The Tearful End Of A Climate Warrior - An Environmental Martyr Gives Up The Ghost To Donald J Trump

Bob Arthur, veteran of the social justice wars, old Freedom Rider, inveterate advocate for blackness, women, peace, equal distribution of wealth, and climate change, had just begun to feel himself after the humiliating defeat of Madame at the polls, when he had to watch the cavalcade of whiteness come to the capital for the Trump Inauguration.  

After years promoting racial diversity, gender fluidity, and the rise of the black man to his proper place atop the human pyramid, here he was awash in whiteness, a horrific retro-finish Fifties Leave It To Beaver episode; and then came the Inaugural Address with the words 'Drill, Baby, Drill' loud and clear.  In one fell swoop, all of Bob's caretaker justice, love for the environment and hatred for the capitalist dragoons stealing from the planet, gone in a flash. 

Leaky pipelines would crisscross the nation.  Vast new oilfields and earth crust fracking derricks would appear from the Gulf to the Canadian border.  High-emission gas-powered cars would belch carbon into the atmosphere, and electric cars would go unsold on dealer lots.  The Earth would warm more quickly than ever, turning the planet into a charred wasteland.  It was a vision of Hell. 

The Trumpers were coming into town in their Escalades and Suburbans, heedless of the existential crisis, indifferent to the perils of a warming climate, a tinseled, sequined, ship of fools.  All the images of his youth in Fifties Babylon, Long Island - mothers in the kitchen, dads in fedoras, Kinder, Küche, Kirche and all the self-assured complacency came flooding back.  Time had stopped, sense and sensibility gone, the country victim of a bullying crowd.  

Of course all this was just the product of a febrile mind and a wildly hysterical man who had put all his eggs in one basket, who was immured within an impossibly fantastical world, and who felt that the cycle of history had actually stopped turning.  The progressive utopia was a sure, inevitable, verdant end; not something impermanent and fungible. The wheel of fortune had landed on  a jackpot of victorious environmental favors. 

All night long, in one inaugural party after another, lights blazed, Escalades idled, and décolleté, strapless, backless-gowned blonde beauties danced the night away in overheated ballrooms in a deliberate show of excess, a big fat fuck you to every responsible American who had worked hard to tame the nation's energy appetite to save the planet. 

Everywhere Bob looked there was a revelry unseen in the four years of the Biden Administration, a dour, morose, worried period summarily tossed aside.  Gone were the rainbow coalition, the community of good works, the determined, missionary men and women of The Movement.  

Unused to glee and good times, Bob went inside and huddled with his inner circle in Scientists For Peace, a catch-all non-profit whose final be-all and end-all was climate change, the last and greatest of social challenges.

The group felt they had been making headway - E-car mandates, no more XL pipeline, a curb on off-shore drilling and gas exploration, and a general willingness to turn down of the heat - and so were all the more upset by the horde of climate naysayers marching into town.  On Day One as promised the Trump imprimatur was stamped on one executive order after another undoing all Biden's airy notions.  The United States would finally realize the goal of energy independence, no longer tied to foreign oil, and freeing Europe from the energy fascism of Russia.  Geopolitics would be the first consideration of energy policy, and the United States would no longer be the country of fairy tale environmentalism. 

'Oh, God', moaned Bob as reality set in.  It was really happening.  Madame, a proud black woman was not getting inaugurated today, and the vision of a multi-colored, harmonious, bonded America of black people and riotous gender diversity was gone. 

He loosened his collar, an instinctive, foreboding gesture to the warming climate, shook his head, and moped down K Street.  What's a mother to do?, the old advertising tag line, popped into his head.  What indeed as the rug had been pulled out from under him.  His whole life of social reform swept away in a gully-washer of conservative idiocy. 

'Buck up, Bobby', said his wife, herself a social justice warrior from way back, veteran of Woodstock, the Women's Movement, MeToo, and the Feminist Caucus, who was as dismayed as her husband at the Trump victory but who was a closet realist, a go with the flow ex-hippy who knew that what comes around, goes around in a let it be world.  It was time to hang up the spurs, move to Florida and break out the chaise lounge. 

When Bob barged into the house, steaming with anger, apoplectic about the Trump turn of events, and saw his wife sitting before the fire sipping a pina colada without a seeming care in the world, the day and all its miseries was complete. 

Actually all of Friendship Village, the solidly progressive neighborhood of Bethesda, was no different.  Wives were propping up their feet, getting buzzed, and happy as larks that the years of emotional penury were finally over.  Excess was back again. Having more than one drink, topping off the tank, tossing masks and social distancing out the window, delighting in hot days and warm winters...Ahhh, sheer delight. 

Women, keepers of the hearth, have always known what's what, when the screw was turning and when it was time to fold 'em; and so it was with his wife and her book group.  A collective sigh of relief when Trump was elected - a silent one knowing the rabidness of their husbands' beliefs, but a smiling release nonetheless.  Marriage had been put on hold for years because of their husbands' political fury, and they had gone along with it, played the part of equally committed spouse, marched along side, but biding their time until the phase had ended; and with Donald Trump it surely had. 

Bob, on the other had, was disconsolate, let down, betrayed.  How could she? he spluttered as he stormed up the stairs, the drumbeat of the inaugural marching bands still in his head.  He looked at the pictures of King, Abernathy, and Jackson crossing the Pettis bridge, and smiled.  Ahh, those were the days, he thought; but the howls of a group of MAGA hat wearing goons roaring up and down Wisconsin Avenue broke the reverie, and again, 'What's a mother to do?'

He turned the thermostat down - his wife had deliberately jacked it up - and wandered from room to room, looking at his peacenik, women's march, gay pride, Black Lives Matter memorabilia.  No, he shouted to no one in particular.  No, I will never give up, never; but the shock was simply too much for a man of his age and increasing mental infirmity, and only the glue factory was in his future. Out to pasture for a few years, then headed for home. 

Barbarians At The Gate - The Trump Victory And The Scurrying Of The Lost Left

Bob Arthur, culture warrior and veteran of all social wars, simply couldn't believe the news on election night. 'How...how could that...that ignoramus, that fool, that....', he sputtered trying to find words for the unthinkable, the unconscionable.  A Trump victory was simply not in the cards, a non-starter, and impossibility, but there he was, bloody ear and all, waving to an adoring crowd. 

