The Evolution Of A Tomboy – The Beautiful Complexity Of A Woman

Letty Armour was a tomboy – a little girl who liked to climb trees, torture frogs, do daredevil tricks on her Schwinn and never, ever wear dresses.  ‘That’s for girls’, she said to her mother who tried to fit her with a pretty white organza dress she had bought at Lord & Taylor.

 

‘Why, Letty darling, you’re a girl’, to which Letty frowned, pursed her lips, and spat, ‘No, I’m not’, which of course upset Mrs. Armour who had always been the belle of the ball, a stunning Hedy Lamar raven-haired beauty who practiced her inviting smile for hours in the bathroom mirror and was always followed by a retinue of boys wherever she went.  

Prom queen, Snow Queen, Spring Queen, she had been the most desirable, alluring, tempting young woman that Chillicothe had ever seen; and now standing before her was this defiant butch girl only she could pick out in a crowd of roughneck boys.

‘She’s just a tomboy, darling.  She’ll grow out of it’, said Mr. Armour, a good looking man who fancied himself a boulevardier,  a Clark Gable.  A bit of a pompous ass, all dressed in English tweeds and Burberry, a man who thought he understood women but had no clue, so self-absorbed was he in his own persona that he was downright lucky to have reeled in a trophy fish like Betty Finch who for her part overlooked John Armour’s sexual obtuseness for the reputation of his family, Old English stock, Mayflower, John Davenport, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the works.

So when he gave his pronouncement, his wife gave that ‘What would you know about it’ snicker and turned to Dr. Spock, the mother’s childrearing guru of the age, for advice.  In the 1938 edition, Spock wrote,

Some girls exhibit a strong desire to be boys, but this is nothing to worry about.  Endowed with the natural femaleness that gives woman her natural litheness, inner beauty, and lovely complaisance, the tomboy will soon realize her genetic destiny and blossom into full-bodied woman

These comments ceased to appear in the post-war editions.  During the war women had been riveters, hod carriers, and bricklayers, hard hats and steel-toed shoes, all of which gave Spock and his editors pause; but in later Fifties editions when women went back to Kinder, Kirche, Kuchen and returned to frills, high heels and silk stockings, it was back in.  Don’t worry, said Spock, your little tomboy will turn out just fine.

 

In Letty’s case it was a long haul, for even as she began puberty she strapped and corseted herself up, wore baggy jeans and shaggy hair that could pass as sideburns.

‘She’s a lesbian’ said Mr. Armour whose scant knowledge of women certainly did not include any sexual variations, and his only passing acquaintance with lesbians came from a Reader’s Digest article, The Femmes Fatales of Bernal Heights, a short showpiece of lesbian life in San Francisco with a few pictures of young women in flannel shirts and jackboots holding hands.

But the tomboy phase did pass and pass quickly.  Spock had been proven right – once Letty’s hormones got cooking, and the XX chromosomes kicked in, Letty did a volte face.  She pulled off her corset, wore slim-fitting jeans, let her hair grow long, and added touches of lipstick and mascara to an already stunningly beautiful face.  If her mother was a Hedy Lamar lookalike, Letty was Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet.

 

Now it was she who had a retinue of desirable young men following her, but she eschewed the faux idolatry of high school beauty queens.  Part of her genetic inheritance was a keen and canny understanding of women’s power.  In their ability to seduce, attract, and hold men through sexual appeal and paternity (only women could know for sure the fathers of their children), women were more than the equal of men.  The war between the sexes, apparently one of parity, was nothing of the sort.

This is neither here nor there.  We all know Ibsen’s women well – Hedda Gabler, Hilde Wangel, and Rebekka West, all defiantly purposeful, strong women who put up with no man and controlled them like a dray horse.  Shakespeare’s Goneril, Regan, Tamora, Dionyza, and Volumnia and Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra were no different.  Letty was certainly one of their kind, but that story is predictable and of little relevance to this one. 

What is far more interesting is Letty’s sexual evolution, her maleness and femaleness and how that distinction was resolved. The Greeks were quite happy to accommodate hermaphrodites, those who were both male and female in a delectable combination.  They were prized lovers for Aristotle and Aeschylus who never had to admit homosexuality, and were able to dally with it comfortably. 

Shakespeare in Sonnet 20 wrote about sexual complexity – the poet loves a man whom God created with the body of a man and the soul of a woman and thus has cover while exploring the delights of both.

The transgender advocates of today have totally missed the point.  Remaking a woman into a man and vice-versa is a crude, obtuse, defiantly ignorant idea.  Hermaphrodites were perfect creations, the best of worlds, the lovely and the pursuant.  No man was shouting to get out, imprisoned in a woman’s body, but happy to be there, a unique highly evolved creation.  And here were the butchers of the modern day, cutting off and reconfiguring, reshaping, distorting and ruining a good thing.

