Pimps And Ho's For Trump - When Capitalism Came To The Ghetto

LaShonda and Euphrates knew something had to change, business had slowed to a crawl under Old Man Biden. Walkin' around money was chicken feed compared to the halcyon days of the crack trade, Jamaican crewes, and hookers lined up from one end of MLK Avenue to the other, ten tricks an hour, some of them, a hundred bucks from those white boys slipping over the Anacostia from the Capitol to get their joint sucked by LaToya who did a land office business from ofay interlopers; and Eveline who whooped and hollered when Capitol brothers came calling, giving them an operatic time for the taxpayers' money, and watching them disappear into the night only to come back for more. 

And that was all under that Delaware fool and his cock-tease Lady Rasputin Kamala who loved black people to death, would do anything for them, pour money down the sluice and never once ask where it was going.  Now business would be booming down here, the free market unleashed with all its limitless financial potential.  Who said that the black community was a dysfunctional shithole that needed white people to set it straight? Get them folk some religion! when all that was needed was some homegrown entrepreneurial spirit. 

All that entitlement money went down the rathole, nibbled and sniffed and wasted on malt liquor and cheap pussy, when  bigtime, organized crime would be the real thing - just like Harlem boss Frank Lucas who made billions with his Blue Magic, direct from the source, high-toned dope, shuttled in every which way, the ghetto made righteous with every shipment, and Lucas hobnobbing with Harlem's finest and the white men downtown.  Why not us?

 

It was time for a Robber Baron revival in Anacostia, start-ups and high-tech meet the street, an organized sex trade, a sophisticated drug empire, money laundering here in the 'hood and not offshore; and President Donald J Trump would be the facilitator, the intermediary, the tie that binds. 

Biden's Office of Minority Affairs, dismantled and discarded on Day One of the new Trump Administration because of its wooly, nappy-headed do-nothing righteousness was replaced by an ad hoc group of black entrepreneurs, fresh from places like Silicon Valley, Dulles, and Route 128, who would bring white start-up money to black businessmen like Frank Lucas, continue the drug, prostitution, gambling, and financial dealings but streamline them, given them real capitalist bite, and transform them from mom-and-pop small time buck-a-shot one-offs to multi-million dollar enterprises. 

To hear these shiny-headed, Armani-suited brothers from uptown talk about it, the whole community would be transformed into a supply and demand miracle.  Since Trump intended to reinstall Congressional Rule in the District, neutering the patronizing, Uncle Tom faux radicalism of the City Council and replacing it with facilitation, connection, laissez-faire - i.e., letting black people be black and make tons of money - would be the rule.

It would finally be the black capitalism talked about decades ago but never acted upon.  The millions made would be re-invested, old shit dilapidated real estate would be bought up, developed with big return on investment.  Anacostia would no longer be the sinkhole of blackness, but a bright light.  It would become the Shenzhen of America, transformed from nothing to a shining, modern, deluxe city in thirty years. 

'We outta work', Euphrates said to LaShonda, admiring his chopped and channeled, silver-spinnered Caddie parked by the curb; but she disagreed, saying there was far more money to be made than a trade in chippies and a side business of E.  Yes, she was proud of her talent, her business, and her prospects, but she was joining the Trumpists who were coming down here with bigtime dollars. 

The thing about capitalism was its no-questions-asked morality, or rather lack of it.  Money, the bottom line, its what's-in-it-for-me simplicity was the arbiter of value; and so there was no hand-wringing or second thoughts.  If prostitution, drugs, and gambling were the stock in trade of ghetto economics, so be it, use it, profit from it, encourage it. 

When Euphrates met Elvin P Jackson, Esq, Harvard-educated, scion of a Philadelphia financial empire, and black man, he was suspicious, doubtful, and armed; but that white-speak made sense.  Government was not the same patronizing empire it once was.  Jackson was here downtown to do business, to facilitate, to provide expertise and investor money to help Anacostia develop along free market lines.

Trump was not concerned about how the money was to be made, what products were involved, or how conforming inner city values were to those of the body politic.  Jackson was in the ghetto to help make fortunes.

