Stalin, Mao, And The Cold War And There Are Still Communists? - The Willing Suspension Of Disbelief

Bob Muzelle proudly said that he was a Marxist. 'Not a Communist, mind you, but a Marxist.  There is a difference, you know'; but of course everyone knew that there was not.  The means of production, the proletariat, workers of the world unite, we will bury you, the politburo, and the KGB were all products of Marxism, just as much as Islam is at the root of Islamic terrorism. Bob was taking the meat out of the stew, being his old academic, precious self, and no one was buying it. 

Back in the days of Stalin and the Soviet Union Bob and his colleagues had looked the other way - or rather explained away the pogroms, gulags, and purges - by saying that the ends justified the means. The rot of capitalistic individualism was so deep that harsh measures were justified.  Yes, thousands of dissidents had been sent to Siberian labor camps, but this exile was only temporary until they realized the error or their ways, repented, and returned to society to fight with their comrades to continue the Revolution. 

Yes, the secret police often relied on extra-judicial measures to ferret out those who threatened the regime, but again such traitorous intentions could not stand in the way of the march to a just, equitable, and fair society. 

There was one aspect of the Soviet Communist state that was hard for Bob to explain - why was there a Berlin Wall? If the Soviet state was so utopian, so perfectly attuned to the aspirations of its citizens, so promising of a good life free from capitalist greed and the curse of individualism, why did citizens want to leave and why were they shot?

 

Although at first Bob stumbled - this one fact, the Soviet state as its own gulag was hard to explain - but he regained his balance and spoke eloquently about the idea of 'consolidarity' 

Who among us has not felt confined, limited by the rules and order of others? What child, what adolescent still immature without a fully developed sense of ethics, morality, and reason, has not fought against his parents?  Who has not chafed under the management of a disciplinarian, a manager with a broader vision of the company's objectives than any one worker?  Who has not balked at speed limits?  We all have, but in calmer, saner moments, we know that structure, limits, discipline and parameters is what makes society livable. 

The Soviets have only applied this principle to their people in the name of Revolution and a greater, more productive, more equitable society for all. 

Attempts to leave the well-ordered, promising, communal society behind is indeed an act of treason, an insidious statement designed to erode if not bring down the entire system.  The Berlin Wall is but a symbol of what I call 'consolidarity', the need to be one people. 

'Horseshit', said Hetherington Morgan, Bob's Yale classmate, descendant of J.P. Morgan and principal in the Wall Street bank founded by his forbears. 

Hatty Morgan was a BMOC - a Big Man on Campus - a scholar-athlete of good breeding, social grace, and sexual allure, and the elision from New Haven to New York was as smooth as silk. He joined the family bank, moved into a Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking the park, and within months was as successful and popular as he had been at Yale. 

 

It was this white, privileged entitlement that drove Bob to distraction. Why and how could a man with nothing but entitlement's graces become such a precious commodity?  Hatty was nothing but superficial gloss, gliding through life on his laurels, using other people's money to enrich himself, summer on the Vineyard or St. Tropez, be seen at the watering holes of the rich and famous.  While he, Bob, had substance, character, and a sense of moral purpose. 

'Horseshit', Hatty said again when he heard from a classmate at the Yale Club what Bob had been saying about him, and with that turned to other, more important things. Like the coming weekend in the Hamptons, the lovely Amanda Lodge and unimaginable delights with her.  Bob was an incidental bore. 

Bob used to walk by the Yale Club hoping to run into Hatty.  He had a speech already prepared, one laced with irony and a muted hatred for all he stood for; but when he saw him come out the door, arm in arm with a beautiful woman and step into a waiting limousine, he stopped cold.  He wanted to be Hetherington Morgan and there were no two ways about it. 

He had dated no one but wiry-haired Jewish girls from Brooklyn, daughters of old Socialists who still talked of Samuel Gompers, Brandeis, and LaFollette, girls who sat shiva and ate matzah balls and joined him for meetings in Avenue A tenements followed by grisly, oily love back on Bleecker Street. 

It was his own fault, he knew, choosing the path of righteousness over Gstaad and St. Barts.  He could have trod the same path - his family, while perhaps not of the same high pedigree as the Morgans wasn't chopped liver, and Yale was the great homogenizing milieu for opportunity and privilege.

Yet, here he was at an age when he should have a summer home, a padded retirement account, happy, well-placed children, an attractive wife, and a beautiful mistress, still plodding away at a Communist revival, snickered at, the joke of the party, the Commie, the Red, the never-say-die failed idealist who jumped to the defense of Stalin, Mao, Fidel, and every tinpot dictator in Africa who espoused The Movement. 

 

A painful moment, realizing that he hated Hatty Morgan for his wealth and privilege, but hated him more for his sexuality - his native, inimitable, desirable attractiveness to women.  'I hate the muthafucka', said Bob, but wasn't sure why. 

In any case, after the almost encounter in front of the Yale Club, Bob renewed his efforts to restore American Communism to its proper place in the political universe.  As always he demurred when asked how could he still be a Communist after the horrendous discoveries about Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Enver Hoxha, and the rest of the 'socialist' dictators in the world.  

'I am a Marxist', he said, 'not a Communist', but no one had ever read anything by Marx or Engels let alone appreciate the fine points of communist thought, and thought that Bob was simply off his rocker, caught in some kind of a wannabee time warp, still banging on about something no one had cared about for decades. 

It was one thing for a progressive to become conservative.  The old adage, 'Give a liberal enough time, and he will become conservative' has never been more true; but the transformation from Marxist-Leninist Communist to the far side is more unlikely. 

If it hadn't been for Hetherington Morgan and the Yale Club epiphany (when Bob realized that he wanted to be Hatty Morgan and hated him because of it), Bob would have progressed slowly from Communist to Socialist to Progressive to Conservative.  But epiphanies being what they are, a wake-up call out of whatever doldrums you are in, Bob did a volte face, rejected not only Communist doctrine but every last one of the nostrums in the progressive canon, and became his own man, the individualist that he had formerly eschewed, the willful, Nietzschean Superman of his imagination. 

There was still time, Bob reflected, to regain some of the territory lost to fantasy.  While not in his prime, he was no old man either, and pretty heads still turned in his direction; but there was the matter of his wife Corinne, the mortgage, the shabby office on U Street, the cabal of bearded prophets.  He might be done with the past, but the past was not done with him, OK, but what was he going to do about it?

Saying he was no longer a Marxist would be shamefully admitting that he had made nothing but wrong turns.  His life would be seen as one cul-de-sac after another, spinning his wheels, and worst of all a blabbermouth with nothing to say. 

'Fuck it', he said.  'I'm voting for Trump', the one final, absolute, irreversible action that would forever distance himself from communists, socialists, and progressives; and once he did, he felt a great weight lifted from his shoulders.

The last sighting of him was in a Portofino night club by none other than Hetherington Morgan. 