So God only knows what beautiful sexuality made up the young Letty Armour; whether she had some of the hermaphrodite in her, whether she, seeing boys’ social advantages chose to imitate them, or whether her spirit was of the fugitive kind.  The point is, hers was a beautiful complexity, a natural born one, an innate, pure one in no need of change, only evolution, stopping only when the time and the moment were right.

‘I liked baseball’, was her only response when her mother asked her about her tomboy days, leaving the older woman as confused as she always had been, especially influenced as she was by the cant and fol-de-rol of sexuality - dyke, straight, or transgender, nothing in between, nothing sophisticated, no subtlety or grace - but Letty always knew, suspected that she was unique, formed specially; and although she never knew for what, she was a happy woman.

A Fool And His Money Are Soon Parted – Elon Musk And The Augean Cleansing Of The American Government

Progressives firmly and unquestionably believe that government should be a friend, a companion, a caretaker, and an adviser.  Without it the people would be an inchoate, soulless rabble.  They would be foundering, lost sheep prey to the wolves of Wall Street and capitalist America.  We, say progressives, are the only thing that stands between enlightened civil governance and anarchy.

Of course no one believes this except those who advocate for social interventionism and benefit from it - printing money, spending it as though it grows on trees, having little to do with it once it pours down the sluice, but taking credit for every penny.

Everyone who gives even a desultory look knows that the trillions of dollars Biden authorized for ‘infrastructure’ and ‘social welfare’ was little more than a scam, enriching everyone with his hand out down the line – governors of blue states who welcomed the generosity and caring counsel of Washington, aides and associates who decided where the fictitious bridges, rail lines, docks, and runways were to be built; county supervisors and municipal mayors whose stock went up for having brought home the promise of wealth, jobs, and development; and contractors whose cuts, emoluments, incentives, and cost overruns for work never done was money in the bank – their banks.

Everyone knows that ‘infrastructure’ means boondoggle, light loads, more sand than cement, and years of haggling over who gets what when.  Washington DC’s city council authorized millions in non-competitive awards to local contractors to rebuild perfectly good sidewalks when the streets of the city looked like bombed out, cratered Third World tracks. Many split-levels in Gaithersburg and Cadillac Escalades were bought thanks to that ‘investment’.

When the city said that the wheelchair-confined needed smooth, even surfaces to ride on, progressives for whom the word ‘disability’ alone all but guaranteed unaccountable millions, wrote a big check.

‘Social welfare’ is another progressive cash cow.  The black, the poor, the marginalized ipso facto need ‘our’ help, and little does it matter that job training, special education, welfare, aid to dependent children, and food stamps have cost-effectiveness ratios in minus figures.  

Most of USAID’s similar overseas programs have the same objectives and the same lack of accountability, thanks to the political nature of foreign aid.  If a country has oil, gas, or rare earth minerals; or if they are in a geopolitically good place for the United States, the money trough is filled, no questions asked.

 

Up and down Independence Avenue, in one government department after another, the same charade goes on and on.  Doing good, caretaking, stewardship, enlightened management – whatever progressives might like to call it – is one big, grand Ponzi scheme. From forests to the inner city, from COVID to whooping cough, from union bosses to creative investment instruments, from farm subsidies to immigration, money is being spent with inattention, inspired neglect, and downright political corruption.

It is the nature of public financing to be spent on political interest rather than cost-benefit or cost-effectiveness.  It is a business of syllogisms – doing good is good for America because doing good is good – and out of that intellectual chicanery everyone but the taxpayer benefits.

The only truly savvy place in America is the inner city, for decades the beneficiaries of government largesse.  Residents there know that for every dollar of entitlement money disbursed by federal and local authorities, little if any is seen after takes and cuts are made.  In DC preachers, community leaders, social activists, local non-profit directors all have their hands out for walkin’ around money. For the rest of Anacostia and Brentwood, ‘We ain’t seen jack shit’

 

So along come Elon Musk and DOGE ready to do battle.  The Emperor’s new clothes are seen for what they are.  For decades government officials from top to bottom of the public service food chain have looked the other way as bureaucratic institutions have authorized entitlements, non-accountable grants, and monies for bridges and highways never to be built.  Finally the naked, sublimely disingenuous bureaucrats have been collared and thrown out, money flow stanched, and some semblance of logical order instituted. 

The outcry has been loud and predictable.  For years bureaucrats and their contractors have had a free ride.  Few questioned the need for job training or welfare for the underprivileged because it was the right, good thing to do, and now the great Washington shibboleth was being attacked.  For the first time public servants were tossed on the curb no differently than private sector employees who work at will and at the mercy of private owners and managers.

