No More Bearded Ladies And Two-Headed Dwarves - What Next After The DEI Side Show?

'Whew, I'm glad that's over', sighed Mavis Porter, sipping sweet tea on her porch overlooking the Red River in Natchitoches.  'That Biden was a doozy', she said to her sister Belinda who herself had had more than enough and for good measure had spiked her tea with a shot of Jack Daniels.  

'What were they thinking?', Belinda remarked. 'Pregnant men, can you imagine?' and went on to recall the political freak show that 'was far better than Barnum & Bailey's.' 

 

'Remember the parade on River Road?' she asked her sister.  'Disgusting! Marching all do-dadded up, perfumed, flouncy dresses and stumbly high heels, making the sign of the cross on the steps of St. Aloysius' Church in some kind of voodoo ceremony, making fun of Our Lord and Savior, and...'

She would have gone on as she often did when she got all wound up over something, tight as a drum and whirling like a dervish until Mavis stopped her with a 'Now, now, Belinda, calm down' note of reassurance; but this recent display of outrageous balderdash was clearly the last straw, the final, ultimate insult to Southern gentility, propriety, and good taste. 

'We never should have moved from the Delta', said Belinda, referring as she often did to her childhood in Indianola, an idyll of good Christian faith, white values, and a respect for history.  Louisiana was a mixed race, Cajun hodge-podge, close to the devil, insidious in its shameless pagan ways. 

'We had to, Dear.  It was father's choice', replied Mavis referring to the bank's repossession of their modest farmhouse and few acres of cotton, their long trek down the river to New Orleans, the bayous, and finally to Natchitoches. 'At least we have this nice house that Daddy built'. 

The two old maids fidgeted and groused on the porch until sundown when the went inside where Beulah had set out the dinner, lighted the candles, and turned on the Mantovani, the whole tableau exactly as she had done for years. 

The horrible nightmare of the Biden years was finally over, and the ladies could relax.  There would be no more gay parades and pride flags festooning St. John Street.  The American flag would be back, flown high and proud atop city hall and up and down Main Street the way it always had been especially on the Fourth of July.  Sense, sensibility, and order was returning to Natchitoches. 

This, it turns out, was the sentiment of the land, a great whooshing sigh of relief that the miasma of gay, black-this-black-that was over and the country was returning to the way it had always been until those bilious imposters moved into Washington.  It had only taken three months, and the new President had washed the streets of the Capital and those as far south as Natchitoches clean of the muck and mire that had befouled them for four years. 

Ronald Reagan had said that his inauguration meant that it was morning in America, that beacon of freedom, that shining city on a hill, and Donald Trump was his successor.  In one fell swoop, everything had changed, and never before had the country seen such a quick, dramatic reversal of policy, ethos, and atmosphere.

Billy Landry, Mayor of Natchitoches and longtime supporter of Donald Trump was not so sure. 'Those idiots are sure as shootin' cooking something up', but for the time being he happily made a clean sweep of City Hall, got rid of any and all Biden diversity detritus, put back the oversized In God We Trust placard which had been removed as racist by the Democratic claques in  Baton Rouge, and played martial music to start the day. 

Mayor Billy was right, however, and as humiliated and dismissed as Democrats had been, they were indeed brewing up more of the same.  It was in their blood, the Mayor said, thickened by all those years of chicanery, and nothing but a good blood-letting would quiet them. 

They couldn't flog a dead horse - the black man, gays, and transgenders were on the run - but there had to be something still unsettled in the progressive canon, anything to revive flagging spirits and inject some adrenaline into the party. 

The elite campuses of the Northeast were as wacky and unhinged as they were in the Sixties; but there were too few Jews in Natchitoches or in the state of Louisiana for that matter to rile things up down here; and the only Arab Mayor Billy and the old ladies of St. John street knew was Ali Baba, the Lebanese Seven Eleven manager who featured shawarma pita sandwiches and gooey baklava, and he was no terrorist, although dress him up in a balaclava and keffiyeh and he could easily pass for one. 

Bob Muzelle, old social justice warrior, now faded and increasingly senile, had been on the Freedom Rides of the Sixties, heady days of solidarity and camaraderie.  He had always hoped to be beaten by one of Bull Connor's thugs or be bitten by one of his Dobermans and come back with a red badge of courage, but no luck.  All he got for his troubles were limp collards and fatback, shuckin' and jivin', and the back seat of the bus; but he had convoluted the experience into something existential, and would still do anything for the black man. 

 

'Natchitoches', he mused when the Washington Post wrote a Style Section feature The Trump Revolution In The Old South featuring the racist shenanigans of Mayor Billy. 'I've been there', for while the locus of the civil rights struggle had been Mississippi, enough was happening downriver for Bob to investigate.  

He had been spat upon, jeered, and humiliated, and vowed then and there to teach those right wing racist thugs a thing or two when the time was right; and now was that time; but he was too 'round the bend to get on another bus, so was content to fire off a few letters to Mayor Billy promising that his retrograde bullish actions would not stand and others urging his political claques to do the needful and go down there. 

'Another gay parade', laughed Mayor Billy when he got the letters from up North, and now that the Biden era censorship and restrictions on free speech were over, he let forth a spewing torrent of invectives.  'If those fa--ots, those butt f--kers, those Communist corn-holers think they can bully me, they've got another thing coming', all of which was reported verbatim in the local papers albeit cleaned up but getting the message across loud and clear. Not in Dixie. 

So, really, now that the woke bullshit was over, what would the Democratic party come up with next?  It seemed as though they had shot their wad with the grotesquerie of transgenderism, the lionization of the black man, Palestine Forever, and open borders, but with these fools, you never knew.

P.T. Barnum was a genius, and knew that he had to freshen up his side shows every so often to keep the public's interest. There was no such thing as something too freakish, too absurdly deformed and inhuman to hawk to customers; and so it was with the progressive Left, inimitable in their ability to come up with the most unthinkable weirdness possible. No, mused Mayor Billy, these fools would be back, and maybe this time they will charge admission. 

Cloning Donald Trump - DNA, Genetic Engineering, And The Guarantee Of A Horrific Living Legacy

The Boys From Brazil is a film starring Gregory Peck and Lawrence Olivier about the infamous Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, who performed experiments on Jews at Auschwitz.  In this fictional account of the whereabouts of Mengele after the fall of the Third Reich, the doctor is in Paraguay where he has successfully cloned 100 Hitlers from the genetic material of the blood of Der Fuhrer taken before his death. 

 

It is a Hollywood tale of suspense, mystery, and adventure in which a Jewish Nazi hunter tracks Mengele down but not before the Hitler clones are all fourteen years old, living all over the world, and thriving. 

