The Perks Of High Office - The Sexual Diary Of A Milkmaid In The White House

Mary Farnsworth was born, raised, and educated in Chillicothe, Ohio - except of course for two years at a community college in Dayton which her father insisted upon and paid for, so bound and determined was he to see all his five daughters properly educated, no matter what the school. 

The college was called MK by Ohio Staters who looked down on Milton College and gave it its moniker thanks to the stupid kids who went there and couldn't spell; but it was the perfect launching pad for Mary who, sick and tired of goats, chickens, and barnyards, saw it is the first step to Washington, the place she felt she belonged more than any other.  More than New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles, the Nation's Capital was the seat of real power where legislators were able to effect systemic changes in the way the country worked, enabling it to serve more, to serve better, and to serve all.  

This was a fantasy, of course, for anyone who has lived and worked in Washington knows what a den of thieves, con artists, and snake oil salesmen it is.  Take the Congressional representative from her district, a man with one hand in the till and the other up some woman's skirt since his days as city alderman and state legislator.  He was a prick and a jerk but with a canny sense of opportunity; and so with every shady feint, cross-over, and pas de deux he advanced his career and made it to Capitol Hill. 

Washington being the kind of town it is - little changed since the days of hanging judges, frontier justice, saloons, whore houses, and gunfighting - no one seemed to notice the flimsiness of the Ohioan's resume, nor felt the need to dig deeper to find the 'truth', for in Washington the truth itself is a fiction, a laid-on-thick pastiche, a shadow play, anything but a serious place of rectitude and national purpose. 

Mary, a savvy girl in her own right had seen right through her Congressman's chicanery and knew that he was just a bloated windbag; but if he could fool most of the people most of the time, then she certainly didn't need any more of an education than MK could provide, and when she graduated she headed straight for the Potomac and Congressman X's chambers. 

Now, Mary was not only a smart, canny girl, but a beautiful one, the kind that the Midwest is famous for - blonde, blue-eyed, flaxen-haired, peaches-and-cream complexion and an innocence that made you weep - ; and so it was that when she walked into the Congressman's office, she was welcomed with more than just professional interest.  She would be a feather in the old philandering bugger's cap before the end of the term, and he hired her on the spot. 

Mary learned the trade and having no particular sexual compunctions, pleasured the Congressman enough to keep his interest but no more.  As his sexual dependence on her grew (he was almost becoming a liability to the Democratic ranks, so obvious was his dalliance), his favors increased, and before long she was not just filing, but considering, commenting, annotating, and preparing. The step from intern to aide was a short, quick one. 

Of course other members of Congress had early on taken note of Mary, understood her opportunism, i.e. doing and diddling for political favors, and thought that they could offer her more and tempt her to greater riches to which she well agreed and before long had made her way up through the Democratic ranks to leadership.

Her affair with the Senate Minority leader was a poorly-kept secret, but since Mary knew that with every rumor and innuendo, her stock would go up in value since sex is the currency in the Capital, she encouraged them.  

 

When innuendoes became too strong to ignore, the Minority Leader appeared with his wife, and after an affectionate political pas de deux, the whispers became knowing smiles, and then disappeared.  These public appearances were very distasteful to him in the first place - to be seen with this old crone was tantamount to political exile - and he was glad when they were no longer de rigeur.  

After all Sarkozy, Mitterrand, Putin and even Kim Jong Il had mistresses, beautiful young ones, and their wives were no hothouse plants either; but pose with her he did until things quieted down which mattered little since Mary had moved on to a position in the Trump White House. 

There were no secrets, no clandestine affairs, no political sanctimony there.  The President, unlike his predecessor was a red-blooded, virile, macho man who set the tone for the White House - young, blonde beauties like Mary were not only welcomed but were the symbol of the Administration's anti-DEI movement.  The White House would be returned to its roots, white, European, sophisticated, sexy, and elegant.  A middle-brow Camelot to be sure - Donald Trump had no pretentions of that kind of aristocratic sophistication - but one joyously retroactive and white as the driven snow. 

Far from an unused fixture, Mary went about her business, and before long had attracted the attention of more than a few male Cabinet members who were young, ambitious, and not at all shy about their sexual intentions.  More light-footed stepping was required here.  

Par for the course and perk of the office that casual sex might be, care was important, particularly in the uber-Type A environment of the White House.  These high-profile, high-volume appointees might not take her sexual mobility as well as her Congressional lovers who were really just boyish simpletons, happy to get away from their wives for a short interlude. The air in these upper echelons was a lot more rarified. 

What about the Oval Office itself? Would not the Chief Executive like to be accompanied by other than granite-statue Melania? Especially because the world knew that he was an admirer of women, had squired beauties his whole life and encouraged everyone on his staff to loosen up. 'We're not Sleepy Joe', he said.

 

How does one return to Chillicothe, Ohio after that? But return she did, kudos in hand, tributes written, and acknowledgements of thanks from the President himself, back to the farm.  She was the happy flip side to the old adage, You Can't Keep Them Down On The Farm Once They've Seen Gay Paree. She had had her fling, knew always what was what and when to exit stage left.  She had become a master of the graceful exit and no one in Washington harbored anything but warm feelings and happy memories of her. 

This was what womanhood was all about, the glories of Shakespeare's, Lawrence's, Ibsen's, and Strindberg's defiantly strong, calculatingly brilliant women.  Women who bested men at every turn, turned tricks and magic, penned journals and solved insoluble puzzles. 

'One and done', she said to a friend. The true victor retires from the field of battle a hero unscarred, praised, and remembered. 

The Taming Of The Shrew - The Sexual Epiphany Of A Bitch And The Key To A Happy Marriage

In Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, Kate thanks Petruchio for having found her, opened her heart, and given her the happiness in love she always desired, and in return gives him honor, respect, and the promise of fidelity 

Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,
Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,
And for thy maintenance commits his body
To painful labor both by sea and land,
To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,
Whilst thou liest warm at home, secure and safe;
And craves no other tribute at thy hands
But love, fair looks and true obedience

Too little payment for so great a debt. 

Such duty as the subject owes the prince
Even such a woman oweth to her husband...

Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare,
That seeming to be most which we indeed least are.
Then vail your stomachs, for it is no boot,
And place your hands below your husband's foot:
In token of which duty, if he please,

My hand is ready; may it do him ease.

  

Marfa Potter read these lines at Brown and was disgusted, tossed her annotated volume of Shakespeare's Collected Works in the trash, and withdrew from Professor Harold Simmons' class with this note:

Shakespeare and you are disgruntled, unhappy misogynists without any sense or sensibility about women.  You, Professor Simmons, continue to propagate the distortions and sexual myopia of men under cover of Shakespearean 'greatness'.  He, for all his poetic wizardry and historical flair, was nothing but a raging bigot...

