The Feral Passion Of A Trump Hater And The Perils Of True Belief - The Saga Of The Madwoman Of Bethesda

'I hate him', said Vicki Carter to her closest friend, Hanna Blinker, referring to Donald Trump. 'He is vile, horrendous person, and I shudder whenever I think about him'. 

'Well, don't', replied the much more recondite and reserved friend; but she knew that any temperance, moderation, or objectivity on the part of Vicki was impossible.  The woman's hatred for Trump had become a part of her, an integral piece of her personality and character, as indivisible and strong as any. 

Vicki began to cry and hated herself for it. Just like a woman, she said to herself, fighting back the tears and choking sobs which wracked her.  'What's a person to do?'. 

There is a bell curve for political belief, just as there is for intelligence, height, and weight.  Some people are uninterested, others diffident, still others concerned, and finally those for whom politics is the be-all and end-all of their lives. 

 

For Vicki hating Donald Trump wasn't just political animus - a normal reaction when one watched the man's deliberate dismissal of the principles of democratic liberalism, international adventurism, and racist attempts to restore white privilege and consign the black man to yet another generation of segregation, isolation, and prejudice.  Vicki's hatred was a defining, existential element.  It was what made her bounce out of bed in the morning, pursue every possible avenue of legal sedition and insurrection during the day, and retire only when the clock struck midnight. 

Political belief so framed her perceptions that she could only live within a circle of equally passionate  believers.  One by one she cancelled her Vassar classmates for apostasy, having the temerity to sympathize with conservatism.  First went Wendy Barker, wife of a former chairman of the Republican Party and Ambassador to the Holy See.  She and Wendy had gone arm and arm down the Senior Path, loved each other like a couple, and had the same aspirations for life; but now, Wendy was of no value. 

Vicki had known Wendy long before Vassar.  They had grown up in the same neighborhood of Bryn Mawr, tony WASP redoubt on the Philadelphia Main Line.  They had gone to Miss Porter's, a finishing school-cum-college preparatory feed to the Seven Sisters, had roomed together, and were both frilly and girly and studious together. They were inseparable and thought that this was a lifetime friendship. 

But now the years of friendship were annulled.  It was as if Wendy had never existed.  Anyone who believed what she did, conservative to the core, could not be trusted.  Despite a natural affinity, she was the sworn enemy, the devil in disguise, an obstruction. 

So now Vicki lived only with her own - a safe space of commonality, an indissoluble group of true believers, women who had dedicated their lives to undoing evil and ridding the country of the scourge of Pennsylvania Avenue and would die trying. 

Everything about the President rankled Vicki - his hair, his voice, his slathered on fake tan, his cruel and dismissive retorts to responsible journalists, his mockery, and of course his politics.

Yet with all her Sturm und Drang and that of her colleagues, nothing seemed to budge the man.  He kept up his drumbeat of faux American patriotism to couch his capitalist greed and autocratic ambitions.  He had been successful in sending back tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants, sent bulldozers down Independence Avenue and razed the government bureaucracy, the only stalwart against conservative intent.  He opened the oil fields, sent oil gushing through formerly closed pipelines, authorized new, polluting refineries, and restarted the nuclear energy program. 

His first year was a juggernaut of fulfilled promises, and loyal progressives had nothing in the wings, nothing to counter his counter-revolutionary agenda except howls of indignity. 

'We must never give up, never, never', she said, her voice trailing off in the summer breeze.  More and more she found herself talking to herself, sitting alone on her suburban patio watching the cardinals and the robins and smiling at the antics of the squirrels.  There was a strange new penumbra around familiar things - the Ficus took on a glow, a kind of angelic, beatific light; the hum of the refrigerator was in tune with the B-Minor fugue; and the sunlight coming in the bay window was celestial. 

Her friends noticed the changes in her - the faraway looks, the unhinged outbursts, and the animal look in her eyes.  When asked, she replied that all was good with her.  She never felt more complete, in control, and on the path destined for her. 

'Yes', she thought as she watched a Spring robin peck for worms ('I must reseed this year'), 'it is a question of destiny' by which she meant an anointed path.  It wasn't just by chance that she was put on earth at this time, maturing politically at just this moment of history.  Fate could be capricious, but at times there is a holy order to its choices, and she was the beneficiary of this particular turn of the screw. 

She jumped up quickly from her chaise longue, upsetting her gin-and-tonic, leaving the mess for the maid. 'I've things to do', and so she ran past the musical refrigerator, the glowing Ficus, and the luminescent bay window to the phone.  'Marge', she yelled into the old fashioned graphite receiver - land lines were less easily hacked - 'we must do something, we absolutely must'. 

'But sweetheart, what on earth do you mean?' said the lady on the other end of the line, Mrs. Helander, the florist whom Vicki in her confusion dialed by mistake. 'I sent you the zinnias last week'. 

Vicki stumbled over profuse apologies, angry at herself for such a blundering mistake, recovered quickly but forgot why she was on the telephone in the first place. 

'This happens', wrote Arnold Israel, Professor Emeritus of Social Psychology at Brandeis, 'in not a few cases.  Ironically the offhanded political swipe at the President's hectoring accusers - Trump Derangement Syndrome - is not too far off the mark.  The virulent, passionate hatred experienced by many in today's political climate can have far-reaching psychological effects'. 

The progression from concern, to extreme agitation, to downright, unsupported hatred in the political advocate parallels certain classic psychological disorders - a kind of early schizophrenic response triggered by exogenous, environmental forces but resonating from deep within the psyche of the disturbed individual. 

Was the professor implying that there was something of group hysteria in Trump hatred?  A certain psychotic personality that many progressives shared; and sensing this commonality grouped together in a kind of psycho-traumatic cabal?

'We have studied only individual cases', the professor went on, 'and while there might be an emergence of classic group hysteria, we have no hard evidence to date'. 

Meanwhile back in Bethesda, Vicki was going around a final bend. She began hallucinating, seeing Donald Trump in her bedroom, drinking her Pouilly Fume before the fireplace, peeing in the rose garden, and leaving muddy tracks on her Kashmiri dhurrie. 

Luckily her mental 'disruption' was caught before she did any harm to herself.  She was stopped by local police responding to a call about a woman walking down the center line of Montgomery Avenue, seen by a staff psychologist, and admitted to the psychiatric wing of Suburban Hospital. 