Rate of return? Inestimable, since we're at ground level said Jackson, but the sky's the limit if you follow the precepts of Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, and Hayek. 'I am here', Jackson went on, 'to facilitate, to help assure that your indigenous enterprises take advantage of free market infrastructure and mechanisms.  You will be the new Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and JP Morgan'. 

LaShonda wasn't so sure.  She envisaged a corporate hooker headquarters, the home office, a white-style brothel, clean sheets and good bourbon, but refined and lifeless.  She preferred the streets, the white boy johns, a few tricks from the black Gold Coast, and a good predictable business; but Jackson assured her that capitalism was a buyers and sellers affair.  'You can run your business anyway you like as long as your profit margins and rate of return remain high'. 

She lit a joint, waved off a john in a Porsche, and turned to listen more carefully to Jackson.  

The thing most liberals don't understand, so mired in their self-righteousness and betterment philosophy are they, is that private enterprise is the most native to human society of any activity.  Cave men were bartering and buying and selling with cowrie beads in the Paleolithic.  Prostitution and gambling were endemic, and as soon as Gork and Thog found something cool to smoke or drink, they turned it into an enterprise. Communism failed because of its mistrust of this normal, natural aspect of human nature. 

So, old fashioned Saul Alinsky-Barack Obama community organization turned private and real, and Trump investment-minded young black men and women became fixtures in the ghetto.  The promise was palpable, and people were lining up to take part.  There was a spirit of renewal in the ghetto, one of relief and almost of joy. Of course Anacostia was still a shithole and would be for some time while the new Trump enterprise ethos took hold, but it held promise, something the neighborhoods across the river had never had. 

LaShonda did a few more tricks that day and Euphrates took his bite; but this time when they went home, they felt a note of encouragement and optimism they hadn't felt in years. 

Snookered! - From Women's Rights To 'Men Only', A Liberal's Journey To Misogyny

Bob Muzelle had been a lifelong feminist long before bra-burning and squawking had become common.  His Great Aunt was a veteran of the suffrage wars of the Twenties, and the old bat never lost an opportunity to let the young boy know what she and her sisters had done for America.  

She still wore her armband, corset, and tight bun to demonstrate her lifelong commitment to the cause of women.  The vote was but the beginning of her journey through male swamps and redoubts - she had been a fierce, undaunted, and outraged defender of women's rights for decades. 

Such vehemence took its toll.  Abigail Collins had never married, for no man wanted to come within ten feet of this raging harridan.  Women were not the issue for her.  Their natural intelligence, social sophistication, insights, and courage were immanent, permanent, and unquestioned.  It was men that deserved every ounce of her vitriol.  They were the enemy, a dumb, scurrilous, untrustworthy lot, all of whom should be wrung, strung, and cut.  

She adapted to her life as an old maid, a spinster, a bitten, tough, wiry woman who lived on her own and was never tempted by the sensual amusement of her sisters. Sex was the ultimate bonding she was told, but the whole idea of it, all that licking and sucking with nothing between her legs but fingers was off-putting. 

She took a shine to young Bob who had shown signs of sexual contingency - a more than usual appreciation of women as women rather than sexual objects, rare for a young boy - and she took him under her wing, a socio-political internship which would hopefully lead him to social justice advocacy.

Bob's mother was cut from the same cloth, taught by her own mother the value of womanhood, its rightful, unique place in life, and the duty of all women to fight misogyny and male predation.

Not surprisingly Bob's father was a withering little fellow who had come under the thrall of the young Marybeth Collins, attracted by her determination, decisiveness, and drive, complements to his own shilly-shallying and indeterminate nature.  It was not a case of dominatrix and dominated exactly, but visitors were stuck by his complaisant fetching and scrubbing.  He might as well have put on leash, harness, and leather and be ball-whipped for all the virility he seemed to have lost or never had. 

Growing up in such circumstances had not been easy for the young Bob, but these women being his sexual role models, he not surprisingly found himself with the same type of intimidating, bullying, intolerably offensive young women who seemed to have been hatched and belonged to a special, separate brood. 

The good news was that sexual initiation by these devouring girls only hardened his resolve.  These classmates were the avant-garde of the sexual revolution, Nietzschean, willful, and punitive.  They kept Bob as a pet, a salamander on a string, a minor evolutionary bit, while they went about their marvelously canny unmanning.  Lady Macbeth, Goneril, and Regan had nothing on them. 