It has been a juggernaut, Elon Musk a Genghis Khan taking no prisoners, leaving heads on spikes up and down Constitution Avenue sending a message to those who might defy him.

Why on earth would anyone want to stop the uprooting of a corrupt federal government and saving billions in taxpayer dollars?  Only those who enable big government are upset, for with each cleansing, the wasteful, fraudulent, venal political insides of the bureaucracy are exposed.  It is as bad for progressives as a Jeffrey Epstein client list.  Their names will be all over the inconsequential, unsupervised, carelessly self-interested programs funded with taxpayer money.

Progressives, already on the run after their humiliating defeat at the hands of Donald Trump, are now in even more hysterical disbelief.  Big government, the heart and soul of Democrat, liberal, progressive policy for ages, is coming down, turned to dust and rubble; and shocked and incredulous, they can only stand by and watch.

The rest of the country is delighted.  The United States will return to its origins, to federalism, small government, private enterprise, and individual freedom – the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution, but more so the freedom from government.

Big Government’s last hurrah, the end of bureaucratic days, the re-launching of a conservative, practical nation – not so much Making America Great Again, but returning it to its fundamental, Enlightenment, individualistic roots. 

Blessed Art Thou Among Women – A Nun’s Tale From Priory to Cat House

Delia Masterson had been a delightful, obedient, dutiful child – a sweetheart, a natural charmer, and her parents’ pride and joy.  She curtsied when meeting adults, said yes Ma’am and no Ma’am, did the dishes without complaint, went to bed without a fuss, and came down to breakfast all bright and cheery every morning.

The Mastersons were good Catholics and went to church regularly, but little Delia found something more than ritual and obligation in the Mass. From First Communion onwards, she became a prayerful, inspired girl.  Religion was not something to be acquired like a handbag or a pair of shoes, but something glorious and intimate.  From the first chords of the organ to the final processional, Delia was in another world where Jesus was her brother and God her father.  As she walked out of St. Maurice with her mother and father, she was always in tears, tears of joy for having been in the presence of the Lord.

 

While Mr. and Mrs. Masterson were outwardly pleased at the piety and devotion of their daughter, they were inwardly a bit concerned.  Religion was all well and good up to a point – a social center, a moral meeting place, but little more -and here was young Delia taking it seriously, and they feared the worst, a religious vocation, a nunnery, cloisters, and a dead end for a bright, talented girl.

The nuns of St. Maurice, trained to spot new talent, saw Delia’s potential immediately, and they did everything to encourage it. They were especially kind to her – most children remember nuns more as prison guards than kindly women – invited her to tea, and talked of the Holy Family and how she was one of Jesus’ little children.

 

Puberty would do it, the nuns knew.  If Delia stayed the course and maintained her spiritual fidelity and piety as she matured as a young woman, she might well have a vocation.  If she turned tarty and boy crazy, and love of God went down the drain, they could discontinue their outreach and fish in other ponds.

To their surprise and absolute delight, the girl became only more prayerful as she grew older. A stunningly beautiful girl whose sexual maturity had turned her into a National Velvet Elizabeth Taylor, she could have made her way with ease in secular society; but she eschewed male attention, made the stations of the cross, received holy communion each and every Sunday and asked to see the convent where the nuns lived.

 

To make a long story short, Delia Masterson opted for the religious life and at eighteen was taken in as a novice to the Rosicrucian Order Of The Virgin Mary. It was there, ironically, that the banked fires of an ardent sexuality burned hot, and the heady mix of love for Jesus and Mary Sue Bartlett, sweet cornflower from Chillicothe was overwhelmingly beautiful. She never had a scintilla of doubt that this double life was what Jesus meant when he talked of love for all mankind; and since her passion for Mary Sue only doubled as they knelt next to each other at the communion rail, she knew that the priory was for her.

Yet only God knows for sure what he created, and Delia was indeed a complex confection, so when she found herself in the arms of Devon Price, technician, sometimes sculptor, deliciously male attendant upon her beauty, she was at first surprised, then delighted.  She knew that in traditional, canonical terms, she had overstepped her bounds, but she had this firm belief in the wholesomeness and universality of Jesus’ love and felt she had done no wrong. 

Her passion burned at both ends, and slowly but surely her vocation became an afterthought.  The priory was little more than a hothouse for sexual passion and desire.  As she walked out the door, asked to leave by Mother Superior, but still in love with Jesus, she faced the world with some misgivings.  What now?

 

She had been trained only for the religious life and had no practical skills, no credentials, and no job future and if she was honest with herself, was good at only only one thing – sex.  She knew that both men and women found her irresistibly desirable, and she was able to rouse the most hidden and repressed sexual desires in both.  Did this not suggest a career?