Now, God forbid that this should happen to anyone, regardless of political affiliation; but it also serves as good counsel if not warning.  'Eating too many donuts is not good for you', said Professor Israel, 'and neither is gorging on political belief'. 

 

A Man Who Imagines Himself A Poet Writes A Memoir - The Marvelous Art Of Self-Deception

Arnold Gray retired early from his job at an international bank.  Tired and discouraged after years of flogging African countries to do the right thing, he decided to settle in to a new life of renewal.  Foreign assistance was now in the rear view mirror, its ups and downs receding in the distance, and a new life of self-exploration and promise was before him. 

'I'm going to write a memoir', Arnold said, 'about my passion, the outdoors' and with that no sooner had he cleaned out his office at the bank, did he sit down at his desk at home, brewed a cup of chamomile tea, and set to work on his new enterprise.  Now, finally, he would be able to put his perspective down in black and white, tell of his years of  cycling, backpacking, and hiking.   

Most of his weekend excursions were on bikes - marvelous machines tuned to perfection, carrying above and beyond his expectations of grace, power, and agility.  'I rode a 21-speed', he wrote, 'and as I approached the first incline on my way through the Shenandoah, I clicked through the gears until I found a comfortable place. 

 

A decent start, but then Arnold, captivated by the sheer elegance of the bikes machinery, went on to tell of gear ratios, torque, wheelbases, incline calculus, braking distance, and the new gyroscopic stabilizer, a $1000 element which provided stability without compromising pull-ratios or cruising equilibrium. He didn't stop at an overview - a glimpse into cycling's advancements for the lay reader - but gave a disquisition on engineering. 

As he rounded steep turns, it wasn't the feeling of speed, the counterpoise of balance and inertia, the whizzing landscape of pines, firs, and oak; nor the sweet, floral scent of magnolias, the sunlit clouds over the Blue Ridge, the exhilaration of a physicality only felt in this one dynamic place - hurtling forward amidst the grandeur of the mountains. 

He didn't write about all this because he couldn't.  There wasn't a scintilla of poetry in the man, not one drop of spiritual drama, not an iota of princely beauty.  The woods, the forests, and the mountains were simply the context - the environment - within which he pedaled, made his way up and down back roads, and clocked his miles. 

The first chapter was indeed Arnold Gray - a treatise on what makes a bicycle go.  It was ponderous, tedious, and boring.  

 

'I have something to say'. Arnold told his friends at the bank when he announced his retirement; but when pressed he could only manage 'biking'.  Most imagined trips through the Western mountains, over the Donner Pass, by the Pacific in Carmel and Pebble Beach, sunsets over Biscayne Bay, Napa, Sonoma, and wine country - a travelogue, a personal account of wind in your hair travel. 

Arnold, however was no Shelley whose poem 'Mt. Blanc' told of his epiphany as the clouds obscuring the mountaintop cleared, and he felt overwhelming joy, surprise, and spiritual discovery

And when I gaze on thee
I seem as in a trance sublime and strange
To muse on my own separate fantast,
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast influencings,
Holding an unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around;
One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings
Now float above thy darkness...

 

Travel writing is an old art.  Ibn Battuta, an Arab traveler wrote of his experiences in 1350, a travelogue of personal impressions, ethnography, and adventure.  Sir Richard Francis Burton wrote of his trek to Lake Tanganyika to find he source of the Nile and his penetration into Islam's holy of holies, the Kabbah in Mecca.  

Mungo Park wrote of his journeys up the Niger River to locate its source, and told tales of his repeated capture by African tribes, bartered and sold as a white slave, and somehow managing to escape. Paul Theroux wrote a series of travel books which were more reflections on his place on earth, his purpose, and the meaning of his ambitions and desires than simple descriptions. 

His The Book of Tao, is a collection of writing from the world's most famous travelers and their particular reflections on the spiritual nature of traveling alone. 

One of the best memoirs of recent years is Roald Dahl's Boy and Solo, the latter a recounting of his days as a RAF fighter pilot, the former about his childhood.  Both have little to do with the actual events of his life, but his often hilarious, ironic, and marvelously creative telling of how he saw them, what he felt, and the often ridiculousness of each situation. 

 

The two-volume memoir of Russell Baker, a journalist for the Washington Post and editorial writer is in the same deferential, modest, humorous mode.  Life is a circus, Baker often noted, but what a fun ride.

Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration, wrote Locked in the Cabinet, a memoir of his time in Washington, and again done with the same self-deprecatory, humorous, sanguine view of life. 

Everyone thinks they have a memoir in them just waiting to be written, but when it comes time to write it, it often comes out sodden, trite, and punishingly boring.

A three-tour Vietnam War helicopter pilot, a man who loved the war, flying helicopters, and landing in hot LZs taking fire, began writing his memoir - one which many thought would be a best seller.  In an era of PTSD, the horrors of war, the misery of death and destruction, the pilot's expression of the joy of battle from above would be unique. 

Yet when he started to write, the results read like an inventory sheet.  Like Arnold and his bikes, he wrote about rotor torque, inclines, inertia, gravitational forces, cargo, maintenance, and logging time.  There was no sense of the sheer joy he had flying about enemy lines, laying down suppressive fire, avoiding the lines of tracer bullets rising from the jungle - just altimeters, compasses, and range finders. 

A doctor who ironically was diagnosed with terminal cancer when he was only thirty-five, defied predictions and lived a long life, albeit with a variety of experimental drugs, radiation, immune therapy, and surgery.  He wrote a memoir about his journey but the book was an unremitting clinical spreadsheet.

He was more interested in telling about alternative clinics in the Alps, aromatherapy, radioactive implants and the techniques of the procedure than his reactions to the early death sentence.  Few people got through the first chapter. 

'I have a story to tell', he told his friends; but he had no idea of the nature of the genre - memoirs are not dutiful biographies, but stories of personal events, life, loves, danger, adventure, travails, and beauty. 

Both Arnold and the helicopter pilot thought that they had something important to say, something vital and human; and they were both surprised to see that they had nothing of the kind.  Even in the unimaginable scenes of combat, the pilot could only manage wind velocity and arcs-of-fire.  

Those who imagined life over the treetops in Vietnam had more creative juices than the pilot ever had.  Those who imagined bike rides up and down the Tetons, Denali, or the Rockies had more fantasy and communing with nature than Arnold could muster on his best days. 

Those who opened the doctor's book were expecting My Left Foot, a marvelous, humorous, delightful memoir of a severely disabled boy who became a world-renowned painter, all using only his left foot. Needless to say, they were disappointed. 