For Bob and his colleagues, the election was supposed to be a done deal. Good always triumphs over evil, and this was no different.  The American people would see as clearly as a hand before their face the pure, unmitigated nastiness of the man, his unprincipled, arrogant, obsessive persona; and his blatant racism, misogyny, and homophobia.  How could they not?  The man was a blowhard, a fool, and crass, crude idiot out only for his own good without a sensible, compassionate thought in his head.  

'How could they...', and here again Bob spluttered and stumbled. Living for so long in the warm, comforting assumption that right and good would prevail - that the truth spread by the progressive Left would be the truth, the only truth, and nothing but the truth. 

But here he was, standing on the curb of Pennsylvania Avenue watching the preparations for the Trump Inauguration, billed as The Greatest Show on Earth, an extravaganza of whiteness, wealth, and privilege, a cavalcade of bimbos, airheads, and insurrectionists.  He shook his head in dismay. 'No class', he muttered. 'A clown show, a vaudeville act, a shameless, buggering idiotic spectacle'

Bob was not alone in his agonizing grief. No one in the progressive cabals of Washington saw this coming.  There was absolutely no way that this interloper, his crude, outlandish boor could ever make his way back to the Capital.  They had spelled out the danger of his return - the man would seize all reins of power and within months would establish the foundations for autocratic rule.  His storm troopers would be sent into the streets to round up black and gay people.  His paramilitary would set up machine gun nests all along the Southern border and mow down all asylum seekers.  He would turn Wall Street loose and the days of the Robber Barons would return. 

The outgoing President, Joe Biden, looked in the camera a few days before leaving office, and warned people of the spawn of the devil.  Donald Trump and his cadre of billionaire investors, captains of industry, and predatory insurance companies would create an oligarchy of white privilege never before seen.  His accession to office will usher in a dark period of hate, prejudice, and oppression in which only the aristocratic few will benefit. 

 

The Trump advance team howled with delight as they watched the old man tearfully address the nation. Squinting to make out the words on the teleprompter but grappling with the meaning of the words before him, Biden looked as lost and befuddled as ever.  His script-writers and confidants had carefully framed his message to the American people, put in all the 'emphasis...pause...anger...smile' prompts in the text scrolling down the teleprompter in large, oversized letters, but the President bungled the enterprise, paused when he should have shown resoluteness, smiled as he mouthed villainy, and was just the sad spectacle of failed leadership he had always been. 

Worst of all, thought Bob, was not so much the politics of the coming administration- the Left could deal with economic and financial challenges - it was the cultural upheaval that worried and dismayed him.  Trump not only brought with him bimbos and airheads, but the unwashed, backwoods, gun rack, bass boat cracker mentality of the fifty million Americans who were duped by him and voted him in office.  It was not the peaceful revolution Bob hoped for but the coming of the anti-Christ. 

 

Gone were any thoughts of a verdant, peaceful, harmonious community of good; and only images of bare-knuckled, insensate, predatory wolves of Wall Street were left. God help us, he muttered, although quickly retracted his words.  There was no God to call upon.  They, the Left, had been the country's secular salvation, and now they, martyred, tossed aside, and left on the curb were no longer. 

'Barbarians at the gate', his wife Agnes mused, remembering her Roman history.  She had watched Gladiator five times and loved the first, dramatic scene where Maximus leads a Roman army to victory against the barbarians; and although she was against any kind of imperialism and colonialism, she couldn't help cheering when the phalanx of archers shot their flaming arrows into the ranks of the Goths. She felt like a Roman, ready to take on Donald Trump and his savage horde. 

Of course neither she nor any of Bob's colleagues were up to the mark on that score.  They had resorted to backbiting, lawfare, calumny, and an insidious campaign of calumny and hatred, so no frontline heroes were they, so the last recourse - violent opposition - was not in their profile. They hadn't even the strength or will to pull up the drawbridge. 

This misjudgment, this impossibly myopic view of the issue, was the problem.  The country had changed.  The American people had changed.  Rather than accept the progressive woke agenda, they had turned against it.  The arrogant badgering, self-righteous hectoring and demeaning was galling. No mas! was the meme of middle America. We don't want what you're selling.  These were not barbarians but normal, sane, responsible Americans who saw life and country quite differently from the whiny, morose, prophets of doom who came calling. 

 

Bob watched the majorettes who would lead the parade practice on the Mall, high stepping, smiling, as beautiful as the Dallas Cowboys' cheerleaders, twirling their batons with verve and precision.  It was captivating, and Bob smiled; but quicky erased it when he realized that these young women were shills for the cartoon character waiting in the wings.  They didn't belong on Pennsylvania.  They should go back to the fervidly ignorant patriotic towns where they came from. 

As the boom and thumps of the Marine band, also practicing at the west end of the Mall came to Bob on a chill January wind, he shook his head. 'Madame was supposed to be here', he muttered, thinking of Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, a black woman of intellect, style, and agency who should have been on her way to consolidating the progressive victories recently won.  Instead it was this imposter, this fool, this unreconstructed barbarians about ready to march down the Avenue to the Oval Office. 

Bob shuddered again.  Lines of old Beatles song came into his head, 'Let it be...let it be'; but he had never been one to do so, always an activist, a true believer in right and justice.  One couldn't simply let anything be, so he stood there wondering.  A Trump supporter in Lafayette Square thought he was a bum, just standing there in an overcoat. 

Pomp, Regalia, Beautiful Women, And The Reign Of Donald Trump - Happy Days Are Here Again

The Left are a disassembled, scattered, uncertain lot.  Humiliated at the polls by a resounding Trump victory, they are at sixes and sevens, an uneven consortium of climate activists, social justice reformers, blackness heroes, open door immigrationists, and MeToo enforcers, all bewildered at the rise of Donald Trump and shocked at the country's rejection of the progressive canon. 

The principles of right action, say progressives, are endemic to American society and will eventually be recognized as such - foundational values more basic to the national character than those outdated, archaic ideas of raw individualism, laissez-faire capitalism, and Wild West euphoric expansionism of earlier days.  Diversity, equity, inclusivity, and identity are more salient and essential to the modern secular American state than any so-called divinely inspired notions of Jefferson and his colleagues.

The time might not have been right for the full-bore, take-no-prisoners assault of the Left - but these principles are no less valid than they were before the election.

This is to miss the point entirely.  The Trump victory was no less than an endorsement of Jeffersonian populism, a republic of individuals ordained to promote the commonweal and a rejection of state interventionism.  The Left's agenda of woke reform, communitarianism, and geopolitical realignment is antithetical to this original vision of America; and Make America Great Again is a rallying cry not for wild, presumptive power, but a call for return to basic principles. 