The story of course is not as far fetched as it would seem. Since the early days of cloning, genetic engineering has come a long way, and in the not too distant future, prospective parents will be able to select prize DNA from a catalogue and have designer babies.  The DNA of celebrities of particular talent - Michael Jordan for pure athleticism, Marilyn Monroe for seductive, alluring beauty, Oppenheimer and Einstein for intellectual genius - will get top dollar and the designer market will flourish. 

The American Left has been obsessed - no, possessed is the better word - with Donald Trump for the ten years he has been on the American political scene and over this time have come to believe that he is the incarnation of Hitler, an evil, murderous, inhuman creature who has set out to exterminate blacks, gays, and transgenders no differently than Hitler did to the Jews. 

Of course this is all poppycock, fevered nightmares of discombobulated progressives on the run.  Trump, far from the genocidal maniac painted by the Left, is out only to restore the nation to its original, unique, and influential origins - the America of Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, and Adams.  Yet, with little else to go on, no platform to speak of, nothing but discredited ideas of race, gender, and ethnicity, progressives still hammer away at the Hitler thing, the demonic thing, the incarnation of evil in the White House. 

 

So it is not surprising that a rumor is spreading throughout progressive ranks that in secret laboratories deep beneath the Utah desert, scientists are reproducing the spitting image of the President and storing hundreds of him in cryogenic crypts for revival and maturity in future after the man himself has passed away. 

Absurdist Theory is the latest of many recent developments in psycho-social research.  It postulates than in environments of mass hysteria, not unlike the current progressive one which confabulates theories of armed insurrection (the Viking helmeted, face painted, clown show of January 6th when two hundred frat boys from the Idaho panhandle and along the way to Washington staged a three ring circus), a return to Robber Baron economics (twisted notions about free enterprise, consolidation of American wealth, and a money-fueled boom), and a Soviet style pogrom of undocumented asylees (deporting illegal aliens) into a universal ethos of doom. 

Consistent with Absurdist Theory, why wouldn't this neo-Hitler concoct a means to assure that his predatory, destructive, horrifically genocidal ambitions would continue, in fact be permanent? As crazy as the idea sounds, progressives give it credence.  

'Couldn't possibly be', said one of the few moderates in the party, but those on the far left, already unhinged by their humiliating defeat and believing more than ever that the Trump victory meant social Armageddon, were not convinced.  

There were enough examples of his defamatory, anti-social, hateful programs and his frightening arrogance (the Left circulated pictures of Trump standing defiant, the image of Il Duce, Mussolini, standing imperiously, chin out, above a crowd of roaring Fascists) to warrant concern. 

Subscription to this, the most outrageously ridiculous conspiracy theory ever, was a sure sign that it was curtains for the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.  They could never come back from this. 

On the QT progressive operatives began to investigate, first interviewing scientists at NIH to see if there was anything whatsoever to the possibility of such advanced genetic engineering. A transcript of a top secret meeting with Prof. Armand Liggett, senior scientist at the Institute for Genetics in Bethesda unearthed recently was concerning but reassuring.  Liberals were not wrong. 

'Ah, yes, cloning', said Prof. Liggett, smiling at the old fashioned idea and remembering The Boys of Brazil. 'Possible of course, but we've come a long way from that quite prehistoric way of asexual reproduction.  'Now', he said, warming to the question like Dr. Strangelove did in Stanley Kubrick's movie, holding down his crippled right hand so that it would not fly up in a Nazi salute, 'we have come a long way and is genetic identic reproduction possible? Of course it is, of course', now a whirling dervish, a latter day prophet, a crazy Union Square mad evangelist. 

The interviewer left unsettled but convinced they were on the right track.  The President with all the levers of power available to him, and with devilish intent and American innovative technology behind him, there was no doubt that he was preparing for an unlikely but certain future. 

In order to cover their already noticeable instability, Democrats requested and were granted a subcommittee hearing on genetic engineering, and there within Roberts Rules of Order and the privileged sanctity of the Senate managed to get at the truth.  Was it possible, etc. etc. and might it be, yada yada, and could we possibly see, etc. etc. the questioners asked Dr. Liggett brought down from Bethesda to testify, and off he went as intemperately as before.  'Yes, yes' he fairly shouted to the panel, and went on until time was called. 

None of this proved a thing, only that designer babies would soon be here, but nothing about anything so sinister as generations of Trump babies being born to realize his satanic vision. 

When asked if he had heard the rumors and was there any truth to them, the President smiled at the CNN reporter, and said, 'Yes, of course', which sent the entire press corps tapping away at their phones, until they realized that the President was just joshing. 

Bob Muzelle, a veteran of the old civil rights bus rides down South, perennial liberal advocate, and espouser of all progressive causes, a tireless sponsor of doing the right thing, was at sixes and sevens, dazed and confused as never before.  Visions of Hitler, a thousand Hitlers shook and rattled in his brain, a terrifying sight of Sieg Heil, SS storm troopers, the Gestapo, and torchlight parades washed before him.  It was happening, the thought, really happening.  All that we feared has come true.  Evil is in our midst, we are...

 

Here his wife Jeannette called him to dinner.  'Pot roast, dear', she said. 'Your favorite', so Bob stumbled to the table looking wilder and more mad than the zany NIH professor. 'It's coming', Bob shouted over the carrots and mashed potatoes.  'It's here.  We're...we're...', but he couldn't finish, got up from the table, petted the dog, and walked out the door, and was later picked up by Montgomery County police, escorted to Suburban Hospital, and then admitted to a private facility in Connecticut for the well-heeled mentally ill. 

A metaphor for the Democratic Party, nastily reported Republican critics who had gotten wind of the 'transfer' of this senile old fool.  Harsh, perhaps a bit unfair, but alas, true as a hammered nail. 

When One Hysteria Replaces Another - Trump Derangement Syndrome In, Climate Armageddon Out

It had been almost four months since the Trump inauguration, and there were no signs of the revolution letting up.  Piece by piece the progressive agenda was being dismantled, dismissed, and left on the curb.  

DEI, the centerpiece of its platform, the sine qua non spiritual fulcrum around which all other policy initiatives revolved, was on the run, a scattered, discredited, shambles; and black-this-black-that, gayness, Palestine Forever, transgenderism, open borders were finished, detritus, flotsam and jetsam floating on the tide. 

'This cannot stand', shouted Bob Muzelle to a small but enthusiastic claque of supporters gathered in Lafayette Park across from the White House.  Bob was surprised that there was no police line, no SWAT team, no sawhorse barriers, no yellow tape - the last straw, a sign of the diminishing returns of a proud progressive legacy.  

At least one mounted Secret Service agent would do, a sign that Bob and his friends meant business, but no, only a few tourists in Washington for a glimpse of the White House, distracted by the whoops and hollers coming from Bob's corner of the park.  

Undaunted, in fact fired up by this desultory environment, by this mildest of all possible attentions, and by this message of indifference sent by the man across the street, Bob raised his voice to a fevered pitch.  More tourists gathered to watch.  Bob was a whirling dervish, a madman, one possessed, something to be videoed and sent back to Chillicothe. 