 

It was no surprise then, that Bob fell into line, and became a social justice warrior, at the barricades, on the pulpit, and in the streets for women's rights.  He had swallowed the feminist line of his mother, Great Aunt, and classmates hook, line, and sinker.  Men were the problem in American society today.  They had never lost their patriarchy, misogyny, and slave-owning mentality and must be deterred, marginalized, and exiled. 

It was bad enough that the women in The Feminist Coalition which he joined, the most forward and implacable feminist group in Washington, were a sour, raggedy, unshaved lot; but they rutted like goats the first chance they got. 'Servicing', they called it, regular tune-ups, a pop in the oven, a little brick work, and holy hell on Saturday nights.  

The law of diminishing returns did not apply to men who were indifferent to 'women as women'.  As long as the brothers could satisfy, they were given sexual visas.  As for the rest, including Bobby Muzelle, they were supernumerary and irrelevant no matter how much they pleaded solidarity. 

It was Samantha Liggett who turned his head - a normal girl from Chillicothe who had come to Washington to make her way in politics, a farm girl, flaxen haired and cornflower blue eyes, a delectable morsel who smiled at him on the Red Line to Bethesda.

Now, Bob had never dated a 'normal' girl before, so coopted had he been by the radical feminist consortium, so he wasn't sure what to do.  He was so stumbling and wretched in his overtures that it was amazing that the girl didn't get off a stop or two before hers; but she didn't and found something charming about his boyishness. 

Bob was smitten and overwhelmed.  Where had this sylph, this water nymph, this perfectly white, stainless, beautiful girl come from?  It was epiphanic, extraordinary, remarkable. For years he had looked at himself as the pathetic male version of his feminist sisters - a kind of saggy, unkempt mess unappealing to any woman except those around him - but he was not unattractive, big-eared perhaps but with a patrician symmetry; and here he was smiled at, enticed by this sweet young, unblemished thing. 

The affair went on for three months when out of the blue came a Dear John letter, handwritten, scented, and embossed.  No explanation, no excuses, just a steely goodbye.

That alone was bad enough but this tart had been fucking somebody else right under his nose.  She lived with him, lived off him, but lived entirely divorced from him.  He was a convenient way station, a bus stop on her way to internship or clerkship or a tryst with a Senator or someone big.  He had been blindsided, snookered, and left on the curb. 

An existential moment.  His first foray into the 'real' world, the whirl of ordinary women, unscarred and untroubled by feminist hatred and cant, and he was dumped like so much refuse.  What was he to make of it? Not quick to jump the gun and conclude something about women in general, he licked his wounds, stayed low and ventured less until some semblance of calm had returned. 

It was then that Desirable Normal Woman #2 came along, a much more patient, considerate woman than the first, and they settled down together in a small but accommodating walkup in Dupont Circle.  They seemed suited to each other.  It was a timely affair, an easy elision from work to home, prospects good, and opportunities limitless. 

However, perhaps sensing some weakness in Bob - something slightly unmanned about him, perhaps due to is association with radical feminists - she began to take liberties, use him more and more, and finally begin take her pound flesh in bits and pieces but substantial nonetheless.  At first she thought it was a good thing that he was so respectful and considerate; but she soon grew weary of his doggy complaisance, and wished he would...well, not exactly treat her roughly, but take her as though he meant it from behind, as horrendous as that thought might seem.

By and by her badgering turned nasty, her constant bitching and irritable fault-finding got boring and tedious, and she finally told him, Basta! out the door, greener pastures, and once again Bob was left on the curb. 

He never saw it coming, so easily and seamlessly had he become the submissive partner; so when the quit order was given, he was shocked.  Another woman in whom he had placed such trust and confidence down the drain; but this time he was spiteful, hateful and disgusted with women - all women - and in one fell swoop he became what his feminist sisters all railed against - a misogynistic, woman-hating man. 

It all piled up on him at once - the old, meanspirited, dry, and pinched Great Aunt; his badgering, manipulative mother, and the cabal of ugly, hysterical, bloodthirsty women at The Feminist Coalition. 

