Tears On Her Pillow, A Woman's Fate - The Gender Spectrum Has Not Cured Feminine Romance

'Who says there's no such thing as true romance' Alicia Fried said to her friend. 'It says right here', she went on, pointing to the latest edition of Cosmopolitan which averred that not only was love alive and well in America, it was within the reach of every woman. 

 

Alicia had had a hard time of it but was still looking for Mister Right.  There was Bobby Barker, the son of the President of New Brighton Bank & Trust, football captain and Class President; but he never gave her a second glance, so surrounded was he by the class groupies, especially Marsha Perkins, all décolleté and doe eyes.  That slut would give it up for the janitor if the price was right. 

And Belinda Farnsworth, of the Farnsworths of the Philadelphia Main Line, preppy little bitch, that cunt rode the rails of her family's fortune but hadn't a decent thought in her head; or Esther Logan, cock tease, daughter of Margarite Logan, nee Carpenter who had been in a Broadway chorus line and passed on her net stockings and greasepaint to her tarty daughter who needed ever last bit of it to shade her ugliness. 

Bobby, for all his charm and Hollywood looks had zilch between the ears, even struggled with 1+1=2 remedial math and See Dick Run reading.  She admitted that she wondered about his cock between her legs, low IQ notwithstanding; but Cosmo advised her to hold out.  Don't settle for less.  You are who you are, a proud, glorious woman. 

 

Yet every morning as she addressed herself in the mirror, tilting her head this way and that to give just the right tilt to her chin, the right angle to her nose, she was not convinced.  The magazine must be talking about some other woman, not this plain, hopeless dour-looking, odd-featured thing in the mirror. 

'There's a man out there for everyone', the journalist went on, 'and it's only a matter of time', an entree into a presentation of helpful tips to attract him.  A touch of coyness balanced by straightforward confidence - this combination was the working title of the modern woman, shy and receptive but assertive and strong.  A bit of blush to lighten those shadows, pink rather than red lipstick, floral rather than French perfume (Men are suckers for lilac and lilies). 

All this clamor did little to boost her confidence or self-esteem.  It in fact hardened her. If such falsehood, artifact, and downright chicanery was the way to sexual felicity, then shove it.  She would rather be true to herself and not the puppet of some girly magazine's sexual editor, getting laid nightly in girl ghetto. 

Then there were the class dykes, Brenda and Bobbi, two ugly leftovers in the sexual lottery, classically butch bull daggers in flannel shirts and E-boots, grease under their nails from repairing a drive train.  They had escaped the whole sexual round robin scene.  Somehow for them beauty, charm, and a lithe, graceful feminine spirit was irrelevant, and as such they were freed from the prettying go-round, searching for just the right halter, the matching beads, and Manolo Blahnik shoes.  They did their shopping at the Army and Navy store, sucked and dildoed each other without a second thought or even a whimsical wonder about a real cock.  Maybe that was the alley to go down. 

Not so easy, of course, not even in today's zeitgeist of the gender spectrum, and the fungibility of sexual identity.  It was one thing to postulate changing sexual orientation as easily as bedroom slippers for shoes, but it wasn't.  Yecchh...the very thought of burying her face in Linda Larkin's twat was disgusting. No, she would have to play the cards she was dealt, go with the given flow of heterosexuality even as declassee as it had become. 

Adolescence is no fun for any girl, let alone in this free-wheeling, politicized climate of alternate sexuality.  Having to wonder what you were in addition to what you wanted added perplexity to the mix.  It was bad enough having to resort to the treacly advice of Cosmopolitan than to worry about parsing your sexual preferences.

So here she was, senior at New Brighton High, surrounded by girly girl cunts and bad ass machine tool dykes, looking for plain, ordinary, sex, and yes, a husband and children. 'This', warned Cosmo was a recipe for disaster because for every happy home in the suburbs, there would be tears on the pillow.  Men were not the fulfilling, satisfying yang to women's ying.  They were Neanderthalic predators without a scintilla of appreciation for women.  They would prey on that homely and vulnerable maternal instinct, string you along, dangle the romantic life in front of you, and leave you on the curb.  Better to spend your best years on your back or eating pussy than being seduced by that. 

Of course Cosmo didn't put it quite that way, but the message was clear.  Don't set yourself up for a fall, take measures, arm yourself, be ready.  We'll give you the tools for battle, but when the fight is engaged, you're on your own. 

This of course was God's honest truth - women keep falling for men's blandishments, promises, and romantic attentions.  For all the sluts, tarts, and daggers out there, most women simply cannot deny their inherently, innately romantic nature. They want to be loved, to be taken seriously, to be cared for and cherished, the myth of lovely romance started by a man, of course, Petrarch in the 15th century who wrote love poems to his Laura and ushered in the era of knights and their ladies, Rapunzel in the tower, the Lady of the Lake and all other engineered fabulist romance. 

 

Tears on the pillow was the meme, the metaphor, and the essentiality of women - desperate for love and adoring romance, ignoring the hardwired duplicity of men, falling head over heels for them, and then left with nothing, a year or two closer to their maternal pull-by date, unsatisfied, deceived, and alone. 

'Why do we fall for it?', Alicia asked.  'Are we that stupid?'

Even the hardest nail in the toolbox, the successful businesswoman who has risen through the ranks and broke through the glass ceiling, falls for this romantic tomfoolery.  Take Elizabeth Prentice Baskin, CEO at one of America's richest insurance companies, corner office, millions in stock options, genius at credit swaps and profitable investments who was found after an unexplained absence in Buenos Aires with her gaucho lover in a romantic fugue that made the Wall Street Journal. 

The story would have been interesting enough if it hadn't been for the denouement.  The gaucho was no different than any other man and left poor Liddy Baskin on the pampas while he sidled off to Santiago with a Chilean firecracker. 

'It is our lot in life', wrote Penelope Harker, sexual psychologist, and conservative advocate who went on to say that women should not struggle against the odds.  

'Our wiring is different, our synapses firing to get a man, someone to stand by us, provide for us, care for us while we bear his children, keep the home fires burning, and give him the support, solace, and love he needs.'

Pilloried by the Left, excoriated by the feminist cadres at the barricades of the gender wars, and dismissed by serious academicians,  Harker was the darling of 'the quiet voices of femininity', women who were quite happy to restore, preserve, and defend traditional female values. 

'She had it coming, that dumb bitch', Alicia said after reading the Journal article; but the juxtaposition of the Argentine fugue and excerpts from Penelope Harker's latest book was revealing. Yes, the Harker woman was wallowing in some Fifties romanticism and faux Christianity, but she had a point.  Keep their eyes and ears wide open and limit the tears on the pillow, but have extras in the laundry. 

Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew is perhaps his only mature romance.  In all his other plays, his views of marriage and the relations between men and women are suspect. But in this play Kate and Petruchio have found that elusive sexual equilibrium - she needs him and he needs her.  She has lost the shrewishness was not her nature but only a result of a punitive upbringing, and has become a willing servant to Petruchio because he has freed her from her penitential misery. 

 

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 labour, 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

Women cry, men don't.  Men's pillows are not wet with their tears over lost love.  Women's are. Alicia, we are happy to report, found her match - not a Petruchio exactly, but a man whose attractive masculine sexual adventurism was balanced by his unusual understanding of women.  A wanderer never tethered, but who always returned.  It was just this kind of sexual reality that kept her pillow dry. 

For God, For Country, And For Yale - The Welcome Return Of Aristocratic Civility

Harrison Cabot Lodge was the latest in the storied line of Boston Cabots and Lodges, product of an arranged but felicitous marriage between the two families which, as all of Beacon Hill knew, couldn't stand each other.  But Beatrice Cabot and Henry David Lodge were meant for each other and defied the long Montague and Capulet hostilities of America's first families, and married.  Their grandson, Harrison, was the proud bearer of both family names, and felt it was his responsibility to honor, protect, and preserve that particular, unique, historical legacy.  

 

Harrison was educated at St. Paul's and Yale - Harvard being the more obvious choice, but his father eschewed the soggy academic feel of the place and preferred the more overtly patriotic, conservative, aristocratic tenor of Yale. He, the father, Elihu Lodge, had been captain of the baseball team, a member of Skull and Bones, and academically at the top of his class. 

Yale in Elihu's day had changed little since its founding over two hundred years before.  It was still the privileged enclave of the New England wealthy and well-to-do, all with homes in Boston, Nantucket, and St. Tropez.  It was an era of sophistication, excellence, and noblesse oblige.  The Lodges and other important New England families gave generously to Yale and sponsored many praiseworthy social projects.  

The Elihu Lodge wing of Grace New Haven Hospital, later Yale New Haven Hospital, was a welcome addition, and the renovation of the New York Public Library, done under the direction of Ashley Hopgood Taylor, a student of Louis Sullivan and a master of the grand style of post-Belle Epoque American architecture, applauded.

 

Yale had begun to change during Harrison's years there.  Although the student body was still primarily from New England and private school educated, chinks in the armor began to show; and upon the ascension of Inslee Clark, new Dean of Students, the university became open-sourced.  The hundreds of Brooklyn Jews, champing at the bit with high-flying test scores and graduation from premier gifted-and-talented high schools but denied entry because of their religion and ethnicity, were admitted. 

Once the doors of admission were opened wide, the descent into the populism of race, gender, and ethnicity was assured.  The progression was slow and moderated by a still conservative board of directors and wealthy conservative alumni donors, but it was inevitable.  By the time Harrison's sons were ready for Yale, the place had become a political jamboree.  Gone was the revered classical education and the likes of Paul Weiss, Harold Bloom, Maynard Mack, and Vincent Scully and in were courses featuring slave journals, queer studies, transcultural communication, and revisionist history. 

It was unfair to blame Yale, of course, for the peculiar progressivism featured at the school was part of the new American social ethos.  Under the mantle of historical revisionism, Africa was raised to a place of cultural superiority, the black man of the forest became the new, sentient, new age human model, and Western civilization was derogated and dismissed for its racist, oppressive, manipulative, and exploitative colonialism.  

Esther Pilchman, head of Yale's Department of Cross-Culturality, declared 20-- Year Zero.  Modelling her revolutionary agenda to wipe the slate clean, to expunge every trace of the old Yale aristocratic mien after Cambodia's Pol Pot who exiled millions of his subjects to a life of Paleolithic labor, she said,  'There is no time to waste. The scourge of radical Right recidivism is here'. 

And with that the university became an inchoate, wild, Third World, rampaging mob scene - Palestinian statehood. death to Israel, down with white supremacy, destruction of the pillars of capitalism. 

The radical progressivism of Washington aided and abetted the dismantling of civility.  Identity politics was not simply a descriptive term for valuing race, gender, and ethnicity, but a banner of militancy. The country predictably divided on these arbitrary lines.  La lucha was too important to be confined by civility, manners, or good taste.

The Sixties, an era of confrontation and violent political activism, was child's play compared to the total lack of personal integrity, respect, consideration, and empathy of today.  There is a primitivism in the protests, a wild, unhinged, feral hatred that the relatively principled Sixties never saw. 

Every other weekend Harrison Lodge went back to Boston and spent the weekend with his family - his aged father, spinster Aunt Tally, poetess, dowager, philanthropist, and family historian; the Cousins Davenport who on each and every occasion reminded everyone that Yale and New Haven itself were founded by their ancestor John Davenport in 1638; and Humbert, a direct descendant of the Third Earl of Northumberland who had married into colonial Massachusetts society and was responsible for the knighthood of Percival Lodge for his service to international settlement. 

Boston was a shelter from the storm, and when Harrison was there, Yale, radical reformism, and the tide of sexual distortion, racial impossibilities, and economic disaster disappeared amidst the Revere silver, Tiffany lamps, Townsend secretaries and highboys, Persian carpets, roast beef, and claret.  

The Lodges were not whiners - history is of its own making, albeit at the hands of financial geniuses and captains of industry like themselves, and despite dire warnings does indeed repeat itself. The propriety, good taste, civilized manners, and noblesse oblige of their generations would certainly return.  Perhaps not in Chippendale, Turner, Copley, and West but in some reconfiguration.  The recent descent into mad, undefined populism has a bottom just like every other socio-cultural movement.  Bell curves are curves because of their waves and periodicity. 

The new radical conservatism of the current era has been a good beginning.  In fact its very lower middle class appeal and membership, its simple demands for a patriotic renewal and a return to the originalist values of Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, and Franklin were ripe for the old traditional, aristocratic leadership of the Cabots, Lodges, and Davenports. 

Civility, honor, respect, and responsibility are not temporal values.  They have been central to every civilization since the ancient Greeks and Romans. They are innate, permanent, and viable.  They are not ancillary, votive candles, but central to the survival and preeminence of human society.  

American society, now in the social dregs, in an inchoate, ungovernable, primitivism, cannot remain as such.  It will recalibrate.  The neo-tribalism of the African diaspora will necessarily be subdued and subsumed within the larger, more temperate and logical majority.  The febrility and fantastical idealism of progressivism will soon run its course. 

America will once again be ordered the way all great societies always are - a top and a bottom; an educated, sophisticated elite, a sedimentary bottom, and an unwashed middle.  No society has ever been uniform or equal and never will be.  The unschooled, deficient, and pedestrian will always look for enlightened leadership and moral guidance. 