The group cheering Bob was not the diverse one he had hoped - one raggedy keffiyeh, a gay man, and a mulatto dressed to the nines was all the diversity present, and for the most part the gathering was dismally white and old-looking, mainly Bob's civil rights friends who had come down with him from Bethesda to show support, one last hurrah before packing it in and heading for condos in Sarasota.  

Finally the DC police came and shooed them away. 'Time to move on, folks', the officer said, a young man, probably new on the beat with no bullhorn, billy club or taser.  A few old women, veterans of the Sixties, shouted 'Pig' at him, but no one joined in.  He looked like their sons; and so it was that the tourists and the demonstrators drifted off leaving Bob with microphone in hand, disconsolate, looking for shelter, disassembled, and wondering what to do next. 

Yet in other quarters hatred for Trump seethed.  Every day that he signed an executive order reversing years of social reform, the angrier they got. By the time he closed the southern border, wiped out every last trace of DEI, started digging on the North Slope, unleashed the private sector, restored every Confederate statue and every slaveholder street name, virtually unplugged every electric vehicle, and let loose millions of tons of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere, they were knackered.  They expected some blowback on their most progressive initiatives but not this yard sale. 

All that was left was pure, unadulterated hatred for the man - a bitter, deep-seated, bilious vileness that was full-blown, indivisible, and white hot.  There was still time for Americans to know whom they elected, what villainous evil they had unleashed on the world.

Individual issues melted in the incendiary ferocity of their hatred.  They must transform themselves from political opponents to latter day prophets.  The must go out into the land.  The time for parsing and deconstructing was over, and nothing less that Biblical rage and injunction would do.  In a feverish St. Vitus' dance, they blazed with righteous anger and holy purpose. 

 

Now that their goody bag of good ideas was empty, and the road to a more verdant, compassionate, and considerate future blocked, they were stymied. The tide was turning from righteousness to villainy as lengths of pipeline, volumes of particulate coal-fired emissions, number of deportations, and predatory Wall Street buyouts increased. Individual protests were of no use, only distractions, diversions from the central truth.  The madman must be stopped, and that was that. 

Fergie Lampo had been one of the first to sound the alarm about climate change, and with the first millimeter of loss from the Antarctic ice shelf onwards, he was on the front lines.  It was not just global warming he said, but climate change.  An irreversible, devastating, existential crisis putting the human race within seconds to midnight on the doomsday clock.

 

He was indefatigable and unstoppable.  With every fluctuation in bird migration, bee population, sea currents, and weather patterns, he was on the air, on every stage that would have him, and in the news.  He had found a home in the Biden administration, a minor player in the White House Office for Climate Affairs but an important one nonetheless.  There among likeminded passionate advocates, he could be himself, feeling good about doing good and making a difference. 

Then, all of sudden Biden was on the street, the Trump juggernaut was in Washington, and climate change was no more than a footnote.  The hatred for the new President and everything he stood for had completely erased any trace of concern for the changing patterns of the world's climate.  Armageddon was as close as it had every been, but no one was paying attention.  What gives? Fergie asked. 

Social psychologist Abraham Silberstein, resident scholar at the Maastricht Institute Of Social Sciences, had this to say about collective hysteria:

The origins of hysteria are well known - a combination of genetic, social, and environmental factors which produce an initial intellectual febrility which quickly becomes an inchoate distortion of reality.  The hysteric, in the popular lexicon, has lost the ability to know what's what. 

The literature amply shows that such hysteria is also a feature of groups and societies at large - majorities who incorporate the most aberrant, unbelievable notions into their psyches and turn them into universal expressions of uncontrollable angst. 

What one observes in America now and what has been popularly but aptly called Trump Derangement Syndrome is occurring.  The bilious, fulminating, inchoate hatred for the man is what scientists call Psychic Universality, a state of mind where all normal, cognitive functions are shut down, and the medulla oblongata, the seat of primitive emotions takes over. 

There is no stopping the transformation once it has started and like rabies it inevitably kills its victims; but before it does, the feral hysteria jumps from one imagined issue to another like a three-legged squirrel... (Maastricht Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 22, 22-100) 

Not that this was any consolation to Fergie who had simply and practically been lost in the shuffle; but at least it explained why his progressive colleagues had gone from diffident to distracted to dismissive about his continued plaints and demands.  If this continued, he knew, climate disaster would be a forgotten issue consigned to the style section of the Washington Post ('Gardeners - Prepare Your Sprinklers for Summer').  

As it was, Trump himself had debunked the issue, saying from a balcony overlooking the White House South lawn on a unexpectedly balmy April day, 'If this is global warming, I'll take it'.  The demission of the issue had already started; but that, Fergie treasonously thought as he too enjoyed a particularly delightful day of early Spring, might not be a bad thing. 

Habemus Papam - A Touch Of Evil, Monte Carlo, And The Splendiferous Rise Of An American Pope

Henry Cabot knew Bobby Prevost, now Pope Leo XIV when they were boys in Chicago.  Henry always thought that the Prevosts were an odd family, fond of bratwurst and beer, shanty Irish or Polish or something not quite American about them; but then again any family would seem an outsider to the Cabots, descendants both of the Mayflower and Jamestown, pureblood Americans whose families had been top rung without dilution since the 16th century. 

 

How and why the family moved to the Midwest and Chicago was uncertain, it didn't do them much good, and as it does to most people, flattened out their curves so that little was left of that special patrician nobility that endured in the East. 

Be that as it may, Henry and Bobby went to Catholic school on the South Side, Bobby an indifferent student and Henry at the top of his class.  When his classmate went off to Villanova, Henry went to Yale, back to his roots to the university founded by the Massachusetts Bay Colony's ultra-Puritan minister John Davenport who, sick and tired of the flaccid Protestantism of Boston headed south to form his own more stern and originalist colony, the New Haven Plantation. 

Yale in those days was still a patrician New England redoubt, but the religious legacy had faded.  Gone were any thoughts of salvation and redemption as the students prepared for Wall Street and summered on the Vineyard.

Henry, however much he thought the Prevosts were hayseeds and saltbox settlers, he followed his old classmate's trajectory with interest.  A religious vocation given the very ungodlike course of history was a curious thing.  

The irony of faith - God's creation of a sentient, intelligent, creative, and insightful being, allowing him to live for a few decades, then consigning him to six feet under for all eternity - and the marvelous political debauchery of the ages, was always a wonder.  The fact that Bobby Prevost not only took reformist divinity seriously, but signed up for the program was even more interesting. It was one thing to be an altar boy, but the priesthood?

Bobby Prevost became an obsession for Henry, but in its own curious, devious way. The more holy and sanctimonious Bobby became - all that snookering with the poor in the slums of Lima and holier-than-thou treatises on faith and divine order - the more Henry was tempted by the other side of things. 