Did Wokism Ever Really Matter? - How Fantastical Jamborees Come And Go With Little Notice

Vicki Chalmers had organized an open house for all her friends and colleagues to celebrate the works of a poet she had tutored at the historically black college where she was a professor.  The young woman, LaShonda Evans, had come from a tough neighborhood, and had been admitted to give a particularly urban take on the black experience. 

 Her essay had described her childhood as the daughter of a Fentanyl-addicted single mother and an incarcerated father, with two gangbanger brothers out on bail, and the sound of gunfire keeping her awake at night. 

The girl had no academic record to speak of.  She was truant for most of her high school years, failed even the most basic remedial math and reading, but was moved along with her class because of what her teachers saw as a budding poetic talent.  Given the school's low overall performance - it ranked lowest of all DC public high schools - anything more than coloring between the lines was given special credit. 

Vicki, as Chair of the English Department, took it on herself to recruit students from the inner city, particularly those who showed an aptitude for written expression, and when she visited the Isaiah P. Bradley high school, she found just the candidate she was looking for.  Although the girl was barely articulate, the poems she had written moved Vicki to tears, for they described in simple, but evocative verse, the fortitude and positive nature of the young writer

Here I sits, on the stoop

While my dog makes a loop

He three legs make him jump

Fourth one just a stump

The poem went on to tell how the dog got his leg shot off during a gunfight, and how she wrapped it up with a baby diaper she found in the gutter and carried it home to Apartment  65D, C-Block in the Franklin Lewis Homes. 

He OK now, but can't lift his leg to piss

No matter no mind, I still give him a kiss

So, LaShonda Evans matriculated at Vicki's college in the Fall, and began her full load of remedial courses; but Prof. Chalmers had overestimated the girl's level of socialization and intellectual ability, and before the first quarter was over, she had recorded a string of zeros or 'Absents' on her record and  despite Vicki's personal attention had scribbled only a few lines of verse.

Not one to give up, Vicki kept at it, even inviting the girl to her home in a white neighborhood of suburban Washington where she lived with her husband, son, and Irish terrier.  The girl had never been out of Anacostia, and for her Chevy Chase was like another country, and after Vicki had driven her home after a pleasant afternoon, she discovered that the priceless Revere silver tea service was gone, pilfered by her young charge. 

'I don't blame her', she said to her husband, Rob. 'She's had a tough life'; but Rob was unmoved and pissed that one of his family's heirlooms was on its way downtown to be  hocked, melted down, refashioned, and sold. 

Yet, Vicki persisted, and despite nominal academic progress, kept LaShonda in her sights as a special project, and only when she was caught dealing the dope Pharoah Jones had given her for sale to her college brothers and sisters, she was dismissed. 

Vicki was chastened but not bowed. There could be no turning back on the mission to help the underprivileged, put upon, oppressed, and marginalized black population.  It wasn't enough that she, a white woman, was teaching at an all-black college - these students were the best and the brightest of their race - she had to do more. 

Yet the tide had turned, the good old days of Martin and Ralph were long gone, racial integration was a thing of the past, and the new world was that of Black Lives Matter, an organization which summarily and rudely had rejected her application. 

Not only that, despite her scholarship and passionate tutelage of black students, she had become nothing more than 'that white bitch' who didn't know her place, was never given the right time of day, and had only a desultory showing in her classes. So she turned to other issues on the progressive agenda.

Vicki was as straight as an arrow, and throughout most of her life wanted nothing to do with anything left of sexual center.  At college she had been friends with Amanda Finch, a butch from San Francisco, but when Amanda suggested some dildo and likker license times, Vicki demurred and hardened against the sexual fringe.  Now in this woke, inclusive era, it was time to revisit the issue. 

She befriended a well-known lesbian on the faculty, had drinks with her in a gay bar on Dupont Circle, and did her best to look pert and interested when her colleague made unmistakable sexual overtures.  She grit her teeth and went to bed with the woman, but rinsed her mouth out for a week afterwards,  and while Vicki was still very much committed to the cause of gay rights, she would keep her support theoretical. 

Now humming to the louder tune of progressive causes, she tried her hand at climate change, the gender spectrum, and capitalism, but each time came up dry.  Climate changers were Armageddon wannabees, streetcorner preachers of doom and gloom anxious to hurry up the warming climate so that their prophecies could be fulfilled.  They convoluted every variation in weather to conform to their a priori conviction that earth's climate was warming beyond control.  

More ice on the Antarctic's Ross Ice Shelf? Less frequent sun spot activity.  Colder winters in the American South? Disruption of the Atlantic currents caused by orbital dysfunction. Consistently normal tides along the North Carolina coast? Temporary atmospheric variations at high altitudes. 

Even with her modest scientific college education, Vicki sensed that something was off-kilter and unhinged about these climate change Cassandras.  Their hysterical, whirling dervish, St. Vitus' dances of the end of the world seemed out of whack.  

The gender spectrum which had seemed reasonable before cracks began to show in the woke agenda, now seemed no more than political idolatry, a chimera of idealism gone rogue.  What was she thinking when she she championed Brenda Johnson who became Brandon Johnson then Be-Linda Johnson-Vibberts, then flouncy girly girl Brenda again?

As for socialism, neo-Communism, and Marxist-Leninist calls for world revolution? Vicki was quite happy in her $1.8 mil Chevy Chase home, driving a late-model BMW, and watching her stock portfolio triple in value. 

 

It was hard for Vicki to shed the mantel of uber-woke progressivism that she had worn so long. Without the comforting cloak of self-assuredness - absolute certainty about the new world of gender fluidity, socialism, environmental epiphany, and the brave new world of communalism - the world at first looked bleak and colorless; but within a short time, the reality of normal, historic socio-economic conservatism began to give it tint and attractive shading.

'I told you it was horseshit', her husband told her when she resigned from the Historically Black College where she was a professor and returned her membership card to every wild-eyed, do-good, reformist organization in town.  She was finally her own woman again. 

After only one year since a conservative president took over the White House and attacked the vanity and absurdity of climate Armageddon, gender folly, adolescent socialist dreams, waves of black and brown 'irregular migrants', wokism is not only in retreat but disappearing from sight. 

The black man is no longer the sentient being of the African forest, atop the human pyramid. The climate may be changing, but only according to the million year cycles that have always ruled the earth.  Capitalism, free markets, and supply and demand have raised hundreds of millions out of poverty in China and India, and continue to fuel American entrepreneurial genius. 

Wokism never mattered, and if anything it will be a footnote to history, more like the freak show at a Barnum & Bailey circus, a side-liner never headliner. 

Good riddance, say Americans who were force fed woke nonsense during the penitential Biden years, now happy that the world has turned once again and things are right and proper. 

Meanwhile Vicki and her husband are living in their Tampa Bay condo, happy as can be, with all the woke  horseshit in the rearview mirror. 