In his mind he hung up a 'Men Only' sign, and from that day forward eschewed any unnecessary commerce with women.  If any came along that piqued his interest, he would be the one to seduce and leave.  In fact, it would not be a one-off vengeful dalliance, it would be a purposeful program of humiliation and deviousness. 

Othello, arrested for the crime of murdering his wife, Desdemona, tells the magistrate that he had no remorse for his actions, and was only ridding the world of one more duplicitous woman.  You should thank me, not convict me he says. 

 

It felt good, finally, to out the closeted machismo within, a cathartic moment of pure joy.  Once and for all he not only left the crusade for women's rights in the rear view mirror but all the febrile, useless progressive cant and faux optimism he had endured for years.  Fuck 'em, he said, and eagerly awaited the sweet young things parading down Independence Avenue to join the Trump originalist cavalcade.  Easy pickin's. 

Playing The Hitler Card When The Race Card Won No Tricks - The Left's Losing Hand

'I knew Jack Kennedy, and you're no Jack Kennedy, Senator', Lloyd Bentsen, Democratic candidate for Vice President, said to Dan Quayle his opponent who compared himself to the late President, and the same can be said for anyone old enough to remember WWII.  Anyone comparing Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler simply wasn't around at the time or was paying no attention, but the yapping goes on.  

The President, like Hitler, says the Left, is in the process of destroying all democratic institutions, preparing to establish an authoritarian rule, one which will be just as genocidal as that of the Fuhrer.  Bathhouses and gay clubs in the Castro will be raided and gay men will be corralled and loaded on to cattle cars headed for North Dakota concentration camps and incineration in gas ovens. Bull daggers and butch femmes from Bernal Heights will be 'extirpated', Nazi-speak for gender reassignment aka tarred, feathered, and burned. 

Elon Musk and his DOGE storm troopers are not simply out to expose waste and fraud, the Left goes on, but to dismantle and destroy the central institutions of government.  'Efficiency' is a cover for the wholescale dismissal of the organs of governance.  Without these moderating, censoring, and enabling institutions, the White House and its cabal of robber baron billionaires can reshape America into an autocratic dictatorship, an oligarchy of the super-rich, a shell of its former popular democracy.  

 

Trump's every line, every sentence, every word is being parsed by progressive journalists in a heyday of anti-contextual jiggering.  According to them, the President sounds like Hitler, struts and salutes like Hitler, and not only channels Der Fuhrer but is his incarnation. 

For over a decade the progressive Left has called Trump evil, but the characterization never stuck.  Evil was too Biblical, too remote, too literary, and too vague.  Only lately have they realized that by personalizing evil, by giving it a Sieg Heil and a brush mustache, Americans can finally see what they have been saying all along.  In thought, word, and deed, Donald Trump is a modern day Hitler - not just an imitation, a last minute walk on, an understudy and imitator, but the real thing. 

In a hyperbolic article in The Atlantic, the author reminds us that "ninety-two years ago, on January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed the 15th chancellor of the Weimar Republic. In one of the most astonishing political transformations in the history of democracy, Hitler set about destroying a constitutional republic through constitutional means.'

He then goes on to detail how Hitler “systematically disabled and then dismantled his country’s democratic structures and processes in less than two months’ time—specifically, one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours, and 40 minutes.”

“We have come to perceive Hitler’s appointment as chancellor as part of an inexorable rise to power,” the author writes. But Hitler’s ascendancy and his smashing of constitutional guardrails “are stories of political contingency rather than historical inevitability.”

It is obvious, the author disingenuously implies, that what Hitler did in Weimar Germany is happening today in America. Less than two months time, he emphasizes, conflating one fact with another circumstantial one, a solipsistic argument, a baldly irrational, presumptive relationship that no one can take seriously.

Yet The Atlantic simply cannot help such imaginative comparisons and maniacal, illogical jumps:

When he describes his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin,” Trump is using words that belong to a particular tradition: “Adolf Hitler used these kinds of terms often,” Applebaum writes. Stalin used the same kind of language, referring to his enemies “as vermin, pollution, filth that had to be ‘subjected to ongoing purification.’” Mao Zedong described his political opponents as “poisonous weeds.”