Ivan's Devil in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov got it right in one - I am a vaudevillian, he said, a trickster, a carny barker, a conman, and a comedian. Without me life would be a desperate, gloomy, thudding, lifeless bore. 

 

Ivan wondered what he had seen and heard, this ordinary, shabby looking man challenging his assumptions about righteousness and divinity who might be right after all if one gave up credulity and simply looked around. 

And so it was that Henry became the anti-Prevost.  The whorehouse was his seminary, the nightclubs of the Left Bank and the cabarets of Berlin his grounds, the beautiful people his peasantry.  The more that Bobby rose in the ranks of the Church and curried favor with the Vatican, the more promiscuous, libertine, and unschooled Henry became. It felt good to be a counterweight to restore the moral balance, to inject some reality into what had become a very sanctimonious fantasy. 

He became a scion of Wall Street as Bobby was headed for Rome.  He made millions through canny investments, buying managerially dilapidated businesses, restructuring them, and selling them for thousands of percent profit.  He spent every last cent of his fabulous earnings on everything from arm candy to Lamborghinis, houses in St. Barts and Gstaad, a cavalcade of riches and pleasure. 

'Remember me, Bobby?', Henry wrote to now Archbishop Prevost, and asked him to lunch on one of his trips back to Chicago to see his brothers; and the two old schoolboys had a grand old time at McFadden's Irish Pub sharing stories of their childhood. 

After the corned beef and cabbage, the Archbishop became serious, took his friend's hands, and clasped them in an embrace.  'What has happened to you, Henry?' and went on to draw parallels and metaphors from the slums of Maravilla, his beloved Peruvian neighborhood of good people, simple people, people of God. The life that his friend was spending at the watering holes of 'the diaphanous rich', wasting his soul 'in barren wastes' was not what God had ordained. 

Who was this fool? wondered Henry, this pompous, windy prelate? But the more Bobby went on about the poor, the marginalized, the refugees of oppression, and the more he felt the pendulum of moral balance getting more and more out of whack, the more he wanted a drink with one of Madame de Miramon's girls and a long evening at the tables in Monte Carlo.  

Sanctimony comes with priestly territory, apparently, for Bobby was never as bad as all that, prayerful to be sure, taking the altar boy thing more seriously than most, but still a Southside kid; and here he was expounding, expatiating like every priest he had come across.  God only knew - no pun intended - what the Church would be like if he ever rose to the top. 

When Prevost was named Cardinal by Pope Francis, Henry wondered if he might actually become the new Vicar of Christ.  What a laugh that would be, he thought, but stranger things have happened, and in one final, anticipatory blowout, he draped himself with the finery of beautiful women, was seen in the best places of Europe, a splendiferous show of money and what it could buy.  For every priestly homily about sharing, compassion, love and divine affection, he spent another thousand in a jubilee of excess. 

When the puff of white smoke was seen eddying up from the chimney of the Vatican, and its spokesman saying, 'Habemus Papam' called the name of Robert Prevost, Henry was as surprised as anyone. It was one thing to have elected an American, but Bobby Prevost, White Sox fan, master of the glib homily, pastor to the most overstated minority on earth - the underprivileged - and tireless bore about Jesus and Calvary? 

 

The jousting game was over.  Bobby had won.  Now that he was Pope, there was nothing that Henry could do to reset the clock, to adjust the pendulum.  Goodness - at least in the moral wrestling match of the two schoolmates - had come out on top. 

So, Henry Cabot tied up his fortune in offshore accounts, pulled in his horns, sold off his properties and moved to a modest home in Apalachicola, Florida - a piece of the Forgotten Coast, the Redneck Riviera where he could eat oysters and grilled grouper and look out over the Gulf.  Now that Bobby was on the papal throne, what better place to settle than this neither-here-nor-there parcel of Americana? 

The Dementia Of A Liberal Politician - Progressive Things Being What They Are, Nobody Noticed

Much has been made of the mental decline of former President Joe Biden, on display again months after leaving office in what he hoped would be a rehabilitating interview on The View, a media claque who had championed the man's intelligence, acuity, perception, and vigor despite his obvious decline. 

In the recent interview Biden clattered on as incomprehensibly as he  had before, cheered on by his wife Jill. Whatever the Bidens had hoped would happen - the return of a bright, snappy, alert man ready to take back the leadership of the party - did not.  It was a sad, dispiriting performance, far worse than the disastrous debate Biden had with Donald Trump, but according to news reports, the former President 'felt good about himself'. 

This is but a preamble to the story of another elderly politician who had for many decades served his constituency and the American people well.  He had been a longtime champion of progressive causes, and in fact there was no cause that he did not embrace. One critic called him 'a brimming stew of rancid ideas' which pretty much summed up the heady mix of environmentalism, black supremacy, gender fluidity, and income equality which characterized him.  

Unlike Chuck Schumer, Senate Minority Leader, a man who never turned down an opportunity to speak, our politician demurred, kept his own counsel, and chose to work behind the scenes to engineer important legislation for his district and to join others in more national and international issues. 

The fact of the matter was that he made as little sense as Joe Biden, but because of his low profile, he was never under the same spotlight as the former President had been. More importantly, because of his pat and practiced endorsement of familiar liberal causes, and his party's insistence on 'ethos, meaning, and purpose' rather than weedy details, he could stick to generalities and still be cheered for the insightful politician that he seemed.  Take this recent speech in Dayton for example:

My fellow Americans, I stand here before you as a representative of this great nation of ours to warn you of dark clouds on the horizon, dark, ominous, portentous clouds. The climate is warming at an alarming rate, and it is the bulldog capitalists of Wall Street who are fueling it with their avarice and deformed individualism.  I stand before you as a man of the people, not the bloated caricatures of prosperity sitting high up above the crowd in their penthouses, top floor boardrooms, and luxury suites.  I am with you, among you, for you...  

All well and good up to this point, for the speech had been written for him, the metaphors, similes, and ironic references cooked up by Abe Silberstein who was known for his glibness and way with words.  Working exclusively with progressives, he knew how to craft speeches of emotional impact without getting lost in details.

If the teleprompter had a glitch and went all wavy and unreadable, the politician would stare out over the crowd and point to one or two of his familiar supporters, and wait until his handlers ushered him from the podium, so seamlessly and elegantly that the audience had no idea that anything was wrong.  

Why would they, for Silberstein was such a master of speech prosody that a talk could end in medias res without notice.  A emotive speech, one designed to create an image, a feeling, had no real beginning or end.  In Silverstein's hands it was a prose poem. 

Silverstein had read Jerzy Kosinski's book Being There whose main character, Chance, a retarded gardener working on a wealthy estate who could speak only in the simplest, childish way and whose entire universe was the lawns, flowers, bushes, and trees of his garden.  When his patron dies and he leaves the estate, he captures the attention of politicians who find his observations insightful.  When he speaks of cultivating a garden, trimming the rose bushes, or tilling the soil, the politicians hear metaphor, ruminations about life. 