 

Because the point was missed, it is natural that the Left is grieving, saddened by what they see is the demise of polity and hopefulness, and an emotional and psychic loss. 

The pomp, circumstance, and regalia of the incoming Trump cadres violates even more the progressive's personal, inner space.  Every Las Vegas showgirl, every blonde beauty, every single white, straight tuxedoed male, and every rendition of the Star Spangled Banner and American the Beautiful rankles at a very intimate level.  'We have been violated'. 

They are right.  The Inauguration, the balls, the festivities are indeed a symbol of what is to come.  America is through being talked down to, humiliated by talks of universal, systemic racism, badgered and banged for their homophobia and climate ignorance.  Americans have had enough faux idealism, absurd sexual transformations, internationalism, and historical revisionism.  America is a country of note, worthy of recognition and respect, not the dismal, socially deformed, ignorant place described by the Left. 

In America image is everything.  It is no surprise that Hollywood is its cultural center. Beauty, elegance, sex, machismo, and Cary Grant sophistication are all its priceless products.  Advertising is the litany of American cultural populism.  Not only do ads sell things, they convey the real foundational values of America - a middle-brow consuming culture of beautiful people doing beautiful things. 

The Trump Inauguration pageantry is only the beginning.  The White House will be Hollywood East, and will be an extravaganza of showy wealth, glitz, glamour, and prosperity.  The morose, whiny, dour days are over.  No more Bernal Heights tough girl flannel and E-boots, no more people-of-color jamborees, no more bashing, intimidating righteousness.  The Trump phalanx is white, straight, religious, patriotic, and showy.  Wealth is not excess but the product of enterprise.  Tinsel, sequins, and pasties are not cheap frills but symbols of an American basicness that the Left never has and never will understand. 

Donald Trump is a man of Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the bright lights of New York.  He is one of us, more than any other President.  George Bush affected a cowboy persona, Jimmy Carter a down-home farmer, Bill Clinton a black wannabe; but Trump has never acted a part.  He is the genuine article - an ambitious, macho, crude, bar fighter; a lover of women, yachts, and mansions; a straight-shooter, an irrepressible braggadocio, a man of the people.  

 

Progressives also have an image, one that has emerged from the rumpled suit, sensible shoes era of one-with-the-people solidarity to ghetto chic, a black-is-cool ensemble derivative of pimp and ho brazen fuck you strutting, tailored for K Street with a touch of genderness. '

We are the people', they shout with the enthusiasm of a circus tout, 'so come on in'; but that inclusive finery no longer cuts the mustard.  The street gives way to the avenue - Rodeo Drive is the new icon, Anacostia and West Baltimore once again dismissed, ignored, and marginalized. 

The Nation's capital will be alight once again.  The glitterati are back, good times replace hard times, glitz and show are the memes of Pennsylvania Avenue, steak and martinis for lunch instead of oats and groats. 

The revolution is not just political or philosophical, although both are at the heart of the changing of the guard.  The new wave is more than anything cultural - a middle-brow populism, an unabashed wholesome crassness, a joy in beauty, wealth, and ambition.  Fault-finding, generic unhappiness, and hapless reform, the unfortunate character of American liberalism is out, gone, finished. 

The revulsion of liberals at the cavalcade of beautiful people is palpable.  Not only has their cherished agenda been tossed out the window, but that they have to watch these airheads, these bimbos, these assholes and pricks come marching into our town is sickening. 

'Get over it' is the new meme in town, the new DOGE broom sweeps clean, but this time it isn't just a broom but a jackhammer, ball and crane, bulldozer, and Cat - the whole place will be uprooted, rebuilt, and re-arranged.  Even after just four years Washington will retain not one scintilla of the old Biden, whingeing, unhappy Left.  

 

This is what insurrection means - not the cockamamie frat boy party of January 6th, but a true cultural makeover.  Everything will be different, and the atmosphere  of Washington itself will feel, look, and sound different. 

The parade down Pennsylvania Avenue is just the beginning. 

The Spotless Cleansing Of America - Trump, Elon Musk, And Throwing Out The Trash

After Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, both hardline butchers heading the new Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, get through, there won't be much left of the bureaucratic behemoth that has sat its lumbering, fat shanks on American affairs for generations. Just like their hero, Javier Milei of Argentina who stood before a poster board to which all the departments of government were affixed, pulled them down one by one, shouting at each, Afuera! No Hay Plata!' - Out! There's No Money - Musk and Ramaswamy will be no different.  The unnecessary, redundant, bloated caricatures of good governance will be summarily and unceremoniously ditched, tossed aside without a second thought,  left on the curb.

The Left is in shocked disarray.  How could they? How could they dismantle the very cornerstones of a caring, supportive government, the only bastions of defense against predatory capitalism, the ravages of the far Right, and the insatiable appetites of the white elites?

They can and will.  Not only will they shuck entire departments, but they will eviscerate others which are nothing but warrens of inefficiency, deliberately tangled with redundant parts in anticipation of triage and elimination.  Bureaucracies are amoeba-like moving organisms - squeeze one part and it oozes into another, always alive, surviving, and as hopelessly needless as before.  Musk and Ramaswamy understand this self-serving nature of bureaucracy and will slice and sever until it is a functionless dead thing. 

The raison d'etre of DOGE is not simply the eradication of useless bureaucratic organs but to block the barrage of legislative fiats that have been designed to transform American culture from a unified, nation-minded one envisaged by Jefferson and turn it into one without an ethos, rallying cry, or principled center.  

The country has been divided by race, gender, ethnicity, and identity, broken apart by false assumptions of diversity and inclusivity, and weakened by centripetal faux utopian forces; and DOGE will, with the support of the three branches of government now in Republican hands, begin the process of re-centering. 

The Left has already begun howling at the moon, wild-haired, crazed preachers warning of the coming of the End of Days, Armageddon, and the Last Judgment.  'Woe be unto you whose soul is at risk, you in the maw of the beast.  Repent!' but of course the frenzied, hysterical Left has always been the last to see what's what in the hinterland, and to realize that America has had enough of their badgering, black this, black that; flouncy, deepthroated transgender kindergarten readers, the erasure of history, and the culture of reverse bigotry.  

Nobody wants what the Left is selling, MSNBC is almost off the air, CNN is desperate to return to hard news before their media empire collapses, and the boardroom of the New York Times is shuddering as the paper sheds readers thanks to their unremitting promotion of political magical realism.  The tide has turn, but the vaudevillian hacks on the air are still claiming 'the victory of ideas', vowing to be at the barricades to obstruct the Republican juggernaut.  No one except a few tailgate hangers-on are interested.  The country has matured, evolved, and has finally found its voice.  DOGE is but the first visible step to the reversal of wokism and the defeatist progressive culture. 