Finding God In The Ghetto - The Hallelujah Epiphany Of A Lifetime Liberal

Victoria Chalmers grew up on the Main Line of Philadelphia, not the cheap inner end but the manor estate end in Villanova.  She was the last issue of the historic Chalmers, descendants of the first English colonial settlers of Pennsylvania who themselves were descended from the Third Earl of Northumberland, squire of Northumberland Hall, the social epicenter for royalty, the intelligentsia, and the New World entrepreneurs who saw and acquired great wealth in the New World. 

Victoria knew only wealth and privilege and from an early age, and was schooled in manners, demeanor, propriety, and noblesse oblige.  The Chalmers, influenced by their Philadelphia Quaker forbears of whom Benjamin Franklin was the most noteworthy, and respectful of the more ancient history of the serfdom and peasantry well-taken care of by the Northumberlands, had a more liberal bent than many of their wealthy neighbors.  

The white Anglo-Saxon residents of Villanova, Ardmore, and Radnor were the inheritors of patrician privilege - the essence of America's ethos of opportunity.  Wealth, status, influence, and privilege were not markers of social insularity - anyone with ambition, talent, will, and ability could succeed in the new republic - but were expressions of the best of New World culture.  They had no responsibility for those not in their class, for they were endowed with the same gifts of opportunity and entrepreneurial possibility as any American. 

They all fraternized at the Gladwyne Country Club.  Their daughters were all presented to society, golf rounds were moments of shared experience and camaraderie; but this one niggling, significant difference - this sentiment of social obligation vs the essential Darwinian imperative held in reserve during social moments - was always there. 

Although or perhaps because the 18th century Chalmers family had invested along with Franklin in the Three Cornered slave trade - shipbuilding, shipping, trading, and ancillary commerce - they felt some responsibility or accountability for their questionable past and African American penury.

Vicki's natural ethical liberalism was honed and sharpened while at college.  Vassar was not exactly a hotbed of social activism, but the seeds of modern progressivism were certainly sown there.  She and a group of Jewish girls whose family tradition traced back to La Follette, Gompers and early American socialism, formed the college's first progressive forum. 

Few classmates had any idea of American socialism, the slave trade of the North, or the historical tradition of noblesse oblige, and so the group largely talked to each other; but the camaraderie and sense of communal values were unmistakable. 

After Vicki graduated and went on to a PhD in American Studies, she secured an Instructor position at one of America's 'Historically Black Colleges and Universities' and taught in the English Department.  Now, as a young woman of impeccable white credentials, she was unique among the all-black faculty.  The recruitment committee thought that she would add diversity to the school.  She looked forward to associating with the people she had long championed. 

It was a bit of an adjustment, what with the culture of the street, the ways and mores of the inner city, the language, the preferences, and unusual and very different sexuality; but Vicki found her place, and after a few years, her home.

For years as she made her way up through the ranks of the college, she was content with her academic duties, which, if she were being entirely honest, were a bit of a slog.  English I was not exactly Fun With Dick and Jane, but close, yet the meme of the Department was 'From the Dimmest to the Brightest' and Vicki never lost sight of the goal, the challenge, and the opportunity. 

After a number of years at the college, socializing with her colleagues and interacting with her students, she still remained a very white girl.  No one had invited her to their homes or offered to share social experiences.  The black faculty and students respected her to a point, but in private had to wonder what she was doing on their turf; and as the years of Martin and Ralph racial integration morphed into radical identity black-only politics, the suspicions increased and the social gap widened. 

Until one professor in the Philosophy Department thought it was time to give this white girl an education and invited her to his home in Anacostia, Washington, DC's worst, most pestilential slum.  It was one thing to talk about the black experience, to read slave journals and women's emancipation memoirs, and to trace lineages back the great Ghanaian, Gao, and Mopti African empires; another altogether to run with the street. 

At first Vicki was dismayed if not taken aback.  'Whatchoo doin' up in here white girl?' were the shouts from street corners, tenement stoops, and balconies on the projects, nothing welcoming and accommodating, nothing friendly or communal. 

It got worse - needles, syringes, Colt45 cans, the sound of gunfire, streetcorner whores, do-dadded up pimps, and the foul smell of excrement and urine.  'This is what I have spent my entire life defending?', she asked herself.  'There must be more to it'. 

 

And so there was, for when the car turned a corner and parked in front of the New Light Baptist Church of the Redeemer and she saw something familiar - religion was an integral part of her patrician colonialist and Early American history - her spirts improved; and when she heard the gospel chorus filling the all of the church and spilling out onto the street, she knew that the world had orbited in her direction. 

'Come in, Sister', said the pastor who met her at the door, 'and sit with the Lord'.  It was summer, and the church was rank, airless, and hot; but the congregation was on their feet, shouting praises to the Lord, and she could do nothing but stand and shout. 

She had sung only traditional Bach hymns in her days in Villanova, in unison with great respect and solemnity; so this unrestrained, unhinged, African tribal voodoo hoopla was new, a bit unsettling, but inspirational in a strange sort of way.  She joined in the prayers, swaying and raising her arms like those to her left and right, and even managing a 'Praise the Lord'. 

Yet after a few minutes and at the crescendo of verse and chorus, she lost her shyness and raised her voice louder and louder.  Congregants left their pews and went into the aisles, shouting, shaking, and trembling with ecstasy.  'He is here...He has come...Oh, Jesus, save me...Jesus, be my companion' they shouted as the pastor raised his Bible, his voice louder than any in the assembly.  'Oh Jesus, heal me with the blood of your wounds...Come to this poor sinner...'. 

When the service was over Vicki wondered how she could ever go back to her life, the college, and the dry, empty world of academia .  There were black people and there were black people, she now knew, and her Anacostia epiphany carried her from soulless academia to the Jesus-anointed streets of the ghetto. 

However, when she asked her colleague to take her back to Anacostia and the church, he was diffident, indifferent and uninterested.  'Knit your own sweaters', he said enigmatically, and left the room, so Vicki was left on her own, hesitant to back downtown without an escort but with Jesus as a guide, what could go wrong?

The shouts from the terraces, streetcorners and project balconies were even louder his time. 'Whatchoo doin' up in here' was now, 'Get yo' white, stinkin' mackerel-smellin' pussy up outta here, bitch'; and not a note of warmth, welcome, or reception in the litany. 

When she pulled up to the church, heard the choral hymns being sung, and the organ loud and impressive, she smiled broadly and began to walk up the steps. 

'We full up, sweetheart', said a black man dressed in a zoot-suit, a welcomer with an armed guard. 'Why don't you get yo' lily white self back where you belong, and don’ choo come back up in here, hear?'; and with that the aura of the multicolored epiphany turned grey and then black and then sodden and lumpy. 

The lead-up to epiphany is exciting and tempting beyond belief.  The epiphany itself is transformative and existential; but the letdown is more horrendously precipitous than ever imagined.  She was back to nowhere, deceived, wasted, and dishearted. 

She quit her job, her black mission, and every and all traces of noblesse oblige.  She returned to Villanova, assumed her proper life as privileged matron of the upper classes and never looked back. 