 

Chance possesses only scanty information picked up from TV, but his naïve and sometimes disconnected responses to questions and conversation are interpreted as oracular by his hearers, who seemingly go out of their way to provide context and ulterior meaning to his statements. Specifically, his statements regarding gardens and gardening (the only subject he knows) are interpreted as powerful metaphors for economic growth and cycles.

"In the garden growth has its seasons.  First comes spring and summer, but then we have fall and winter; and then we get spring and summer again, and as long as the roots are not severed, all is well", he says, and the politicians assume he is talking about the business cycle, the inevitable turning and returning of economic growth.

The more he speaks, the more those around him think he is a man of particular insight and intelligence.  Even when introduced to him as Chance, the gardener, they hear only Chauncey Gardiner. 

He rises in political stature thanks to the willing suspension of disbelief of the ambitious politicians who hear only what they want to hear, and he is even mentioned as a possible candidate for Vice President.  Kosinski writes:

Facing the cameras with their un-sensing triple lenses pointed at him like snouts, Chance became only an image for millions of real people. They would never know how real he was, since his thinking could not be televised. And to him, the viewers existed only as projections of his own thought, as images. He would never know how real they were, since he had never met them and did not know what they thought.

And so it was with our politician whose increasing dementia was overlooked by his colleagues who saw in him man passionately devoted to the progressive agenda and who could communicate the simple, essential messages of social reform, justice, and the inevitable utopia to come to a waiting public. 

They, like the politicians in Being There took his words for granted, marvelous confections of emotional impact and resonance.  Few even bothered to look for a script writer let alone the genius Abe Silberstein, and gathered more and closely around the politician as he became the darling of the progressive Left. 

Energy, ah energy...where would we be without it, the infinite, eternal energy of the sun turned into useful power for our lives.  Aeolus, God's winds, blowing north, south, east, and west, turning the turbines that generate electricity to warm and brighten our homes.  There is enough energy in the world around us without having to despoil God's green earth with despoiling efforts to pull oil out of the ground.  Wind and sun are part of Creation, and we share it with them.  It is our destiny, our path...  

Once again, not one reference to detail, for who needed it? The entire progressive platform was magically chimeric, a beautiful comic book fantasy of a better world and the politician was a master of conveying such poetic reality to the voters. 

Even when his mental vacancy became painfully obvious, his supporters ignored it.  In a way, like Chance, the gardener, it was a source of his inspiration.  Silberstein's words, so elegantly crafted were what the politician would have said had he the versatility as the speech writer.  It was serendipity which brought the politician and Silberstein together in complete, understanding, symbiosis.  Silberstein's words needed a vacuum in which to thrive. 

So the politician, thanks to his eloquence, modesty, and obvious commitment, rose in prominence, and like the empty-headed Chance the gardener, was considered for high office.  Of course Silberstein wouldn't be around for ever, nor be with the politician on his rise; but at some point the words would sink in and become his own; and by that time they, the politician’s colleagues, would be well on their way themselves. 

It was the perfect storm - a totally vacant, mentally absent politician, a brilliant speech writer who knew the progressive canon and the way a simple man would make its simplemindedness meaningful, an ambitious claque of colleagues who would ignore the most obvious if it served them, and a gullible, credulous public who would swallow anything that sounded like heaven. 

Eventually of course, the teleprompters broke down, metaphorically of course, and no one could ignore the politician's dementia, now so severe that not only did he make no sense when left on his own, he had no sense at all.  Some around him were convinced that his childishness was still an asset, for the progressive following did not want some reflective, parsing exegete but a simple man like the politician; but they were in the minority, and the politician, no longer useful was left on the curb. 

'A good run', said one who was sure, given the persistent adherence to the fancy swirls and brushstrokes of his progressive colleagues, that another one like the politician would soon appear. 

Oh, Dear Me - Faux Compassion As ICE Cleans House And The Alien Invasion Is Over

Millie's, a popular upscale restaurant in Washington, DC was 'raided' by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) yesterday, and the surrounding neighborhood, progressive down to the last soul, was apoplectic.  This was nothing less than a pogrom, Kristallnacht returned, Nazi SS storm troopers in a genocidal sweep of the ghetto, a brutal attempt to ethnically cleanse America, rid it of brown and black asylum-seekers, and restore it to its original whiteness. 

This neighborhood ironically was at the heart of the COVID vigilante movement, a Stasi-like system of informants sent out to identify, name, and humiliate those not wearing masks or keeping social distance. Residents were inflamed. This truancy, this obliviousness to public health, this outrageous defiance of government order and brazen refusal to conform was nothing less than a festering boil on the body politic of American University Park, a cancer, an insidious viral epidemic that had to be stopped. 

J'accuse! was the meme. Social miscreants were howled at, confronted, and spat upon.  They were apostates, unbelievers, and moral traitors.  The community was at a fever pitch, all sense of neighborliness, accommodation, and respect disappeared in a howling St. Vitus' dance of wild, crazed obsession.   

 

This was a caterwauling, howling, mob out to tar and feather anyone who did not follow orders and who were outliers and dangers to the state.  These vigilantes were no different than the East Germans who joined in the purges of insurrectionist democrats, who informed, identified, and pointed to anyone who even suggested political deviance.  AU Park during COVID had become a neo-Soviet, intellectually shuttered, unconsciously obedient place. 

And here they were again, lawn signs again out in force, but the ante was upped.  The 'Hate Has No Home Here' rainbow signs, banners of personal identity and belonging were replaced by those of pure hatred for Trump, Musk, and their torchlight fascist marchers. 

Mr. and Mrs. Jones went out of their way to give coffee and donuts to the illegal immigrants who fled Millie's and were secreted in sanctuary homes in the neighborhood.  It felt good, finally, to act like both Jesus and Marx, embracing generous Christian values and social revolution. 

The Joneses were no strangers to illegal Salvadoran immigrants.  They were the ones who cut their lawn, replaced their shingles, painted their porch, and were nannies for their children, all in a no-questions-asked, comforting ignorance.  Jose and Maria were not illegal anything, but legal human beings and would be treated as such; and when former President Biden open the gates to the southern border, they cheered, for a new generation of leaf-blowers and house painters was on its way to Washington. 

They ignored the social and economic disruption of millions of illegal aliens pouring into the country unchecked and unquestioned.  These were good people fleeing bad, and America had a duty to shelter and harbor them.  There was no such thing as illegal entry when an asylee had been beaten, tortured, and insulted.  

It made no difference that restaurants like Millie's were saving millions of dollars in wages, thanks to illegal immigrants who would work for peanuts; or that such illegal employment was driving down all wages and effectively obstructing the fair working of the labor market.  It made no difference that open immigration was no different from Fidel Castro's Mariel Boat Lift thanks to which he emptied his prisons and sent convicts to their new American home.  