Bob Arthur, a social justice warrior since the days of Freedom Rides, Selma, and the march across the Pettis bridge, was distraught.  Years, decades of honest labor to reform the country and move it inexorably towards the bright, verdant, peaceful future he and his progressive colleagues had always imagined, were suddenly in jeopardy.  Bob was aware enough to know that this was not just a simple changing of the guard, a turn to the Right, but a sea change - a radical uprooting of all holy and sacred and replacing it with a laissez-faire robbery of civil rights and compassionate government. 

He and his colleagues, usually in lockstep, marching boldly forward, were at sixes and sevens, in disarray, and unsure of next steps. 'We must act, and act now', said Bob, but the quizzical, upsetting blankness on the faces of the assembly was a scary sign.  Years of lambasting Trump as the spawn of the devil, an insurrectionist racist and homophobe, a carny barker for circus politics have ended in naught.  The man is back in office; but that incontrovertible fact still didn't wake up the somnolent, still hopelessly hopeful Bob and shake some sense into him.  Nothing should change, he hammered on, nothing, for to do so would be to capitulate our hard-earned victories for the poor, the other-gendered, and the racially diverse. 

He had reason to be concerned, for Trump was serious about his frontal attack against preposterousness. Minorities should indeed shake in their boots as the scythe cut clean and low.  They would be no longer have privileged status and would have to pull their own weight to compete with the majority.  Equal opportunity was the new ethos, key to the rising fortunes of everyone.  Once one forgot race, gender, and ethnicity and focused on individualism, upward mobility and social equality through economic parity, the country would be back on track. 

 

Objectivity is the byword of DOGE - does it work, is it necessary, what is the return on investment, and could it be done privately? Risk analysis will replace assumption.  Economic productivity, wealth creation, geopolitical security, and national interest must be factored in to environmental policy. Long term performance evaluation must accompany any educational program. 

Bob was up in arms at this so-called objectivity which he saw as nothing but window dressing to cover up racist bigotry and the continued oppression of the poor; but again, the train had left the station and Americans were outraged as they watched their tax dollars pissed away on cockamamie giveaway schemes.  No Mas! they shouted, and DOGE listened while Bob turned a deaf ear. He like Alexander Hamilton never trusted the unwashed, and it was always the elite progressive cadres who were the caretakers of America's well-being. 

'Let's boycott the Inauguration', Bob suggested, but even if they did nobody would notice.  He and his progressive claques were already history, footnotes at best, examples of febrile utopianism and political hegemony.

'Think about that condo in Florida', said Bob's wife, tired of so many years of bloody seriousness and petulant lack of humor.  'You've given your all'; but Bob simply couldn't admit that decades of rancid hotels, crowded busses, and financial arrears had been worthless.  Yet what could he think, faced as he was with the total dismissal of all the had fought for?

'Good riddance', was heard more often than not on K Street for the likes of Bob Arthur.  Washington was glad to be rid of this pompous, humorless lot. 

The plans for the Inauguration extravaganza were almost complete, and Bob sickened as he watched the glitzy blonde women, the fanfare, the pure Las Vegas tinsel of it all come to town; and for the first time, he actually considered a condo in Sarasota and long days in a chaise lounge on the beach.  

The Insane Blundering Of The Left - Missing The Point As A Badge Of Honor

The Inauguration is a few days away, and the Left's wails have been quieted for now.  It's Donald Trump's day and no matter how it sticks in their craw, CNN, MSNBC, and the New York Times have to cover the news. 

Of course they do it ironically for according to them everything that the President-elect has proposed is nonsensical fantasy. Nothing but a cookie jar full of ju-jubes and bon-bons, treacle for the masses.  One by one - reduction of the size of government and eliminating interventionist fol-de-rol, turning back the nonsensical woke agenda, digging for oil, staring down Putin and Xi, reducing taxes and punitive restrictions - key issues are smarmily dismissed. 

 

The Left in America is a flailing, disembodied, two-bit circus of faux idealism, and cannot simply see the future. Here and abroad it is not one of fuzzy communitarianism, brotherly affection for the races of the world, welcoming all comers, and turning normal society into a gender freak show; but one of heady individualism, enterprise, and energy.  

Yet they continue to deny the obvious, toy soldiers marching to a tin drum.  The black man is not the native forest genius they said, transgenderism is not the sexual be-all they claimed, and history - nasty, ugly, and scary - is indelible not expungable.  America is not the world's scourge, home to racists, misogynists, and homophobes; and the planet does not need saving. 

Bob Arthur, culture warrior and age-old fighter for social justice, simply could not lay down his sword, tilt back in his chaise lounge, and admire the sunset.  This egregious Trump character, this fraud, this mighty blowhard will only be in office for four years, and we will be relentless in our pursuit, he said. We will never give up, never!

But the relentless campaign to maim, deter, and destroy didn't work.  Despite the bitchiness, the smarmy innuendo, and outright ad hominem attacks, the man not only survived, but prospered.  He thrived on the clown show, the antics, and the bile.  The more his attackers piled it on, the more energized and defiant he became; and the more he raged and breathed fire, the more his supporters loved him. 

'We must change our approach', said Bob; but he hadn't  clue as to what that might be.  There were no poison arrows left in the quiver, no more missiles in the silo. If the country still didn't believe that the man was Beelzebub, the spawn of the Devil, and Evil incarnate, what was Bob to do? He was still a raging misogynist, a Bull Connor racist, a Hitler, a Stalin but nobody seemed to notice. 

Policy, advised his inner circle, policy - neglected in the past, but now the time had come for articulated ideas, principles, and programs translating the ethos of inclusivity and diversity into practice; but there too Bob and his minions were flummoxed.  They had already buggered the schools, slam-dunked climate, pushed and shoved black people up and down every corridor of power - and still nothing. 

'The barricades', shouted Bob, fist in the air.  'We will take to the streets', but the days of Black Panther, Black Lives Matter store-busting, totin', and car burning were over.  Who is George Floyd? was the current meme, a white, MAGA, racist ignorance par excellence.  The heady days of sit-ins, protests, and demonstrations were over.  'Get a job', was back in. 