“In each of these very different societies, the purpose of this kind of rhetoric was the same. If you connect your opponents with disease, illness, and poisoned blood, if you dehumanize them as insects or animals … then you can much more easily arrest them, deprive them of rights, exclude them, or even kill them,” the journalist writes. “If they are parasites, they aren’t human. If they are vermin, they don’t get to enjoy freedom of speech, or freedoms of any kind.”

The insensibility and the sheer intellectual dereliction of the article is stunning.  Hitler indeed said vile things, but acted on them.  His genocidal ethnic cleansing was an exact operational exercise or his philosophy.  Hitler was genocidal and wanted to rid the republic not only of Jews but cripples, homosexuals, and atheists. 

Trump's references, taken within the context of his deliberately offensive caricatures and hyperbole, are nothing but Épater la bourgeoisie - to shock and upset the timid, faint of heart, overly sensitive, and cowed.  No one but the Left takes him seriously, and his remarks about returning America to its originalist Christian, conservative, European roots has nothing to do with extermination but with restoration.  

Waves of unwanted, uninvited immigration never scrutinized nor admitted on the basis of talent, ability, fidelity, and productivity will indeed alter the ethos and character of the American  population.

 

Trump if anything recalls Shakespeare when in the Sonnets the poet encourages his 'fair young man' to procreate.  Anyone of such beauty, intelligence, insight, and creativity owes it to the world to populate it with his genes.  Far from eugenics, Trump wants America to be what it was - a nation of proud, faithful, loyal workers and entrepreneurs who share common goals and character.  To jump from these legitimate political, social aspirations, to a claim of genocide is pure nonsense. 

Trump is most definitely uprooting the old, traditional, organs of government - the vast federal bureaucracies into which billions of unaccountable taxpayer dollars are poured each year.  The arrogation of power derived from this idealist largess is destructive, demeaning, and damaging.  Government is not the solution, said Ronald Reagan.  Government is the problem; so the bulldozers out on Independence Avenue are not paving the way for an autocratic State, but for a far more democratic one than seen in two centuries. 

The President is also most definitely reversing the progressive Left's fantastical, unfounded, operatic makeover of human sexuality and the lionization of the 'other-gendered'.  This has nothing to do with Hitler's desire to exterminate homosexuals, but only with the intent to restore biological and historical imperatives.

Trump's insistence on removing all traces of affirmative action and DEI initiatives has nothing to do with racial prejudice or racial cleansing.  It is simply a commitment to restore natural competitiveness to the society and the economy, to stop the adulation of the black man as a primally pure, native African being to be replaced atop the human pyramid and to return to proof and performance. 

The Hitler thing is nothing but the last, losing card of the Left's poker hand, a desperate hope that no one around the table sees the bluff for what it is, the incompetence and foolish play.  They tried the race card, pumped up half-black Kamala Harris as the antidote and savior of the black race, damned and condemned white people for their racist intransigence, and came up empty.  The whole gender fol-de-rol fell flat and tarring normal, heterosexual Americans as reprobates was shown to be the insidious charade it always was.

The rabid last ditch name-calling side show cannot last, for already the Trump sledding has run into rough patches.  The Democrats might be finished as a salient political force, but the Constitutional checks and balances have shown themselves to be more than durable.  

So the juggernaut rumbles on, bureaucracies fall, and the ethos of the country is finding a familiar equilibrium.  Trump will prevail as he always has and the ridiculous hysteria of the Left might settle down and something substantive might emerge; but given the first two months of chickens with their heads cut off political vaudeville, don't hold your breath. 

Doing What It Takes, Whatever It Takes - The Buried Bodies Of A Political Star

Mae Easterly was born and raised on an Iowa farm, learned to milk when the was five, sow and weed when she was eight, and draw water from the well when she was ten.  She grew up with Jesus, the Bible, and the Third Baptist Church of Ames, had thought she had a calling to the ministry, and was tutored in the Christian faith by the Reverend Jackson Peet who took a special interest in the young, spiritually mature girl.

 

The Reverend Peet, however, found more in the young girl than spiritual promise, and during their many after-hours sessions on the Pauline Epistles, established a certain intimacy which at first was quite chaste and proper, quickly evolved into something far more. 

