Marriage In America - Lace Curtains And Orchids Until The Wheels Come Off The Bus, A Wives' Tale

Bettina Marks had married badly, a 'What was she thinking?' marriage built on unrealistic expectations, unreasonable hopefulness, and a ticking biological clock. The marriage was dreary on most days, antagonistic on others, and full of suspicions for the rest.  

Henry wasn't a bad sort.  He meant well, pushed the right buttons, was dutiful and respectful, helped out in the kitchen, and was reasonable in bed, but it didn't take long for 'the real Henry' to emerge. The pupa and chrysalis had offered promise, but the butterfly was disappointing. 

'What do women want?' is the question asked only by clueless men. A little attention now and then, a good listener, a shoulder to cry on, a modicum of understanding during bad times of the month, a little patience in bed. Not rocket science, more the ABCs or McGuffey's Reader; and still men scratched their head and wondered.  

  

Henry's good intentions turned out to be nothing more than suppositions, bit and pieces he had picked up en passant but not worth the effort. He failed the kindergarten of marital relationships. 'I should have known', Bettina said, kicking herself for vetting like a hopeful child, ignoring the telltale signs, and rushing into a space where she didn't belong.  

Bettina had given it her all, especially when she saw cracks in the foundation and leaks in the roof.  'I will make this work', she said as much to justify her mistake as any respect for the sanctity of marriage. 

She prettied up the house, gave it frills and attractive appointments, had fresh bread baking in the oven on Saturday mornings before her husband went out to play eighteen holes, filled the vases with fresh flowers, plumped the cushions on the divan, straightened the crockery, and polished the silver.  This all before and after a professional week not without its own headaches and need for order and discipline. 

To be fair, Harry was no wastrel and seemingly not even interested in straying, 'Working late at the office meant exactly that'; and to be honest, Bettina could have done with a little more spicy intrigue.  An uxorious man who pays the bills is OK but only up to a point. 

The dissolution of a marriage should not be based on trifling issues, and theirs was far from coming apart at the seams.  She had married an uninspiring man who was not far off the apogee of the bell curve for men - decent, ambitious, but clueless when it came to women. 

Neither a Lothario or a saint, but as boring and tedious as they come. Their marriage was a far cry from George and Martha in Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, a slugfest, a brutal, bloody, savage affair in which they flayed each other to the marrow.  No, by comparison, Bettina and Henry were an ideal couple. 

'You're still a young woman', said a close friend. 'Get rid of him'.  The dismantling of the marriage would not be that bad - no children to fight over, a fair and reasonable pre-nuptial agreement, a small mortgage thanks to a windfall and large down payment, and most importantly, no tears to be shed.  She never really loved him, and for him she was little more than a convenience.

In America over fifty percent of marriages end in divorce, so while it is not expected, given the odds, one must certainly plan, act, negotiate, and compromise assuming the worst.  This is not good for intimacy; but good for business, and as Engine Charlie Wilson, former President of General Motors once said, 'The business of America is business'. 

Petrarch invented the idea of romantic love in the Fourteenth Century, ushering in a long period of chivalry, knights in shining armor, maidens, and head-over-heels romance.  Romance was nothing more than a perk of wealth.  Most people before then married purely for economic reasons -  strong arms, fertility, overall good health, and generous dowries; but once the idea of pure, romantic love entered the scene, there was no end to frivolous, senseless, and useless marriages. 

Eros, Philia, and Agape were the three types of love proffered by the Ancient Greeks - erotic love, brotherly love, and charitable, altruistic love.  They had no name or room for romantic love, and that took many centuries to take form and gain currency.  

There was no romance in the relationship between Agamemnon and Clytemnestra.  There was plenty of jealousy when the brought home Cassandra as bounty from his victory in the Trojan War - this tart would upset a going concern she had with her own lover and king pro temp Aegisthus. 

'Perhaps arranged marriage is not such a bad thing', Bettina thought as she watched the pillars of her marriage crumbling.  Enter into it with no idealistic expectations whatsoever and stick with it as long as contractual codicils are fulfilled.  In today's AI world, a convenient, suitable match could easily be made.  Risk and doubt would be removed or at least minimized.  Love might or might not follow, but that was not the point. 

At the same time no woman brought up with Barbie dolls, castles, princess outfits, romance novels, and girly advice from Cosmopolitan and Elle, not to mention tearjerker television serials and movies about lost love, could be indifferent to love and marriage.  The idea of Mr. Right was still out there. 