'What's a mother to do?', the tag line from a Fifties breakfast cereal commercial was back in vogue.  The ultimate sigh of despair and hopelessness. 'What indeed?' said LaShonda Evans, head of the DEI Department at Duke, a big, brazen, outsized woman of color who took no prisoners.  She was one tough bitch, a cunt with agency, and Bob turned to her.  

'Whatchoo muthafuckin' ofay white boys doin' about takin' care of business?, she hollered at Bob when he came courting.  She had learned no more and no better than the rest of the shills and claques, colored window dressing white progressives had put here and there to show the flag.  But, reflected Bob, if she was now just flotsam, bits of reject and insignificance, where was the whole racial thing going? Was there any way for a middle ground?

Actually and in private, Bob had some bad thoughts.  Maybe it was time to trade on his whiteness, his New England patrician pedigree, his family history that dated back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the plantations of Virginia.  Horribilis dictu!, he muttered, shaking his head to get rid of such damning thoughts; but then again why not?  Wasn't authenticity what the movement was all about? Identity and all that. 

 

For decades he had eschewed any reference to his family's storied past - Puritan and Cavalier leading America and setting the standard for European aristocratic American culture - but now might be time to dust off the family album, frame some of his ancestors, and put them on the walls.  In politics, memories are short, so showing up white and pedigreed even after so many years in the progressive trenches would not be all that out of the ordinary. 

Yet there was note of existential concern in his project.  What were the decades of marches, women's conferences, black solidarity, and environmental lobbying worth if no one paid attention to them anymore as the wheel of political fortuned turned? And if there was no intrinsic value in once cherished causes, then why fuss?  March right in to conservative enclaves, 'I'm white, and I'm proud'. 

While Bob toyed with the idea of dalliance, his colleagues were at sixes and sevens, gobsmacked and incoherent.  They had been summarily and unceremoniously booted out of power and positions of merit and importance, and were left on the curb with no bus in sight. 

LaShonda was uncontrite and unbowed. 'White muthafuckas', she hollered so loud that she could be heard through an open window on K Street; but no one was having her brand of in your face black supremacy, and she had to return to the St. Louis where she had been found by Biden operatives cruising the ghettos to find appropriate black women to ride the progressive DEI wagon.  She had no other credentials other than being black, pulled aboard to look as black as possible, hammer whites, and look scary.  

 

As for the rest of the lot - a hodge-podge of single women wondering where now they would find a man to marry, old social activists who could never get over the heady moments on the Pettis Bridge with Ralph and Martin, and opportunists who thought the progressive ride would lead somewhere up - floundered and flopped around, but found work in hardware stores and restaurants back home. 

The core Left had dispersed.  A few stragglers stayed on - accommodationists, the despondent, the hopeful, and the beggars.  It was a shell of its former self, a cracked and used one, ready for the dustbin, but still intact.  A few rainbow flags still flew in American University Park, and scattered Hate Has No Home Here banners still hung from balconies; but most signs of defeat and the humiliation of a discredited cause were taken down, some tossed, others stored 'just in case'. 

So perhaps progressives will coalesce, something untoward might happen during the Trump years and the Left may rise again, but they are a beaten lot, and four years of a dynamic revolutionary Presidency is sure to send them further into the backwaters. 

Only Bob survived, and at last sighting he was sipping a dry martini at the Yale Club, happy as a clam in his new skin. 

The Regal Presidency - Donald Trump And The Coming American Monarchy

There is no doubt that Donald Trump has imperial designs.  He is a secret admirer of Putin, Xi, and Erdogan, leaders who have made clear their desire to return to the czars of Russia, the Mandarin princes of a hundred Chinese dynasties, and the Sultans of Ottoman Turkey.  He has made it clear that democracy is an ill-conceived notion, and that the will of the people has turned the country into an inchoate, aimless, deformed rabble.

 

‘Hamilton warned us’, Trump has said, referring to the Founding Father who mistrusted the majority and insisted on the Constitutional creation of an aristocratic buffer to keep its unschooled, backwater notions from oozing out of the backwaters and infecting the state of the nation. The mob is not to be trusted with governance, Hamilton cautioned, and to do so would be to lead the new republic into a mob-ruled, undisciplined, and riotous place.  While not exactly championing the royal rule against which Washington fought, he was never completely dismissive of the idea of aristocratic rule.

Why should any government trust the unwashed? What was the point of listening to those of competing, narrow parochial interests – men who would never look beyond their own patch, never understand the affairs of universal, national governance, and who, if allowed, would turn America into a gabbling, brawling, head-banging place?

 

Look to Shakespeare, Hamilton, always the erudite sophisticate, said citing Jake Cade, the rabble-rouser  in Henry VI, the fickle mobs in Julius Caesar, and the Boar’s Head crowd of Henry IV.   Better still, look at history.  The Roman Empire was not the creation of democrats but emperors. The rule of the Caesars  alone enabled universal governance and the civil laws, jurisprudence, arts, administration, and infrastructure that made it possible. 

The reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King, was one of ennobling greatness – the Palais de Versailles, the Louvre, the sponsorship of art, literature, and music, the establishment of the principles of royal governance – was but one of history’s many remarkable periods of cultural flowering.  The tenures of Peter the Great,  Alexander,  and Nicholas I were no different, nor were those of the Sultans, Shahs, Shoguns, and Kings, and Emperors of the East.

‘Make America Great Again’, the slogan of the Trump presidencies, has a particular resonance for American royalists.  While the restoration of America, given its long descent into a progressive miasma will be long and hard, it can be accomplished, but only if the ethos of regal rule is its governing principle.  Of course America has no thousand years of royalty.  There are no Bourbons here, no Medicis, no Yorks and Lancasters whose regency was well established, and the principle of divine rule never challenged.

 

Yet look at England whose centuries of monarchy were abruptly interrupted by Cromwell and his democratic reforms, only to be rejected with the Restoration of Charles I.  Monarchy supplanted democracy, and so it can be done here.  History is nothing but a perpetual re-invention of itself as human nature, that ingrained, unstoppable force which propels change but always in the same ways; so democracy can never be here to stay despite Churchill’s comment that democracy is the worst form of governance except for all the others.  The reigns of Putin and Xi alone should give inveterate democrats pause.

So, is the move to a radically conservative Right the first step to centralized authority?  Not necessarily.  American history militates against it.  We have no millennia of imperial history behind us, no foundation on which to build an American empire.  Putin and Xi are not just some fantasists, imagining past glory.  The roots of monarchy are still deeply planted, and dynastic and imperial rule is recent history. Our beginnings were anti-monarchical; Robespierre was our hero along with the minds of the Enlightenment.