And here she went on to cite the many references of vile hatred of women in the plays - Posthumous, Othello, Cymbeline, Leontes, and Richard III - dismissed Romeo and Juliet as an adolescent wet dream, and consigned the Bard to the dustbin of some academic's hapless and hopeless ambition. 

Without realizing it, she had become as vixenish, shrewish and impossibly man-hating as any woman since the Gorgons, Greek sisters who could petrify any man who looked upon them; and in this punishing, vitriolic letter to Prof. Simmons, finally came out of the feminine closet.  No more complaisance and obeisance to male patriarchy.  No more bowing and scraping to immature, puerile male sexuality.  No more saccharine smiles, no more demure, virginal deference. 

Epiphanies come in all sizes and colors, and the outing of this nasty, ill-considered, bitch was one of the most exhilarating and transforming.  From that moment on Marfa went on a tear.  No male dominion was safe from her hurtling viciousness, no man innocent of censure.  In a short time even the radical feminist campus organization, Cunts!, kept her at arms length. 

Marfa had become a whirling dervish of rancor, hate, and resolute misandry; and while she was at it took on every seemingly benign expression of male subjugation.  The happy family, that faux ideal of a bad Norman Rockwell painting, that throwback to frilly aprons and turkey dinners, that procreative gulag was but one of her targets, and everything followed - the church, that universal male autocracy, capitalism the redoubt of greedy, sexually impotent men...Her targets were endless, her scorn and retributive anger unhinged and frightening. 

 

No one wanted to go near her, not even the bull dyke transfers from Bernal Heights, the truck-driving, jackbooted tough girls whose scorched earth policy of extermination frightened the most resolute of campus gender activists.  She was the Genghis Khan of the university, and the spiked heads of her victims were arrayed from pillar to post. 

After graduation from Brown, her life was a peripatetic journey of radical feminism, with stops in all the underground, armed-and-dangerous cells of bad, angry women, far right cabals of razor-wielding anarchists from coast to coast. Here she felt at least comfortable, if that bourgeois, accommodating term could ever be used in a hostile, male-hating environment.  The women in these clusters were truly nasty, bitter, and ugly.  Nothing that came out of their mouths was anything but spewing rants of viciousness. 

Now Marfa, despite her bad bitch, bull dagger persona was actually as straight as an arrow, and although she would never admit it to herself let alone her sisters in arms, she wanted a man.  No dildo, fingering, cunt-licking hijinks would do; and this caused her to up the ante, howl and scream invectives even louder in hopes of quieting the voices in her head. 

Yet she knew that the louder she cursed and yelled, the slimmer the chances of meeting Mister Right, and the greater became her confusion.  What kind of a feminist was she to even entertain such patently bourgeois, ignorant thoughts?  The very idea of a cock deep into her, sending her into paroxysms of delight, rocking her into oblivious ecstasy, was anathema, unthinkable, and disgusting. 

But there it was, indelibly and ironically placed somewhere in her psyche, and as hard as she tried, the thought kept occurring.  To counter it she slept with one woman after another, but each and every time  she extricated herself from her partner's cunt by cunt scissor grip, she found herself wondering, 'What on earth am I doing here?'. 

And so it was that she met her Petruchio, a man out of the blue who found this untamed wild woman attractive - or rather a challenge.  He like his Venetian counterpart had bedded untold women but had found their complaisance insipid, their affection girlish and unwanted, and their feigned love and affection transparent.  One after another, one by one, he left them on the curb, sobbing emotional  wrecks. 

There was Marfa, defiant and impatient, arm in arm with some butch, striding down Broadway, the two of them in work boots and overalls like hod carriers or steel workers, but who turned away and gave him a look that betrayed her interest, a look like all women gave him, or at least those who were sexually attuned to unrepentant and unapologetic men like him. 

If one was a true Bardolater, loving Kate's taming by Petruchio or simply a savvy male who understood women's need for strength, direction, and conclusive sexual interest and took well advantage of it, there would be no surprise in Marfa's quick turnaround. 

At first she couldn't believe the young man's insolence and indifference, his dismissiveness and inattention.  Interests and ideas clashed - she hated him for his male superiority and assumption of misogynistic potency but was attracted to him because of it.  What did he want? and why did he want it? She was the example of lesbo defiance, couldn't he see that? She belonged in Bernal Heights not in the bed with this sexual troglodyte. 

But there it was, and a seeming flash, she had jettisoned every last one of her female associates and became his lover, his servant, his dutiful, adoring partner.  

Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth,
Unapt to toil and trouble in the world,
But that our soft conditions and our hearts
Should well agree with our external parts?

They became an item, a princely couple. D.H. Lawrence would not have been surprised at the affair. He understood sexual equilibrium and channeled Shakespeare when he wrote of sexual epiphany, a perfectly balanced sexual encounter.  To the phooey of his critics who branded him a sexual illusionist and romantic dreamer, he asked that they simply look around them; and indeed what they, or any generation of men had seen, was a measure of complicity in women, that sexual, self-interested, shared centrism that he talked about.

 

Those women who had known her were sure that she would quickly tire of this dalliance, this out of character temporary fugue, this adventure; but she did not.  She was last seen in Chillicothe, Ohio, the young man's hometown, working a farm with him and their four children. 

Go figure, said those who thought they knew her but had been so caught up in gender identity cant that they overlooked human sexual nature, let alone Lawrence and Shakespeare. Too bad, Marfa thought, reflecting on the happy circumstances of her life. 

Who Am I? - The Frivolous Search For Identity When You Are One Of Eight Billion

'We are all God's creatures', said Father O'Rourke to the young man sitting before him in the sacristy of The Church of the Redeemer who had asked the unanswerable question, 'Who am I?'

The priest knew that the country was awash in 'identity' but the term had been limited to race, gender, and ethnicity, unhelpful terms given the enormity of creation and the true God-given individualization of every human being, and so he thought it best to offer spiritual advice. 

'God gave us each an individual soul', the priest went on. 'A unique, divinely inspired character knowable only to Him and to the bearer; a gift of promise and hope'; but the young man stared at him blankly.  He had heard all of this before, and was in no mood for spiritual placebos.  He was kept up at night by thoughts of his insignificance and worse by his ineptitude. Whether nature or nurture, he was an ineffectual person.  Without agency, some modicum of influential ability, he was wallpaper, elevator music, hotel room background.  

 

'We must make the best of what God has given us', said the priest; but the young man wanted no priestly nostrums, only something to chew on, something of substance that acknowledged his presence. 

Nietzsche said that the only validation of the individual in a meaningless world is the expression of pure will, but Adam Farley had always found himself prevaricating, weighing unpleasant options, giving himself time to think; and what he saw as his character - ironic humor, linguistic fluency, and some logic - was a dime a dozen.  Given the world's eight billion people, he must have a thousand clones, ten thousand. 

Konstantin Levin, Tolstoy's character in Anna Karenina, wondered at God's irony, having created Man as an intelligent, creative, insightful, talented being, allowed him a scant few decades to live, and then consigned him to eternity in the cold, hard grounds of the steppes - this negating any particular uniqueness to the species.  