Once again she turned to Jesus for advice and counsel.  She knew what the Church would say, but Jesus the all-loving, the compassionate; the infinitely understanding would not turn away.

Mrs. Lambert Rivers was a patrician lady from Beacon Hill who understood the sexual preferences of the well-to-do, and had had many affairs with them.  She knew that there were just as many elegant hostesses of Boston who wanted a discreet but passionate affair with younger women as there were those who preferred young men; and so Mrs. Rivers facilitated introductions, and over tea and biscuits arranged many informal affairs.

 

It was particularly satisfying to meet the needs of her people, the well-born, the sophisticated, and wealthy women of Boston; and to do it with women.  Men had always been assumed to be the natural clients for such services; but Mrs. Rivers knew otherwise, and her ‘social club’ was the sought after place on the Charles.  She was discreet, charming, and welcoming to the women who came to her, and outside of her clients, few knew of the real inner workings of her establishment.

Delia met Mrs. Rivers at a Catholic convocation in Framingham.  Despite the quite unusual paths they had trod, both women had remained devout Catholics, although their reasons were quite different. While Jesus was Delia’s companion, her soul mate, her loving partner, he was a principal in Mrs. Rivers’ spiritual firm – the CEO of her secular enterprise which gave her context and a certain security.  Dealing with such intimacy and personal uniqueness was a responsibility.

And so it was that the two women came to a felicitous agreement.  Delia would work for Mrs. Rivers, be paid well, be invited to the Islands by the most congenial of clients, and have her pick of any of the young men who satisfied these women’s ‘other’ demands.

Sex is a marvelous, multi-layered, multi-faceted, unexplainable phenomenon; and in any city one can find entrepreneurs who satisfy the demand.  From ghetto pimps and ho’s to the tony, exclusive, bi-sexual arrangements of Mrs. Rivers Social Club, there are hundreds if not thousands of way stations for the sexually ambitious.

For some reason many of the matrons of Beacon Hill, Park Avenue, and Georgetown who came to the Club were as devoutly Catholic as Mrs. Rivers and Delia Masterson and in the same uniquely passionate way.  Jesus actually meant something to them, and without him life would have a distinctly missing piece.  He was as much a part of their sexual enterprise as anyone.

The Homecoming – Donald Trump, Jesus, And A White House As White As Can Be

‘Religion is back!’ said the President on Easter Sunday, the most holy of Christian holidays, a day only a year ago was celebrated by former President Biden as Transgender Day.  Instead of Holy Week processions, a solemn High Mass, and thankfulness for the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the White house was festooned with gay pride flags, colored with pink lighting, and honored with transgender women all flouncy, dressed to the nines, high heels and silk stockings, frilly dresses, gold and silver, redolent with Yves St Laurent.

 

The nation was outraged, and that absurd event was the straw that broke the camel's back.  Having already had quite enough woke, badgered and hammered for four years with race, gender, and ethnicity, black this, black that, queerness, and diversity, when the President festooned himself in gay finery, put on the gayest Cage Aux Folles drag show the nation had ever seen at the very moment Jesus Christ was being nailed to the cross, Walmart greeters, shoe salesmen, and housewives howled travesty, and Joe Biden breathed his last political breath.  

Of course there were other reasons for Biden to go – high taxation, open immigration, punitive environmentalism, and impossible restrictions on private enterprise – but it was this Easter transgression that did it. All the rest could be dismissed as political exaggeration, easily reversed by a conservative administration; but this impossibly ignorant, weird transmogrification of any decent sense of religious sentiment, this attempt to humiliate Christians could not. 

Easter! The holiest of holy days, the most important date in the Christian calendar, a day of such significance and such spiritual, historical, and ecclesiastical importance that it overshadowed all others treated by Biden as a bother, another obstacle to progressivism and secular reform.

Religion, said these progressives, would mark a retrograde turn to Bible-thumping hysteria, ecstasy, born again nonsense, and mindless, abject, floor-scraping idolatry.  The causes of the black man, the other-gendered, the poor, the marginalized, and the forgotten would be ditched in favor of some airy fairy faux visionary blather.  What had religion ever done for the world but been the right hand man of colonialism?

It was the black robes, the friars, monks and priests that sailed with the conquistadors, blessing the establishment of a Christian reign over the savages of the indigenous tribes of the Americas.  It was the Crusaders sent by Pope Urban II to liberate Jerusalem from the infidel who slaughtered, raped, and maimed thousands in the name of Jesus Christ.  Worst of all it is the Jews who are currently massacring tens of thousands of Palestinians in the name of Moses, Abraham, and God.

Religion simply gets in the way.