Democracy? That has shown to be a very weak and intellectually corrupt political system.  China which has never lost its Confucianist ethos, sense of respect and discipline, order and responsibility is a good example - a model for the future of the West.  Europe is in chaos, and only a few countries like Poland and Hungary have stood by their allegiance to European, Christian values - assured through strong, disciplined leadership. 

 

'So, there's hope?, asked Aunt Tally at dinner. 

'Yes, my dear, but as my great uncle Carlton said when he was Governor of Mysore during the British Raj, "takes time, my dear, takes time". 

Harrison Lodge no longer contributed to the Yale Alumni fund or attended reunions.  Let the St. Vitus' dance finish playing. Perhaps not in my time, he reflected, but it will. 

A Misogynist And A Womanizer Walk Into A Bar...The Drinks Are On Me, They Both Say, Women Are All The Same

Anson Phipps was a womanizer, whatever that is, he wondered.  A man who loves women? Who likes sexual variety? Who enjoys the give and take of battle? Or a misogynist at heart - a man who doesn't think much of women and for whom seduction is the most complete humiliation?

The Jack Nicholson character, a successful writer in As Good As It Gets is asked by an adoring young woman how he writes about women so well.  'I take a man', Nicholson says, 'and I take away all reason and accountability'. 

A bit harsh, thought Anson.  A lot of women he knew were both reasonable and accountable; but there was something innate in them which gave lie to those qualities.  Take Althea Roberts, a woman of means and not inconsiderable intelligence who simply could not resist a man who took her seriously; a man of sensitivity, insight, and respect who was willing - eager - to visit her inner rooms and find the real woman inside. 

Anson was that man.  Not that he cared one way or another what lay behind the purdah of her soul, but because empathy was the key to sexual conquest.  He sat with her over drinks at the Oak Bar and tea at the Russian Tea Room, took long walks with her in Central Park and fed the pigeons on Columbus Circle, listening to her story unfold more and more intimately until the sexual deal was done. 

Althea was a successful businesswoman who had made it in a man's world of high finance, armed with supreme self confidence and  with a mother like the one in Strindberg's Miss Julie who brought her up as strong, determined, and willful as a man, but scornful of male ambition and their sweaty, beer-swizzling ignorance. 

Julie's education took root and as a young adult ran roughshod over the men on her family estate, a vixenish mistress who took her superiority for granted.  At the same time, regardless of the behavioral adjustments made at the hands of her mother, her womanhood was still intact.  She finds Jean, her valet, sexually appealing, but true to form she must demean and unman him, make him her slave.  She makes him beg like a dog, sit up like a trained bear, and jump through hoops until she cannot resist his virility, and native seductiveness.  She becomes his slave, beholden to him, desperate for his love and attention. 

Jean is not so much attracted to her as a woman but a satisfying prey - bedding the mistress of the estate on his terms would be the social conquest he had always dreamed of, sex far above his station, a position of authority and respect.  He, like Anson Phipps understood women and saw beneath their pretense, show, and drama to their vulnerable, desirous feminine core. There was no love involved, just a desire to remove the veil, to enjoy the seduction, bond the woman forever to him, and move on. 

Yet to say that Anson was a misogynist would be going too far.  Although he did not prize women, or see them as a necessary complement to his life, he enjoyed them - the perfume, the high heels, the décolleté, the makeup, and the hours before the mirror.  How charming, how delightful, how fanciful and appealing.  Life would certainly be dull without their fanfare and sexual vaudeville.

And the seduction itself - the soulful conversations, the understanding, the empathy and compassion; and then the inevitable stairs to the bedroom, the undressing, and the marvel at the glories of the female body.  The woman was delighted by his attention for it was admiring, not prurient; patient, not hurried; appreciative not hungry.  

Women, despite his indifference to meaning, purpose, or higher value, were on his mind continually, and pursuit, seduction, and conquest were his modus operandi his ethos, and his meme. His reputation was well known - admired by men far less successful and challenging for attractive women who wanted to see just what was behind the myth. More importantly, they wanted to be the one to bring him to heel, to the altar, and to their bower. 

So, Anson was truly 'the man who loved women' as long as one did not probe for ulterior motives.  Sexual conquest for him had the same ineluctable appeal as any challenging sport.  In fact why on earth would men willingly risk their lives climbing Annapurna when the delights, adventures, and pure excitement of unveiling a woman's soul was there for the asking?

A real misogynist had run into the blades of a feminist sawmill - intimidating, threatening, bullying women moved up to middle management, taking their pound of flesh after so long in the typing pool, treating men like gofers and handmaiden, watching them founder in their wake, grasp for any handhold on a ship which was quite able to sail without them. 

Emil Fanning was one of these outclassed men.  A hard, dutiful worker, a child of solid middle class values and expectations; but one without much empathy or insight. He was no match for the women who had quickly risen above him, were uncomfortable in their presence, and had no defenses for their brazen scything of the male fields.  He was willing to give women the benefit of the doubt at first - he had always loved and admired his mother who had raised him and his five siblings on little, had been a faithful churchgoer and contributor to civic activities - but was unprepared for this incivility, callous disregard, and monumental ego.  

Yet even this was not pure misogyny, for it can be explained in socio-cultural terms.  Competition for scarce resources is not pretty and plays itself out in the most predictable ways, and it is quite natural for men who have been passed over in favor of a more 'diverse' workplace to feel left out and lost.

One needs to turn to the witch trials of Salem to explore true misogyny.  There hundreds of women, suspected witches and tools of the Devil were burned at the stake.  The clerics and burghers of the town were not threatened in any way by women who were servile, penitent, and obedient.  There was no inkling of feminism or suffrage.  Women were in their place. 

Yet the fervor of the Puritan clerics who tried and condemned these women was hateful, spiteful, vengeful, and absolute.  Every woman who went crackling up in the punitive fire at the stake was one less harridan on earth. 

Real misogynists are not unknown in literature.  Shakespeare was famous for them - Othello, Posthumus, Cymbeline, and others were quick to label women as evil, preternaturally corrupt beings, the death of men and the scourge of mankind.  'I did you a favor', Othello says to the male judges accusing him after having killed Desdemona - one less cheating, lying, scurrilous woman to contend with'. 

So when Anson and Emil met at the Blarney Stone for a shot and a beer, the struck up a congenial friendship. As men will often do, after a few drinks, they started talking about women, their conquests, their frustrations, and their ambitions.  Although they were definitely men of a different stripe, their attitudes towards women converged.  Emil wanted nothing to do with them, Anson wanted everything; but Anson's pursuit of women was as amorally dismissive of them as was Emil's overt hatred.  Women were a different species, a devilishly troubling one, unfortunately necessary and therefore tolerated, but...