At the same time there are more movies about bad marriages than good ones.  In Woody Allen's Match Point and Crimes and Misdemeanors characters in desultory marriages take lovers whom they eventually have murdered and then get away with the crime. Andrew Davis' movie A Perfect Murder and Adrian Lynne's Unfaithful also feature murderous husbands.  Turkish soap operas all center on family jealousies, ambition, and violence. 

 

'Happy families are all alike.  Unhappy families are all unhappy in their own way', wrote Tolstoy in Anna Karenina, and what would world literature be without bad marriages, infidelity and worse? 

The fifty percent American divorce figure seemed low to Bettina who, thanks to her inherited wealth, seven-figure salary, high-class education, and marriage to a similarly well-off mate, was part of a divorce-heavy cohort. Anyone of similar means could easily afford a divorce, move on to the next marriage, divorce again and still be happy and solvent. So why not her?

Yet when she tried to formulate a shopping list of grievances to present to her husband, she came up only with snack food.  Their marriage was good, except for the fact that they didn't much care for each other.  Could they conscionably dissolve it with such airy pretenses?

Of course they could.  This was America, and the pursuit of happiness was ingrained in the Constitution.  Happiness was a function of wealth, opportunity, and advantage.  Even the slightest excuse was good enough for divorce court. 

The Catholic Church frowned on divorce, whatever the reason or justification.  Marriage was a sacrament, and failure to abide by it meant eternal damnation; but nobody believed in that these days and Catholics were getting divorced as much as non-believers, so the last brake on marital separation - a moral code - was now a thing of the past. 

So enough with frills, orchids, lace curtains, and bread baking in the oven,  It was time to go, and good riddance. 

 

Bettina's story is not meant to be either illustrative or apocryphal, just a brief look into an institution that might be better off retired.  Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage sums it all up. Persistence, longevity, dependence, bad judgment...What else to be expected from the random association of two unknowns thrown into a locked cell with No Exit, as Jean-Paul Sartre called it.  Hell is other people, Sartre said, so watch out for what you wish for. 

Bettina did well after Henry. She coasted along, muddled through, had her ups and downs and missed the benchmark of marriage.  Edward Albee said that marriage was the crucible of maturity - without the hothouse, hermetically sealed environment of marriage with all its expectations and restrictions, we would never grow up. 

Amen. 

Diversity In America - Cults, Wackos, Food Freaks, Armageddon, And The End Of The World, What A Great Country!

 Marfa Potter stood over her blender, unsure of what to make this morning.  She felt well but bowel tremors had awakened her during the night, so a good onion-parsnip infusion would be just the thing. 

At the same time her nerves were a bit on edge because if the kerfuffle at the pharmacy where she worked - a woman demanding, absolutely demanding a medication that had long since been discontinued and taken off the shelves.  Near hysterical with anger and frustration, the woman banged on the counter with her cane, and demanded to see the manager. 

'It's Mrs. Goldblatt', Marfa informed the manager who was in the middle of compounding a drug.  Lexington Pharmacy was one of the few independent, family owned pharmacies in the Washington suburbs, and one of even fewer which still compounded drugs, so the manager took special care and pride in his skill. 'Tell her I'm busy', he said to Marfa and went on with his business. 

Now, Mrs. Goldblatt was demented, that much Marfa knew, and her condition required patience and consideration, but she caused a ruckus when she came in every Thursday and upset the applecart.  It took infinite patience and some diversionary tactics to calm the old lady down, 

Stirring in some bone broth along with tincture of bloodwort and anise blossoms, she very much needed the infusion's calming, restorative properties. 

Marfa's kitchen shelves had as many potions, tinctures, powders, grains, and seeds as an ancient Egyptian apothecary. Despite working in a pharmacy - or perhaps because of it - she eschewed any of the concoctions brewed up, bought, and sold.  Every day she prescribed more anti-depressants, anti-anxiety, ADHD drugs than she thought the leafy suburb's residents could possibly consume.  It might be God's will, but this corner of the globe had some serious problems. 

Problems which she took home with her, requiring the bone broth mixture.

Every morning after a healthy, well-proportioned, and carefully balanced breakfast - like every other meal, it was comprised of foraged plants - reeds, sea grass, lichen, moss, algae, and fox burr - mixed in with rugged, unhusked, organic grains and goat milk.  