 

'God doesn't play dice with the universe', said Einstein concluding that there must be some divine plan to Creation, but the young man saw none whatsoever, and so, a la Sartre felt an existential nausea. 

To make matters worse, women were attracted to him - not that he minded the attention, but concluded that venality was behind it all.  He represented something - his Mayflower ancestors, the wealth of his uber-capitalist father, his good health, intelligence, and reproductive promise - but that something was as fictive and illusory as anything.  Those women who claimed they wanted access to his inner rooms, his soul, were just more canny in their pursuit of a mate. 

 

So maybe he was missing the metaphysical point - since there was nothing beneath the Sturm und Drang of strutting, posturing, and seducing, maybe pimping oneself was the be-all and end-all. You are not what you are - because nothing is there - but what you seem.  And there, in this new age of social and fungibility, you could be anything you chose and trade it in for a new model every year. 

The fluid gender spectrum was a work of genius.  It was a marvelous, fantastical Mardi Gras of sexual fanfare and inexhaustible variety.  It mattered not that you were born either-or, male or female.  Sexuality was a choice like any other, and why remain straightjacketed in suit and tie when you could dress like a chorus girl and be tarty for a while? Or why not trade silk and organza frills for jackboots, jeans, and flannel?

Why not tout your blackness, your victimhood, your years of oppression at the hands of the white man when you still hadn't outgrown your tribalism? Better to be the subject of interest and compassion than a throwback.

As true as this fantastical cavalcade might be, and as sufficing as it was to those without much substance, it didn't solve the young man's conundrum. He neither had nor wanted pretention and was neither happy nor unhappy with the way he turned out. He wanted resolution, that was all, some clue as to who he was and why God had even bothered putting him in this insignificant, forgotten town of New Brighton. 

Evangelical Christians had the answer, although a facile one. If you took Jesus as your personal savior and formed an intimate relationship with him, you became divinely appointed, and what could be more significant than that?  It was one thing to talk of salvation, redemption, or even heaven - all conventional, collective imaginings - but to be friends and lovers of the Lord Jesus Christ, not that was something.  Once you found him, you became his emissary, his missionary and no secular purpose interfered or confused. 

 

But the young man had grown up Catholic, and no matter how ecumenical he had become over the years, the chalice, chasubles, host, hosannahs, and transubstantiation were still in his blood; so it was not surprising that he sought counsel if not wisdom from Father O'Rourke. Yet of course 'priest' was only the cloak that the man wore, a professional garb no less than 'judge' or 'advocate'.  In private he was a happy gay man living with his ordained lovers, playing out an identity which at least had inexorable, hardwired sexual desire behind it. 

Hindus had it right in one - the world is illusion, Maya, and one's only purpose is that realization and how it leads to spiritual evolution if not enlightenment.  Hindus uncomplainingly accept the strictures and limitations of caste because personal identity and freedom mean nothing.  It is enough to be a Kshatriya or Shudra.  The question of 'who am I' never occurs. 

Graham Greene explored the issue of identity in The Comedians - we are all actors playing a role - and Shakespeare said it best in the words of Macbeth, 'Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing'. 

So between God and Nietzsche, the young man had a bewildering array of explanations in front of him including 'fuck it' which day by day seemed the most sensible. 

Tolstoy in his spiritual memoir, A Confession, told of his lifelong search for God and after years of studying history, science, art, literature, and philosophy with no answers, he gave up and concluded that if hundreds of millions of people believed in Him, there must be something to it.  A backdoor  conversion, but a conversion nonetheless.  

After thanking the priest warmly and graciously, the young man left the sacristy and headed for home, convinced only that absent God in the machinery, the circus antics of identity were at least worth the price of admission.

Confession Of A Reformed Foodie - Give Me Pot Roast, Mashed Potatoes, And Gravy

Rene Redzepi is a Danish restaurateur famous for foraging wild things and creating architectural masterpieces on the plates of diners who have waited months for a table.  Images of him waste-deep in North Sea shoals picking periwinkles off rocks and harvesting seaweed and grasses are viral icons. Articles on him are common in Food & Wine, Gourmet, and Wine Spectator. He is a champion of nouvelle nouvelle cuisine, the latest in locally-sourced, organic, field-to-table food, at the top of his game, and an pioneer in the food revolution. 

The American palate, says Redzepi, has been ruined by massive portions, pedestrian imitations of European cuisine, and a whopping amount of salt and sugar.  His preparations point the way to a new age of dining, an elegant, environmentally friendly, unique tasting experience. 

Now, most Americans having spent thousands to travel to Copenhagen and thousands more on Redzepi's food, will come back home singing his praise - 'indescribable...superb...unmatched...worth every penny' - but in reality have no idea what was on their plates and left the table hungry.  If they had been honest, the reaction would have been 'trimmings from my front hedge...barnacles off a boat bottom...whatever floated his way...'

'The American is a boor', said Redzepi when interviewed in a field of wild hayseed. 

Henry Woods had grown up with his mother's pot roast, mashed potatoes, and gravy and loved every morsel. 'Delicious, Ma', he would always say as he licked the platter clean, finished his milk and waited for the apple pie.  In Bolivar, Ohio Amanda Woods was well- known for her cooking - her marvelous bread pudding, casseroles, and pies - and she had the biggest booth at the county fair every October. 

When asked how she did it, she replied, 'With no fuss and bother.  I am a busy woman', and so she was, mother of five, farm housewife with a thousand chores to do every day, not about to waste time gussying up her meals. Besides, she went on to say, this was Ohio, not New Fancy Shmancy New York. 

So, of all the things that Henry Woods missed when he went East for college, was his mother's pot roast. He unlike many of his classmates, was not tempted by dim sum, pho, couscous, or pad Thai. Invited by a classmate to eat at Pho 69 a college favorite, he could only poke around the bible tripe, fatty tendons, gizzards, and hearts - the offal that his father scraped out of the slaughtered animals every Fall. 'Disgusting', Henry said. 

But it wasn't long before he not only got used to these oddities, but came to appreciate them.  By comparison home cooking was a bland, pedestrian affair.  Although he still had fond memories of Sunday dinners in Bolivar, he was increasingly excited about the incredible foods all within a few blocks of his dorm.  By time he graduated and settled in to his new job in San Francisco, he was an aficionado, not quite yet a food sophisticate, but well on his way. 

San Francisco was an eye-opener. Gone were the cheap Asian meals around Harvard Square, and in was Asian fusion - a marvelous blending of California New Age cuisine and the best of Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Korean foods.  No more unrecognizable body bits in a sodium-laced broth, but the must subtle combinations of ingredients, composition, and presentation.   His ability to savor and appreciate good food, long hidden under piles of mashed potatoes slathered with gravy, was now in the fore.  He simply couldn't wait for his next meal. 