But what? both men agreed.  'Women.  Can't get along with them, can't do without them'; but life is not fair and Emil had to return to a hectoring wife and a bitch of a boss while Anson moved from bed to bed, up and down Fifth Avenue and the Village until he had had his fill.  Even the playful, wonderful game of conquest and go home grew tiring and uninteresting.  He still watched the pretty young things on Lexington Avenue with interest, knew that even if he wanted, his days of sexual appeal and seduction were over. 

No regrets, he said to himself.  None whatsoever.  He was a man who loved women and thought little of them.  Who said that consistency was a higher value?  Holding two opposing thoughts at the same time was a sign of intelligence, no?

The Deception Of Nature - The Irrelevance Of The Woods In A Brave New World

Sam Perkins was a nature lover, although he never would have called himself that, for his communing with the world could have no description.  It simply was and would always be the closest Man would ever come to God.

Sam came by this affinity with nature quite naturally, born and raised as he had been a Western valley town surrounded by the snowcapped peaks of the Rockies.  Chesterton had once been an important railhead for coal trains, great mile-long iron and steel caravans out of the Old West, and even now the winsome whistles of the Great Northern line broke the silence of the Wyoming night. 

Sam grew up with deer rifles, meat lockers, and pickup trucks and went into the Absaroras in all seasons to hunt, track, and hike. He felt exhilarated every time he stepped into the wild, alone but never feeling lonely in the vast wilderness.  A spiritual home was in fact more comforting than any brick and mortar dwelling could ever be.  

He smiled as he started up the long, winding cliff trail up to the top of Blantyre's Peak, his place of rest and solace, his Tibetan sanctuary, his holy shrine, his resting place.  The day was bright, clear, and cold.  The first tinges of yellow were on the aspen leaves, and few reds and golds were appearing on the cottonwoods.  The day was brisk, and Sam felt that special energy that he always had when he stepped into the mountains.  A spring in his step, a firm grip on the steep ledges of the upper reaches of his climb, deep breaths at 12,000 ft. in the air.  All was right with the world. 

One might expect that a man with such sensitivity to his surroundings and with such an ability to commune with nature, would be of fungible character.  He would be just as open, generous, and spiritually alive with his wife and children as he was high in the Rockies. 

The sad truth was that the Absaroras were a refuge.  Nature was only a temporary balm to the misery of living in a spiritless cow town, an endlessly aimless job, and life in a trailer on empty, rocky land east of town. 

Sam was a prisoner of the mountains - addicted to the wide open spaces and the rush of glorious possibility every time he set foot there.  He knew nothing else, for he had never been far enough east or west to see the great cities of the coasts but had convinced himself that they were chimeras, imaginary, fanciful places without the heart and soul of the West.

At the same time he felt the old spiritual energy of the Absaroras draining out of him.  The hike up Blantyre's Peak became more and more of a slog.  No matter how hard he tried to rid his mind of the clutter of dissatisfaction, there it was ahead of him at every turn.  Nature had become an empty, spiritless place, devoid of anything remarkable or new.  The view from the top of the mountain, a hundred miles of prairie extending to the Montana border, a vast empty space he once saw as a metaphor for infinity had become simply a desolate, empty, unwanted place.  He had wasted time and energy just for the sight of something as pedestrian as a Walmart kitchen aisle. 

It wasn't supposed to be this way.  There was supposed to be something permanent about nature, some indescribable subtlety that always touched the soul, landscapes that in their simplicity reflected the mind of God more than any New York skyscraper could; so how was it that he was bored, tired of being cold, pulling off galoshes and stoking the fire.  Tired of seeing nothing but featureless rangeland in the shadow of uninhabitable mountains.  Tired of the limited possibilities, the routine, the absolute vacuity of his life. 

He had been cheated, born and raised in this desolate place, provided an education so spare that it allowed him not even an intimation of the greater world around him, and forced to lead his life without variation.  

Worst of all, nature had deceived him. It was not what it had seemed.  It was not the place of spiritual renewal but of a deadening conventionality.  The world was exploding with information, knowledge, and experience, and here he was still bound and tethered by the mountains, the prairie, and the endless winter. 

Joe Francis was also a nature lover, but he, unlike Sam, embraced the term and the idea. For him, it was life's safety valve, a temporary, needed exit from the hopeless bureaucracy where he worked.  He had risen up through middle management until he secured a position as Division Chief of an important bailiwick of the Treasury Department and remained there secure, respected but desperately unhappy.

The perks of such an existence were not insignificant - a good salary and retirement, a home in a wealthy Washington suburb, and enough disposable income to enjoy occasional trips to Europe - but they could not compensate for the endless, soulless warrens of the Calvert Building, the perpetual meetings, the petty politics, and the depressing lack of any substantive value of his work. 

Only the Shenandoah lightened the load, gave him some measure of inspiration, some inkling that his life was not entirely meaningless.  Nature was itself inspirational, intimating meaning, suggesting that the life of Hindu sadhus and Tibetan monks sequestered high in the Himalayas reaching out for God was not just religious extremism but something valuable to be sought after. 

But after a while the Shenandoah had lost its cachet; or better had lost the spiritual significance that Joe was so sure he saw.  Leaves were just leaves, vistas were just breaks in the clouds, panoramas just perspective, silence was not golden but empty.  What was he doing here? he repeatedly asked himself; but he had no ready answer, no alternative.  This - the Washington bureaucracy and the Shenandoah were his ying and yang, his only one. 

On every hike in every season, his mind filled rather than emptied, and the clarity he had once sensed in solitude was entirely gone, replaced by nonsensical clutter, scattershot ideas, bits and pieces of women, food, and camaraderie. The woods - his woods, his solace, his go-to place for spiritual rest had become nothing but a buggy waste of time.  What had Thoreau been thinking?

Everything in life comes in cycles, and this particular one - the routine of work and the anodyne of Nature - was at an end.  Although neither Sam nor Joe realized it, a new, impossibly seductive, appealing, and satisfying world was just beyond their reach.  

Virtual reality was in its embryonic phase - simple back-and-forth excursions in a Disney world that offered more in the Wow! than in the substantial - but soon when one travels to infinite places with infinite permutations and combinations of the imaginary and the real and no distinction made between them, the real world will cease to hold interest and attention. 

Sam and Joe were on to something - they saw beyond the scripted reality they had been provided.  They both had been told that there was something mystical and transformative about nature, something elevated and spiritual, an unchallenged good of a priori value; and they had found that it was nothing of the sort.  

Being alone in the woods was simply to be without, not with.  It was primeval, yes, but in that originalism it is best left on its own.  It was, it is, and perhaps it will always be in some form or another, but not as this sacred fount, this holy temple.  The human spirit wants exit not a psychological huis clos. It doesn't want to be hemmed it, confined, limited in choice and opportunity.  Nature is a red herring, supposedly offering a glimpse into the sublime but offering nothing but shade. 