In many cases failed memoirs are because of inexperience.  The writer does have something to say, but cannot find the words to say it.  In most others, however, the writer has nothing to say but is laboring under the false impression that he does - the marvelous art of self-deception. 

'At least he tried', said Arnold's friends as each rewrite was as uninspired, intellectually lethargic, and frightfully boring as the previous one.  Arnold finally gave it up, never really sure why he couldn't manage something that people liked; but his friends never let on. 

Dreams Of A Political Arriviste - The Consort Of A Kingly Leader And Finding Him In Washington

Barbery Byfield was a typical girl of her generation - coquette, ingenue, but with that precocious sexuality that most girls affect but she had in abundance.  She was indeed a Lolita, a nymphet, a girl barely out of high socks and school uniforms, who had desires well beyond her age. 

When she read the Arabian Nights, or Rapunzel, Goldilocks, or The Fairy Princess, she did not let them float happily in her fantasy.  When she dressed up in sequins, crinoline, and glitter, she was not just pretending to be a prima ballerina, noticed by the Tsar of Russia and invited to the Winter Palace.  She was that ballerina. 

When she saw pictures of the palaces of Persepolis, Constantinople, and Babylon, she was not just an imagined princess of the pasha's harem, but was that lady of exotic charms. 

She spent her classes daydreaming, imagining a world far beyond Chillicothe, Ohio, the farm, the cornfields, and the Methodist church - a world of wonder, limitless possibilities; a life of sybaritic pleasure, sexual abandon, frankincense and myrrh.  

Her grades slipped, her teachers critical, and the principal dismissive.  'Unless your grades improve, Miss Byfield, I would be remiss if I didn't remind you of your responsibilities', said the principle, an old queen never satisfied; but Barbery knew that her future was not in conjugations, the Hundred Years War, or Jeffersonian expansionism. 

Where was it, then? she wondered.  'Dreams are misfortunes in disguise', her mother had warned her, a woman who had had her share of promising but ultimately disappointing love affairs.  In fact, Mrs. Byfield was never entirely sure that Barbery was the offspring of Mr. Byfield or the ravishing Viscount of Northumberland who had swept her off her feet, treated her like a queen, then left her for the Duchess of Kent.  

Such is the stuff dreams are made of, she recalled; and best warn her daughter off such fancies before it was too late. 

But too late it was, for whether a product of genetic destiny or environmental influence, her daughter Barbery followed in her footsteps, enamored of the princely life, the romantic, and the wellborn. 

'At least keep your knickers on

, her mother finally said to her precocious daughter, 'until Mr. Right comes along', but those were words of an older generation of women.  Hers, feminist, demanding, and impatient, was different.  If she wanted a trail of disappointed men behind her, so be it. 'Reputation' today was more a question of dominance and success than virginity. 

It was a fine line to walk, the one between the slatternly and informed choice.  There were the usual suitors from which she assessed like Portia - Bobby Parker, captain of this and that, a bit slow off the mark but zesty and confident; Alfonso Evans, eccentric artist with little talent but with an insouciance which appealed; Dickinson Putnam of the Putnams, the Putnams of the Davenport expedition, the Salem trials, and the founding of New Haven; and Ralph DiMarco, goomba, the first New Haven Italian to be admitted to Yale, a political foundling with all kinds of connections and good in bed. 

Women have made fame, fortune, and history thanks to their ineffable and irresistible sexual appeal.  Margaret, wife of the weak King Henry VI, tired of his shilly-shallying rule, took over the reigns of power, defeated the French and saved England from foreign rule.  Cleopatra made short work of her Ptolemaic adversaries, and ruled Egypt for decades, in the meantime bedding Julius Caesar and having two children by him before luring Marc Antony into her bed chamber.  Ibsen, Strindberg, Dreiser, and Lewis wrote of indomitable women who took what they wanted and left a trail of men behind them. 

The problem was this: there was no American royalty, no cultured legatees of a thousand years of history, not even a significant aristocracy to speak of.  Yes, there were the Cabots and Lodges, Rittenhouse Square, Beacon Hill, and the Waldorf, but they couldn't hold a candle to the Bourbons or the Windsors. 

All that America had was this unwashed, hungry, bourgeois class of go-getters - the Zuckerbergs, Bezos, Buffets, Gates, and Jobs and their successors; so Barbery's fantasies of a palatial life were as fanciful as ever.  Times had changed. 

Or had they? Was an affair with an Ohio Congressman, an important member of the Ways and Means Committee of Congress, he heir to the wealth that only a few years in elected government can provide,  not the same as a rung on the ladder of viscounts, counts, and dukes but a reasonable aspiration?  Distasteful perhaps, but equivalent. 

So with a higher prize in mind, Barbery shared her bounty with others in Washington, moving her way up from interns to Congressional aides to inner circles. 

It is supposed that the political elite is a notch above the rest, more savvy, canny, and worldly wise; but the reverse is true.  These politicos, especially those with tenure, were particularly vulnerable to the blandishments and advances of young women like Barbery. 

As Shakespeare well knew, men are boobs and women can run rings around them.  Viola, Rosalind, and Portia were marvels of misandry, dismissing men like so much lint.  Lady Macbeth and especially Queen Margaret wife of the Danish regicide king and uncle to Hamlet, were the most well-known examples of native feminism.  Not to mention Tamora, Queen of the Goths or Dionyza harridan and murderous queen. 

 

So these fools in Washington would be easy pickings; but would bedtime with the nation's philanderers  be any satisfaction of Barbery's desires?   Would a liaison with the likes of Newt Gingrich, Mark Sanford, John Edwards, or even Bill Clinton, duplicitous, craven, heartless idiots, be the apogee of her ambition?

Doubtful.  Washington has no aristocratic sophistication, no Old World cavalier culture, no royal entitlement, and worst of all, no class.  It is a barnyard, pigsty, rutting free-for-all. 

Yet there is value and honor in accepting the challenge and wearing the laurels of victory.  So what if Congressman X is a rube from the sticks? Having him prostrate, vulnerable and hers was worth something.  Perhaps not in the annals of Mme. de Maintenon or Marie Antoinette, but a statement nonetheless. 

And so it was that Barbery Byfield found her home - not the Palais de Versailles or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon exactly, but a fertile ground for dominance and sexual satisfaction, the very essence of woman. 