He travelled across the Bay to eat at Alice Waters' Chez Panisse, the first restaurant to launch the now-familiar California cuisine of fresh locally sourced ingredients combined in uniquely original ways; but was more delighted with the newer offerings which, although inspired by Waters, took off into more sophisticated territory.  The dishes were now architectural and painterly.  Not only were the morsels embedded in these elegant towers or arranged with artistic swirls on the edges of the plate tasty, but they added a certain tempting invitation to the courses to follow. 

Yes, Henry was hungry as he left the table, but almost spiritually satisfied.  These elegant preparations were meant more for the palate and the sensitive soul beyond than the stomach.  He became a true San Francisco foodie, and became well-known at the best restaurants in town. 

While he was a bit shamefully supplementing his dinners with cheeseburgers at White Castle and microwaving some mac 'n' cheese once he got home, he never once considered altering what had become a passion. 

Now, epiphanies come in all shapes and sizes, and so it was that one day at Dottie's Lunchery, the ironic name for one of the city's finest, most sophisticated restaurants, and looking at the tower of crispy things with peeks of brown and rosy notions, surrounded by swaths of avocado green, and dotted with berries and nut bits, he laughed, jabbed his fork into the tower, and watched it crumble into a ratty mess. 

'This is ridiculous', he shouted, slapped a hundred on the table, and walked out.

Epiphanies are not the unique, surprising affairs most people think of but slow cooking.  They take time to mature, to formulate before they burst forth; and so it was that for months Henry was thinking niggling, irritating thoughts about the increasingly baroque confections on his plate. They were becoming less food than febrile concoctions of a gay chef in the kitchen - his flouncy version of what an alternative lifestyle would look on a plate,

 

If it hadn't been for the burgers, fries, and mac 'n' cheese, he would have looked like the skeletal bums on Capp Street, but as it was, his blood chemistry was way off kilter. Weird potassium and zinc ion levels his physician had never seen.  'What on earth have you been eating?', the doctor asked; and it was not long afterwards that he experienced the outburst at Dottie's Lunchery. 

'I'm sorry, Ma', Henry said to his mother shortly after the epiphany.

'Sorry for what, sweetheart?', she replied, and Henry confessed all, his food hegira, his turning his back on Bolivar and pot roast, his shameful arrogance, and his pitiful ignorance 

Of course his mother had no idea what he was talking about, but listened patiently and reassured him with 'It's all right, dear' and other motherly caresses, love and kisses which were all he needed to return home to the sheep, the pigs, and the chickens. 

He had moments of exaggerated conflation - California cuisine somehow represented dissolute America (all cultures, once baroque, disassembled and declined) - but righted his ship and led a composed, productive life. 

Slavery And The Demonization Of The South - All White Men Must Pay

 American progressives like to hammer the South for its slave-owning past.  Unlike the Holocaust  ('Never Again') and Je me souviens', (Great Britain's 18th Century take over of French Quebec) any and all traces of the Old South must be expunged, removed, and forgotten. Unlike Israel and Quebec which insist on remembering the past so that it will never happen again, progressive activists are intent on eliminating it, thus removing any chance of learning lessons from it. 

Historical censorship, however, is not enough.  It is only through insistent, perpetuating hatred of the South that punishment can be meted out.  In an extraordinary display of revisionist conflation, all white men must be called to account for slavery.  It wasn't so much that the South was responsible for slavery, it was whiteness - an insidious, pervasive, presumptively arrogant sense of racial superiority - that was behind the institution, the ethos that was the foundation for its growth. 

Of course nothing could be farther from the truth.  The African slave trade started in tribal Africa.  If it hadn't been for local warring tribes who took, kept, and bartered prisoners as slaves among themselves and then realized the lucrative business of selling them to European traders, the trans-Atlantic slave trade would never have prospered as it did. 

 

Slavery has been a going concern since the first human settlements, common in the Paleolithic era, Ancient Greece and Rome, Persia, India, China, and Japan. It wasn't a white thing but a human thing. Enslavement of a captured enemy was fitting punishment and a reward for the victors.  Later in the age of empire, conquest of land and people was the currency.  Progressives themselves like to point to child labor, trafficking, and economic exploitation as modern day slavery.  The Communists insisted that the working class was enslaved by capitalists and in revolt they had nothing to lose but their chains. 

Slavery has always been successful, and it was no different in the South.  Historian Seymour Drescher has written:  

What makes the success of that movement especially amazing is the extraordinary strength, vitality, productivity, profitability, and transferability of racial slavery in the New World. By the late 1600s the sugar-producing Caribbean colonies had created the most profitable economy, per capita, in the world. Their exports were worth two and a half times those of the partly free-labor economies of North America, and colonists with the highest incomes now lived in the West Indies. And despite the emergence of liberal and radical ideologies in the Age of Revolution, despite the rise of antislavery organizations in Britain, America, and France, despite the disruptions of the American, French, and Haitian revolutions, the African slave trade reached its peak between 1783 and 1793 and could hardly have been more vigorous and profitable when outlawed in 1807 by Britain and the United States.

The value of British West Indian exports to England and of imports in the West Indies from England increased sharply from the early 1780s to the end of the eighteenth century.  The British West Indies’ share of the total British overseas trade rose to high peaks in the early nineteenth century and did not begin a long-range decline until well after Parliament deprived the colonies of fresh supplies of African labor.

After assessing the profitability of the slave trade, which brought rewards of around 10 percent on investment, and the increasing value of the British West Indies, the British slave system was expanding, not declining, at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The Civil War was fought over economic competition between North and South (with Britain, the biggest consumer of Southern cotton in the mix), The defense of ‘free labor’ – a philosophical principle derived from the Enlightenment and enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution – was made even more compelling because of US colonial history.  Americans were slaves of a sort to their colonial masters, unable to profit from their own labor, and therefore philosophy grew practical, political teeth.  

Slavery was indeed a 'peculiar institution', for slaves were both labor and capital.  As such slaveowners went out of their way to protect their investment.  While there may have been Simon Legree overseers in Southern plantations, owners (who kept careful records available to historians) invested significantly in food, lodging, clothing, and health care.  Slave labor was conditional on optimum performance and reproductivity. 

Slavery was a successful, productive, and viable system which for centuries produced great returns and it would not have collapsed on its own write Drescher and the economic historians Fogel and Engerman (Time on the Cross).  It was not the universally brutal and exploitative regime portrayed by the Abolitionists and modern day ‘Progressives’.  It was a business to be managed like any other.  

What is conveniently ignored by today's revisionists is the role the North played in slavery. While slaveholding in the North was minor compared to the South, it was common and widely accepted. 