The Mental Breakdown Of An Idealist - Down The Rabbit Hole Of Good Causes

Vicki Chandler, a white woman, had spent most of her professional career in a small, historically black college, appointed to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in the heady days of integration and before the swing to identity politics, black solidarity, and racial separatism.  She taught English, but her premier Ivy League and top-flight graduate education overmatched the needs of her students, most of whom were enrolled in remedial courses, all process and procedure and no content.  These students had to learn how to read first. 

It wasn't exactly Fun With Dick And Jane, but close.  Students who had read the Bible at best, and even then the same hallelujah verses over and over again were totally unprepared for the rigors of college.  How they had gotten through high school with such a minimum of reading comprehension and writing skills was a mystery; but Vicki's job was not to question the deficiencies of the past, but to build able thinkers, readers, and writers. 

 

After a year or two, the dean promoted her to English I, a course which necessarily kept academic rigor to a minimum, and although Vicki protested the treacle listed in the curriculum - romance and Western dime store novels - the dean insisted that it wasn't the content of the novels that counted at this point, but text, language, grammar, and organization.  It didn't matter whether Lucinda fell in love with Bobby or if the high plains drifter was hanged for cattle rustling, it was all just getting students to be familiar with the process of 'processing'.  More serious works would come later. 

Vicki could never adequately explain why she had committed to life at an 'educational trade school', the unfair but true characterization of the college which was basically the academic equivalent of shop; and what there was about the Negro (the term used for black people during her early years) that so interested her, but in her increasing years teaching the most basic, simple, works she never doubted her mission. 

For mission was what her career had become - 'teaching the dim to shine' was a meaningful profession, she said, and all through English II and then the more academic-sounding Senior level courses ('Passion and Progress - Slave Journals of Heroic Black Women' or 'Barron Chumley's Apprenticeship - From Stable Hand To Groom'), Vicki never lost her way. 

As Dean of the Department she tried to upgrade the curriculum, but the more challenging courses she introduced were failed in such numbers that she was told to drop them, for they were lowering the grade average of the department, a figure needed to show the national administrators of the consortium of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) that the school was pulling its weight and then some. 

 

So reluctantly Vicki pulled back on Dreiser and Lewis - simple enough American authors with straightforward narratives and messages - and went back to more basic fare. 

Her department was running smoothly, without internal conflict, and with each new matriculating class as much in need of remedial education as those before.  Graduation levels remained acceptable although students were far less prepared for life outside academia than their shop classmates at the trade school across the river who after their two year course found well-paying jobs in carpentry, plumbing, and electricity. 

It was at about this time that Vicki's attention began to turn to extracurricular activities, and political activism was a natural outlet for her.  She had given her all to the black community at her college, but the black population at large was still an oppressed minority, still kept in subservience in hopelessly dysfunctional inner cities due to white supremacy.  She could not let this stand without remediation, and so she became a social reformer. 

Although she was initially welcomed in the struggle, the movement for black equality became almost exclusively African American.  To her dismay 'Whites Need Not Apply' was the sign posted on Black Lives Matter doors.  She had assumed that her academic credentials were all the bona fides she would need to become a member of the organization, and was sorely disappointed when turned away. 

Yet the liberal lamp had been lit and was still burning brightly - the specific cause mattered less than the engagement in progress towards a better, more verdant, more compassionate and unified world.  It didn't matter whether she worked to slow climate change, promote gender fluidity, or limit the predatory greed of Wall Street, progressivism welcomed her.  It was a big tent with environmentalists, Bernal Heights lesbians, socialists, migrant farm worker organizers ,and an assortment of sub-niches, each with their own particular liberal agenda but all subscribing to the same higher goal. 

Vicki, having for so many years been confined in the small world of academia, was overjoyed at the almost bewildering choices before her.  She was welcomed by her compatriots in arms, and encouraged to join this or that movement, rushed by sorority-like groups with their own iconic cause.  

Why just one? wondered Vicki; and with that she hurried to sign on to many liberal causes.  She, for example, was interested in the woman-to-man transgender flow, a far more challenging dimension of radical change.  For some reason there were far more sexually closeted men who wanted frills, pearls, diamonds, and high heels than  women who wanted work boots and tobacco chaws. 

Less interested in snail darters and spotted owls, she felt that the macro issues of rising seas and coastal destruction suited her more.  Capitalism was indeed the foundation for all American neo-colonialism and worker exploitation, but she was interested in Wall Street's vast manipulation of the American economy to benefit the few, the white, and the privileged. 

She became a whirlwind of social activism, available to all, compromised by none, and committed to revolution.  The movement could not rest on simple laurels - a few more black faces on As The World Turns and more gay couples in ads for Caribbean cruises.  It must be comprehensive, consolidated, and unified. Changes must occur everywhere, not just here and there. It was a revolutionary struggle, all or nothing.  

Progressivism was based on the principle that progress was possible and real, and that Utopia was reachable.  A new, better, more verdant, compassionate, and considerate world was the future if everyone put their minds and resources to it. 

The election of Donald Trump was a shock, a completely unexpected, harrowing event that threatened to set back progressive's hard won victories. In just one year the borders had been closed, the gender spectrum ridiculed, rainbow education dismantled, gays and lesbians sent back into the closet, billions of cubic feet of pollutants released into the air as environmental programs were eliminated, and Robber Baron capitalism was back. 

Yet for progressives like Vicki, it only meant more diligence, more investment, less sleep, and more determination.  It was now all the more important to effect the changes that would lead to a better world.  She renewed her efforts, was seen on daises and stages, at lecterns and in print.  She was a whirling dervish, a St. Vitus dancer; and before long had crossed the Rubicon into a kind of febrile hysteria.  'I must....I must....I must' she mumbled like The Little Engine That Could. 

Her adult children were concerned and her friends worried.  Worse, her fellow activists began to keep their distance.  Vicki was becoming unhinged, unaccountable, a volcano which could erupt one day into total madness.  She was giving the movement a bad name. 

'Focus, dear, focus', said her husband one day as she awoke frazzled, haunted looking, bedraggled, and red eyed. 'You can't do everything', but Vicki just looked at him with a vacant stare, uncomprehending, not even hearing. 

She shuffled over to the vanity table, looked at herself in the mirror, and sent it, her powders, blushes, and creams crashing to the floor.  She began tearing her hair, ripping her nightgown off and tearing it into shreds until her husband called 911 and medical help arrived. 

Her colleagues were commiserate but many said they saw it coming and should have stopped her before it was too late - not for her sake, but for the movement's which was getting bad press after every one of Vicki's hysterical outings.  They should have hooked her off the stage, done a dance routine to cover the damage, trucked her out of sight, and left her to recover her senses; but they let her rant and rave, for her passion was infectious and people still cheered.  They regretted treating her like a trained bear, but the ends justified the means, and if she was packed off to St. Elizabeth's, cossetted, drugged, and electroshocked, it was a worthwhile casualty. 