So when Donald Trump proclaimed a new age of religion, and in one fell swoop wiped years of liberal secular sanctimony clean, progressives were incredulous.  Not only was he intending to allow religious belief to take precedence over secular progress, the irony of such an evil man claiming the right to do so was infuriating; and yet, they could only stand by and watch.  Their credibility already non-existent thanks to their capitulating internationalism, their wild environmentalism, and their hysterical championing of the black man and homosexuals, had dropped to near zero after the Biden Easter fiasco.

If this wasn’t bad enough, the second Trump Administration was as white as snow, lily white, universally white, blonde, blue eyed, flaxen haired white.  It was a reversal of the centerpiece of progressivism – multiculturalism.  For progressives diversity had a higher value, it was innately, unquestionably right and good.  It was naturally good, it was syllogistically good, irrevocably good.  A crowd of black and brown people was ipso facto better, more morally correct, more historically right than a crowd of whites.

 

And in a flash that assumption was tossed aside, left on the curb, dismissed, derogated, and forgotten.  It was white, European civilization since Ancient Greece and Rome which had given the world higher learning, art, culture, science, administration, and jurisprudence.  While Africa was still a Neolithic, Stone Age place, Europe was a land of cathedrals, palaces, arches and aqueducts, vineyards and wheat fields.  Not only was there no shame in being European, there was pride in its heritage.  Whiteness meant greatness, it was as simple as that.

Progressives in their monotone harping about the evils of colonialism have refused to accept European white accomplishment if not glory.  Their historical revisionism has been an expression of this cultural myopia.

 

The new Trump Administration, therefore, is not just a new, different political regime – it is a socially transformative one.  It has vowed to reject multiculturalism as an innate higher good and to replace it with universal opportunity.  Success will be colorblind – whoever reaches the top will be lauded for their ability, talent, and intelligence, nothing more.  In its pledge to restore religion to prominence, it has simply reflected the aspirations of every culture, none of which are without God, gods, or spirits.

It is no wonder that progressives are a scattered, scratchy, aimless lot.  If their humiliating defeat at the polls wasn't bad enough, the new president has committed himself to remaking America in the image of the Fifties – a white, religious, patriotic, and wholly ambitious place.

It is no wonder that the Left is dazed and confused, still pandering and howling racism and white supremacy, capitalist greed, neo-colonialism and bloody adventurism, but with no one listening.  Of course their claques and shills on the coasts are still shaking their heads in disbelief, certain that moral rectitude and government compassion will return, but now with no moral, political, or socially believable core, that is doubtful at best.

A few progressives are leaving America.  It is too horrible a place to live, they say, too vile to abide, and they fear for their lives; but these wealthy, privileged few are not giving up their citizenship or their right of return. Europe is a fanciful idyll at best, an imagined world of high culture and tolerance when of course the continent, thanks to uncontrolled Islamization, is turning into a far more rabid, hysterical, and intolerant place than America ever could be.  Worse for these expatriating idealists, Europe is fast becoming as conservative as Trump’s America.

Giorgia Meloni, President of Italy has said that she wants to restore, rebuild, and promote the greatness of the West, not a geographical place, but a state of mind and culture, an intellectual region of logic, brilliance, openness, and spirit; and it is just this cultural ethos that the Trump revolution intends to  restore.

 

The Left Scatters Like A Flock Of Startled Pigeons - Oh, Lord, What's A Mother To Do?

Bob Muzelle had proudly called himself a social justice warrior.  He knew that the term had been coopted by the Right and twisted into a caricature of anyone committed to social reform; but still when he deconstructed the term, he was pleased.

 

'Social' - for Bob that's what the struggle was all about, reversing the nefarious trend of individualism, self-interest, and personal ambition and directing America's energy towards a collective, collaborative, and compassionate goal.

'Justice' - a founding principle of the Republic, enshrined in the Constitution, hallowed in every jurisdiction of America, but ignored, dismissed, and deformed by an increasingly autocratic Right.  Restoring 'equal justice under the law' meant restoring the rights of black people who have never achieved racial parity; honoring the rights of newly emergent genders; and respecting the honest labor of the working man and giving him his due. 

'Warrior' was the most apt description of Bob.  He felt anointed, a Crusader headed off to Jerusalem, sword in hand, ready to remove the infidel from The Promised Land, the Holiest of Holies.  There was no way that the Usurper, the Interloper Trump should remain one more day in power, for each twenty-four hours produced more mayhem, more wanton destruction, and more penitential misery for the poor. 

 

For the millions that elected Donald Trump, and the millions more who have given him the highest approval rating of any modern president after his first hundred days, the original, sarcastic meaning of the term was even more appropriate now.  

These SJWs were the very caricature of the airy-fairy, fantastical, irrelevant notions of the past.  They were the self-anointed priests of an unwelcome, imposed, and increasingly hated orthodoxy - men posing as women, the black man on the top of the human pyramid, illegal immigrants ordained as freedom-seekers; and the dismantling of free enterprise, the cancelling of history, and the shutting down of free speech. 