It made no difference that undocumented immigration increased discrimination and caused a fractured, divided American society.  It made no difference that under the pretense of a compassionate caretaker, the role of government was being yet again expanded. 

The umbrage, the outrage, the furious and wild outcry against the ICE raid of Millie's was just what AU Park needed to reenergize their fight against Trump and the Far Right, a fight which had lagged in the first months of the new Presidency because of the unexpected juggernaut slashing and burning up and down Independence Avenue. 

Now the heady feeling of real protest was back and the juices of the old civil rights days flowing again.  'To the barricades', AU Park shouted, and down they went to official Washington in busses just like the old days. 

 

Betty Jones hoped that they would once again feel the blast of water cannons, the thud and whack of police batons and axe handles, the bite of police dogs, the sense of justice and righteousness that brought out the best in one. 

Of course all the undocumented, illegal workers at Millie's, Chef Geoff's, and a number of other upscale Northwest Washington restaurants went scurrying for the exits after the ICE visit, and no surprise, the establishments started paying a living wage to the plongeurs in the kitchen. 

'What if ICE comes after us?', said one anxious resident of AU Park. 'We are just a stone throw from Millie's and...' Here she stopped herself.  If ICE did indeed to make a U-Turn and head north a few blocks, roofers would stumble down from second story dormers to their vans, lawn maintenance crews would drop their leaf blowers, nannies would run out back doors, and painters would leave walls have done.  Traffic would pile up on 46th Street as the undocumented headed for the warrens of Rock Creek Park and across to the barrio.  

Betty Jones knew this, and knew exactly what would happen, and despite her outrage had to think of her rose bushes and cracked chimney, let alone her children about to be picked up at school by Hortensia, so she kept her own counsel.

'A police state, that's what we're becoming', lamented Betty Jones, forgetting the Orwellian nightmare of censorship, revisionism, government interventionism, and Armageddon-based environmentalism of the previous administration  If there ever was a mind-controlling, expansionist state, it was out of control during Biden's tenure. 

 

Such political irony is not uncommon in progressive redoubts like AU Park where history is an afterthought, the Enlightenment a curious intellectual bypass, the Constitution increasingly irrelevant, and social reform, if done properly, the future of America; so Betty Jones was a happy person, alive in heady times - difficult and trying to be sure, but meaningful, and what a legacy that would be!

The Pope, The Ayatollah, And Donald Trump - The President's New Gambit For World Power

No one can accuse Donald Trump of being recondite, hiding his true meaning; and certainly no one can accuse him of being politically correct, but the AI-generated photo of himself as Pope was over the top, the last straw for progressives and their media shills who said 'I told you so', the man is completely irrational, mad, and unworthy of the office to which he was elected. 

'A disgrace' was the meme repeated again and again on the Internet, 'a travesty, a heinous, arrogant, blatant threat to democracy.  How could he have?'; but he did and loved every minute of it, poking his finger in the eye of every sanctimonious whiner in America.  This, the whiners said, was the last straw. 

At once they began to parse, deconstruct, and disassemble the photo and the intent behind it for hidden meaning since no president in his right mind would do such a dishonorable, disrespectful thing.  It was particularly offensive because coming so soon after the death of Pope Francis, beloved pontiff of the Left, it was a particularly outrageous statement. 

Trump supporters of course cheered, for they knew their man for the tummler he was, a vaudevillian, a comedian, and an in-your-face provocateur.  This, like many of his hilarious takedowns, his caricature and ridicule were out of a Jackie Mason Borscht Belt playbook and playing to the entire nation not just New York Jews at Grossinger's. It was pure Trump, and no one except the easily offended were bothered by it. 

 

In fact they loved it and everywhere from Dubuque to Roswell, more flags went up, and kazoos, cymbals, and drums were heard in every corner of America.  Their man was in fine fettle and in full form. 'More', they shouted for an encore for the ringmaster, the carny barker, the tummler and comedian par excellence. 

Meanwhile, liberals convinced that there was more to the image than wicked playfulness, dug deep for coded messages of intent.  They knew that Trump had hegemonic, authoritarian ambitions, and while the idea of him as Vatican Head of State and leader of the world's Catholics was an absurd impossibility, was he actually somehow devilishly intervening in he sacred deliberations of the Conclave of Cardinals?

 

Now that all the levers of power were in his hands, there was no doubt that he could definitely work his way inside the chambers of the Vatican.  The cardinals, ambitious men like every other male, eager to either rise to the top and secure the prize, or curry favor with those who might succeed, could be had.  

The hand of God notwithstanding (the Catholic Church teaches that the electing cardinals are guided by His hand and that the election is divinely inspired if not determined), the claque assembling in the Sistine Chapel was no different from Mafiosi installing a new don or the Roman Senate choosing an emperor.  

So liberals in Washington looked for clues - cables, tweets, official correspondence, informal meetings, and back room leaks that would prove collusion and political interference.  After all, Democrats were well adept at the game, for they had played it themselves, and had cooked up a scheme of Russian interference in the 2016 Trump election, conspired to brand him as a traitorous dictator-in-waiting, Russian dupe, and blatant anti-democrat. It all came to nothing, and they were getting payback from the unbowed President, and that was all the more reason to mistrust him. 

If that wasn't enough - i.e., the Presidential manipulation of the election of the next pope - there were some in Washington who believed that Trump had his eyes on an even more elusive prize - Iran and the Ayatollah. Decades had passed since the overthrow of the Shah, and Iran, only a step from becoming a nuclear power, was already the most influential power player in the Middle East. 

If somehow Trump could support a popular insurrection in Tehran and influence the next government, his influence in an international axis of power would be complete.  He and Putin had, despite necessary public displays of disagreement, come to an understanding.  There was more to gain from a joint partnership in the pursuit of world hegemony than an adversarial one.  

China, once it realized that all this tariff nonsense was just Sturm und Drang, of no consequence, would be a welcome member of the new World Triumvirate. If Trump could influence the Iranian situation his way, a new international order would be settled. 

Of course the CIA has tried since 1979 to topple the Islamic regime of the ayatollahs with no success, but times have changed and a new oil equation is in place.  Trump's open energy exploitation policy was a final step to American energy independence, so indirectly collusive relationships with Iran would be things of the past.  Without oil to hold him back, Trump could engineer all kinds of mischievously serious troubles for the regime. 

And so it was that a joke, a hilarious, self-mocking, marvelously outrageous AI-generated portrait of Donald Trump as Pope became the newest weapon in the Left's war chest, a rocket that can't shoot straight, a rifle with a bent barrel, a dud. 