The Left, in all its febrile myopia has branded Trump as an insurrectionist, an autocrat-in-waiting,  a dictator whose only purpose is the acquisition of self-perpetuating power, and whose only intent is to turn America into a Third World tinpot, big man rule.  The see the frat-boy antics of January 6^th as the beginning of an insurrection, a planned, orchestrated, determined attempt to storm the Capitol and take over the government. 

 

It is the nature of a political party so given to fantastical notions of pedestrian reform and intent on cleansing history rather than understanding it to misreading Trump’s real intentions.  The path to a ‘democratic monarchy’ comes from a restructuring of the architecture of American governance and the society which supports it.  Such structural change enabling wealth production, innovation, and extensive prosperity will permit the establishment of neo-imperial rule.

The post-Mao reformers of China – autocrats as powerful as Mao but with a different, capitalist perspective – reduced poverty, universalized wealth, and gave Chinese citizens what they wanted and needed – prosperity;  and along with it international preeminence.

These new Chinese rejected the brutal peasant-based ideology of Mao and developed the country into a capitalist engine of productive power.  Trump need only look that far to see what America could become.  Making America Great Again is not a matter of a few executive orders and a legislative turnaround.  It is the first step in creating a capitalist giant with universal wealth and unlimited geopolitical power and influence.

 

‘Never in a million years’ shout the same cornered, limited critics who cannot see the coming radical transformation of human perception and the concomitant revolutionary genetic engineering which will usher in the post-human era.  The same unthinkable creation of a new political order will follow the inauguration of a new race of human beings with limitless intellectual possibility.

The Left has absolutely no idea of what’s coming so mired in their absentminded focus on race, gender, ethnicity, and identity.  Hamilton certainly saw the modern Left coming since they are drawn from the same hoi-polloi that he mistrusted over two hundred years ago.  The Left has never been an innovative, creative lot, always more satisfied with nearsighted vision; so it is natural for them to misread the nature of the silliness of January 6^th and to ignore the real portent of the coming Trump Administration.

‘Hail to the Chief’ might not exactly be ‘Long Live The King’ but it certainly isn’t just whistlin’ Dixie.

 

I Got Those Inauguration Blues - Hail To The Chief While The Incredulous Scurry For Cover

The Inauguration of Donald J Trump is but a few days away, and the Left is still in disarray, disbelief, and incredulous fluster over it.  How could this have happened?  How could this insurrectionist, racist devil possibly be seated once again in the Oval Office?

Such disbelief, such downright shock and utter emotional disassembly was made far worse because of their absolute certainty, received wisdom, and sense of moral and ethical right.  It wasn't simply that their opponent had won, it was as though some apocalyptic design had been visited upon them.  The country couldn't have simply fallen under the spell of a tummler, an oversized, ridiculous circus clown. How could the good people of America, even with their naïveté and credulous backwater notions, not have seen the true nature of this dictator-in-waiting, this anti-democratic Hitler?

In fact the good people of America did see Trump clearly, but saw nothing of the hysterical caricature painted by the Left.  Their man was a patriot, a believer in the foundational values of the Republic, a man of principle and purpose. Of course he was an outrageous personality, a braggadocio, and a no-holds-barred, politically incorrect politician, a big mouth, an in-your-face bully; but America was sick and tired of whiny, whingey, hectoring preachers; fed up with the inverted, woke vision of a rotten, nasty country, and loved Trump, the Genghis Khan of the Right, the conqueror, the hero. 

Now, in the runup to the Inauguration, Trump is at it full bore and full of bellowing outrage.  He has appointed a Cabinet of loyalists committed to dismantling every idealistic, dreamy, destructive notion of Utopian idealism. Gone would be the immanent power of the State and the bureaucracy that maintains it.  Gone would be the revisionary interventions in schools, the spread of inverted sexuality, and the cowardly catering to Machiavellian powers. 

Worse, he has proposed a takeover of Greenland, Panama, and Canada whose leaders are incapable of safeguarding natural resources and keeping them out of the hands of America's opponents (Greenland), whose tinpot nationalism of the custodian of the world's most important waterway (Panama) is obstructing American free trade, and whose masters of the ruined state across the border with their foolish, immoderate, and insane progressivism, has made it a refuge for immigrant waste (Canada). 

Of course no one but the Left takes him at his word.  As they have for ten years, they insist on countering his ‘lies’' with the truth.  They believe absolutely that pogroms and Kristallnacht will return with jackbooted storm troopers rounding up illegal immigrants and shipping them in cattle cars back across the border; that a more brutal, unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism will ravage the poor and create great shibboleths and redoubts of elitist wealth; and that gays and transgenders will be isolated, marginalized, and sent to reservations as pitiful and forgotten as Pine Ridge.

Trump supporters hear what they have always heard - hyperbole, exaggeration and a welcome, canny ability to reduce the Left to tears. Only the credulous, self-important, and ridiculously self-righteous claques in Washington really believe that gunboats will be headed to the Panama Canal, that the Sixth Fleet will be deployed to Greenland and an invasion of Normandy proportions will overrun it, and that Canada will be placed in an economic and financial stranglehold until it gives up its sovereignty. 

Trump, true to form, wants the flags that have been lowered for Jimmy Carter be raised to new heights for his Inauguration.  He hates the Gregorian calendar for putting him on stage with Martin Luther King, and wants his show to be the biggest show on earth, a show of might, patriotism, and exuberance. 

All of which is vintage Trump.  Nothing less was to be expected.  Not only was he triumphant in victory, he humiliated the very politicians who for ten years tried to dishonor and destroy him.  An outrageous, Soviet style parade of military might and political power is exactly the way to drive a nail into the coffin of his enemies.

 

'We will boycott the Inauguration', shouted Bob Muzelle, an old, faded progressive but with still enough fire in his belly to show his outrage and speak for the voiceless millions who shared his anger and militant objection.  Unknowingly channeling Winston Churchill, that hated colonialist and usurper of black and brown rights he said, 'We will stand firm, we will object, we will storm the battlements, we will never give in', to which there was only polite applause drowned out by the raucous pre-Inauguration celebrations on K Street below the windows of his rattletrap non-profit office rental. 

He was but one of the hoarse, pleading voices heard during these days.  Not only were Bob and his compatriots out of a job, out of power, and on the run; but felt humiliated as the country backpedaled on everything progressive.  DEI, Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity, was out the window. The plight of the black man such as it was portrayed by the Left, was ignored in a wave of opportunity.  Transgenders were cast as circus freaks, and asylum seekers as unwanted illegal aliens.