Impossible as it seems, these SJWs were still at it, flailing like demented dervishes in a St. Vitus' dance, baying to the moon, howling, screaming to the heavens.  The country in a few short weeks was shedding the penumbra of progressivism and returning to sense and sensibility, ready to return to its Christian, conservative, Jeffersonian principles of the Enlightenment. 

When the news of Donald Trump's victory was made known, disbelief turned into a maniacal fear - all that progressives had fought for, worked for, and laid down their lives for was gone in a gully-washer, swept away like so much detritus in a flood.  Bob and his colleagues stood openmouthed, gaping at the television screens as the insurmountable votes were tallied, stood stunned and paralyzed until reality set in, and then the flailing began.  It was as though a firecracker had been thrown into a flock of pigeons - terrified chaos, each bird flipping and flapping his way up. 

Bob wandered aimlessly up and down K Street, looking for companionship, some of the old Solidarity and La Lucha Continua bravado, some post to lean up against while he caught his breath. But there was none, and he had to move into shop doorways to let pass the throngs of young, blonde, blue-eyed Trumpists headed for the White House.  The cheering, the exuberance, the sheer delight of these crowds was something to behold, but for Bob a sign of the Apocalypse, the End of Days, the beginning of the long night of misery. 

Bob found no companionship because every other SJW, startled by the firecracker hopped and jumped and ran for shelter - north to the welcoming Hate Has No Home Here neighborhoods of Northwest, east to Latino Land, west to the River, south to Anacostia and the ghetto - anywhere they might be welcomed, given shelter. 

Yet the white suburbs were giving a sigh of relief that they no longer had to hew to a progressive line that was becoming increasingly unhinged. Salvadoran house painters and leaf blowers welcomed the New Age of their young, conservative president who swept the country clean of Mara Salvatrucha MS-13 gangbangers, slapped them ex judicia into prison, and came to Washington in strong alliance with the American President. 

Only the black community was non-plussed, for national politics never concerned them in the first place, and this white boy in the Oval Office had the long knives out for them anyway. 

'What's a mother to do', was the plaintive cry of the fluttering Left, a reprise of the old Fifties ad, motherhood, old fashioned values, and children, an ironic wailing for times past. 

In the most laughable, pitiable moments since the election, former President Joe Biden and his Vice President Kamala Harris have shown up in public.  Biden who in his last years of his Presidency never knew what was what, so around the bend that he imagined the White House to be his Delaware beach house and the Oval Office his childhood playpen; and Harris who not once in her tenure ever made sense were back at it, on the stump, reiterating old, discredited notions of faux righteousness. 

What were they thinking?  What were Biden, removed from his office like old files, and Harris laughed at from within for her ditzy, black-this-black-that vaudevillian charade, doing in public? Or the old, Soviet wannabee Bernie Sanders dancing with his new date, Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, a woman as empty-headed as a glass bowl, bound and determined to be taken seriously but with few takers?

 It was a side show of bearded ladies, two-headed babies, dwarves, and misfits.  The country had moved on, but these fools were still at it, banging away as though someone was paying attention. 

Bob's posse did regroup, and met in a cold water basement flat somewhere east of the park, huddled together in commiseration, fellowship, and anger.  This will not stand! Bob shouted to rousing backslapping and hugs, but when they emerged from their midnight cabal, Washington was still that miserably happy, white, blonde, blue-eyed grotesquerie they had left the night before.

In one fell swoop, the borders were closed, illegal immigrants were being deported, federal funds denied from anti-Semitic universities, wokeness shut down from pillar to post, a new realpolitik foreign policy in place, the harnesses, bits, and traces off the the private sector, and gas, oil, and rare earth reserves drilled, mined, and shoveled.  

Lawfare, the only recourse remaining to the discombobulated Left, was in full swing, as Democrat-appointed judges tried to block the Trump Administration from its appointed rounds.  Rather than create an outcry, it resulted in hurrahs. Finally, and hopefully once and for all, this blatant abuse of judicial authority would be stopped in its tracks.  'So sue me' was the Trump meme in his New York mean street real estate days, and was now. 

'Go home!' shouted a crowd of Trump supporters to the Farragut Square, old time, progressive revivalist rally a block from the White House; but Bob and his fellow SJWs had no place to go.  The whole country was being washed as clean as the Augean Stables of flighty notions, so no port in a storm, no accommodating, welcome place of love and companionship. 

 

The SJWs were surprised at the public reaction - so unfriendly, so unsympathetic when all they were trying to do was point the nation in the right direction; but they were as tone deaf now as they had been for decades.  