There has never been a more depressingly sanctimonious, humorless, desperately anxious group than today's progressive Left - a caviling, hectoring, boring lot of whiners without a substantial idea in their heads.  Diversity and Trump hatred is all that is in there, and now that diversity-equity-inclusivity has been shown to be the absurd charade that people always knew it was, only Trump hatred remains. 

The whole Pope thing has to be the last gasp of a twitching corpse.  How else to take it?  Good Catholics loved it, not a drop of upset or umbrage there.  The regulars at McFadden's, drunk as all get out thanks to rounds of Guinness on the house, cheered when the picture of Trump as Pope appeared on the screen. Catholic and Irish they all might be, but Trump in the Vatican would be just the thing to shake the Church loose from buggery, socialism, and bloody Africa. 

So the Left, as always, thought they had the President cornered.  His foul, vile, venomous assumption of holy sanctimony plus his unholy alliance with Russia and his attempts to create the axis of pure evil by assembling international outlaws, anti-democratic brigands, and authoritarian dictators would finally do him in. 

 

As usual, they were flabbergasted by the malicious laughter which met them at every public gathering.  When Kamala Harris got on her high horse and brought out all his insidious plans in a messed up, incoherent babble, even her former supporters wanted her to shut her big fat mouth and go home. 

And when the squawker, Little Miss Muffet the ankle-biter, the little brown woman from Brooklyn started yapping away on The Axis of Evil, crowds shut her up just as roundly as they had Madame. 

'What's a mother to do?', yelled Bob Muzelle, one of the old time liberal crowd, longtime defender of the faith, passionate advocate of everything progressive; but he too was drowned out in the laughter and whooping and hollering of the MAGA legions. 

The Left still cannot believe that their candidate, an anointed black woman, was defeated by Trump; and that he has turned out far worse than expected.  Worst of all, no one was paying attention to them! Voices of reason, intelligence, and moderation were falling on deaf ears. 

There has been no political figure like Donald Trump in American history, let alone a President, and there is not likely to be one again.  Most Americans realize that a show like this is a once in a lifetime affair, and are enjoying it to the hilt. 

Dumb Is As Dumb Does - Despite Inclusivity The Potholed Road Of A Clueless Person

Harper Fields was, in the words of his parents and teachers, 'a slow learner', diagnosed with ADHD and other learning disabilities, but despite all the professional nomenclature he was simply as dumb as a stone, unable to tell this from that, befuddled by simple addition, and bamboozled by the most basic sentences in his first grade reader. 

His parents had tried everything to boost the boy's potential, to at least raise him a few notches above the bottom of the barrel, give him a fighting chance in a desperately competitive world, but no dice.  The boy stumbled along, bumping into things, asking directions to nowhere, and left wondering at life's simplest mysteries. 

Now, Mr. and Mrs. Fields were not dumb by any means. While not the sharpest knives in the drawer, they both had creditable professions.  She was an accountant, and he was a manager at one of Washington's largest banks, both occupations which required more than a modicum of ability and intellectual resources. 

'So where did he come from?', Mr. Fields rhetorically asked his wife, glancing at the photo of old Gertrude Bingham her great grandmother who was apparently in the lexicon of the day, 'a few bricks shy of a load'.  Looking dumbly at the camera with a stupid smile fixed on her face, it must be the old lady responsible for Harper's unfortunate mess.  Genes have a way of finding a home, Fields said, and God only knows where that will end up. 

 

Mrs. Fields objected.  She had never much liked her mother-in-law, and whenever the old bat started in on her storied family history, Mrs. Fields retched.  The Fields family, a classic case of interbreeding and incestuous intents to preserve its legacy, had nothing to brag about, and any defective genes must have come from that side of the family. 

At the same time neither one of the Fields was willing to give in to Nature.  Nurture had a role to play in all behavioral outcomes, and they might still be able to gin up some mental energy in their son.  Before they saw how hopeless this was, they bought all kinds of interactive toys, the kind which engages the child's logic.  Nothing complex, but challenging; but day after day as they spread the component parts in front of the boy and watched him suck them and roll them like dice instead of figuring out where they belonged, they grew more discouraged. 

They tried everything, and since was still in the days of 'multiple intelligences', they assumed that although he might not be cognitively apt, he could still color between the lines, whistle a tune, or jump high hurdles.   His teachers quickly but apologetically disabused the Fields of that notion.  The boy was not good at anything they said and referred them to the school clinician trained to deal with slow learners and refer them to appropriate medical attention. 

Before long little Harper Fields was so doped up with the latest state-of-the-art drugs that he was barely recognizable.  One day he was a whirling dervish of inchoate energy, hopping around the house, climbing the walls, and kicking things; the next he was catatonic, sitting with a blank stare out into space.  When changing prescriptions failed after many attempts, all drugs were discontinued, and Harper was allowed to return to his original, unfortunately blank slate. 

He wasn't retarded, so there was no place for him in special institutions, no special help offered by the state; and his parents were left to deal with him as they saw fit, but since educational toys, counselling, and raft of psychoactive drugs had failed completely, they were left with few options. 

The elementary school kept bumping him along, but by the time he was in sixth grade and barely able to do third grade work, they were perplexed.  Middle school looming on the horizon would be a disaster.  There in a hormone-fueled environment, he would make no headway and would, despite progressive adjustments to ensure inclusivity and eliminate bullying, adolescents always seemed to find a way to be mean.  The only up side to all this was that Harper was too stupid to realize anything.  The taunting boys and girls would still be his friends. 

So armed with that rather uncharitable notion, the Fields sent him to Lafayette Junior High School, one of the District of Columbia's better places, but given the pitiful rating of the city's school system, that wasn't saying much. 

'Perhaps the diversity there will be a good thing', said Mr. Fields, obliquely referring to the black students who, thanks to the same progressive reformers, came from the slums of Anacostia and points east.  These children might not be genetically mis-wired like Harper, but every educational indicator of intelligent performance barely registered.  Harper would at least be in a stable of slow learners. 

These black kids, however, brought up in a macho culture where consideration and compassion were unknown quantities, were the meanest, cruelest of Harper's antagonists; so much so that neither teachers nor administrators knew what to do with these unsocialized, intellectually devoid students. 

Even poor, clueless Harper eventually got the picture and told his parents that he didn't want to go to school any more, so the Fields opted for St. Mary of the Valley, a parochial school not far from their home.  There, Father Brophy told them, their boy in the spirit of Jesus Christ would be treated with respect and love. 

  

Not so, of course, for all adolescents are the same, and there is no stopping the hormones coursing through their bloodstreams or their viciously competitive nature; and Catholic or not, Harper's classmates were as vile to him as their counterparts downtown. 

Somehow the boy managed to stumble his way up and out of St. Mary's.  His classmates simply got tired of bullying him and finally left him alone.  He managed to graduate high school with an equivalency diploma, and headed for MK, Montgomery College, so called because the students couldn't spell 'college' but the perfect place for Harper including as it did old-fashioned courses in shop and carpentry.  Thank God the boy had at least some aptitude at planing a board and affixing drywall, so could find an apprenticeship somewhere. 