 

Was the President of the United States immune to feminine wiles?  No President in American history led a faithful, uxorious life.  Every single one of them had a mistress except perhaps for Jimmy Carter who admitted only to having 'lust in his heart' which of course counts for the same thing, almost. 

Donald Trump has a beautiful younger wife and during his long career has squired the most desirable women; and since all men even at an advanced age think of sex every waking moment, the President would certainly be fair game. 

Particularly now when he is at the top of his game he would be at his most susceptible. All powerful men reach an inviolate plateau, a no-fly zone, an untouchable position from which they feel they can do anything without prosecution.  Especially in a president's second term in office, his last by Constitutional injunction, he feels more empowered and immune than ever. 

Former President of France Nicolas Sarkozy kept his mistress in the Presidential Palace, the Elysees, at his beck and call.  President Mitterrand's lover and illegitimate child mourned at his grave alongside his wife and legitimate children. 

There would be no fuss - there could be no fuss - if Barbery moved into the presidential quarters, but that was  putting the cart before the horse, engaging in one of her romantic fantasies before political reality.

The old adage - men will always be men - has not changed in millennia. Men are and always will be suckers for sexual attention and will throw fidelity, trust, and honesty to the winds for sexual adventure. 

In fact the older a man gets, the more insistent he becomes about expressing his virility; and a May-December affair, if ever achieved, can be transformative for an older man.  

Now, Donald Trump might be a hard sexual nut to crack, but he's no different from John Q. Public, wanting that nubile, silken freshness that only the likes of Barbery Byfield can offer. 

At this moment Barbery is in wings, but soon will show herself in all her marvelously seductive allure,  Why Barbery, you might ask given the tarts, comers, and glamorous showgirls of the world? Because some women have it and some don't, and this President  among all before him knows what's what.

What A Great Country! - How A Somali Pirate Turned A Fraud Ring Into A Drug Empire Under The Nose Of The US Government

Bashir Abdi was born and raised in Mogadishu.  He had never known anything but civil disorder, mayhem, and political chaos.  His country, Somalia, had been this way for decades - a lawless, ungoverned and ungovernable state, and to survive one had to rely on wits, ingenuity, craft, and fearlessness. 

 

His father, Barre, had brought him up with the survival skills necessary in such an unstructured society.  The rules that applied elsewhere- honesty, fairness, justice, consideration, and compassion - not only did not apply in Somalia but were tickets to an early death. 

No, the Abdi boy was brought up in a culture of harsh reality, violence, cruelty, and self-interest.  At a very young age Bashir accompanied his father on the pirate boats that plied the Indian Ocean.  He learned how to fire a machine gun and was trusted with manning the M240 mounted on the prow to lay down suppressive fire as they approached their target. 

Later as a young man, he was entrusted with leadership and had brought home a number of high-value assets.  He was also a member of the X-7 militia, a paramilitary group turned into gangland crewe responsible for 'sanitizing' the city and making it 'clean' for extrajudicial rule.  Fortunes were made in the lucrative drug trade, for Mogadishu became a key transit point for Southeast Asia heroin, a trusted depot given the military acumen and ferocity of its managers. 

'It is time to go to America', Bashir's father said to him one day.  'There is more money to be made there in one day than in a lifetime in Somalia'. 

Barre Abdi also knew that as well as profiting mightily, his son would not be killed.  American authorities were easily convinced to give immigrants and easy pass, and would overlook 'minor' infractions of the law.  More importantly, shooting a black man no matter what the circumstances, was simply not done in the United States, so the young man would be safe from harm. 

Entry into the United States over the years had been possible, especially if one had the financial resources of the Abdi family.  The thousands paid in bribes to American officials - from the border patrol to the courts - made illegal entry a simple matter.  

The Abdi money was not needed, however, since Bashir entered the United States during the Biden Administration, well known throughout Africa as an easy mark. Biden and his Congressional supporters made it known that all were welcome.  He and his fellow progressives felt they had a duty, a holy obligation to right the wrongs of decades of American imperialism, neo-colonialism, and racial oppression of Third World nations and to give succor and asylum to anyone fleeing that world. 

Given this political stance and the myopia which went along with it, the fraud, embezzlement, and financial crime committed by the Somali community grew geometrically.  No one in the Administration dared look at Somali books, for doing so would have been tantamount to racism.  There was already a widespread popular belief in the endemic criminality of the black man, American or African, and investigating him would only confirm that rancid prejudice. 

Since the local police, the FBI, and the wider network of federal law enforcement agencies were told to look the other way, the Somalis raked in hundreds of millions a year, built financial fortunes, and were looked at within the underground community of scammers, fraudsters, and snake oil salesmen, as brilliant profiteers. 

Bashir Abdi felt quite at home in Minneapolis despite the bitter cold.  He was welcomed as a hero, thanks to his reputation and that of his family, perhaps the most successful criminal operatives on the African continent - and that was saying something given the widespread endemic, universal corruption in every corner. 

'We will teach you all you need to know', Bashir was told as he settled in to his new white collar role.  At first, of course, he missed the thrill of the chase, the roar of quad Yamaha 350s, the gunfire, and the final assault; but he soon got used to a life of leisure. 

The government of the United States at every level had been so snookered, so completely bamboozled by the ethos of 'diversity' and 'inclusivity' that Somalis had a virtually free rein.  Child care centers which were no more than empty storefronts with welcoming signs, eldercare transport services without a single vehicle, and home visit nursing care without a nurse to be seen were the rule. 

'What a great country', Bashir said to his colleagues after evening prayers and a night with a Somali princess; but he was becoming increasingly bored with the simple routine.  Yes, his Aruban bank accounts were swelling, but he missed the life of excitement and adventure he had enjoyed back home.

Fraud was a profitable enterprise, but it lacked mojo, risk, and reward.  Drug running had been at the center of the Abdi business, so Bashir naturally considered that avenue of profit here in the United States. 

There were two avenues open for an enterprising man like Bashir - one was the lucrative cross-border trade in California-Mexico, but that was locked down by Latino gangs.  No one crossed Mara Salvatrucha, MS-19 or even intimated joining their ranks.  Bodies were littered on both sides of the border for just that. 

The other was the smaller but still lucrative drug market in New York City.  Frank Lucas had made hundreds of millions through a canny marketing scheme - buying heroin wholesale direct from Southeast Asia, shipping it on military transport planes shuttling between Saigon and New York, and selling it at a competitive price on the street. 