Slaves were auctioned openly in the Market House of Philadelphia; in the shadow of Congregational churches in Rhode Island; in Boston taverns and warehouses; and weekly, sometimes daily, in Merchant's Coffee House of New York. Such Northern heroes of the American Revolution as John Hancock and Benjamin Franklin bought, sold, and owned black people. William Henry Seward, Lincoln's anti-slavery Secretary of State during the Civil War, born in 1801, grew up in Orange County, New York, in a slave-owning family and amid neighbors who owned slaves if they could afford them. The family of Abraham Lincoln himself, when it lived in Pennsylvania in colonial times, owned slaves (Slavery in the North, Andrew Harper)

Second, while slaveholding in the North might have been relatively small compared to the South, huge wealth was generated by its participation in the slave trade. In 2006 a team of Hartford Courant journalists wrote a series called Complicity in which they chronicled the North’s role in slavery.

 

New York slowly and reluctantly abolished slavery; federal census figures showed slaves in the state until 1850. But the death of slavery in New York scarcely impeded the city’s business in the slave trade. In the peak years of 1859 and 1860, two slave ships bound for Africa left New York harbor every month. Although the trade was technically illegal, no one cared: A slave bought for $50 in Africa could be sold for $1,000 in Cuba, a profit margin so high that loss of slave life was easily absorbed. For every hundred slaves purchased in Africa, perhaps 48 survived the trip to the New World. By the end of the voyage, the ships that held the packed, shackled and naked human cargo were so filthy that it was cheaper to burn some vessels than decontaminate them (Reported in The Northern Slave Trade, Phyllis Eckhaus, In These Times)

The slave trade in particular was dominated by the northern maritime industry. Rhode Island alone was responsible for half of all U.S. slave voyages. The DeWolfs may have been the biggest slavers in U.S. history, but there were many others involved. For example, members of the Brown family of Providence, some of whom were prominent in the slave trade, gave substantial gifts to Rhode Island College, which was later renamed Brown University (Traces of the Trade – A Story from the Deep North)

Money was certainly made by the transatlantic shipping of slaves; but the greatest Northern wealth was generated from the cotton trade.  Northern textile mills flourished in the antebellum period largely because of Southern, slave-picked cotton.  Industrialists in the booming New England and Mid-Atlantic states thrived, and the basis for a vigorous American capitalism was established.

“King Cotton” was to antebellum America what oil is to the Middle East. Whole New England textile cities sprang up to manufacture cloth from cotton picked and processed by millions of slaves. In 1861, the United States produced more than 2 billion pounds of cotton, exporting much of it to Great Britain via New York (Eckhaus).

Those Northern traders, industrialists, and shippers invested the money realized from the slave and cotton trade back into America.  Wall Street made millions thanks to the investment of New England and New York capitalists, and lent that money out to thousands of large and small entrepreneurs throughout the rapidly growing country.  In other words, slave money infiltrated everywhere in the new United States. Looked at from the modern PC perspective of disinvestment, we should boycott everything.

Given this complex of factors - the historical persistence of slavery as a going economic system, its universality and commonality, and the very basic human instincts of control, exploitation, and economic self-interest - the particular calumny and hatred levied at the South is surprising.  It should be enough that the cyclical forces of economic competition, philosophical differences, and moral rectitude provoked the Civil War and ended slavery.  If one were to look at history through a moral lens, one would turn away at level of brutality, deprivation, and sheer aggression that have persisted throughout the ages. 

History has shown that there is no such thing as right and wrong, only victory and defeat. The moral judgment of world affairs is a recent phenomenon, and it seems to have reached its apogee - or nadir, depending on one's perspective - today.  Not only do modern progressives want to ignore history, but based on a stubborn moral rectitude, wish to expunge it and replace it with their own version of past events. 

It is convenient for progressives to use the South and slavery as the basis for a universal indictment of white men, white society, and white culture. Revisionism at its very worst. 

Spiritual Traitors - Catholic Buggery Or Protestant Thievery, Take Your Pick

The sex scandal that has rocked the Catholic Church - sexual abuse of young boys in thousands of parishes everywhere - was a disregard of the the holy sacrament of Ordination, a heinous crime, and a betrayal of the hallowed and respected role of priests as ambassadors of Jesus Christ and caretakers of his mission.

 

Betraying the trust established between Catholic clergy and parishioners, a sacred relationship that has existed since the founding of the Church was bad enough, but relying on this trust to seduce young boys was a heinous, unforgiveable sin; and the Church was slow in realizing both the extent and severity of the problem. 

The Church has always protected its own, and its refusal to subject clergy to secular law was the casus belli of the dispute between Pope Paul III and Henry VIII and the principal cause for the schism within Christianity and the establishment of non-Catholic denomination of which the English king would be regent.  Martin Luther's Reformation finished the job that Henry had begun, and Protestants and Catholics would forever more be at odds. 

 

In any case, the modern Vatican acted no differently than Paul III and told secular authorities to keep their hands off.  If there was a problem - and the Church never admitted there was - the Church itself would handle it.

The Boston Globe under its Spotlight aegis, investigated child abuse by Catholic clergy in the city and found that hundreds of priests had abused thousands of boys, and were simply moved from parish to parish in a gesture of mild censure.  The articles published by the paper were enough to force the resignation of Cardinal Law.  The Church was not above or immune from secular law. 

The Vatican under Pope Benedict understood that it had to act, but realizing that they were facing a worldwide problem, a literal epidemic of child molestation, rape, and abuse, were uncertain as to how to deal with the issue.  If they forced the resignation of each and every priest who had committed or even was accused of child abuse, vestries would be emptied. 

What was behind this betrayal of trust and horrific, unconscionable action by supposed men of God? Celibacy of course was the Church's first target, a policy which had encouraged gay men to join the clergy but ignored their San Francisco, Castro-type promiscuous bathhouse behavior.  While now the gay community has by and large joined the mainstream and rejected its old lifestyle for marriage, only a few decades ago the heady moments of gay liberation were enthusiastically celebrated with unbounded serial sexual encounters.  It was out of this cohort group that the Church selected its priests.  

 

In fact, what could be more ideal? A respected profession if not vocation, and a closed likeminded community protected from prying eyes by the Vatican itself.  

While outside observers were quick to conclude that gay 'celibacy' was at the root of the child abuse problem, the link between homosexuality and such behavior was by no means proven.  One could draw inferences - gay promiscuity knew no restraint, and anyone was fair game - but the very inhumane, arrogantly presumptuous, and profoundly immoral actions could not be simply attributed to uninhibited sexual desire. 

What was it, then, which encouraged thousands of priests to commit such horrible, dastardly sins? How could such absolute immorality exist within the supposed fount of goodness and righteousness?  No one has answered this question. 

The Church so far has made no move to vet for a straight clergy.  Its emerging market is Africa where homosexuality is condemned, so selection from that demographic pool might solve the problem; but what about America where particularly under liberal governments every combination and permutation of sexual variety have been ambitiously promoted? Or America's cultural lapdog, Europe, sure to follow suit?