Whole Foods of course carried none of these items, but Bruce Davidson's shop did.  Davidson had spent years in the northern forests of Humboldt County and the deep woods across the Oregon border, and he with his fellow refugees from the city concocted brews from Yakima and Aleut Indian herbal recipes, bottled them, and once a month made the trek south to the city to sell them.  

When the cold damp weather finally go to him with a bad case of rheumatism, he decamped, left the business to his colleagues, and headed East where from his small confectionary tucked away in a back alley, he tended to the ailments of people. 

This, of course, is only the tip of the iceberg.  America is filled with people like Davidson and Marfa Potter, men and women who have found ways and means of surviving in the impersonal world of today, turned their alternative life style into a religion, and became cadres of belief. 

Marfa did not really believe in djinns and evil spirits, but did not disbelieve either.  Her amulets, sprigs of honeysuckle and birch, inscriptions, and engravings were 'just in case', but the truth of the matter she was as disoriented and mentally discombobulated as Mrs. Goldblatt. 

Bruce Davidson, the dispenser, before moving to Humboldt County had lived with other members of the Church Glorious and Resplendent, a large congregation of over a thousand souls tucked away in a broad valley of the Mountain West.  The Church was millennial, apocalyptic, and charismatic and had moved to the mountains from California, convinced that it would be hived off from the mainland in a cataclysm of existential proportions.  

The relocated church, far from the coast and from any big city would thrive and when Armageddon would come they, burrowed deep below the mountain in shelters, would emerge to repopulate the earth. 

The Church was just the place for Davidson, for he was a seeker, discontent with the platitudes and homilies of organized religion, and hungry for spiritual awakening.  At the Church and in the hands of its charismatic leader, he found what he had been looking for.  The Reverend Blanton A. Parsons invoked the Inca gods of the Peruvian altiplano, the spirits of the Mesoamerican Mixtecs and Aztecs, and the souls of the departed Mauryan saints.  He was the incarnation of the descended masters in whom the energies of all holy men before him resided. 

 

Every day Davidson and his fellow congregants prostrated themselves before Master Parsons and begged the many gods, saints, and spirits of the past to watch over them, give them spiritual sustenance and eternal life. 

When the Church was raided by the FBI in a notorious episode not unlike that of the Texas Branch Davidians but without the carnage - they simply rounded up Parsons and his inner circle, handcuffed them, charged them with money laundering on a Bernie Madoff scale, and carted them off to federal prison. 

Accounts in the New York Times whose reporters had had access to Madoff and Jeffrey Skilling, the infamous Enron con man, said that both men were impressed with the scale and intricacy of the Church affair.  'Rank amateurs', Madoff was reported to have said. 'Hayseeds; but impressive to say the least'. 

Nothing new here either, nor anything surprising.  America is full of credulous seekers and the snake oil salesman ready to take them for a ride.  The financial empire of Parsons and the Church was impressive, all the more so because it had so long remained anonymous and undiscovered.  'Along the way', said Parsons to an FBI agent in the paddy wagon taking him to Helena, 'I did some good'. 

Things have a way of revolving in a 'what goes around, comes around' kind of way, and so it was that Davidson's colleagues who had stayed in Humboldt County after he had left, had joined the Ken Kesey-inspired cross-country caravan and on January 6th marched on the Capitol.  It was quite an event, for Davidson's crew and their associates, the heart and soul of the neo-hippy, Great American Circus, cavalcades picked up every sort, variety, and species of crazy along the way.  By the time they got to Washington and marched on Congress, they were a doo-dadded, Viking helmeted, face-painted, fright-wigged, barnstorming mob. 

Although the political Left howled 'Insurrection!', it was nothing of the sort.  It was just America being America, as wacko, unhinged, and freaky as can be. It was a show of solidarity and character.  For once and for all the stuffed shirts of Washington would see what America was really made of. 

Much is made these days of 'diversity', a catch-all phrase meant to assemble people of color, the disabled, the alternately sexed, the poor, the marginalized, and the homeless into one large, accommodating basket. 

Yet the real diversity is not that politically-driven, narrowly focused, self-interested category.  It is the cultists, the uber-vegans, the foragers, seekers, nonsensical believers, millennialists, and naked Humboldt County holy men.  It is the scammers, the con men, the fraudsters, the make-a-buck tricksters and modern-day snake oil salesmen. 

It is the hilarity of Congress, the nicky episodes of grilling witnesses, the fraudulent ankle-biters from the inner city, loudmouths, pretenders, and buffoons. It is the store-front churches packed to the gills, televangelists, and spiritual hucksters.  It is lockstep neighborhoods with electric cars and COVID vigilantes, Hollywood tarts, Las Vegas tinsel, La Cage Aux Folles transvestites....The list is endless. 