'See, there's a place for everyone', said Mr. Fields who had long since dropped the cover he had invented for his son and accepted the fact that he would go no further in life than hammering nails.  There were enough 'mentally challenged' girls out there, so he would more than likely marry one; but given the vagaries of genetics, their children might turn out to be Einsteins.  

'Wouldn't that be a hoot?', laughed his father, finally having an ironic sense of humor about the Creator's deck of cards.  

Adulterers Welcome - A Final Goodbye To Good Boys And Girls

Bentley Upton never intended to be an adulterer, properly brought up as he had been in a dutiful, patient, and moderately successful family.  His father adored his mother, a woman of style and good taste, 'born too early' to enjoy the benefits of suffragism and women's liberation and frustrated because of it.  An adulterer in waiting was the best way to describe her in a sexually censorious age, and while she had ample opportunities to stray, she remained - at least as far as Bentley knew - faithful. 

Bentley's father was a man of wifely bent - not so much under the thumb of a demanding woman, but obedient to the mores of the times and without much adventure in his soul to push him awry. 

The marriage soldiered along - not unhappily but without much note - no strewn bedcovers, no leers or innuendoes.  All quite proper. 

Unlike the Blevins down the street.  Old Harvey Blevins always had his hands all over his lovely wife Martha, 'Oh, Harvey, please'...she said, but liked the feel of him, and even when Bentley and Billy Blevins surprised them in the kitchen, they were slow to pull apart.  Not so in the Upton household where a proper, appropriate distance was always maintained, and one got the impression that it was not because of the children but of their own sexual standoffishness.  

So, growing up in this sexual potpourri - his own parents, the Blevins, and The Cad of New Brighton, Dr. Trapp who never tried to hide his paramours or his afternoon liaisons - Bentley was fascinated by sex.  Trapp's wife as well as all the wives of the town felt it a privilege to be pursued by such a confident, maturely sexual man.  It was therefore no surprise that the precocious Bentley was primed to begin his own adventures. 

He dated serially, and with his mother's inherited sexual instincts, was one of the few boys in the ninth grade with sexual experience, albeit with the infamous Nancy Burns.  He also tried monogamy - going steady - to get the feel of an open pantry of sexual offerings, but ended up where he felt he belonged, in the world of Dr. Trapp who never met a woman he didn't want or who didn't want him. 

His four years at Yale were an idyll of sexual delights.  He had a nose for sexual interest - which girls would give it up without reservation - but also delighted in the chase after the daughters of those families for whom the right marriage was key to their social legacy. 

 

His years at Harvard were less sexually abundant.  In those years the law school was a largely male, and after Yale the girls of Wellesley and Holyoke seemed girlish and fussy; so he renewed his college roommate's Park Avenue acquaintances - Jewish girls on the borderline of spoiled but with an irresistible Levantine sexual permissiveness that made his law books tolerable. 

He was delighted to be in Washington as an aspiring partner at Swenson, Locke, & Perkins, K Street's premier law firm specializing in the crimes of the rich - insider trading, fraud, and misappropriation - an appointment which gave him easy access to the women involved, usually indirectly complicit and never charged; and who were, characteristic of that peculiar tribe of wealthy, well-bred, and ambitious women, excitedly sexual. 

For anyone old enough to remember the love-the-one-you're-with Sixties, today's censorious, neo-Puritanical, reverential days might be a surprise.  How did we get from a free-love, enthusiastic sexual freedom to a hard no? How had feminism, a movement of so much exuberant promise of sexual liberation become one of nasty misandry?  

Bentley Upton knew that the halcyon days of Woodstock, Jimi, and Janis could never have lasted.  America was, after almost three hundred years, still a penitential Puritan culture, afraid of its own sexual shadow.  Although American men might like to be a Mitterrand, Sarkozy, or Strauss-Kahn, sexual adventurers all, they were too timid and fearful to do so.  

Yet as he and any savvy man knew, the whole MeToo, neo-feminist canon was just a passing show. Women still wanted to be noticed, courted, and loved regardless of the circumstances.  

Bad boys were still in vogue, the badder, the better; and Bentley knew how to reap the benefits.  The seduction of women steeped in feminist cant was not only possible but desirable.  The woman who by day marched on the Mall for respect, honor, and dues paid, but complaisant and happy to have a man by their side at night, was easy prey. 

Estelle Perkins for example, a model of feminist propriety and principle and thanks to her ambition and gender-committed board of directors, rose high in the ranks of Parsons, Peabody & Finkel, a law firm that rivalled Bentley's for legal influence. Estelle had never lost a case, had defended the worst of the worst, and was called The Magician of K Street. 

At the same time, thanks to her traditional upbringing, she was a normal, predictably docile and complaisant woman.  She might be a terror in the courtroom, but wanted only peace and a good man to lie with by night.  She was ripe for Bentley's overtures and seducing a willful woman not to mention a courtroom rival, was a memorable victory. 

Bentley was married and had been so for years, but he had married into wealth and social prosperity, and his wife, the only child of the Boston Holbrookes was so stubbornly protective of the image of her family's importance she looked away at her husband's vagrancy.  Not only that, she loved him like every woman had - with complete sexual abandon. 

 

Her husband's adultery then, was not just admitted, but expected - a sign of his attractiveness and allure and a feather in her cap.  She wanted no part of divorce regardless of his truancy. And so it was that Bentley went from top floor to bottom, east to west, rich to poor in a memorable odyssey of lovely philandering. 

He heard the gossip of course - 'womanizer, cheat, adulterer, defiler, cad' and much more - but paid no attention.  The ethos of America would undoubtedly change and return to the heady days of the Sixties, a time when he would be one of many, a pedestrian on easy street rather than one of God's unique creations. 

'House-wrecker' was the old-fashioned Fifties term for an adulterer, his father's generation, a generation hamstrung and tethered by convention and propriety; but Bentley was much less than a disrupter of marriage than a sexual revolutionary.  He understood and easily bedded women who had prided themselves on their individualism and independence but found themselves the willing, complaisant lovers of a man who loved women but who could do without them.  They were women suddenly tossed on the curb and left to ponder their infidelity and willing obedience to men. 

All this was of no particular intellectual interest to Bentley who went about his business, pausing for breath and a cool drink, but as pursuant of pleasure and conquest as always. 

Future generations would look to him as both revolutionary and historically sentient.  He was a Sixties man in the early 21st century, a Casanova in a snipped and cribbed age, a man who understood women and the irrelevance of sexual culture.   Men and women were as destined as ever to play out life according to genetic imperatives. 

He ended his life like many successful men on a Miami beach with many memories and no regrets.  He had sharpened things up, added some spice and verve to the very intellectually and sexually sedentary life around him and had a whale of a good time doing so.