Lucas was long dead and buried but the drug trade in Harlem and beyond was still not only viable but rewarding.  Bashir had a feeling that with his credentials - black men in Harlem had heard of Somali macho derring-do and liked it, and understood the need to be more canny about their investments.  A veteran of the biggest scams going in the United States would be welcome in New York. 

While Bashir started as an accountant - well, more of a financial advisor - he let it be known that he would be a valuable asset in the muscle end of the business.  He had shown no mercy on the high seas and was known up and down the Somali Coast as the Genghis Khan of piracy, and there were enough upstart factions causing interruptions in the now standard-issue trade, that some measure of 'discipline' was called for; and he was the one. 

The reputation that preceded him was well-deserved, and in a few short months bodies were showing up in the Meadowlands, drug sales returned to normal, and the domain of the new drug lords of Harlem increased by leaps and bounds. 

Never one to turn his back on friends, family, and community, Bashir returned to Minneapolis and began to transform what had only been a scam into a serious, American-style, gangland operation.  He used his Harlem connections as sources of heroin, meth, and Fentanyl, built a cadre of loyalists within the Somali community, and selected the best and the brightest to work for him. 

Within a short time, the streets of Midwest cities were filled with his products; and the local authorities, still under restraining orders and unable to investigate anyone in the black community, did nothing. It was a bonanza, a jamboree, an operation that simply printed money. 

With the election of Donald Trump, the aggressive operations of ICE, and the long-overdue investigations into Somali Minnesota fraud, Bashir knew it was time to leave.  He knew the day would come as it did for Frank Lucas and the Big Men of Africa - not in federal prison but in his villa in St. Tropez which he had already bought and furnished.  Since his record was clean - federal authorities in the US never even suspected his level of involvement in the childcare fraud or the drug trade - and with generous payments to EU authorities, his residence in the South of France would be undisturbed. 

Everything in life is subject to the dictates of the bell curve; and even in a continent only known for misrule, corruption, venality, abject poverty, and medieval tribalism, there can be bright stars, men of brilliance, enterprise, and creativity.  Bashir Abdi was one of those stars and at last report was living decently and well on the Cote d'Azur. 

We Are The World - Realpolitik And The Fantasy Of Peace, Cooperation, And Good Will

Charles M'bele, longstanding President of a central African republic, sat back on the south verandah of the palace and looked out over the river, across the thousands of miles of forest to the ocean.  'Africa', he said, to a foreign visitor, 'is the future'. 

The visitor smiled, in country on a humanitarian mission and hopeful that the President would turn his attention to the starvation, pestilence, and economic misery of his people.  So far, no such luck, as M'bele had visions of a grand African renaissance, one to challenge the West and the white race for global authority. 

'We Africans', he said, 'are inheritors of Lucy's legacy', referring to the discovery of the first human being in the Olduvai Gorge, 'and we will inherit the earth'.  

He poured the visitor another glass of bonded 30 year single malt, lit a Cuban cigar, and watched the smoke drift languidly over the balcony, across the formal gardens he had fashioned after Versailles, and disappear into the mist over the river. 

M'bele had been in power since a violent coup in which his militias and South African and Israeli mercenaries toppled an elected president of the opposing party, a party of 'devilish intent, endemic corruption, and venal ambition.' 

Following his ascent to power, he built an impregnable empire assured by a loyal army, a brutal secret police, and a system of imprisonments and generous gifts which kept partisans guessing, loyalists firm, and those wavering in prison. 

'The world is in a flurry', said the President, and went on to cite the many international efforts at peace, cooperation, and reconciliation. 'Folly, hysteria, foolishness', he said, walking over to the balcony at the sound of distant gunfire. 

'Our neighbors', he commented to his concerned visitor, 'who have not learned our lessons of peace and security. 

The President was right, of course.  Dictatorships are good for one thing at least - peace and national security.  The regimes of the Duvaliers in Haiti made the country an idyll for foreign visitors.  The Olaffson was filled with writers, artists, and dancers, French restaurants served Michelin-starred meals from the harbor to Kenscoff.  Iran under the Shah was a modern day Persepolis - elegant, majestic, and safe thanks to Pahlavi and Sevak, his notorious Secret Police. 

 

The civil uprisings across the river from M’bele’s palace were the result of weak-minded, soggy, addled puppets who never learned how to rule.  'Don't worry', the President went on as heavy artillery fire was heard echoing in the forest.  'They won't come here'. 

The President picked up the phone by his side, spoke a few words, smiled, and announced that the interview was over - important business awaited him. 

Now, as much as Western democracies criticized M'bele and his authoritarian rule, his refusal to join any international agency, and his anti-democratic sense of imperial justice, he was the rule rather than the exception. 

Machiavelli writing in the 16th century understood human nature - man's ineluctable aggressiveness, territorial ambition, self-defensiveness, and survivalism.  Rather than suggest ways to a more considerate, compassionate, and unified world, he stated that peace was the result of stalemate or conquest, nothing in between.  Wars will always be fought, but should be engaged only to establish and secure national interests. 

 

The world order today is exactly as the Prince predicted.  Russia, China, and now, finally the United States are forcefully and unapologetically promoting their national interests and using every means to secure them.  Putin, Xi, and Trump are members of a new world order - a Machiavellian one where power is exercised and parity is sought.  

The force of arms, as Clausewitz famously noted, is diplomacy by other means.  The armies and arsenals of each of the three nations is impressive to say the least; but the lessons of the Cold War are resonant.  With thousands of megatons of nuclear explosives aimed at each other neither the Soviet Union nor the United States was tempted to pull the trigger. 

M'bele of course would never be invited to join this powerful triumvirate.  His nation was an impoverished, fifth-rate country with just enough mineral wealth to interest foreign donors; but he considered himself of the same ilk.

‘How do you say', he once said to a group of supporters, 'namby-pamby?' and with a guffaw and toothy smile to his attendants, he claimed his place as a member of the militant elite of the world. 

One Worlders have been around for decades, promoting international peace and harmony, demilitarization, healthy compromise, good will, and understanding. Yet they have been no more important or influential than streetcorner preachers, idealists with an abiding faith but no grounding in history, human nature, or geopolitical reality. 

American progressives are no different, challenging the Machiavellian Trump to stop his military incursions and withdrawal from international consortia and join hands with allies in a common front of good intentions.  NATO, the G7, the EU colloquies on transatlantic cooperation, the United Nations General Assembly, says Trump, are all hopelessly weak, flaccid, indeterminate organizations, taking up space and taxpayer dollars. 