There were plenty of Vicki Chandlers in the progressive movement, and because the cause demanded an almost hysterical passion, their encroaching mental debility went unnoticed until it was too late.  Yet as in the case of Vicki, such nearly demented madness was the fire that ignited popular support.  Calm, reasoned, temperance would get  you nowhere. 

Only a few colleagues asked 'Where's Vicki', but after a month or two she was completely forgotten.  Political activism, although a lifelong pursuit for some, is irrelevant for most, or at most a peek into a circus side show to see the two-headed baby and the bearded woman. 

No one missed Vicki and no one was curious enough to know her whereabouts, so she ended up a cipher, a bit of a smudge on the calendar, a broken reticule found floating in the Potomac, a nothing. 

She wanted to be thought of as a good ISIS soldier, fevered with the desire to create a progressive caliphate and who would stop at nothing to achieve it; but never quite made the grade, never could gin up that kind of virulent absolutism, that howling frenzy of intent.  Ending up in the loony bin and not martyrdom was her fate, and so be it. 

Chef, Cook, Scullery Maid - Meat Loaf And The End Of Foodie Cuisine

Rene Redzepi, Danish chef known for foraging, articulation, and minimalist presentation, has a cult following of organicists, farm-to-table aficionados, and international high-flyers whose thousand dollar prix fixe five meal of sea grasses, cockles, and marsh weed is the Holy Grail of cuisine.  No master is more enlightened than Redzepi, no artist more attuned to the playing of sound and light in tidal pool sanctuaries, no prophet more inspired with perfection than he. 

'Articulation' is a term used by Redzepi to describe the unique confluence of presentation, character, and quality.  His plating is expressive of this union, the very essence of nourishment for eye, body, and soul. 

While most food critics have been more than generous in their praise of Redzepi's genius, his reshaping of the culinary experience, the chef/artist of the new age of environmental sentience and the integrity of all life, others have seen it as a marvelously constructed, ingeniously marketed, and brilliantly engaging scam. 

While travelers who have come from as far away as Perth and Christchurch have looked at the sprays of sea baling, marsh filaments, and mollusk cairns, Harvey Fieldstone of Food & Cuisine, a Bay Area publication channeling Snopes, the Fact Check online service, was offering a clear and unflinching look at the high-end restaurants and celebrity chefs of Milan, New York, and San Francisco. 

Nothing has been a more pretentious, self-referential, manipulative, rabbit-in-a-hat chicanery than this arrogant nonsense of Rene Redzepi.  Plates not minimalist but minimum, hundreds of dollars for bits and pieces of tidal refuse arranged in kindergarten swirls and dots, and happy rainbows.  Anyone taken in by this vaudevillian charade to be fleeced by Rene, watching the looks of stunned amazement at his creations from behind the arras, deserves to lose his stake.  The great P.T. Barnum observed that a sucker was born every minute, and Redzepi is certainly his offspring.  

 

Redzepi, used to adulatory, celebratory reviews which required to comment, felt he must answer critic Fieldstone's unfair, ignorant, and villainous attack, and did so in a venomous, hateful rejoinder.  It was like the good old days of the New York Review of Books where critics and authors went after each other with sharpened swords, and the popular press picked up on what Redzepi thought would be a private affair. 

Food Goes Bitch headlined the New York Post, quoting the Fieldstone review and Redzepi screed in full.  Journalist Tom Packard wrote:

Have you thought that food, food critics, and tony, must-go restaurants were only for the rich and well-to-do?  You've got another thing coming, Dear Reader, this is a food fight extraordinaire, a mud-wrestling extravaganza of pure delight.  The Redzepi scam has finally been outed, and those of us happy enough with a dinner out at Waffle House or Cracker Barrel can have a barrel of laughs over this bitchy pas de deux. 

Packard continued with a series of articles on Redzepi and the foodie craze.  With photos of Redzepi's creations - 'clots of seaweed that tangle fishing lines and clumps of swamp grass smelling of low tide' - his readers howled. 'Where's the meat?'

The scrap between Fieldstone and Redzepi with the Post as interlocutor started a brushfire and then a firestorm.  Americans had always known that this pretentious, coastal, Legoland architectural, organic, locavore, environment-friendly movement was total bullshit, a Baroque funhouse of absurd eating; and now they realized that they were in the majority. 

Of course foodies immediately rushed to the defense of Redzepi and the many Michelin-starred and Nouvelle Cuisine, Alice Waters-like establishments featured in the New York Times. If they did not support Redzepi and his world-renowned culinary colleagues and justify the thousands of dollars they had spent on minimalist, leave-the-table-hungry meals, they would be outed and laughed at for the gullible, credulous fools they were. 

A letter to the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote:

The criticism of Rene Redzepi and his colleagues is nothing less than populist envy.  Those 'ordinary Americans' chowing down at Olive Garden and Wendy's would love to sit at an elegantly presented meal of class and sophistication; but the precision, acute perception, and the inspiration of the forager, innovator, the genius might be lost on them

 
This one letter sparked a sideshow of reader response. There were the gourmets who dug in their heels, continued to cook sous vide, shopped organic for the most carefully sourced, grown, picked, and purveyed food, and who proposed artistic, forward wine pairings.  On the other side were the champions of traditional American food - simple food, comfort food, the steady-as-she goes meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and corn. 

When the foodie craze hit its apogee, few were prepared for its disappearance.  Critics expected more of a gradual disappearance, a voluntary retraction of out-there food choices, a drop-off in Michelin starred reservations, poor circulation of Gourmet and Food & Wine, but somehow when the cat was out of the bag and the Emperor's new clothes came off, the whole thing just collapsed.  

It was as though people had been looking at some hyper-virtual rendition of food through a specially crafted lens to show off a kind of trapeze artistry, and when the lens was removed all they saw was scattered bits of unrelated hardware - nuts, bolts, screws, washers, and rings with no rhyme or reason for their assortment, arrangement, or construction.  

When they saw with the furze removed, their optics aligned, and their eyes clear enough to see what is and not what is intended to be, they saw nothing edible, nothing appetizing, nothing mouth-watering. 

The whole house of cards collapsed, and amidst the fallen architecture were only the scattered, foraged bits that should have stayed where they were.  The wild grasses on the plains, the reeds in the marshes, the seaweed rolling with the tide, and the barnacles attached to sea drift and boat bottoms. 

The taste of a rare Porterhouse came back.  After years of grazing in weeds, swamps, river banks, and forest beds, diners rediscovered what real food tasted like. 

Vicki Blevins looked at her spice rack, stove to ceiling crowded with as many spices as an itinerant Arab medicine man - banyan root powder, cactus flower seeds, hibiscus stamen, fermented Indonesian civet musk - all to be added to dishes of shaved eucalyptus bark-infused poitrine of crab soup and pave de squab in elderberry creme, her piece de resistance. 