Sam and Joe were first adopters - they both had an insight into the false promise of nature and into the nature of the inexhaustible human spirit.  The realization of both at once made them unique, for taken individually the ideas are familiar.  Rejecting the faux promises of nature while at the same time understanding the full dimension of their very human nature is significant, and then discovering the virtual world an epiphany. 

Of course such tales are informative and interesting; but Sam and Joe were just ordinary guys trying to make the best out of the hand they were dealt, often befuddled by the unexpected, bored to tears by the hyped miracle of the woods, getting word of this brave new world but leaving it at that.  Yet attention should be paid to these two. 

The Useless, Inept, And Political United Nations - Time For It To Disappear

What a great idea Woodrow Wilson had when after World War I he initiated the creation of The League Of Nations, the precursor of today's United Nations.  WWI had been 'the war to end all wars', but Wilson, as any good diplomat and serious student of history knew, wars would never end, but an agency to limit or mitigate them would be at least a welcome gesture.

War, civil conflict, strife, sectarian and religious violence had been a part of history since the first human settlement, so it was a good thing that the war was called the first world war, for there surely would be others. 

 

And what could be more sane, more thoughtful, more inclusive, collaborative, and compassionate than a world body dedicated to peace and international harmony?  Everyone would have a one man, one vote in the General Assembly, assuring that even the smallest and most politically insignificant country would have a say in world affairs.  

The Security Council would be a small group of elite, powerful nations residing permanently and acting as a reasonable filter through which the demands of the majority would flow - a kind of representative system not unlike that of the United States where the Senate was created to act as the same filter, or rather brake, to the often feverish demands of the many. 

Alexander Hamilton was very wary of the majority and majority rule.  He understood that for all the good will and native patriotism of the republic's settlers, they could only be counted on for parochial interests and when it came to public policy would never look beyond farm, hill, and dale. An august body of the well-heeled would be the ideal intermediary between the masses and governance. 

Hamilton would be turning over in his grave if he could see what the Senate has become, nothing more than the same venal, self-interested, highly partisan rubes found in the House. 

The founders of the United Nations should have been better apprised of American history when they set up the machinery of international adjudication.  Of course the Soviet Union and the United States would never agree, and the Communist veto assured only the most congenial decisions for Russia.

As for the General Assembly, what could one expect from the representatives of the Third World, the vast majority in the body.  Whipped up by Soviet shills and operatives and with the promise of Communist largesse, the African nations could be called on to vote against American capitalist interests and to initiate the most self-serving and insolent motions against the US.  The General Assembly, increasingly Muslim and radically progressive, became an 'anti-Zionist', anti-Israel, and anti-Semitic body. 

 

Because of this generalized socialist, progressive ethos of the General Assembly, the technical agencies that were created to promote world order and wellbeing became the tools for the implementation of this agenda.  

UNESCO, the most politicized agency of all became the advocate for the 'free flow of information', a policy designed to do just the opposite. Small African countries were encouraged to publish their take on information, news, and events regardless of its foundation or veracity.  The truth or at least some measure of objectivity was less important than the 'freedom' of speech.  

The Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Labor Organization became advocates for collectivization in both farm and factory - free market solutions and options were ignored or dismissed out of hand.  The World Health Organization, the oldest of the technical agencies and therefore the most bureaucratic became an interventionist meddler, interfering and obstructing the legitimate policies and programs of national agencies. 

The Population Fund became little more than a branch of Planned Parenthood, militantly demanding universal, unlimited abortion everywhere.  'Reproductive Rights' was the innocent-sounding cover for this aggressive program, and no opposing pro-life views were permitted.  The same was true for its intimidating, inflexible promotion of breastfeeding, so universal and absolute that no accommodation was given for women who worked and whose income was significantly beneficial for family welfare. 

Throughout these social service organizations a progressive operational philosophy dominated - the ends were more important than the ends. 'Collaborative, participatory, inclusive' operations, regardless of how they resulted in inefficiency and poor outcomes, were promoted as the 'long term solutions to endemic problems'.  Meanwhile untold thousands of 'beneficiaries' died for lack of a direct approach to vaccinations and child care. 

The UN peacekeeping forces have always been a joke.  These 'blue helmets' deployed to war zones with no mandate to use force of any kind and only to act as peaceful intermediaries, were useless supernumeraries, often sexually and financially corrupt - a ragtag, poorly trained, feel-good responsive contingent worth nothing. 

 

The problem of the United Nations is more fundamental and goes beyond inefficiency, corruption, and political venality.  The very idea of international peace adjudicated by a third party is fallacious.  Conflicts have always been settled between adversaries alone. International 'cooperation' has always been the alignment of allies, nothing more.  

Where mediation from a third party seems reasonable, as in the current Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Palestine conflicts, it is always partisan and meddling. In rare cases, such as the Northern Island conflict, mediated and resolved thanks in large part by the American President Clinton, outside intervention works but works best within a well-defined geopolitical framework not the idealistic stage of the United Nations. 

Why should Iran, China, Russia, Israel, or North Korea listen to the empty blandishments of the United Nations.  Machiavellian realpolitik has always been the currency of international conflict and always will. 

 

So, when President Trump got up on the podium at an international gathering at the United Nations headquarters in New York and lambasted the organization for all its faux idealism, empty promises, and ineffective programs, the American Left howled and called him a traitor to world peace, a wild man, an unhinged xenophobic autocrat. Saner observers understood the point.  

Many European nations have been frustrated and angered by the arbitrary decisions of the European Union, interventions they say deprive them of their sovereignty; and so they understand Donald Trump's criticism of the United Nations and back him for his outspoken stance. 

Conflict, the nasty side of Darwinism, is as much a part of the evolutionary equation as sweetness and light. Competition is the foundational philosophy behind all human interaction, and as Darwin understood, it is the force behind evolutionary change.  Are their victims in the survival of the fittest?  Of course - the weak and ill-prepared - but that is no reason to deny the natural, inevitable, interminable course of history. 

Europe is just waking up to the fact that their generosity and social consciousness, permitting tens of thousands of illegal immigrants into their countries, was wrong-headed.  These radicalized Muslim newcomers are at war with the West, know nothing but victory and defeat, and have been militant since Mohammed and his tribe burst out of Saudi Arabia and into Jerusalem and across Africa into Spain. 

Borders, walls, and armed perimeters are natural human expressions.  Peace reigned during the Cold War not because of peaceful negotiations but MAD - mutually assured nuclear destruction. 

So it is time for the United States to withdraw its support and its taxpayer dollars from the United Nations - a pittance in economic terms, but a bold statement of realpolitik and political reality. 

Reversal - The Rapid And Universal Restoration Of Uni-Culturalism, Sovereignty, And National Pride

The Trump years are well underway, the Vance ones sure to follow, and a young generation of American conservatives is being groomed to continue the counter-revolution. For counter-revolution it certainly is, a complete, unabashed, militant reversal of the progressive policies and programs of the recent past.