The relationship surprisingly was consensual - Mae had a preternatural sense of male desire and the female power derived from it and knew that the sex would be nothing compared to the rewards gained through intimidation of this incontinent and rather stupid man. 

Of course she had been warned against the likes of the Reverend Peet.  Men were always on the prowl, said her mother, and proper little girls must always be on the lookout; but she was sexually precocious and ambitious, and without tutelage or practice, instinctively knew how to attract men.  She was Nabokov's 'nymphet', a pre-pubescent girl with a precocious sexual desire and an instinctive understanding of how that allure had irresistible power over men. 

 

She was also despite her rigorous upbringing, surprisingly amoral and indifferent to common social wisdom.  Sex and sexuality were matters of commerce where the rules of supply and demand, risk and reward, and opportunity cost applied just as easily and clearly to personal behavior as to market transactions.  There was no higher good in either, and the freedom from either guilt or aspiration was liberating for the young Mae. 

And so it was that she let the Reverend Peet have his way with her, but just as complaisantly and innocently let him know that unless he did her bidding, the truth about his statutory rape would quickly out and his ministry would be over. 

This was but the first step in her whirlwind trajectory to political prominence. Not only was she accepted by Georgetown, but received a full scholarship.  An intellectually talented young woman, admission to the Law School was assured, and thanks to her academic record and personal charms, she secured high-profile judicial clerkships. 

She was far too savvy to share sexual favors in pursuit of her career, but she was not niggardly either.  Judges, despite a deserved reputation for objectivity and professional discipline, were still men who could not resist her beauty, her attentiveness, and caring concern.  Judge ____in particular was smitten and desperate to keep her affection; so thanks to him, Mae secured a partner-track position at one of Washington's premier law firms. 

Now, it wasn't just sexual precocity and moral fungibility that characterized young Mae.  They were facilitating and enabling while her fierce competitiveness did the rest.  She made it quite clear that she had no problem working on the legal margins, inches from federal inquiry and possible censure.  No matter how ethnically dubious an investment or corporate restructuring might be, Mae was always there on the front lines.  She knew how to do whatever it takes and was never afraid to do so. 

This combination of sexual maturity, amorality, and a guiltless, shameless ambition was Washington's perfect storm.  There might be many men and women with one or two of these indispensable attributes, but to have all three was remarkable. 

She cut close to the edge on her personal and professional relationships and was never hesitant to engage or withdraw when the logarithmic curves crossed and it was time to sell. She did all with grace, and her lovers and partners accepted her demurrals without rancor or vendetta. 

As time went by and her remarkable ability to make money became legendary, she became less concerned with propriety and grace, and the dead bodies began to pile up.  Men who were otherwise savvy and alert were blindsided, left penniless and adrift, suckered and conned and left on the curb.  

There was nothing that intimidated her.  'See you in court' was no more serious than an invitation to tea.  Investigations by the SEC, FBI, and federal prosecutors were child's play, and agents were easily distracted and sent up one blind alley after another.  

Of course she made enemies along the way, but each and every one of them had to smile at the deftness and sheer chutzpah of the woman.  It was almost a badge of honor to be screwed by her.  'Isn't she wonderful!' one rube was overheard to have said; and she was, a colossus astride the world of Washington. 

Thanks to her reputation for unmitigated pursuit of power and her sheer indifference to the means of acquisition, she was a natural for electoral politics.  What was Washington if not the very seat of whatever-it-takes power?  A woman of her intellectual caliber, Machiavellian realpolitik, and Nietzschean will would be President before she was fifty. 

 

She demurred, happy in her role of uber-fixer, financial Genghis Khan, and power broker.  Why go on the stump and curry favor with Alexander Hamilton's 'grossly unwashed', the masses, the johns, the rubes, the herd?  The only battle was to the death, and that only accomplished with knights of the same order.  The fun is besting the best without them even knowing they'd been had, not garnering a million insignificant votes. 

No, it was far more satisfying to be a king maker rather than king of a shabby kingdom.  She would stay behind the scenes known only to those worth knowing. 