The combination of a political rout and the humiliating indignity of not only seeing their cherished programs dismantled but the entire progressive ethos terminated, relegated, and dismissed was too difficult to face.

Across the street in a well known conservative watering hole, a Trump supporter in town for the Inauguration was feeling his oats - an enthusiasm, a sense of triumph and relief, a joyous bye-bye to sanctimony, presumptuousness, and downright bullshit.  

And so it was that this particular changing of the guard was much anticipated.  Donald Trump was unlike any President in history - a man of Las Vegas, Hollywood, and the mean streets of New York; an outrageous, intemperate, crude bully who also held the most foul opinions.  

A Trump presidency, his opponents claimed, would be the beginning of the end of democracy.  His supporters, on the other hand, cheered the rout of fools and looked forward to a government free of cant and small-minded intellectual corruption. 

 

A divided country? In the past perhaps, but coming together nicely as conservatism takes hold here and everywhere else in the world. 'It's our time', shouted the Trump barfly, and the whole place erupted. 

The Last Days Of A Great Capitalist - Sex And God Compete For His Attention

Bradford Hart was a billionaire, not as unusual today as it was even a generation ago, but still, something to take notice of.

Brad had had the instinct for making money, or rather an intuitive understanding of worth. He knew exactly what to charge for shoveling old people's snow, washing and waxing cars, and picking up vacation mail.  He bought novelty items from a local variety store and then sold them to his classmates for a profit. Palm buzzers, flies in plastic, and whoopee cushions were increasingly hard to find, so Brad tracked shipments, bought wholesale, and sold at retail with significant but not discouraging markups. 

 

He noticed and wondered about variable pricing - why one gas station charged one price per gallon and the one across the street another; how the price of lettuce, milk, steak, and eggs varied weekly; and how people valued their time.  Old Mr. Frampton spent whole afternoons searching for the best deal on refrigerator parts instead of trading on his financial wizardry and helping wealthy widows sort through their portfolios. 

Brad quickly learned how to live on the ethical margins of the market.  Exchanging a pair of once-worn shoes to a store with a generous return policy was within bounds since the store had factored in questionable transactions.  If the store raised its prices because of a higher than expected rate of such returns, it was their problem, not his. 

In short the boy had an uncanny understanding of the workings of the market and a remarkable nose for profit. At Yale, he bought an old hearse, contracted with a local appliance store for unsold inventory, and made his tuition selling used refrigerators to students.  He imported Danish pornographic films and set high prices his wealthy classmates would quite willingly pay. 

 

After Yale, he borrowed five thousand dollars from a well-off uncle, bought prime Cape Cod real estate in a down market, and resold it at a handy profit to a developer who made a fortune.  Before he was thirty Brad had made his first million and was well on the way to tripling it in the next year.  His diverse portfolio of commodities, creative financial instruments, and startup investments was a high flyer. 

Everything he touched turned to gold, a real-life King Midas; and before long he became not just an investor, but an owner, and in an unheard of event, two of his companies were in the top twenty Standard & Poor's list of the largest and most profitable corporations in America. 

Making money had long since become a necessity, but it was so much a part of Brad's being that he could not relax and retire.  Profit was his drug of choice. 

And sex, for Bradford had had his pick of women since he was at Yale, and enjoyed every minute or conquest, sensuality, and the pure joy of rutting.  It wasn't just his millions that drew women to him, although he was never adverse to taking advantage of the credulous beauties who saw profit in his bed.  The most delightful, charming, sophisticated, and successful women found him attractive and desirable.  There was something fungible about his drive for financial gain - women sensed his sexual drive and were abjectly welcoming of it. 

In sex as in buying and selling Brad lived on the margins.  Sexual relationships were matters of contract like those of business and finance.  One had to know how much to invest, when to short, when to go long, and when to pull out; and in each and every case it paid to wait for the most propitious moment to act.  Living on the margins, when risk and reward were delicately balanced, was not for the faint of heart or the ethically timid. 

 

Life was good to Bradford Hart, but not without a bit of luck.  He had been gifted a good set of genes, the luck of the draw, and kept healthy and alert well into late middle age.  There was no reason why he couldn't live to 100 and even beyond, and as long as mind and body held, he could enjoy both his financial and sexual enterprises. 

It was surprising then that this man of few doubts, little existential reflection, and certainly few anxieties about the future began to wonder what was next. Such reflection necessarily leads to a valuation of the past. If life ended without fanfare, an extinguishing moment, a mystical disappearance after so much organization, planning, and secular effort; then what had the soon to be ended life been worth? Anything? Everything, since death promised nothing?

He like all older men faced with the same prospects, shook off these morbid thoughts; but they, insidious as they were, were consequential in and of themselves.  He thought more and more about women, and less and less about God. In a paroxysm of sexual energy he had a December-May affair with a young attorney, a passionate sexual jamboree which did all but erase any upsetting thoughts about his failing and ultimate demise.  

 

When the affair ended, as all such affairs must, Brad was disconsolate, confused, and at loose emotional ends.  The downside of the exhilaration of sex with a younger woman is the heroin crash of withdrawal. Life after such an affair is even more despairing and empty than before.  What was I thinking, he wondered?

Of course he was never alone.  He had a large family, a bevy of friends and colleagues, and acquaintances from east to west; but the satisfaction that he always had had among them had disappeared.  They were cold comfort to what he felt was his approaching final irrelevance. 

And so he turned again to that heady, irreplaceable, inimitable sexual pleasure he had enjoyed since he was a young man; and in each case the days were as happy as any.  However the letdown and depression following them became worse and worse. His famous fungibility left him - financial dealings, buying and selling, profit-making and risk-taking which were always the seat of pleasure, were no longer so.  Sexual desire had erased them and the satisfaction they provided; so all that was left was sex and God. 

'What a choice', he said to himself in a rare moment.  Jewish humor and he wasn't even Jewish. 

Why wouldn't the affairs of life cease to tempt him? Why wasn't old age a period of equanimity and acceptance?  Why was he always thinking of sex, its remarkable rejuvenating and renovative power? Its magical ability to dispel doubt, concern, even guilt?  If there was a God, then why did he give men a few short decades to love, and then consign them to years of impotent longing?  It was His greatest irony, his cruelest test of faith. 

His holdings had long since been sold or put in trust and the days of sexual dalliance were over, so he was left with God or nothing.  Again, what a choice! Not a totally unpleasant one as he remembered his catechism, high mass, and the pretty novitiates of St. Aloysius.  Maybe there was something to it, after all. 