Calling her gourmet was like calling Pavarotti just an Italian singer - nothing could do justice to her inventiveness, creativity, and confections with an environmentally sane menu. 

Now, after the Redzepi expose, she could no longer look at her one-of-a-kind assortment of spices and condiments with interest and anticipation of the next meal.  Now they were only swirls and whorls in a Tiepolo ceiling

That's all it took, that one random article, that unvarnished expose that ripped away all the absurd assumptions of food.  Redzepi was simply a seashore opportunist, picking, culling, sorting, and clipping what no sea animal wanted, all at the bottom of the food chain; and once so observed, foodies from Napa to Santa Barbara gave up on the organic, locally sourced, farm-to-table, farmers' market, high-priced circus and returned to basics. 

Back to supermarket screw-top wines and Walmart specials.  Food was a resource, a commodity, a necessity, and not some Barnum & Bailey freak show.  The purpose of eating was sustenance, an intake of nutrients, a palatable mix of essential ingredients, table ready fare. 

Dinner was not a vaudeville act, a Borscht Belt tummler's joke.  It was a part of staying alive, easily chewable, and reliably sustaining. 

'What's for dinner', Vicki's husband asked her; but dinner had already been prepared without fuss or fanfare, a meal that had been eaten by millions before her, food from the chicken coop, the barnyard, and the fields, sorted, cleaned, chopped and cooked, nothing fancy, nothing to report. 

'What happened?', he asked. The sablefish meuniere for another day?'

Vicki was sure he would come around to her new, epiphanic way of thinking.  He would see the light and the waste, fraud, and frivolous diversion of Redzepi and his claque of food groupies.  He too would see with a new clarity and would never more line up at the farmers' market in the cold for ramps or periwinkle puree.  He would go quietly to Sam's Club, Costco, and Walmart and come back with a market basket of familiars.  

Within a short time Michelin stopped giving out stars, Wine Spectator saw no purpose in reviewing Bulgarian blends, and Travel & Leisure gave up on the 'Restaurants: Our Choices of the Best Bargains in Greece'.  The whole industry reeled and sought new avenues for revenue; but once the genie is out of the bottle, or when fraud is exposed, recovery and redirecting is not easy, for it means starting from zero. 

Vicki never got tired of home cooking, the tried and true, the five basic food group meals with no fanfare.  Friends who still held on to the gourmet fantasy assumed that this was simply a passing faze, and soon enough she would return to reason if not delight; but she did not, and as far as anyone knew died with a pantry full of canned goods and a freezer chock-a-block with frozen dinners. 

Social critics have wondered about the demise of gourmet culture, but could never admit the obvious conclusion.  Americans had finally had enough of the fol-de-rol, the pretense, and the con; and once they realized the bill of goods which they had been sold was an airy, insubstantial lot, they gave up on it, trusted their own judgment, and tucked into what they knew best. 

A Mature Woman Looks For Love - And In America's Diverse Society, There Are Many Rocks To Look Under

Vicki Chalmers never thought of herself as a 'mature' woman, for like most elderly people the inside never matches the outside, youth still rages within while cracks, lines, sags, and liver spots deny it. 

She was not a 'senior' and refused to even consider moving to Brightwood, the elite retirement complex in Washington, the go-to place for the Capital's best and brightest, now much dimmer and in need of elder care, but still up to a challenging discussion about interest rates, Russia, or Kierkegaard.  

A few names might be lost in the muddle, dates no longer at one's fingertips, and seminal quotes recalled with difficulty or not at all, but everyone was in the same boat so sentences were finished by others without missing a beat. 

Vicki was not 'ready for the glue factory' as she said to her daughter who suggested that now that Dad was dead and buried, perhaps her living in that big house in Spring Valley might be a burden rather than a comfort.  No, she insisted, the only way I will leave this house is feet first, and so her daughter and her two siblings resigned themselves to looking after Mom as she aged in place. 

However, Vicki was not the aging in place type of person.  She was more the 'dying in her traces' kind, someone who would not go softly into that good night, but raging as Dylan Thomas recommended.  Raging might be putting it a bit out of her reach, but still something energetic, positive, life-affirming was well within her grasp.  Phooey, she said to those who said that these golden years were for reflection,  preparing to meet one's maker, and putting one's things in order.  She was no sanyasi, a sadhu in rags in the Himalayas contemplating The Great Beyond.  She was Vicki Chalmers, goddamn it, with a lot of piss and vinegar left in the tank. 

 

One advantage to old age, at least in an adventuresome woman like Vicki, was that one might as well try everything before one's time was up.  Taboos, social opprobrium, priestly advisement - none of that mattered now. 

Vicki was a lifelong liberal, deeply committed to progressive causes, convinced that the planet was warming disastrously, that the black man was the true inheritor of God's grace, that capitalism was a nefarious, disastrous economic system in which the poor were enslaved, and that the gender spectrum was a welcome evolution from the hidebound man-woman sexual paradigm.  

But, typical of most well-educated, wealthy, white progressive woman of her era, she had espoused these beliefs without actually experiencing them.  She was an a priori liberal.  Although she did once consider travelling on a Freedom Ride bus to Alabama to march with Martin and Ralph, she demurred.  The thought of singing camp songs all the way down South was not her cup of tea.  It all smacked too much of Girl Scout jamborees and summer vacation. 

The ghetto, considered by her progressive colleagues to be the cultural center of the new polymorphous, diverse America, did not interest her.  What more could she learn about inner city dysfunctionality by going there?  Weren't the images of the wretched place enough?

As much as she promoted gender fluidity, the right and obligation to choose one's sexuality, she found the whole affair a circus side show.  In fact what could be more circus-ready than a man all tarted up as a floozy, flouncing and swishing down Main Street? Or a great, muscled bull dyke downing boilermakers at the Blarney Stone?  Pretty boys and tough girls, buggers and trannies, every possible permutation in the natural order?  Not for her. 

'Perhaps I have been missing out', she thought to herself.  Perhaps there actually was some substance to the theory, some vital signs, some actual reason for believing.  Of course she did believe.  If not her whole life would have been a hypocritical joke; but still and all there always had been something missing - the 'out there' was not particularly appealing, and it should have been. 

But where to start?  The only black men she knew were the garbagemen who picked up her trash once a week and she only got near enough to call the encounter personal at Christmastime when she rushed out into the alley with two twenties at the sound of their horn.  They seemed nice enough and at least had a job unlike most of their brothers and sisters in Anacostia; but the idea of actually fraternizing with them was unthinkable.  What would they talk about, and would she have to drink malt liquor from a can?

The black nanny who took care of the neighbor's children was not really black, but Haitian; so interaction with her would be cross-cultural, not cross-racial.  The uppity register queens at CVS or the snarly clerks at the post office offered no promise; and the list went on.  There seemed to be no way to cross the racial Rubicon. 

Gender would be a lot easier.  There were gay men who had worked in her office, but they were as straight looking as Charlton Heston.  There was butch Mandy Phillips in Accounting, the sourest and most unpleasant woman on the floor with an attitude to boot. Invite her to tea? Think again. 