Diplomacy, a la Clausewitz, is showing off American military might and defying any country to challenge it.  Former President Truman authorized the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to send a message to the Soviet Union. Look what we've got, and we're not afraid to use it. 

'Harry Truman, my kind of man', said M'bele, a student of American history who knew that with the election of Donald Trump, Truman was back.  

Of course, M'bele could have reached back a lot farther in history to conclude what he did.  The Hundred Years War, The War of the Roses, the countless bloody conflicts in the rest of Europe, China, Persia, Turkey, Japan; the tribal conflicts throughout Africa, the civil strife, uprisings, revolutions, and beheadings par for the course for millennia were evidence enough of the permanence of territorial conflict and the irrelevance of conversation. 

'I am a man of peace', he said, and he was correct as far as that goes.  For decades under his authoritarian rule, no shots had been fired in anger or revolt.  Of course in the early days after the coup, he was merciless in his search-and-destroy missions, burning entire villages suspected of disloyalty, beheading dissidents and impaling their heads on spikes leading in and out of questionable towns; but once security was established, peace reigned. 

Africa is the mirror of the political environment of the developed world.  Big Men, authoritarian dictators rule on all points of the compass.  All have loyal armies, insatiable secret police, and arsenals full and ready for deployment.  Whether internal or external, any threat to power must be met with overwhelming force. 

The progressive Left in Europe is on the run.  Their accommodating, politically naive policies have led to millions of unwanted, illegal immigrants who vow to Islamize the continent, an erosion of traditional European, Christian, Greco-Roman values, and impending chaos.   The Right is resurgent in Italy, France, Britain, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Poland and Hungary among others.  A reemergence of nationalism and regional identity. 

'Stay for the parade', M'bele told another foreign visitor.  'You will like it'. 

The parade in honor of the thirtieth year of M'bele's rule will match anything the Soviet Union managed on May Day, he said. 'Tanks, artillery, ranks of disciplined soldiers, martial music, and triumph!' 

The visitor of course demurred.  He was as anxious to get out of the country as quickly as he could, such a nasty, horrible place; but he smiled graciously, accepted a generous present from the President, was escorted to the airport by a phalanx of armored limousines, helped on the plane by welcoming airline staff, and never returned. 

Sex And The Liberal Woman - Rutting, Pillow Talk, And Other Irrelevancies In A Desperately Serious World

Bennington Pease (Bennie) grew up like every other well-heeled, privileged girl - cotillions, Christmas balls, country club dances, the occasional flirtation in class, and  summer vacations on the Vineyard with the likes of Parker Harrington and Cabot Phillips, boys from Groton and St. Paul's on their way to Yale. 

Sexual interest, desire, and promise was part of the package. Bennie would be married soon after Wellesley or perhaps after a year or two after Harvard, probably to one of the boys she grew up with on the North Shore.  They would move to New York, probably on the East Side, have three children, two homes, three cars, and the vibrant social life that only Manhattan can offer. 

'The best laid plans of mice and men'  the old saw that always seems right around the corner would never apply to Bennie, for such is the essence of privilege - there is little that can either shake its roots or move it from its assigned path. Yet, it did, and somewhere between Junior and Senior years her head was turned. The life she had taken for granted might not be all-inclusively right.  Her patrician forbears, as historically relevant as she knew them to be, came under harsh scrutiny from the emerging liberal Left in academia. 

The Putnams, her direct ancestors, had been among the first English settlers in the New World, went on to establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and with John Davenport built the new conservative Puritan settlement of New Haven.   

   

The other side or the family, the Potters, were judges at the Salem trials, influential clerics, respected thinkers, and perhaps most importantly, investors in the burgeoning transatlantic trade.  As shipbuilders, owners, and investors, the Potters made a fortune and built Boston as a worthy competitor to New York. 

So Bennie was shocked when told by her liberal classmates that this all meant nothing and that these men were responsible for the concentration of wealth that distorted the very fundamental principles of the new Republic, were the patriarchal fathers of generations of insular, white privileged males, and their investments were instrumental in perpetuating slavery (The Three Cornered Trade, the slave routes from which the Putnams had profited), propagating an ethos of aristocratic Louis XVI - Marie Antoinette 'let them eat cake' royalty, and creating a cabal of wealthy subterfuge. 

Bennie's weakness - that was the only explanation offered by her family - led her astray and before she graduated she had turned against family, legacy, and tradition, and had become one of 'them', the pious, Left. 

One would have thought that her life of discipline, enforced rectitude, and an unshakeable code of honor would have made her strong.  On the contrary, her life was so predicted, so constructed, so inviolable that she was never was allowed to think on her own; so when she was forced to rely on her wits, her intelligence, and her logic, she could not and was easily and quickly subsumed within The Movement. 

Now, the liberal woman of today is not Eleanor Roosevelt, a woman of honor and patrician pride who espoused her husband's social liberalism and spoke out in favor of labor, the working man, and the irrevocable principles of popular democracy. 

 

She is a harridan, a succubus, a vixenish howler for revolutionary change.  No gentle, compromised, accommodating change, but absolute, immediate, and brutal reform.  The black man is no longer the subject of Uncle Tom Martin Luther King's righteous cause, but the new American, the inheritor of forest wisdom and environmental insight to be raised to the top of the pinnacle of society. The disappearance and death of the white race should be accelerated to make room for black power. 

Heterosexuality, a legacy of a medieval reproductive past should also be expunged from American society to be replaced by a myriad of genders, a cornucopia of sexual choices, and halcyon years of sexual liberation.  The capitalist system, responsible for racial oppression and climate Armageddon, must be dismantled and replaced by socialism, a generous, compassionate, inclusive form of government. 

Given this agenda and its existential importance, liberal women have no time for anything less than serious pursuits.  Moreover, the privileged white lifestyle of conservatives - blonde, vacuous, ignoramuses more interested in mousse and Potomac mansions than social justice - is itself anathema.  Not only do liberal women have no time for St. Tropez or Cannes, they see the vapid lifestyle as counter-revolutionary, signifying the hopeless emptiness of the bourgeoisie. 

Sex for the conservative is nothing but wanton pleasure, trysts amidst darkness, self-gratifying pleasure while others were struggling to survive.  Sexual orgasm is nothing more than the bourgeois sentiment, the sought -after Holy Grail of political turpitude.  Camaraderie, fellowship, comrades in arms, solidarity, communalism, and bonding are the only sensible, reasonable, and logical relationships in a troubled world. 