The Protestant churches have had their own scandals none of them sexual.  Although individual preachers have been found guilty of adultery and have even assumed this as a birthright, there has been nothing like the Catholic Church's shameful and unpardonable behavior. Protestants prefer financial fraud, money laundering, and bilking the credulous faithful out of millions.  

And why is this? Perhaps because the evangelical churches are under no strict hierarchal authority.  Pastors can do whatever they please, and since there are no higher level corporate treasuries like the Vatican whose wealth is in the trillions, the incentive to cadge, wheedle, and downright cheat congregants out of their money is obvious. 

The large evangelical churches are no different from their secular counterparts - Enron, Bernie Madoff, and the Wall Street investment banks which devised incredibly complex financial instruments to illegally and unethically generate millions from unsuspecting rubes. The big megachurches take in millions through canny marketing and widescale exposure and pay no taxes on their revenue.  What better environment to steal millions?

And perhaps since both evangelicals and financiers are both quintessentially American, capitalist and entrepreneurial to the core, that they share the same penchant for elaborate trickery.  America is not that far removed from the era of snake oil salesmen and barnstorming revivalist frauds. 

Judaism seems to be immune from both types of scandals.  While Jews like Bernie Madoff and a hundred others have been just as guilty of financial misdeeds, and the sex pervert of all sex perverts, Jeffrey Epstein was Jewish, the institution has remained morally intact. Why is that, observers ask? 

Perhaps because there is enough secular chicanery among Jews to go around; or because there is something to the People of the Book, a particularly centered, observant group; or because of a thousand years of discrimination and abuse, Jews have circled the wagons and policed Judaism with an iron hand, keeping it unshaken. 

Islam has had no scandals to speak of because a) it is a radical, hegemonic, politically aggressive religion with little time for tomfoolery; and b) decapitation for the most minor sins is common.  Say what you will, absolute monarchical authority - religious dictatorship - keeps Muslims chaste and their hands out of the till.  Mostly chaste and honest. Remember, the discussion is about institutional waywardness, not individual indiscretions. Istanbul Turks have their afternoon assignations like any other European, and why should imams be men of complete moral purity?

There have been no Buddhist or Hindu scandals, although sex and improper financial dealings are just as common on an individual basis; so that leaves the Catholic Church as the worst offender, the most indifferently immoral, callously and seditiously evil of all.  Protestant thievery, shell game trickery, and Megatron deceit cannot hold a candle to Rome. 

The Sexual Escapades Of A Proper Harvard Girl - Getting Her Money's Worth With A Palestinian, A Jew, And A Black Man

Abigail Potter, direct descendant of the New England Potters, Mayflower co-founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the New Haven Plantations, heir to a family fortune and bright star of the Boston elite, was eager to enter Harvard in the Fall. 

Harvard had educated generations of Potters and Davenports, and the Admissions committee had only to see her name on the application form to stamp their approval.  She, of course, was of fine temperament, solid academic credentials, and stunning beauty - not that the Committee was to pay attention to this last quality, but all in all, when selecting among highly qualified candidates for America's premier institution of higher learning, charm, allure, and physical beauty could not be overlooked. 

The Chairman of the Committee, Branford Cummings, a progressive champion of affirmative action and finely attuned to the plight of the black man, had second thoughts; but when out of courtesy to the Potter family he agreed to break protocol and meet Abigail, he was taken by her absolutely remarkable beauty.  Most Harvard girls were the Jewish type - frizzy hair, fleshy face, tight lips and all twitchy intensity - but Miss Potter was a lithe, graceful, blonde, and blue-eyed woman without a trace of importunity or showy intellect.  

Cummings knew that he should be on the lookout for black inner city women, but he simply couldn't resist the physical charms and graciousness of this patrician, elegant girl.  What was one place in the entering class, after all, and he had had already emptied the ghetto with more than enough LaShondas and Letitias. Abigail would lend a certain classical elegance to the university, a rose among prickly, pushy weeds. 

And so it was that on a fine, warm September day, Abigail took up residence at Harvard, arranged her room in Adams House, and prepared for what she knew would be the experience of a lifetime. 

Her father, uncles, and grandfathers had spoken fondly of Harvard, a place of inquisitive learning, intellectual excellence, art, music, and poetry - the best that a liberal arts education could offer.  They had contributed mightily to the university, were active alumni, and members of the Board. 

Harvard had changed since their day, of course, and was no longer the Bostonian redoubt it once had been.  Affirmative action had cured all that and made Harvard Yard a uniquely diverse place, brimming with all sorts of young people from all over the world, and as such the old ethos of academic and social excellence was sent packing in favor of street experience.  Black people would show their white classmates what's what and would share the reality of the 'hood with them.  

Pharoah Jones, for example, had been a pimp's pimp, learning the trade by the side of the brothers on MLK Avenue, preaching the gospel at the Tabernacle of The Risen Christ, and fighting pit bulls for ready cash. His college boards barely registered on Harvard's scale, and most of his grades were left blank, but Chairman Cummings and the committee saw him as the new direction, the way forward, the first, most ambitious step to reforming Harvard and making it a people's place. 

Mahmoud al-Abbas was a Palestinian from Gaza who had been selected according to Harvard's foreign inclusivity program - a deliberate attempt to put a hold on European applicants and admit people of color from the world's oppressed minorities.  Abbas was, at least in his interviews, a mild-mannered, studious young man who professed an interest in number theory.  He reminded the admissions committee that Arab mathematicians had invented both algebra (an Arabic derived word) and calculus, and he felt honored to carry on in their august tradition. 

Thanks to Harvard's myopic insistence on diversity wherever it was found, this Jew-hating radical was admitted and from day one began his seditious campaign to turn the campus into a pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli place of protest.  There were enough credulous, faux liberal, diversity wannabees to fill Harvard stadium, so his job would be easy. 

Shmuel Bernstein was the last of the old generation of Talmudic conservative, observant Jews to attend Harvard.  With prayer shawl and tefillin Shmuel was the ur-Jew, a brilliant scholar, violinist, and profound moralist. 

Abigail wasted no time in bedding all three.  Men of color (Jews and Italians, she knew, were in that mix), wherever they are from, are suckers for blonde, blue-eyed white girls, all of them sick and tired of wiry black-haired pussy and longing for that soft silken bower of earthly delights. 

A bit of background here.  Abigail was no easy lay nor was she a Belle de Nuit, an upper class sexual deviant wanting to taste the 'other'.  No, she was a woman of precocious will and sexual ambition - a kind of Hedda Gabler, Rebekka West, and Hilde Wangle, Henrik Ibsen's characters who with ploy, determination, and careful tending made men their subjects. 

Since Abigail, thanks to her remarkable beauty, could have any man she wished - and indeed she had her share of Cabots and Lodges while at Andover - she wanted to play the field, graze on the periphery; and so it was that she headed for terra incognita and the horny, rutting men of the ghetto and the Third World.  