As far as the capitalist menace, there weren't any communists in her crowd, no real Marxist-Leninists who had stayed faithful to the canon despite the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union; but she happened on one at an open house last Christmas.  The man looked like a Hollywood version of a communist, all Marxist beard and that Lenin chin, and true to form he was holding forth on Hegel and the means of production; but he was as unattractive as any man she knew - short, balding, and fat.  He could very well have been a professor at Columbia, but spending even fifteen minutes with him would be torture. 

 

What else was there?  Oh yes, climate; but that was harder to personalize.  Just about everyone in her progressive claque was a committed environmentalist convinced that unless something were done now, the planet would be burned to a crisp in a generation. 

So, Vicki didn't get very far in her late-stage epiphany.  She had wanted to personalize the progressive canon, see for herself the reality of black dysfunction, gay and lesbian sexual authority, and radical anti-capitalism right next to her (here she thought of having pastrami and chicken liver sandwiches with a group of Communists at Katz's in the East Village). 

However the thought of intimacy with any of them was distasteful at best.  While she might be an old, dried-up and overused widow, she still had her notions of sexual intimacy - at least her judgment of other people was largely based on sexual attractiveness - and this lot was dreck. 

'Stick to your own kind' was the resonant aria of Maria in West Side Story and after a year or so of muddling around with the same adolescent fantasies of the old musical, she returned to form, a solidly Protestant, upper middle class Georgetown matron. 

At the same time, a year in the trenches, seeing the real progressivism in the flesh in all its Barnum & Bailey trapeze act big top finery, not only gave her pause, but turned her right.  When you get down and dirty it doesn't take much to see what a charade the whole gabbling, posturing, hysteria is all about. 

Besides ,conservatism was more fitting for a proper older lady like herself. 

An African Safari - Wildebeests, Prospective Husbands, And Communing With The Original Black People

Marjorie Vickers’ husband, Michael, had just died and left her well looked after.  The behest was generous enough so that in the relatively few years left to her, she would never have to worry. 

Marjorie loved her husband very much, but fifty plus years of marriage can take their toll on anybody, and if she was being completely honest, she would have to admit that a decade or two without him was just what the doctor ordered.  She was in good health, still cut a fine figure, was energetic, and longing for adventure. 

He was not cold in the ground before she called Carlton Tours for a consultation.  They were particularly well known for matching personal preference with specialized group tours, and the counselor, experienced both in tour management and marketing, quickly realized who was sitting in the chair before her.  

She had seen and provided for many such women - new widows flush with inheritance and insurance money, old but not too old for sexual adventure, and willing to risk all for an out-of-the-ordinary experience. 

The counselor didn't even bother to mention the Rhine and Danube tours - too predictable, genteel, and ordinary.  She thought about Morocco and its romantic souks and bazaars, but dismissed them as too travalogy - spices, nuts, and Persian carpets but no real romance. She considered India but the heat, dust, and filth threw off even the most seasoned traveler. China and the Great Wall? Bali and its shadow plays? 

 

She finally, although hesitatingly considered an African safari which had romance, the thrill of the Dark Continent, the ecstatic encounter with animals in the wild, and the romance of an old English, Downton Abbey-type resort amidst the banyan trees of Tanzania and the perfect setting-off place for the veldt.  

'Perfect', said Marjorie. 'Sign me up', and so it was that 'Marjorie's Marvelous African Adventure' began.  She excitedly told her friends who shared her enthusiasm, all but an old World Bank colleague for whom Africa was nothing more than a series of malarial, corrupt failed states where Presidents-for-Life ruled with an iron hand and another in the till. 

'Why on earth would you want to go there?', he asked, but Marjorie had her mind already made up.  This was the trip she had always dreamed of, the one in which her husband had no interest, but for her the one which promised everything, the perfect storm of satisfied desires. 

She would see nature as it had originally been created.  She would see and mingle with the immediate descendants of Lucy, the first homo sapiens. 

Now, as savvy and sophisticated as Marjorie considered herself to be, she never looked beneath the glossy ads in Travel & Leisure. The tour company was by no means disreputable, passed the magazine's muster and was certainly not the scam of the defrocked minister Shannon's tour portrayed in Night of the Iguana, but it did cut corners, and in Africa every cut corner lets in malarial mosquitos, rats, beggars, and thieves - the real Africa.

The owner did all the right things.  He was sure to include the right number of attractive, sixty-something men as lures to the predominantly female travelers, to hire well-trained congenial Africans who suggested African forest 'sentience', and secured lodging at reasonable but far from luxurious dwellings, enough comfort plus the sense of 'living like the people'. 

Of course such fly-by-night tours, for all their careful if transparent arrangements, are too flimsy to withstand the rigors of fifty middle-aged American women looking for romance, love, and adventure; and it was on the very first stop on the journey - an unplanned, emergency stopover in Angola - made only because of engine trouble and and 'irregularities' with onward reservations - that the tour first began coming apart. 

Now, Luanda International Airport is exactly where you would send an American tour group looking for the real Africa - a pestilential hellhole of a place; as hot, mosquito-infested, tout-ridden, and corrupt as any on the continent.  Shakedowns at immigration, customs, health, and security.  The rudest, most dismissive, most callous and indifferent treatment anywhere in Africa; and by the time Marjorie and her tourmates had made it out into the steamy Luanda night, she had already had enough of the real Africa. 

She did share a seat on the old school bus that the tour company had hastily arranged with the kind of gentleman she had hoped to meet, patrician, well-heeled, and with money; but the circumstances were such - so miserable, threatening, and ugly than any personal engagement let alone a romantic one, was impossible. 

'Sorry for the unexpected stopover and unfortunate disruption of our program', said the tour guide, and then without a trace of irony he continued, 'but we hope that it will give you a feel for what you all have come looking for, the real Africa', and with that the bus made it through military checkpoints, detours around washed-out bridges, two flat tires and a cracked axel to the Hotel Good Luck. 

No sooner had Marjorie gotten settled in her airless, roach-filled room, than room service came to her door - not with canapes, daiquiris, or cheese toast, but with a bottle of siphoned cognac and an offer to spend the night with Joao, the best looking boy on the peninsula. 

Loaded on the tour bus, rancid and irritable after a miserable sleepless night at the Good Luck, Marjorie and her compatriots headed back to the airport where, true to form, they were shaken down for invalid exit visas, improper government authority and excessive foreign currency.  They were able to board their Air Afrique flight only after they had 'settled their accounts'. 

Carlton Tours soon went out of business, accused of fraud, financial mismanagement, and deceptive advertising, but not before the awful 'romantic' safari had been completed and all fees and expenses either returned or deposited in Swiss bank accounts. 

For a committed, devout political progressive like Marjorie Vickers, the aborted, horrific tour was a wake-up call long in coming.  The African was not 'the sentient, primal forest dweller, the descendant of Lucy, and the legatee of jungle wisdom ready to take his place atop the human pyramid', but a renegade savage, an innate, irreconcilable moral thief. 