Not only that but the liberal woman is conflicted about her own sexuality, challenged as she was to rid herself of the outmoded, antediluvian heterosexuality, to be liberated, and invested in the new sexuality of the day.  

For heterosexual woman, this is truly a conundrum.  The whole idea of likker-licenses, S&M street fairs, dildo buggering, and pussy cum is revolting, yet these new liberal phalanxes are not deterred, and in basement apartments everywhere, they put up with clit-pierces and tongue studs, fingering, and faux orgasms in a show of political solidarity. 

Most demurred - better speak out in favor of the gender spectrum than wallow in it - so sex in liberal quarters was a bottom drawer issue. 

Bennie, however had always been a woman with a strong heterosexual desire. She never considered Biblical injunction, biological imperative, family values, or other such covers for her native instincts.  She simply wanted to be taken, penetrated, and released - and not by some plastic robotic insert held by a big-titted, overweight bull dyke.

And what was this political conflation all about ?  Who said that sexual inclusivity had to be the menu du jour?  Who ever came up with the idea in the first place?  How in God's name did a tiny, outlying demographic become the zeitgeist of the liberal movement?  It was one thing for two men to do unspeakable things in bathhouses, but to raise that level of peculiar satisfaction to the national agenda?

Ironically, this sexual abstemiousness must have been what it was like back in Salem - a Puritanical obsession with celibacy, necessary sexual ritual, and the co-existence of evil with female sexual desire. Of course there were women like Bennie then, demoiselles who had their pleasure in the bushes or the barn, but it was a censorious, brutally ascetic time. 

Bennie quickly saw the errors of her ways.  It turned out that she was not so much the wilting flower that her family had assumed, but a woman who only needed a wake-up call - the supreme arrogance of these ponderous, hoarse, ugly women to send her packing.  Liberalism might have some redeeming values, some raison d'etre, but the whole thing had gotten so baroque, so rococo in fact, that there was no aging in place.  It was time to go, and go she did back to her roots, her old Nantucket summer friends, Grandma Putnam and Grandfather Potter, and eyes on the prize - a handsome, successful Wall Street banker with charm and promise...or something like that. 

At this point leaving the big tent of social causes, the bloody sanctimony and sexual perversion was enough so that even Bob from Accounting looked good to her. 

Of course she reverted to form and married well, had the expected three children, and lived a happy, expansive, prurient (yes, she and her husband were not beneath that) life. 

Liberal women? In the rear view mirror where they belonged. 

'If The Rule You Followed Led You To This...' When Conviction Grows As Stale As Week-Old Bread

Vicki Pastor had given the best years of her life to social justice.  She had marched with Martin and Ralph across the Pettis bridge, joined Freedom Riders in Montgomery, braved the ax handles and dogs of Bull Connor, and had come back to Washington to continue the struggle for equality and fairness.

She had put up with Ronald Reagan and the Bushes – conservative politicians of reasonably good will but misinformed intentions.  You couldn’t help but like Reagan, a jolly old soul with a self-deprecating sense of humor. George Bush I was a patriot, whose noblesse oblige was memorable – WWII combat airman, long service in government, patient and dutiful Vice President, and finally Chief Executive.  

His son, George II was a bit of a cowboy but within reason, and took 9/11 with  proper stolid American commitment; but the man now in the White House, Donald J Trump was another Republican altogether.

He was a bully, a racist, and a warmonger in bed with his Wall Street cronies and New York real estate mogul, a self-satisfied criminal who had avoided the law for himself but went on to abuse and distort it for ordinary Americans.

Vicki hated him with a visceral passion, an unrestrained, immoderate, bilious hatred; and although she was not proud of such unchristian behavior, she felt that such animus was called for.  The more hatred for this hateful man, the better.

It wasn’t just his politics that was so upsetting, but his lack of culture.  The man was a crass, bourgeois caricature of America’s worst instincts. His yachts, his Mar-a-Lago, his glitz, faux glamour, and arm candy were revolting examples of his excess.  His gross superficiality, his disdain for high culture and intellectual sophistication, his defiance of reasonable social norms and outright determination to create a cheap, tinsel-and-sequin Washington were disgusting.

Yet here Vicki was in her later years, widowed, children in San Francisco and Paris, rarely invited out, disconsolate and feeling hopeless, with nothing but memories and Trump hatrcd to support her growing despair.  ‘I need to do something’, she said; but the climate conferences, rallies on the National Mall, letters to the editor, and speaking at college reunions were not enough.

She thought of Coleman Silk, the Phillip Roth character in his The Human Stain who takes a much younger woman as lover in his later years.  ‘She’s not my first love nor my last’, he says to a censorious friend, ‘but she certainly is my last. Doesn’t that count for something?’

Men, Vicki knew, had it in them to take young lovers even at seventy; yet here she was a shriveled up old prune whom no man wanted any more, let alone a younger one.  Men were the lucky ones.  Only a nice bank account and a flat stomach – and not even that – could assure a December-May affair while she languished alone, tending her petunias and hating Donald J Trump.

It was at the poetry reading she had arranged at her home, an event to celebrate the works of a local artist whose verses had been overlooked for the many decades she had been writing them, that she had an epiphany, a conversion, a bright light of possibility.

The poet stood up before the gathering and began to read from her works – one treacly, predictable, crushingly adolescent poem after another. The guests smiled at a simile, shook their heads at a painful metaphor and took the whole brutal recital as though it were the Second  Coming.

The theme, of course, was social justice.  ‘Oh, what these eyes have seen’, she read, ‘and wept tears of love and warm embrace’ and from there went on to speak of the black man, ‘the sentient soul of the forest’, the inheritor of God’s first graces, noble creature maligned, dismissed, and damned. 

This was only the beginning, for she went on and on until even the adoring crowd began to grow restive;  but their love for the poet, her poetry, and her heartfelt emotion was stirring, and they kept their attention.

But Vicki was shaken.  The poetry was so awful, so irremediably bad, so self-assured in its miserable sentiments, that she had to leave the room, down three shots of chilled Stoli, and turn the oven to high.  In a fit of pique and resentment at her own idiocy, and with a hateful desire to be done with the whole disgusting mess – the horrible poetry, the black man, the insufferable toadying of her friends – she would burn the canapés to a crisp, serve them on a silver tray, and watch her guests eat them, swallow the bitter bits and thank her profusely.