A cheered comeuppance for these hectoring boobs was the conclusion of those who took over, and not one tear was shed for the scattering pigeons as off they went. 

The Vanity Of Foreign Travel - A Cruise Ship To Nowhere

In Sinclair Lewis' Dodsworth, the main character, Fran Dodsworth, is a hopelessly bourgeois, socially ambitious woman who convinces her husband - wealthy, secure, and happy as the founder and President of an independently produced automobile company - to sell it and travel with her to Europe.  They go from one capital to another, she looking for sophistication and the attention of royalty, and he following dutifully, longing to return to his simple, rewarding, productive life back home. 

Lewis writes: 

Since the days of Alexander the Great there has been a fashionable belief that travel is agreeable and highly educative. Actually, it is one of the most arduous yet boring of all pastimes and, except in the case of a few experts who go globetrotting for special purposes, it merely provides the victim with more topics about which to show ignorance…The Great Traveler has shot lions in Siberia and gophers in Minnesota, and played tennis with the King at Stockholm. He can give you a delightful evening discoursing on Tut's tomb and the ethnology of the Maoris.

Actually, the great traveler is usually a small mussy person in a faded green fuzzy hat, inconspicuous in a corner of the steamer bar. He speaks only one language, and that gloomily…He is as valuable as Baedeker in regard to hotels and railroads, only not so accurate.  He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all…

These are the laws of travel…It is the awful toil which is the most distressing phase of travel. If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows, it is the irritation of getting tickets, packing, finding trains, lying in bouncing berths, washing without water, digging out passports, and fighting through customs. To live in Carlsbad is seemly and to loaf at San Remo healing to the soul, but to get from Carlsbad to San Remo is of the devil.

Actually, most of those afflicted with the habit of traveling merely lie about its pleasures and profits. They do not travel to see anything, but to get away from themselves, which they never do, and away from rowing with their relatives--only to find new relatives with whom to row. They travel to escape thinking, to have something to do, just as they might play solitaire, work cross-word puzzles, look at the cinema, or busy themselves with any other dreadful activity. These things the Dodsworths discovered, though, like most of the world, they never admitted them. 

 

Worse, as Lewis claims, is the desire “to escape thinking, to have something to do, just as [one] might play solitaire, work cross-word puzzles, look at the cinema, or busy themselves with any other dreadful activity”. 

Hermione Adams, a single woman long alone, had always wanted to travel ever since she saw pictures of Le Cafe des Deux Magots in her French reader.  When Alain Dufour came to the school as an exchange student, the case was sealed.  She would go to France as soon as possible, follow her dream, and live the life of an expatriate. 

She, unlike Fran Dodsworth, was a simple woman who had caught a glimpse of life beyond the prairie and felt that travel to Europe would be the entree to a glamourous, romantic world of fine food, elegance, and savoir faire.  Europe would not replace her Midwestern life, only nourish and embellish it. Travel would be 'elucidating'. 

Paul Theroux, American novelist and travel writer, wrote The Tao of Travel, a collection of writing from travel writers from Ibn Battuta to the present, all of whom had understood the allure of travel, its almost epiphanic character, and its magical freedom. 

Travel for Theroux was never incidental, but central.  Travelling alone, removed from family, friends, and responsibility with no one to turn to, no one to trust, and no one to provide support, confidence, or simple help - jettisoning every piece of personal baggage, cutting all social, cultural, and intimate ties - is the only way in a prescribed and predictable life to allow for discovery if not epiphany. 

You go away for a long time and return a different person – you never come all the way back.

Travel is at its best a solitary enterprise: to see, to examine, to assess, you have to be all alone and unencumbered…..It is hard to see clearly or to think straight in the company of other people.  What is required is the lucidity of loneliness to capture that vision which, however banal, seems in your private mood to be special and worthy of interest.

Travel which is nearly always seen as an attempt to escape from the ego, is in my opinion, just the opposite.  Nothing induces concentration or inspires memory like an alien landscape or foreign culture.  It is simply not possible (as romantics think) to lose yourself in an exotic place.  Much more likely is an experience of intense nostalgia, a harking back to an earlier stage of your life….What makes the whole experience vivid and sometimes thrilling is the juxtaposition of the present and the past.

Individual travel is a personal privilege.  For weeks or months at a time, one can travel on one's own, freed from domestic and professional responsibilities and so unconcerned about them, they cease to exist.  The traveler begins to see things through his own eyes, and reflect on them with a perspective unencumbered by family, home, nation, friends. Returning home, the traveler, having become solitary, independent, unattached, and guilt-free for so long can only seem strange and indifferent to his wife and children. 

At the same time such willing detachment brings home and family into relief, not with regret, but with appreciation.  