It only took a visit to Luanda to disabuse her of her Utopian visions, her febrile fantasies of an African Eden, and her conviction that it was to Africa, not Asia or Europe to which humanity must turn for social renewal.  How credulously stupid she had been to swallow the bill of New Age nonsense she had been fed.

Once back home with the Carlton Tour expedition in her rear view mirror, she had to thank them for her awakening. True, she had found no man with whom to share her senior years, had never even gotten within a long shot of a wildebeest, but she had become a new woman, sentient in her own right, militantly conservative, champion of intelligence, talent, and creativity, and once and for all finished with her progressive African fantasy. 

What's In A Name? - Trump Renames The Kennedy Center And The Left Declares World War III

National Airport, Washington's close-in facility, initially designed to serve members of Congress who needed quick access for their trips back home to attend to their constituencies, was renamed Ronald Reagan Airport in honor of the two-term Republican President. former actor, victim of an assassination attempt, and the man who was at least partially responsible for the coming down of the Berlin Wall and the swan song of the Soviet Union.  

 

The name of BWI (Baltimore Washington International) airport was changed to Thurgood Marshall Airport in honor of the first black Supreme Court justice, longtime advocate for civil rights, and a tireless supporter of an equitable society. 

The Houston Manned Space Center was changed to the Lyndon B Johnson Space Center to honor the United States president.  Maury Hall at the Naval Academy, named after a Confederate loyalist, was changed to Carter Hall to honor the former American president and Annapolis graduate. 

The J. Edgar Hoover FBI building will be changed to honor an American without Hoover's questionable racist past and quasi-governmental doings. 

Just about every professional football stadium in America has been renamed to reflect its corporate sponsorship. Three Rivers Stadium, home of the Pittsburgh Steelers and named after its location at the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers is now Gillette Stadium after the well-known razor company.  Los Angeles Coliseum, a historical landmark in Southern California was renamed after the company SoFi.  AT&T and Bank of America Stadium are but two more of many. 

The names of half  of Yale residential colleges have been changed to remove those of founders who had any association with slavery and replaced with people of color and women; and once the university's historical record has been thoroughly researched, the other half will soon go.  Since slavery was common in the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the wealthy, influential Americans honored by Yale had at least some association with it, either directly or through shipbuilding, the Three Cornered Trade, or Wall Street investment in transatlantic slave shipping. 

During the Biden years, army bases named for Confederate generals were changed to something more suitable.  The name of any public institution, avenue, or thoroughfare named for a Confederate was removed and replaced with either a victim of Southern slavery, or a hero in the fight for black liberation.  Everything from Congressional office buildings to Northern Virginia schools and streets were changed in a revisionist attempt to expunge the last traces of slavery from the historical record. 

Why, then, was Donald Trump's addition to his name on the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts the abominable, outrageous act claimed by the Left?  Only because of unmitigated hatred of the man, an assumption that he intends to retain power ad infinitum, replace democracy with his kingship, and run roughshod over every hallowed American institution and remake it in his image. 

And of course because he changed the name, not Americans honoring him after his death as has been the case for other presidential renaming.  The Left, however, sees no irony or hypocrisy in their claim.  What is the difference, say historians who have seen names changed to reflect changing regimes, courts, governments, and investors for centuries?  Given the political motivation behind all renaming, whether done by men in office or after the fact, there should be no moral questions raised.  Politics is a venal business.  

And no on doubts that if a Democrat is elected after Donald Trump, he or she will sign an executive order to change the name back to Kennedy within the first few days in office, 

Anyone following the rise of Trump and the course of his two presidencies knows that such acts have as much to do with enraging progressive opponents as it is self-glorification.  He knows that every outrageous, ad hominem, reference - 'You are stupid', he recently said to a White House reporter - will drive Democrats to distraction.  His handy, off-the-cuff characterizations of Biden (Sleepy Joe), Elizabeth Warren (Pocahontas) Chuck Schumer  and foreign leaders and the their countries, are not only hilarious and accurate, but against the woke canon. 

He is no different that the tummlers of the Borscht Belt - Henny Youngman, Jackie Mason, Rodney Dangerfield, and others - whose monologues were laced with hilarious ethnic stereotypes.  H.D. Hughley and the young Eddie Murphy were no different, playing on the very recognizable stereotypes of gay men, whites, and women. 

Only seen through the lens of political correctness and the revisionist, Utopian progressive perspective are Trump's characterizations not funny.  Of course they're funny, just as funny as those of Buddy Hackett and Joey Bishop

Most of Joan Rivers’ comedy would not play today except off the airwaves, only at home on DVDs. They are hopelessly incorrect and, despite attempts by neo-Puritanical moral watchdogs to brand them offensive, they are hilariously funny.  There was nothing off limits or beyond the range of River’s comedy. Eddie Murphy’s rants about gays were funny then and without the censorious blinders one is obliged to wear now, still would be.

Murphy, Rivers, and the Borscht Belt, Carnegie Deli Jewish comedians made their bones and their living off of insults, caricature and satire. Mimicking Italians – the barber shops, the cannoli, and the goons way down the capo chain of the Mafia – Jews elbowing each other out of the way for a dollar’s worth of spilled nickels, blacks pimp walking and jive talking; fat people taking up space; gay men swishing, Arabs falconing and bagging their women, WASPs sipping tea while Dresden is bombed….Everything was funny.



There was nothing cruel about any of them, no twisted intent, no political agenda, just a canny sense of the absurd, the ridiculous, and the predictable.  When all lesbians in Bernal Heights dress in flannel shirts, work pants, and shit-kickers, they are fair game.  When S&M trannies always wear biker leather, and always lead each other around in stud collars and traces at the Folsom Street Fair, they beg for satire.  When all obese women waddle their way up aircraft ramps that sway and buckle under their weight; and when they do a contortionist routine to get into their seats, they are absurdly funny, outrageous examples of a norm distorted.

Trump called Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia shitholes.  'Somalia stinks', he said, 'a failed, dysfunctional, horrible place.  Ilhan Omar belongs there not here'.  Trump says what most Americans are thinking and the Left simply cannot square such ingrained political incorrectness with their reformist vision. 

Only the Left is surprised at Trump's doings.  Every other American knows that their president is a tummler, a vaudevillian, and a Las Vegas casino performer.  What's the difference anyway between Trump Tower and the Trump Center for the Performing Arts?

The Left, for all its St. Vitus' dance, whirling dervish, holy rolling hysteria has become the hilarity.  They are the laughing stock, the butt of the dirtiest jokes.  Their straight-faced, bald hypocrisy and uncanny historical ignorance are made for Borscht Belt comedy.  Their uppity-ness, prissy wokeness, and holier-than-thou posturing are absolutely side-splitting.  No one can take them seriously; and Donld Trump and the American people are having one, good belly laugh.