When she left Washington, a fabulously wealthy woman with homes in St. Tropez, Palm Beach, and St. Bart's and offshore accounts from Aruba to St. Maarten, she was sorely missed.  The gaping wounds, beheadings, spaying, and dead bodies were testaments to her acclaim.  Washington doesn't want or care for saints; it is sinners they love, and the more devilish and evil the better.  Mae Easterly was their kind of woman. 

Sticks And Stones Are Good For You - In Praise Of Taunts, Insults, And Bullies

'Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me'. How often had Marley Brixton heard that old saw from her mother. “You are too thin-skinned”, her mother went on. “Too sensitive for your own good. Live and let live for a change.”

Of course that bit of advice went in one ear and out the other, because Marley’s mother had no idea what the girls said to her during recess or on the walk home, how insulting the whispered asides were, or how offended she was at their….indignities.

Marley unfortunately was one of kind, the worst hand any pre-teen could possibly be dealt.  With frizzy hair, wide-set eyes, and a mouth far too big for her face, she was an easy target for the straight-haired, blue-eyed, perfect teeth in-crowd. The Celestial Dealer hadn’t stopped there either.  Marley was pigeon-toed, tall for her age, and a redhead.

Adolescent claques being what they are, the abuse dealt by the Barbies, as Marley called them, was no worse than in any other school. “Girls are bitches”, said her mother, “and that is as permanent a feature as anything on God’s green earth”.

That, of course, didn’t help Marley; and each day she had to run the gantlet.  The Barbies’ taunts were orchestrated.  The girls nearest to the curb ragged her about her hair.  In the next rank were the prancing monkeys who crabbed along after her, scraping their knuckles, and waddling with exaggerated knock-knees.  Then came the Ubangi, pumping their lips and puckering kisses at her.

Every day it was the same.  There was no let up, and she had no recourse.  There was no protector in the wings, no chivalrous knight to defend her honor, no righteous girlfriend to stand up to her tormentors.  She was on her own.

“Bullies”, said her mother when Marley told her of the gantlet, the asides, and the catty comments in the halls; but she had no intention of fighting her daughter’s battles, going to the principal to demand justice under the new Inclusivity Rule.  Lord knows, she had to fight her way through her own girl gantlets and far worse.  She had been suspended for fighting with Becky Lieberman who had called her a cunt.  There was no way that Margot Brixton was going to let that little bitch get away with sexist slurs; and before it was over, she had clawed Becky’s face, pulled our clumps of her thin, unsubstantial hair, and clubbed her tits with her knapsack.

Becky went blubbering to the principal who, seeing her raw, bleeding cheeks, disheveled hair, and unkempt uniform, yelled at Margot, pointed to the door, and told her to leave the school premises. Margot was denied Harvard because of the stain on her high school record.  Despite the efforts of her lawyer mother and father to expunge all reference to ‘the delinquency’, it remained indelible and very visible to the Admissions Office. Yet Margot had won.

If she had found a way to best the Barbies of Jefferson High, beat them at their own game, and bring down the leaders of the girlie cabal, so could her daughter.

Bullies, despite the constant criticism of them, are necessary – indispensable in fact. Their abuse may be hard to take; but it is nothing compared to the humiliating practices of real-life adult bullies. Bullies toughen the hide.

It doesn’t take long for a young employee in a new job to encounter a supervisor who is in over her head, who lacks confidence, who is intimidated by the smart young things under her; and who takes out her frustration and feelings of inferiority on them.  These thugs are rarely called out for what they are let alone punished; so timid underlings quit, and the more forthcoming are consigned to back offices and ignored. Better to suffer bullying early on, learn from the experience, and be equipped to counter contemptuous abuse later on in life.

Bullies are important for another reason – they show what one is  made of. There are those who suck up to bullies and join their ranks.  Better to bully than to be bullied, they say.  Others simply avoid them and take the back stairs, walk home a different way, neither antagonize or ingratiate, and remain in the shadows. Finally there are the Margots who stand up and fight.  Bloodied and uncowed, they show the bully and the rest of the school the importance of character, moral principle, and fortitude.