A painful part of travel, the most emotional for me in may respects, is the sight of people leading ordinary lives, especially people at work or with their families; or ones in uniform, or laden with equipment, or paying bills.

Tourism is big business, and Paris, Rome, and New York welcome millions of visitors each year.  The Eiffel Tower, the Tower of Pisa, and the Empire State Building are, despite their familiarity, perennial favorites.  Why, exactly?  The Eiffel Tower, other than an iconic image of Paris, is no more than a Victorian, early-Industrial Age construction, surprising and remarkable at the time, but only an architectural curiosity now.

The  leaning Tower of Pisa even less remarkable as a structure and insignificant as a historical moment with no particular iconic value is on most Italian tours.  The Empire State Building has historical interest as one of the important skyscrapers of the modern era, but it is of far less immediate significance and interest than the many contemporary glass towers surrounding it.

Tourism is not the same thing as travel, but Hermione didn't know the difference.  Without fully realizing it, she wanted the insights and particular vision of the traveler, but was trapped within the American dream of expansionism, always wanting more, never content with the way things are, and happy enough to recreate, fantasize, and imagine without having to understand. 

So she was betwixt and between - the unschooled, simple American who needed to leave Chillicothe, Grover's Corners, or Zenith for no other reason than to expand her horizons, see how the rest of the world lived, finally be someone other than the dowdy librarian and church goer and become the perceptive, interior, intelligent woman who knew life had to be more than the prairie, the farm, and the river. 

Vladimir Nabokov, a unique traveler and one who valued the inscription of events on memory and the importance of place and time said:

To a greater or lesser extent there goes on in every person a struggle between two forces: the longing for privacy and the urge to go places: introversion, that is, interest directed within oneself toward one’s own inner live of vigorous thought and fancy; and extroversion, interest directed outward, toward the external world of people and tangible values

 

Theroux agrees, but adds:

Africa seemingly incomplete and so empty, is a place for travelers to create personal myths and indulge themselves in fantasies of atonement and redemption, melodramas of suffering, of strength – binding up wounds, feeding the hungry, looking after refugees, making long journeys in expensive Land Rovers, recreating stereotypes, even living out a whole cosmology of creation and destruction.  That’s why many travelers in Africa are determined to see it not as fifty-three countries but rather as a single, troubled, landscape

Theroux writes for and about the few - those particularly educated, wise, and intellectual adventurers who find foreignness itself intriguing.  Are we humans all the same? Or are we divided and different by culture? Is their a commonality to language, some innate configuration which demands logic? Or is it simply expressive of environment, history, and unpredictable forces?  Are there common threads to humanity?

Josef Conrad answered this question in The Heart of Darkness. 'The horror...the horror', says Kurtz on his deathbed when he realizes that the savagery he has seen in the tribes deep in the African rainforest and realized in himself, is universal, the most basic, profound, and ineradicable part of human nature. 

For the many - the legions of Hermione Adams, tourists hungry for sights and sounds but with no eagerness for anything more than a visit, no interest let alone patience to unravel, unclothe, or investigate anything.  Perhaps this is a good thing - if it weren't for foreign travel, Americans would still be eating pot roast.  Amidst the glop and goo of inedible offerings in Paris, the tourist usually finds something to bring home; but for the most part, tourism is one routine drive-by incidental affair.  

Particularly now in the age of virtual reality the towers, arenas, and monuments of Europe ticked off on an all-expenses-included tour can be reproduced with absolute fidelity through AI.  There soon will be no difference between virtuality and reality. 

If she was being honest with herself, Hermione did hope to meet a count or viscount on the slopes of Gstaad or at the casinos of Monte Carlo, but once on the bus between Trocadero and the Tuileries, between lunch and dinner, she knew it would never happen. 

Nothing exciting happened on her European tour, nothing except endless train rides, on-and-off bus stops, one-night each at unremarkable hotels, and predictably oo-la-la meals that beneath the sauce and hoopla were not that much different from Dot's Kitchen. 

Like all Americans, she was happy to be 'foreign returned' and stirred up a bit of fuss at her book club and church group.  'Meet anybody interesting?', the girls hinted enviously; but soon enough the trip faded, the photo album gathered dust, and Hermione went back to business, not unhappy she traveled, but not particularly happy either. 

This in the words of one social scientist had a name - American Travel Letdown, the realization that the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, and the Danube were just things in a different place, irrelevancies, oddities remembered vaguely but without timbre, color, or tone,  Just things.

For the likes of Ibn Battuta, Nabokov, Burton, Park, or Theroux - eye-painters, philosophers, adventurers - travel was immeasurably important and central to their lives as artists and thinkers.  It offered a distance, a perspective, and insights that could never occur in familiar, predictable surroundings. 

For everyone else, it was time, effort, and money wasted.