplexed at who got locked up in the tower and why, and what was he doing cobbling shoes?

For months after the last collection came from the publisher, Moran looked at the great bulge on the top shelf, fat tomes of War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov, books he had been told must be read to complete anyone's literary education; but like most readers, he was totally lost.  Unfortunately he began with Dostoevsky, one of the most impenetrable of the Russian writers, an author obsessed with Christ, his duplicity, the absolute necessity of religion and its accountability, and the role of the Orthodox Church in Russian life.  Karamazov is not an easy read by any means, but the accomplished reader will soon be immersed in the psycho-social, deeply philosophical world of the author. 

Moran, for all his good intentions, was surprised at his inability to make heads or tails of the story - if that's what you could call these treatises on divinity, redemption, the nature of humanity, and the eternal schisms of religion.  There was no story there at all, just a series of indecipherable disquisitions.  How on earth did Dostoevsky ever get such an enviable reputation?  What was the point of writing such dense, turgid, overthought books?

That, he mused, was part of America's problem today - overthinking, overintellectualizing, making simple affairs as complicated as a cypress swamp, lose your bearings for an instant, and you are lost among the alligators and water moccasins.  When Donald Trump said he wanted to drain the swamp of Washington, Mayor Moran knew exactly what he meant. 

At the same time the Mayor, not a stupid man by any means, began to wonder about his intellectual depth.  How was it that a man who had made it through two years of college, complemented shop with literature, and had an open mind to everything international was so befuddled by books that had been read, understood, and referenced by millions since their publication?  Was he less intellectually able than he thought?

He dismissed that errant thought out of hand, and simply concluded that like baseball you had to work your way up - tee ball, coach pitch, kid pitch, Little League, etc. No one went from kindergarten to a 100 mph fastball with no stops along the way; and so it was that he gave Dostoevsky another try, banging away at the first chapter bound and determined to make sense of it and make some headway before the week was up. 

As a side note, he was asked by his wife to stop by the library and pick up some romantic novels. When he asked which ones, his wife replied, 'Oh, any ones.  Just get five or ten from the rack', and there they were by the hundreds under Romantic Fiction.  The covers all showed beautiful women in tearful poses with a man's silhouette in the background.  'A Night to Remember', 'The Last Belle of the Ball', 'Midnight's Tears' and many more. 

 

He flipped through one or two, found them easy to read, engaging (what would become of Felicity?) and similar.  One could read one in a few hours time. 

Moran had always been somewhat dismissive about his wife's literary choices, but now that he had taken the time to actually read some of the library offerings, he began to understand.  There was no difference between 'Two Women, Two Loves' and Tennessee Williams.  They both wrote of loves lost and found, romance, frailty, and courage, so why put them in different categories?  It was like the soap operas his wife watched, melodramatic, tearful affairs about infidelity, deceit, and unhappiness.  

What was the difference between them and Absalom, Absalom, a book by another Mississippian, William Faulkner, on his shelf for years.  Why would any author deliberately choose to discombobulate time, perception, events, and emotions and reassemble them in a devilishly incomprehensible order?  

Moran thought of Fun with Dick and Jane, his first grade reader. 'See Spot run', he remembered.  The little cocker spaniel running with cute Jane who looked very much like Nancy Blythe who sat next to him.  Now that was writing, he thought - not in its basic simplicity but the whole idea of art.  Make it simple so people can understand it. If the same themes are broached in Faulkner and As the World Turns, then why not sit back and enjoy the show?

 

The same was true of numbers.  Why grapple with algebraic equations when the most challenging mathematical calculation you ever needed was totting up a grocery bill or at worst, calculating a 20 percent tip on a restaurant check.  He was not for dumbing things down exactly, just for getting more practical and sensible; which is why he had to shake his head at the cockamamie nonsense claimed as absolute truth by politicians.  Ninety-two genders on a fluid gender spectrum? Transgender reassignment surgery? The black man on the pinnacle of human society?

This is where reading Dostoevsky and Faulkner gets you - into the weeds where you just trudge and fumble and pull up whatever soggy clump you find. 

'Very impressive', said Bartleby Jones, owner of the local feed store in Indianola, when he saw Mayor Moran's library.  'Have you read them all??, to which question he demurred and swept his hand over and above the bookcase to the bronze Remington copy of a lassoing rider on horseback.  'Now, that's something he said', and he meant it - simplicity and frankness in one six-inch piece of metal.