‘No mas!’, she shouted as she drank another shot. ‘Basta’, and with the last remaining reserves of patience let the old bitch finish her recital, sit down, and be feted.  What was she thinking?  How could she have let her sympathies go so far afield?  She and the event she had arranged were caricatures, horrible reminders of the penitential years spent promoting old chestnuts, goodness, promise, halcyon years to come.

‘Fuck ‘em’, she said, now drunk beyond control but relieved of the Sisyphean burden of doing good once and for all.  Like the Coleman Silk character, it was time to give it up, clear the decks for running, and be done with it.

Her friends and colleagues could not believe the transformation.   Every last trace of her fidelity, obedience to and respect for social justice was gone.  What was left was a pissy, dismissive bitch of a woman who had finally come into her own. 

She was off to parts unknown, drawing down on her private income, so long hidden from the censorious view of her progressive colleagues, and finally happy. Joyous actually, as only anyone who has finally given a last goodbye to the sodden past can feel.

‘Fuck ‘em’, she said as she drove past the White House for the last time, waving to the beautiful blonde young things along Pennsylvania Avenue.

The Poetry Reading – Treacle, Bad Bunny, And Latino Housepainters

‘I paint houses, says the Robert Di Niro character in the Martin Scorsese movie, ‘The Irishman’, a euphemism for being a hit man; and Linda Chavez Porter, the poet, chose that ironic beginning for ‘Hollow Men, A Reprise’ her featured work.  Latinos, her group, were indeed housepainters, leaf-blowers, and lawn-mowers and she, a poet of tongue-in-cheek positivism and ethnic solidarity wanted to praise Caesar, not bury him.

Linda was not a poet in the published, recognized sense; but an amateur versifier that Vicki Chalmers had chosen as her political pet.  Women poets, said Vicki, especially those of color, never got their due in a white, privileged world.  Yes, there was Emily Dickenson, she noted, but she was history; and today was today, the era of the new woman, the confident woman, the champion, the spokesperson for civil rights, honor, and justice.

‘Think Guernica’, Vicki told her friends. ‘Now that’s what I’m talking about’ – a painting of powerful political import within a framework of modernism and artistic genius.  ‘Linda is of the same ilk’.

Of course she was nothing of the sort.  At best she was good at rhymes and had a way of pronouncing the cadence of her lines with a melodramatic flourish which made audiences sit up and pay attention to what was, despite Vicki’s praise, rather treacly, childish stuff.

I paint houses, said the man

A distant uncle in a faraway land

With death in his heart, and a gun in his hand

He dealt with the mob to beat the band

The group of matrons and their husbands gathered in the living room of Vicki’s suburban rambler all smiled at the irony, and familiar with Linda’s work, knew what was coming and what they had gathered together for – a screed in verse against Donald Trump, usurper of the American dream, unconscionable liar and intellectual thief, a moral brigand and fool.

Vicki was a multiculturalist, a woman with una gota of Spanish blood which gave her currency in the progressive world of inclusion and diversity.  The drop of blood had been diluted over the years, mixed with enough Palestinian bits to give her even more political credibility, but she clung to the legacy of her forbear who had demonstrated in the streets of Madrid to protest the bloody reign of Isabella and demand peasant rights for which he was guillotined in the public square, his head thrown to the dogs.

Suarez in fact was not even a footnote to Spanish history let alone a peasant hero.  Records kept in the Alhambra library cite him as ‘a man without a brain who would soon lose his head’ (un hombre sin cerebro que pronto perderia la cabeza); but Vicki never got that far – myth and popular scuttlebutt were enough for a woman whose ideas about universal social justice had been fixed since her first year at Wellesley where a young firebrand from the South Bronx had been invited to speak.  

Vicki had been taken with the Puerto Rican’s politics and, as it turned out, her powerful sexual allure and took a leave of absence from school to live with her charismatic lover in New York.

Be that as it may, Vicki was naturally drawn to the poetry of Linda Chavez and gave her every opportunity to shine, such was her defiant refusal to see the woman’s puerile verse for what it was and claim it to be the ‘new voice of Latina womanhood’.

It so happened that Bad Bunny, a Puerto Rican rapper and Latino icon was to headline the Super Bowl halftime ceremony.  The NFL had been criticized for its choice because Bad Bunny was known more for his cross-dressing and anti-ICE sentiments than for his talent.  Nevertheless, Bad Bunny went on stage, in a toned-down white suit, said ‘We are all Americans’ or some compromising nod to white people, and the show went on.

Vicki loved him for all his Latino looks, salsa, an unashamed piragua, a fancy, zoot-suited icon and hero of immigrants.  This is what white America needed – a jolt, a shot in the arm, a wakeup call heralding the arrival of diversity.  In a few short decades white people would be in the minority and in a few more wiped from the face of the earth.

All this because of a Spanish man without a brain, a South Bronx Puerto Rican lover, and some flimsy indoctrination by The Young Progressives at Wellesley but that’s what the whole diversity thing has amounted to in the first place, so Vicki was just one of those who fell in line. 

‘I am a proud Latina’, she said to the group at her poetry reading, and went on to give her by then familiar disquisition on the native beauty of the Latin woman, body and soul.  She gave Chavez, the poet, a warm embrace and sat down as she began to read.

‘We must do this again’, said one guest about to leave after the empanadas and pupusas; but as soon as she got out the door, turned to her husband and said, ‘I’m glad that’s over’, a wasted evening if there ever was one, subjected to irrelevance – and bad irrelevance at that – and the only recompense soggy Mexican food.

Vicki beamed as she embraced each one of her departing guests.  As far as she was concerned, the event had been a smashing success, one of her best; and she was indeed planning the next in what would become a series. 

She didn’t want to clean up, rearrange the furniture, or even turn off the lights, so ebullient did she feel about the evening.  She wanted to remember it as it was, a happy, engaging, fulfilling time; so she went to bed tired but happy, impatient to start the next day.

There was to be no series as Vicki had hoped.  The awful, brutally stupid poetry of the evening had sealed her fate.  Her friends who had always been loyal to her, patient beyond expectation with her growing reflexive progressivism and airy-fairy political cheeriness, had had enough.  There were limits after all.  

At their age, a chaise lounge in Tampa was more their style regardless of Donald Trump and so while Vicki was still whirling like a Turkish dervish, let their rooms be cleaned by Salvadoran maids, and be done with it.