First was Pharoah Jones who despite all his macho pimp-walking and braggadocio had never had a white woman before, cock of the walk only for the sisters of Anacostia.  He was a pussycat when it came to Abigail, a shy, stuttering fool put in his place simply by pure white skin and cerulean blue eyes; and if the truth be known his humping ghetto ways in bed were off-putting to say the least, so, experiment over, Pharoah was left on the curb, begging for small change on Harvard Square, unmanned, a fish out of water. 

Mahmoud al-Abbas, for all his Jesus-like good looks never shut up about Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, and the Jewish devils.  He had a small mind, a smaller dick, and because of his existence shuttering women, he had clue how to treat a lady; and she left him howling, ranting, and raving, the leader of a thousand benumbed Harvard students crying for the extermination of the Jews. Not long after he was left on the curb, ICE came after him shipped him to Guantanamo on the first boat south. 

Finally was Shmuel Bernstein who was so caught up in Talmudic exegesis and Old Testament kabbalah that he rarely paid her any mind.  Yet there was something boyish about him, the spirit of a thirteen year-old singing psalms at his Bar Mitzvah and getting loaded up with presents from Aunt Esther and Uncle Abe.  If this was Jewish, it wasn't so bad. 

And that was only freshman year.  The final three were back to normal.  She studied micro-biology and genetic engineering, graduated Summa Cum Laude with a full academic scholarship to MIT, and along the way returned to the fold of the St. Grottlesex crowd, the Cabots and Lodges, summers on the Vineyard and winter skiing in Gstaad. 

Manipulation? Callous sexual exploitation? Misandry? Nothing of the sort.  A sexual jamboree for the privileged was all, a four year of hijinks and high spirits.  Harvard was most definitely worth it.  

When Jesus Walked On The Potomac - The Crippled Were Made Whole And An Old Progressive Did Even More Good

Bob Muzelle was not a religious man.  Yes, he was brought up as a Christian but his modest Long Island family wanted nothing to do with evangelism or any particular devotion. They were content to go to church on Sunday, to listen to the gospel, and to be seen with Pastor Phillips on the steps of The Westmoreland Church of Christ. They were desultory Christians, not unfaithful or unmindful of the Lord's teachings, certain in their settled rectitude, and expecting little in the way of joy or redemption. 

Bob's indifference to Jesus only increased as he got older, especially when he was a student at Yale, a campus just beginning to find its political mojo after decades of aristocratic propriety - summers on Nantucket, skiing in Gstaad, and a second home on St. Bart's.  Bob, perhaps because of some residual churching, found the Reverend Billings Longworth, Yale Chaplain and missionary to Mississippi Negroes.  First on Freedom Rides, first to be manhandled by Bull Connor and his racist thugs, first to be bitten by police dogs, and first to be beaten with KKK ax handles.

He came back from these sojourns bruised and bloodied, but a happy man wearing The Red Badge of Courage, and banged up and bandaged, he proudly addressed the congregants in Woolsey Hall.  'We shall overcome', he said in a loud, stentorian tone, and the Yale men said, 'Amen'. 

There was something about Longworth's passion that woke the young Bob Muzelle from the indifferent slumber of Great Neck, the half-baked quasi-religious, tepid secularism of his growing up.  He went to him and from that first meeting became the Chaplain's acolyte, his altar boy, his advocate.

'Doing good is our mission', said Longworth. 'Will you join me on the journey?' Bob, smitten with the beatific vision of his mentor enthusiastically agreed and together they, martyrs to the cause of the black man, travelled to Selma and Montgomery to get beaten, bloodied, and crucified. 

There was indeed something spiritual if not epiphanic in those heady encounters with angry white men. Bob and the Reverend were retracing the steps of Jesus to Jerusalem, taunted, abused, and cursed but holding their own in the service of the Lord and America.

 

Bob went on from Yale to continue a life of doing good but never regained the spiritual dimension he had found with Longworth.  His commitment was purely secular, for according to the progressive canon, religion was an obstacle in the way of reform, reconfiguration, and realignment.  The Christers of the backwater Bible Belt were to be challenged, argued with, and eventually erased - cheered with a rousing 'good riddance' as their ignorance no longer stood in the way of revolution. 

Yet there was always a niggling regret in Bob's mind. Although his parents were not the born-again type and the Reverend Longworth was no wild evangelist, he could never shake the persistent image of Jesus which kept appearing at the most inopportune moments; and so it was that he, unconsciously and certainly unwillingly, was preparing himself for apparition. 

It takes such letting down of one's secular defenses to be ready for a spiritual experience; or, as cynics might say, to let the psychotic nature of the febrile minded come out of the closet.  In any case as Bob was walking along a lonely stretch of the C&O Canal along the Potomac River, Jesus Christ appeared  walking on the water. 

At first the irony of it all made Bob even more incredulous.  From the Sea of Galilee to the political waters of the Potomac? You've got to be kidding.  It can't be; but there he was looking just like the thousands of pictures of him hanging everywhere - bearded, handsome in his long white, silken robes, arms extended with a smile on his face, beckoning. 

Of course Bob turned away, worried enough about dementia as he proceeded towards old age, and not willing to let it gain any more of a foothold than it already had.  He walked quickly back to his car, shaking his head, trying to think of hot Barbara Alden from HR, the Redskins, or Donald Trump, but only saw the recurring vision of Jesus. 

After a week of night sweats and unsettling nightmares - Jesus or Satan were always after him- he decided it was time to confront the facts about what had occurred, and he retraced his steps back to Mile 22 and waited.  There from the Virginia side of the river, the same man in robes came walking on the water towards him.  'Come to me, my child', the apparition said, and Bob, weak-kneed but desirous, walked to the river bank.  Just as he was about to push back the tangle of kudzu and walk in the Potomac to meet Jesus, the apparition disappeared. 

Who could he tell about this?  Who among his progressive friends would possibly take him seriously, listen to a crackpot who was seeing things?

And yet a few days later there it was, right before his eyes, the answer.  A short piece in the Style Section of the Washington Post reported on an unexplained medical mystery.  A homeless man, crippled since birth and a fixture on Thomas Circle dragging himself and his useless legs along on a sawed-off skateboard, got up and walked.  The article went into 'spontaneous psychological remission', suggesting that the poor man had been emotionally crippled by abusive parents, transferred the trauma to his legs, and ever since was living out his childhood nightmare; but suddenly - as often is the case - saw the absurdity of his self-enforced imprisonment, and walked.

Bob thought otherwise and went to Thomas Circle in search of the homeless man and found him sitting on a park bench feeding the pigeons.  He stank but looked peaceful, and Bob struck up a conversation with him.  The man sidled away from this uninvited guest and spat out some incoherent nonsense; but when he realized that Bob was friendly, began babbling about 'the light...the clouds...him...' interspersed with enough references to rats and bowsprits to throw Bob off the trail, but when the bum said 'Jesus', Bob knew that he had found what he had been looking for, thanked the man, and walked back to K Street. 