 

No one could have predicted such an electoral result, but the Biden, woke years had taken a political toll far worse than expected; and Donald Trump is changing Washington and profoundly affecting the ethos, moral principles, and foundational core of the nation.

This supposed buffoon, this tummler, man of the mean streets, Hollywood, and Las Vegas came roaring into town in 2016, was narrowly defeated in 2020, and then charged back in 2024 and set out to put a brake on the hysterical idealism of the Left, restore respect for the country's foundational values, and return the nation to geopolitical primacy. 

The recent election was the beginning of a political revolution.  Not only have traditional conservative principles of small government, free range private enterprise, a strong military, and a a patriotic nationalism been reinstated, but there is a socio-cultural sea change underway. Whereas progressive administrations have dismissed white European culture as a uniquely damning, racist, corrupting influence, under the aegis of Donald Trump it is being restored to its proper premier place in history.  

Its kings, emperors, queens, and courtiers have been responsible for the efflorescence of high culture, art, music, philosophy, literature, and architecture; and for the extension of civilization to the vast underdeveloped reaches of the world. 

The Trump administration is recentering American culture on established moral and religious principles, strengthened an ethos of responsibility, patriotism, ambition, and individualism, and restoring common sense.  The days of the transgender side show were over, the sanctity of motherhood and universal respect for basic family values on which the republic were based have been restored. 

'Think Poland', the President had said when looking at the militantly Christian, white, traditional culture which has stood alone amidst the Islamization of Europe.  Poland's cities are safe, the culture unified and strong, its economy among the strongest in Europe, and its prospects limitless.

Poland, Hungary, and Italy form a counter-revolutionary European triumvirate, their leaders all outspoken about the viral spread of an antithetical, anti-European culture within their borders.  They all recalled their storied history of empire, high civilization, and geopolitical influence. 

A wave of social conservatism is sweeping from east to west in Europe as native-born populations, proud of their heritage but seeing it disassembled, ruined, and derogated by unwanted intruders, are turning against so-called 'multiculturalism' and turning inward to form national coalitions of nativists and adamantly principled adherents.  

France is to once again be La Belle France, proud of its legacy as the eldest daughter of the Church, having repelled the Muslim Saracen hordes, and even more proud of its high culture. 

Italy is to return to the glories of Rome, the brilliance of empire and its administration, jurisprudence, management, infrastructure, and collaborative rule. Britain is to confirm its allegiance to the monarchy, symbol of its empire and civilizing mission.  

 

All of Europe, having for so long subjected itself to a cultural whipping, an endless train of mea culpas and inward-looking progressivism, is turning outward.  Europeans reject calumnious charges of racism, neo-colonialism, and white supremacy and are again outspoken about their place in the world. 

Cultural relativism is a thing of the past.  Leaders like Marion Marechal, Alice Weidel, and Giorgia Meloni have said in no uncertain terms that Western Christianity is a superior moral philosophy to the medieval brutality of Islam.  That the African countries from which illegal migrants have poured in have barely budged from their Paleolithic past; and worse, that these migrants intend to recreate in their new countries the same abysmal social dregs which they had left behind.

This shall not stand, shout Marechal, Meloni, and Weidel. 

America has taken the lead in this dramatic reversal.  Donald Trump at a joint session of the United Nations said what millions in Europe have been thinking for years - European civilization is in danger of being destroyed, of losing its cultural integrity and identity.  

European countries are not being improved by multiculturalism but destroyed by it, and it is their own fault for having swallowed the bait, for capitulating to the cries of racist insularity, bigotry, and hermetic nationalism. 

France let the northern suburbs of Paris grow - not into the vibrant, colorful, culturally distinguished places that multiculturalism promised but teeming slums, breeding grounds for terrorism, cells of anti-French sentiment. 

Sweden, for decades a model of civility, harmony, and liberal thought changed overnight.  The vast numbers of immigrants from Africa, insolently refusing to assimilate, have turned the once well-balanced society into a Baltimore, St. Louis, or Detroit - miasmic slums of violence and dysfunction. Entitlement breeds irresponsibility, assumed privilege, and social division.  

America has had it easier, for most of the immigrants crossing the southern border are at least Christian and Western in orientation.  As poor, uneducated, and lawless as they might be, they have at least a modicum of shared values.

Originally and long before the open border policy of Biden, the debate over immigration focused on economics - how would the introduction of millions of migrants affect the labor force, welfare, productivity.  What was the value added to immigration? How did the balance sheet balance?

The debate is still rightfully centered on this - Latino lettuce pickers in a generation become much like native-born Americans.  There is none of the medieval absolutism of Islam, the complete rejection of secular law and the adoption of a religious Sharia one. 

At the same time, wary of la cultura de la hamaca, manana, and a que sera sera easygoing culture which threatens America's foundational Puritan work ethic, many critics say the problem is culture. 

Lawrence Harrison, one of the first outspoken advocates for considering culture as an important factor in economic development recently wrote the lead essay for a conference on Culture and Economic Development sponsored by the Cato Institute. In it he said:

The "Confucian" countries (more accurately the countries strongly influenced by Chinese culture, which also embraces, in addition to Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, and ancestor worship) all share substantially in the universal culture of progress: education, achievement, work ethic, merit, and frugality are all highly valued in the East Asian societies. Their economic success contradicts Weber's analysis in The Religion of China in which he asserts that rapid capitalist development is unlikely in China in large measure because of the absence of anything like the Calvinist "tension" caused by uncertainty about being of the "elect."

 Many observers attributed the stagnation of the East Asian economies (Japan excepted) at mid-twentieth century to Confucianism, particularly to the influential role played by the Mandarin literati (Mao a prototype) and the low prestige that attached to economic activity in the Confucian scheme of things. Yet all this was necessary to release the powerful education, achievement, merit, frugality undercurrent; and all that was needed to perform its economic magic was encouragement from the political leadership. The trigger for the magic in China was Deng Xiaoping's 1978 pronouncement, "To get rich is glorious," effectively marking the end of Mao's Marxist revolution.

If Asians were coming into the country in the same numbers as Latinos, no red flags would be raised.  They take the American work ethic, personal responsibility, moral rectitude and respect to whole other level. 

It is not too late for America to resolve the migration-economics issue, nor too difficult whereas Europe is facing years of social unrest, violence, and racial and ethnic hatred.

President Trump laid it on the line at the UN - wake up before it is too late, he said.  Face the fact that your countries are being ruined and destroyed from within.  Your so-called generosity was naive and profoundly immature, and you are suffering the consequences.

  However the opposition is rising.  If an election in Britain were called today, Nigel Farage's anti-immigration conservative party would win by a landslide.  The AfD conservative party in Germany and the La Reconquete party in France are similarly poised. 