The students of Jefferson High all fell into one of these three categories, and showed their true colors by such association.  Herman Banks was always a toady, eager to curry favor and skate around the edges of moral and ethical behavior. Betsy Barton never lost her timidity and willingness to trade recognition, popularity, and acclaim for invisibility; and Don Chalmers never backed down from a fight.  Their early encounters with Bobby Parker, the bully, were the first episodes of character.  It might have taken years for them to realize, let alone accept who they were; but they all returned to their encounters with Bobby.

Herman found ways to insinuate and ingratiate himself with prospective investors and clients. There was no need for principle or rectitude if one was canny enough to sense weakness and be willing to compromise if needs be. Betsy Barton grew up unnoticed and unremarkable.  The deal she had struck with Bobby Parker was an all-inclusive and permanent one.  She made her way slowly and carefully, a ‘nice girl’ and faithful wife, but always looking over her shoulder.  She was risk-averse as an adult, over-protective and sheltering as a parent, and a complaisant lover as a wife.

Don Chalmers joined the military as an officer, won two Bronze Stars for bravery and heroism in combat, and was the revered mayor of his small prairie town in Minnesota for four terms.

All three children ineluctably acted the way they did.  They were born either timid , evasive, or courageous. Their early years simply consolidated their character. Run-ins with Bobby Parker were the first proofs or examples of those inbuilt, hardwired traits of personality and character.  .

Catty, bitchy girls, are different.  They bully in concert.  They swarm and surround. They travel in packs.  Their goal is the cull, not the victory. Surviving them requires less fortitude and more indifference.  “Pay no attention to them”, said Marley’s mother. “They will soon lose interest”.

Their interest did indeed fade; but other hungry girl-packs formed to take their place.  The original center always held, and although some girls graduated and others left the neighborhood, supply always exceeded demand. There were always more than enough bitches to go around.

Like bullies, these girls were good for the school and the students. Because of their particular type of cliquish assembly, they demonstrated gender differences.  Girls have always been more socially adept, more attuned to subtlety, and far more sensitive to personality, looks, and behavior than boys; and when combined with adolescent angst, a compelling need to belong, and the mentality of the pack, they could be brutal to The Other. Girls learned about themselves and boys wised up quickly.

Boys’ braggadocio, simplemindedness (“Cunt, faggot, pussy”), and concern for their own swagger and posturing, never coalesced into disassembling packs like girls. Two or three boys were enough to rough someone up, but male ego was at stake rather than the hunt, the cull, and the kill.  Boys were easy to understand and easy to avoid.

School administrators, principals, and teachers have been trained to practice zero tolerance for bullying and intimidation.  Rules on language, behavior, and the impropriety of innuendo, slight, and even indifference are posted everywhere.  Inclusivity is the new status quo.  The weak must be protected, the strong tethered, and the abusive removed.

None of this does any good, of course. Children are simply too smart, too inventive, too socially aware, and too cruel for artificial, engineered rules to take hold. Who said that childhood was a bed of roses?  On the contrary, it is the earliest battleground in the war for social superiority, dominance, and authority.  A smooth ride that ends abruptly in the violent, brutal, and no-holds-barred world of adult society profits no one.

Political idealists insist that we are all good people, and policies of diversity and inclusivity according to which there are no weak or strong but only difference are the best in the long run.  They do indeed prepare students for the real world by sending them out with high self-esteem and a sense of respect and compassion for others.

This is nonsense. Every knackered idealist returning home at the end of the day, has to admit that he was ill-prepared for battle. The rule of tooth-and-claw was never posted, and it is the only one that matters.

Marley Brixton was an Ugly Duckling.  As she matured, all the ungainly features of adolescence developed into distinctly attractive if not beautiful ones. More importantly, thanks in large part to her mother, she learned how to deal with other women.  Once bitchiness was correlated with sexual competition, it became less threatening; and as she developed into an alluring young women, the cattiness and defensive aggressiveness of girl-packs made less and less difference.

Other girls were not so lucky. Their deck could never be reshuffled, and the hand they were dealt was it for life. Depending on personality and character, they emerged from the school experience either hardened at bitter or newly savvy and cynical about life in the raw.  In all cases, however, the bullying/girl-pack experience was beneficial and necessary. Laissez-faire is always the better policy.