From that moment on Bob became a whirling dervish of good.  He was everywhere - in homeless shelters, in the hollers of Appalachia, in the slums of Calcutta, and on the streets of Anacostia, the Capital's worst, most pestilential ghetto.

'Whatchoo doin' here, white boy?' yelled a big black man all blinged and do-dadded up, perched on the hood of his Cadillac smoking a doobie and swigging from a can of Colt 45.  'Get the fuck up outta here', to which Bob only smiled, expecting this crown of thorns, the sword thrusts, and the vinegar. He was there to do good, the Lord's work, and this truth would be known. 

Pharaoh Jones was not convinced, rolled the sucker, took his money and his Prius and left Bob on the curb. 

It was not long after that that Bob went completely around the bend, bonkers, and was committed to St. Elizabeth's.  He had long before drawn down on his already meagre bank account and given all to the poor, so only a public institution would do. 

'What ever happened to Bob Muzelle?', asked a colleague about to suit up for rally against some offense or other; but no one seemed to know until the scuttlebutt about him being straight jacketed in D Ward of St. Liz came 'round.  'Always knew he was cracked', said one.  'A good progressive, but completely wacko."

Putting The Truth To Rest - Donald Trump, AI, And The Delights Of Rumor, Innuendo, And Tall Tales

Let's face it, no one likes the truth. We might say we do and hold politicians' feet to the fire when we suspect misstatements, but the only fact is America is a land of image, fantasy, and the confabulated world of rumor, innuendo, and tall tales. 

What is the truth anyway except someone's idea of it? Durrell, Browning, and Kurosawa among other artists and writers have not surprisingly concluded that the best we can manage is different readings of the same event.  Truth, reality is nothing more than perceptions of it.

 

Eye witness accounts confirm the assumption.  The recent case of a drive-by shooting was brought to court and eye witnesses called by the prosecution and the defense saw different things.  It was as if each had observed a different event.  The car was either blue or green, a sedan or SUV, driven by black man or a Latino, or a Mediterranean-looking white man, the gun was an Uzi, an assault rifle, or a Glock.  Eye witnesses see what they want to see. 

Political belief distorts reality to conform to preconceived notions; and the more passionately the beliefs are held, the greater the distortion.  Since most progressives are convinced that Donald Trump is evil or at best a hateful, destructive simile of it, all policies, programs, initiatives, councils, or negotiations can only be seen through that lens. He is ipso facto wrong. 

Psychologists and neuroscientists agree on one thing - memory is not only fallible, it is little more than a construct of imagined happenings, wishes and preferences, and third-party add-ons.  What we remember about Aunt Tilly's Christmas dinner when Uncle Harry upsent the wine decanter and spoiled the roast is the product of retelling, the mini-distortions of each account, and the personal desire to conclude one truth, our truth. 

Not only that, America is a land of image-first, glorified Hollywood renditions of reality,  In a book about the Jews of Hollywood, Empire of Their Own, author Neal Gabler recounts how Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B Mayer, Jewish immigrants, refugees from the pogroms of Europe, created an America that never existed nor could exist but should exist, a happy world of beauty, success, reward, love, and romance.  A willing suspension of disbelief when the American moviegoer left their Hobbesian nasty, brutish, and short lives for the marvelous fantasies of Hollywood. 

Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov, created a Devil who says he his a vaudevillian, a tummler, a jokester and a trickster and without him life would be a bloody bore, three hundred and sixty five days of Sundays and Holy Mass. Life is an absurdity, God's ironic creation, and man's impossibly idealistic interpretation of it. 

 

And so it is that the spectacle of American life is a hilarious, outrageous one. Who can watch blubbering televangelists apologize for their hands in the cookie jar or up a woman's dress without laughing; or to listen to the cockamamie excuses politicians give for their dalliances - hiking on the Appalachian Trail instead of a weekend tryst in Buenos Aires, distributing food at a soup kitchen instead of cheating on a dying wife. 

John Edwards not only lied through his teeth about his indiscretions, but paid an aide to claim paternity of the Senator's illegitimate child.  Bill Clinton's mastery of parsing, disaggregating, disassembling, and recreating his own fable of the truth is epic.  Mark Sanford's lies were so absurd that even the most credulous and supportive dismissed them as poppycock. 

Enter Donald Trump, the most free and easy with the truth politician ever to grace the American scene, a man of bombast, hyperbole, confabulations, and unimaginable confections; and his supporters love it.  The first real American President.  A man straight out of the tradition of snake oil salesman, get-rich-quick money peddlers, streetcorner preachers of salvation and redemption, con artists, carny barkers, hustlers and Borscht Belt tummlers.

He is as outrageous as Jackie Mason a comedian with everyone in his sights.  No one was beyond ridicule, no ridiculous act out of bounds, no posturing, posing, or vanity left unnoticed.  Trump supporters hear his one-liners, his hilarious caricatures, and his overstatements parse them for the point, the 'truth' of policy within. Exaggeration and tall tales were embellishments of a point about immigration, energy, climate fiction, progressive fancy, and European wobbly knees. 

It has been a delight to have a man in the White House who is as American as they come, fast and easy with just about everything, a man of image, production, and marketing.  He picked on USAID, an agency whose budget represents a tiny, miniscule fraction of the national budget, to ransack and not the bloated bureaucracies of the military, Medicare, or welfare because it played well.  Transgender training for Malawian miners, gay cooking classes in Zimbabwe, speech therapy for Salvadoran retirees got the picture of endemic government waste and fraud better than any deep diving on gears and wheels for the obsolete M-1 tank. 

Democrat lawfare suits have singled out his real estate dealings, alleging that he overstated the value of his properties to make an unfair profit from their sale.  Of course did, and in the caveat emptor mean street world of New York real estate every single developer would have done the same thing.  A sale price is nothing more than an overture, an inflated assessment of worth par for the course.  International relations are no different.  Lies, distortions, posturing? Yes indeed. 

Now enter Artificial Intelligence, AI, the newest and latest technology to further obfuscate 'the truth', settled science, reality.  There is now no way to determine whether Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or Pope Leo is actually saying what they seem to be saying on YouTube.  The phony avatars are remarkably accurate, what they say includes just enough 'truth' to give the whole spiel credibility. Now everyone can be a tummler, a fantasist, a Donald Trump. 

Facts and 'the truth' have long been overrated and overvalued not only because they are only products of perception, belief, and idealism; not only because people want to disregard them in favor of a Hollywood version; but because America is the image, faux truth capital of the world.  

'Get over it', says Trump, the prophet of the New Age, Tummler In Chief, man of un-substance but immense popularity.  He's on to something and always has been, and Americans are coming around to tossing out the troglodytes of the Left who insist on hammering, hectoring, and badgering about the truth until they are blue in the face. 

Nothing in this new generation is as it seems, and Donald Trump is the man for the times.