The counter-revolution has begun and is unstoppable. 

The Fallacy Of Environmentalism - Epictetus, Siva, And The Inevitable Cycles Of Destruction And Rebirth

Climate change is off the front pages these days. Donald Trump is causing quite a stir with his political juggernaut - ICE roundups, federal crime fighters, secure borders, a muscular foreign policy, and a return of LGBTQ to the funhouse - so there isn't much space for global warming.  Yet for all the hysteria around the issue just a few months ago, one would have assumed a bit more staying power.

 

All it takes is some unpleasant truths to dull the awe of climate Armageddon.  AI is using so much power that there is no way that a few wind farms and solar panels will suffice.  Ramping up the energy grid with gas, oil, coal, and nuclear is the only way to meet geometrically rising demand.

It's a bit like the movie Chinatown and the water wars of Los Angeles and the West.  Who gets served? The productive fields of the Sacramento Valley or the growing urban populations of rain-deficit Southern California.  Nothing has been so revolutionary as AI Its power, range, scope, and applications are staggering.  Virtual reality was just the beginning.  Now powered by AI, the virtual world has become more immediate and more real.  The entire perceptual landscape has changed. 

AI has challenged traditional views of what is and what isn't and expanded the cognitive and imaginative reach of everyone a billionfold.  Its problem solving, research, and innovative potential is staggering.  An accelerated technical development in all fields is here.  And that is just the beginning. 

Geopolitical positioning now hinges largely on AI.  The Chinese without the doom-and-gloom badgering of the American Left, is going full steam ahead on energy production.  No source of energy will be overlooked and soon its AI apparatus will be larger, more potent, and more significant than America's.  China's productivity, innovation, and socio-economic influence will grow exponentially. 

Forget the fact that Antarctic glaciers have been gaining ice in recent years, that there has been no precipitous warming of the climate, and that every dire environmentalist's warning of the coming climate disaster has been proven wrong. America cannot afford to be behind in the AI race, and it already is. 

 

Even besides these practical issues, now that the global warming hysteria has cooled, the term 'adaptability' is being heard more and more. Especially with the rapid and remarkable advances made in both genetics and cybernetics, the world is approaching a post-human generation.  In a relatively short time, human enterprise will be increasingly virtual and the human genome adjusted and transformed to adapt to any environmental influence.

Why should human beings be exempted from the miracles of genetic engineering which have enabled pest-resistant, fertilizer-independent, water-efficient plants?  The human organism will soon be given the same innovative technical modifications.  Human beings have always been adaptable, conforming to brutal winters and baking summers, building great cities in the harshest of climates, digging underground, over canals, against the tide.  Now they themselves will be in the mix for adaptable survivability. 

Even before that revolutionary change, urban and rural areas are already taking steps to adapt to global warming, whatever its cause.  Renderings of a twenty-second century New York with vast wetlands, Venice-like canals, and a complete refashioning of seafronts have already been published.  Farmers are experimenting with heat and drought-resistant crops, and northern farms of Saskatchewan and Manitoba preparing for longer growing seasons. 

 

In classrooms throughout the United States during the worst of the climate hysteria, human beings were being blamed for provoking environmental catastrophe.  Ignorance, obdurateness, myopia, and intellectual flaccidity, America's ethos, were once again preventing progressive action.  Yet Epictetus was alive and well in some corners.  Man is as much an integral part of the environment as any factor, sometimes an actor, sometimes acted upon.  

It is intellectually false to assume man as the environmental predator, the destroyer, the pillager. All actions have repercussions, what comes around goes around, reap what you sow. Mankind has been decimated by plagues and environmental catastrophes not of his making.  Human beings are no different from the dinosaurs. 

Traditional Hindus have perhaps the best, most mature understanding of this phenomenon.  The universe is periodically destroyed and renewed according to some ineluctable and unknowable plan.  Man or some exogenous, unexpected event may cause the destruction; and just as forests are reborn after catastrophic fires, sometimes in more profusion and finery than before, so it will be with the world and its inhabitants. 

 

'Defeatist, determinist, do-nothing resignation', say Western philosophers when they view India and Hinduism, imbued as they are with their culture's determination to make a difference, to change what is not right, to make the world a better place. 

The world is but an illusion, say Hindus, and the only purpose for being is a revelation of the divine, a clearing of the path to enlightenment; and it is within that context that global warming is placed.  It may or may not be happening, but to determine whether it is and to assess its cause and effect are vain, idle enterprises. 

Philosophy is not such an idle enterprise.  How can one look at the long trajectory of human history and not see that it repeats itself interminably.  If human nature is aggressive, self-interested and self-protective, territorial, and expansionist, then every group of human society will be subject to it.  Stoics look at history as an expression of a vast, impersonal, valueless and universal randomness; and as such should not be cause for concern.  Nietzsche said that the only validation of the individual in a meaningless world is the expression of pure will.  

 

There will always be an intersection of the practical and the philosophical.  Even the most stoic scientist will work towards a greater, technologically-assisted human adaptability.  The California farmer will look northward for the future.  Miami will be awash but still vital.  Stoicism does not imply inaction - human beings are not built that way.  Survivalism and stoicism intersect and always will.  It is just that hysteria has no place in the scope of things; and modern day progressivism with its hectoring assumptions of righteousness abouts everything cannot last. 

Why is global warming off the front page? Because despite progressives' harshly critical view of the American unwashed, an ignorant lot barely worth saving, Americans have a more profound philosophical sense than any Washington activist.  

One need not look at the new Webb telescope images with their scope of billions of light years, uncountable galaxies and infinite numbers of stars and planets to realize earth's insignificance and the happenstance of its inhabitants.  Nor read Macbeth's lines about life's brief appearance on the stage full of sound and fury signifying nothing. 

Life is not one long slog of misery and hopelessness.  The slog is not really that long and meaning is itself a meaningless construct. America is a hysterical country because it has no grounding philosophical construct.  Christianity with its Book of Revelation is no solace, only providing fuel for the Armageddon doomsday naysayers found on every streetcorner. 

'Whew, it's hot', an American was heard to say to an Indian in Delhi in July. 

'It's summer', replied the Indian who went about his business; and so it will always be, the clash of fundamentalism, worrywarts and sadhus. 

Charlemagne And Islam, The Crusades, And The Alamo - Keeping People Out Is What We Do

Mohammed is now the most popular boy's birth name in both the UK and France - no surprise as waves of Muslim immigrants, welcomed under the banner of diversity and inclusivity, have changed the very fabric of European civilization. 

 

France and its laicity, an all-encompassing policy conferring French citizenship on all who immigrate and based on the assumption that any foreigner who becomes French by law will become one by culture as well.  It was Europe's most integrationist policy, one which refused to ignore radical racial, ethnic, and religious differences and felt that because of the historic nature of French cultural wisdom and appeal, all newcomers would soon become indistinguishable from the native born. 