 

In any case, he pulled himself together, resigned himself to his fate of prurient dreams and imaginings of an afterlife, and either fortunately or unfortunately lived to the 100 years he had hoped for. 

Unthinking Thought - Why The Vaporous Ideas Of Social Reform Have Such Appeal

After four years of harping, hectoring, and whingeing, the Left, badly defeated in an electoral rout to Donald Trump and the Republicans, are still at it, singing the same tune, banging the same drum, and still marching to Zion. 

 

Why is that? Why despite the radical turnaround of the country is the Left still so tiresome and banal?  The case for the black man has been made, examined, and made again; that for gender fluidity, transgenders, and the gender spectrum hawked and flogged without a rest; and that for climate change hollered, banged, and hammered to beat the band - and yet these issues to most of the country are of marginal interest, matters of indifference and irrelevance. 

The inner cities are still hellholes of violence, drugs, and social dysfunction.  The idea of a multi-faceted, fungible human sexuality has been rejected out of hand for its febrile assumptions; and concern for a fiery climate Armageddon dismissed in the expectation of rational human adaptation and ingenuity. 

 

America, say progressives, is worse than the worst African shithole - a corrupt, venal, oppressive, hateful, parochial place unconcerned about the planet, social dignity, and genuine human generosity.  It is a place which deliberately and persistently marginalizes the poor, demonizes life in the middle, and pursues the almighty dollar at all costs. 

Only a few, they say, have the foresight, the intelligence, and the commitment to revive and revitalize what few democratic sentiments still exist; to educate the ignorant swamp dwellers, crackers, and Mississippi coonhound, gunrack, bass boat racists.

 

These prophets of doom and self-appointed evangelists of mercy are so shuttered, cloistered, and immured in their own apocalyptic nightmares and as wild-eyed and crazed as the most unhinged streetcorner preacher that no one is listening.

The freak show and circus acts of the 'upenders', the born-again social reformers for whom only a brave new world of vision, compassion, and righteousness is the answer are history.  They have not just been demoted and removed from office, but relegated to some nasty gulag, some horrible reservation in North Dakota, isolated and forgotten. 

'La lucha continua!', shouted Bob Arthur, longtime social justice warrior, veteran of freedom rides, barricades, the Pettis bridge, attack dogs, and ax handles. Stalwart supporter of women, gays, the poor and disadvantaged; and resolute enemy of the entitled rich.  He was a liberal's liberal, a man without blemish, without error, and without a doubt.  

He was at once the champion of the now routed Left and an example of why it has so lost favor.  His absolute fidelity to progressivism was his political myopia.  His devotion to the canon and his irreproachably unquestioning acceptance of its principles made him the poster boy for political hysteria.  

There is no doubt that progressivism is a religion, secular but with all the trappings of true belief.  It has its credo, its doctrine and liturgy; its saints, priests, and acolytes; and its book, altar, and cross. That can be the only explanation for a progressive faith without proof, a collection of unproved assumptions which if recited enough become part of the holy order.  

Someone who looks reality in the face and rejects it in favor of some kind of beautiful illusion is ipso facto religious. The reality of America - prosperous, land of opportunity, practical, enterprising, and patriotic - is replaced by a miasmic vision of hell and notions of salvation. 

 

Bob had been so indoctrinated, so completely coopted by The Movement that he could no longer think for himself.  Taking a shit could only remind him of the shambling outhouses of slave quarters; making periodic love to his wife made him think only of le droit du seigneur and the sexual advantage taken by plantation grandees and their overseers. Eating was never a pleasure but a reminder of plenty amidst want.  He was a painfully insistent man and an intolerable bore. 

The poor, the black, the marginalized fit into every discussion, every backyard barbecue, every Christmas dinner.  Bob hammered away at the shibboleths of the Right with unremitting passion, undaunted by their solidity and resistance.  Right and good would always prevail. 

If this wasn't enough, Bob met with his support group every Thursday night, men and women for whom the ascendancy of Donald Trump was not just an electoral victory, but the beginning of the End of Days. 

These weekly sessions were the only emotional outlet for Bob and his colleagues.  Every other hour of the week was consumed with political activism, battlefield operations, and theatre strategy.  The group offered solace and tears - it was OK to cry here, every shoulder was there to shed a tear on. It was as weepy as women at a wedding or disconsolate over the loss of a lover.  

‘Oh, God', wailed Bob, bawling like a baby, embraced by his friends but unrelieved of the horrible existential pain of defeat. 

The whole progressive kit-and-kaboodle was being tossed aside by the MAGA Trumpers - not one pillar of the carefully constructed liberal architecture would remain standing and the whole edifice would collapse on itself in one final, devastating crash.  

What would they do? Where would they go?  No one wanted them anymore, but they all still had fire in the belly, and an absolute faith in the rightness of their cause.  'Impaled on the horns of a dilemma' Bob remembered his old Yale professor Vincent Scully saying about the mountains of Cnossos and the goddesses of Crete and the conundrums of life. 

Irony and sad humor aside, where indeed would Bob go?  Now at the very fag end of his career, he was hoarse with decades of rebellious defiance, a bit saggy and lined from years in the trenches and on bad beds, sallow and grey from too many hours in moldy basement hideouts, and mentally agitated and confused after so many varied causes.  

'Time to retire, dear', said his wife Agnes, herself an indefatigable advocate for peace and justice, but far more sensible than her husband. Yet the thought of life on a chaise lounge on a Florida beach was anathema to him.  He would rather die in his traces, the death of a hero. 

Retirement came to him, he did mot choose it. Fewer and fewer organizations wanted him and his antiquated notions of integration and communitarianism, so his engagements were few and far between.  Now that he and his colleagues had been routed and were heading for the exits, there would be no podiums, daises, and platforms; so why not buy that condo in Sarasota?

Even with that consoling thought Bob could not give up thinking of the black man, the inner city pestilence in which he was forced to live and the white supremacy which kept him there.  He tossed and turned with alternating images of pina coladas and steel-grilled, pimp-walking street dons. 

Ninety percent of life is just showing up said Groucho or Woody Allen, and so it was that showing up on the balcony of his condo in Naples, sipping a sundowner, and reading a trashy novel was part of the ebb and flow of life.  Now, most of his younger colleagues thought it strange that a man of such political commitment and religious fervor could vegetate like that, a turnip, a beet; but Bob had met with his maker and they agreed that his dues had been paid and a few years time off before heaven was certainly OK.