Nothing could have been more naive. Muslim immigrants from North and sub-Saharan Africa poured into an open-bordered country, remained deliberately isolated, adherent to Third World customs and Islamic law, and were increasingly insolent and aggressive about France's attempts to secularize them.  Allah's law superseded French law, and no amount of persuasion, intimidation, or force would budge them from their principles. 

 

The French were caught between Scylla and Charybdis - on the one hand they believed in laicity and the full and unquestioned assimilation of newcomers; and on the other hand they saw a threat to their millennia-long Christian, European legacy.

France was always la fille ainee de l'Eglise - the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church for having saved Europe from the Muslim Saracens at the Battle of Roncesvalles - but watched as its hallowed traditions of art, literature, philosophy, and culture were being eroded by a defiant and utterly opposed Muslim horde.  

The irony was not lost as French SWAT teams fought African migrants in the Northern suburbs, trying to teach them a lesson lost in the centuries since Charlemagne. 

Now it is too late.  The birth rate among Muslims in France (the largest such population in Europe) is growing exponentially while that of native born French is declining.  Whole arrondissements of Paris more resemble Africa than Europe.  From the hundreds of mosques in the country clerics damn the French and their Islamophobic policies.  

Muslims categorically refuse to abandon the veil, Sharia, and the medieval traditions of Islam, and the French, still believing in accommodating integration resist arrest and deportation of radical imams. 

The political Right is resurgent, and the party of Marine LePen and Marion Marechal are outspoken and unrepentant in their harsh criticism of Islam.  Islam is not a religion, says Marechal, but a radical political force out to establish a ruling caliphate throughout Europe and erase all traces of  Christian, European culture.  

All Muslim immigration must stop and a purge of mosques, madrassas, and Islamic political cells in France must take place.  The most radical, divisive, and aggressive clerics, French citizens or not, must be deported.  France should take every measure to recalibrate and to restore the dominance and preeminence of Christian Europe. 

 

Italy under the leadership of Giorgia Meloni has taken the same unequivocal stance.  Islamic fundamentalism has no place in Italy.  It runs counter to Italian, European, and Christian mores, laws, and traditions, and anyone preaching otherwise must be deported.  Political leaders in Hungary, Poland, Germany, Scandinavia, and the Netherlands have been no less demanding. 

Closing the American southern border is of less consequence. Most aliens making their way across the Rio Grande are Christian, albeit of a different ethnicity and cultural background.  Their presence is more a threat to native-born American employment, a drain on public resources, and a challenge to the white, Protestant ethos.

Xenophobic nationalism is what it is, cry progressives on both sides of the Atlantic. Who said that France must ad infinitum be white and Christian?  Who said that America should not one day soon be rainbow, mixed race, and mixed ethnicity?  And would not that diversity be an advantage?

Of course not, say conservatives.  It's one thing to have highly educated, intelligent Indians, Chinese, and Southeast Asians immigrate and fill key technical positions in emerging AI technologies; another thing altogether to be swamped by lettuce pickers who simply delay the automation of agriculture, add to the public dole and increase the ethnic and cultural divisions within an already divided society. 

If migrants were to assimilate into European culture - retain enough of their home cultures to keep important cultural links to the past but reject any and all contradictory philosophy, religious demands, and ethnic claims - they would be welcome.  Yet no European country wants enclaves of foreignness within its boundaries. 

So, nationalism? Yes indeed, and there is nothing unique or wrong about it.  Ever since the first Paleolithic human settlements, territory has been claimed and defended.  'This is mine' has been the rallying cry of human societies forever, and expansionism the natural sequel.

There was no way that the new America was going to stay east of the Mississippi and let the land beyond stand as Indian territory; and no way that Europe was going to let the Muslim hordes of Mohammed retain control over the Holy Land - Europe's territory, the birthplace of Jesus Christ and the place of his resurrection. 

China wants Tibet, Taiwan and the Turkic speaking regions of its west to come under full Han control.  Russia has been overtly territorial and nationalistic in its takeover of Crimea and eventual absorption of the rest of Ukraine.  Iran wants total hegemony over the Middle East. 

If there was ever a fabulist fantasy in recent years, it was the One World movement - the Utopian idea of a harmonious, interdependent, collaborative world of peace and cooperation.  To even suggest this was not only to ignore the lessons of history - territorial and aggressive since the beginning of time - and to dismiss the permanence of a self-interested, defensive, territorial, aggressive, and defiant human nature. 

The international Left has sold its febrile, untenable, fictional dream for decades - diversity, equity, inclusivity, and identity.  There is an a priori advantage to diversity they say, a divine right, and absolute truth although they have proven nothing of the sort.  Why should a white European culture responsible for a world civilization of high learning, art, philosophy, science, jurisprudence, and architecture be dismissed in favor of a polyglot peasantry? Prove it. 

There is nothing wrong with the world the way it is - a competitive, harsh, aggressive, territorial place - for it has always been so.  Darwin's theories don’t only apply to finches and barn swallows but to people and cultures.  Competition is at the heart of humanity and the engine of progress.  The more able, capable, strong, intelligent, and visionary will always dominate those who are not.  Rebellions, civil strife, wars, and perennial violence are the rough edges of social evolution -  a playing out of innate self-interest. 

 

Territorialism, xenophobic nationalism is an expression of such evolutionary destiny.  Human beings have always wanted their own patch, defended it to the death, and expanded it when opportunity presented itself. It is natural, expected, and predictable. The attempts of progressives to deny this ineluctable human and social nature, and to attempt to neutralize enterprise, acquisition, and expansion simply delay the inevitable. 

The whining and offense taken by the Left at territorialism, nationalism, and xenophobia is understandable - idealism has no bounds.  Yet such idealism has turned Europe into exactly the divided, sectarian, isolationist ethnic and religious cabals that it so wished to avoid.  Now it must extricate itself; but such extrication will not be easy, for if there ever was a socio-cultural force that dug its heels in so deeply as Islam and from that purchase demanded more and more turf and influence, it is hard to find. 

The world is now turning radically conservative, having had enough of the fanciful, one world, accommodating nostrums of the Left and is fighting back.  Leaders do not hesitate to call out Islam for what it is - an aggressive, highly motivated, unintimidated political force - to defend the glories of empire and Western civilization, and to reject infantile ideas of 'inclusivity'. 

In America, politicians no longer hesitate to defend the idea of a central Christian ethos at the core of American society - one of traditional religion, sexuality, and social configuration.  Immigration, the heart and soul of the American Republic since its inception, will continue, but only on certain well defined  terms.

The era of open borders, halcyon 'diversity', and racial and ethnic identity is over.