'What a great country', say patriots who are thinking of money, opportunity, warfare, and the world's biggest economy; but real patriots recognize the absolutely irredeemable bourgeoisie that gives the country its cheap excesses, the clown shows, the soapy serials, the gunracks, bass boats, and tobacco chaws of the swamps. 

'Pomegranate juice and flax seed', said Marfa.  'Just the trick'. 

Tales Of Seduction - Where Have All The Don Juans And Casanovas Gone?

Harlan Adams was a typical boy who hated girls until it was time to love them, and love them he did. There is something in certain men that is irresistible to women, a je ne sais quoi virility without show or pretense, an innate confidence without arrogance, and an absolute love of them. 

He was handsome in that classical that is most attractive to women - strong, well-aligned features, perfect symmetry but never feminine, an innate masculinity, a certain, subtle sensuality - but more importantly, he was interested.  He listened, he paid attention, he was attentive - far more than women were used to and out of a genuine like. 

As such, he could have any woman that he wanted, and the more he had, the more those who had been left behind wanted to know what is was that drew women to him, and as a result he had them too. 

Strangely the women were never jealous, and there grew an unusual sisterhood among them.  They talked about him, told pleasant anecdotes and reveries; and his reputation grew. 

There were some women of course, those far out of his ambit, who criticized him for his typical machismo - the brutish predatory male who blundered on without a sensitive, respectful, or considerate thought in his head.  A sexual thug, a throwback. 

Of course he was nothing of the sort, and this kind of sniping was just sour grapes. These caviling women barked from the outer fringes, consigned there not by men but by women who wanted them out of sight, reminders of how if they looked carefully in the mirror, they might see something of the misshapen mess of the outcasts. 

As a result, the marginalized, carping women resorted to each other for sexual comfort, and so became even more unpleasant, unattractive, and malignant. Even Harlan with his eclectic, all-encompassing love of women, kept his distance. 

At university he fell afoul, although through no fault of his own, of feminist cabals who condemned him ipso facto. Beauty is as beauty does was their motto, their meme; so beauty was to be mistrusted, especially in a man.  In the worst sort of exclusivity and bias, Harlan got a reputation for being a white, privileged, sexist oppressor without lifting a finger.  The more girls flocked to him, begged him for favors, and followed him like pilgrims to Mt. Ararat, the more the feminist sisters hated him. 

They had good reason, for his sexuality challenged the progressive canon. Straight men were at the far end of the gender spectrum, deliberately marginalized in favor of the more evolved and mature sexual categories.  Not only that, their type of sexuality - pursuing, single-minded, deliberate, and sexually obsessed was antithetical to the central premises of the progressive canon. 

So much for principle. From the margins, Harlan Adams ruled the roost.  He was not the misogynist, retrograde, simian throwback feminists claimed, but the most sexually successful of anyone on the spectrum.  How could that be? But no matter how much these women singled him out for his sexual opportunism, women simply could not get enough of him. 

It was a matter of Nature over Nurture, another anathema.  Progressive principles denied both the hardwired nature of human traits and their permanence.  Human beings have been aggressive, self-interested, violent, and territorial since they first descended from the apes, but progressives have argued that with investment, commitment, purpose, and belief, the world can be peaceful, verdant,c compassionate, and inclusive. 

Harlan defied Nurture.  No matter how social reformers had tried to create a more equal and accommodating world of diverse sexuality, one which would automatically marginalize and remove the persistent individualism of the male, the Harlan Adams of the world never went away. 

Marva Link, a member of the University Feminist Caucus, was determined to give Harlan Adams his comeuppance, to destroy his self-aggrandizing womanizing, and to leave him sexless, soulless, and insignificant. 'An inside job', she said, left her flannel shirts, E-boots, buckles and butch haircut aside and tarted herself out in feminine fashion.  It had been a number of years since she had 'dressed up', as her mother had called it, and when she looked in the mirror she was surprised at her reflection.  She was a beautiful woman after all. 

She immediately hated herself for the thought, returned to the business at hand - the finery was a costume, nothing more. 

Harlan was not what she expected, and his clear, considerate, and attentive welcome was a a complete surprise.  Reality was far from canonical prediction.  Aha, she thought, again pushing anything other than the mission from her mind, an act, the old trickeroo, the Don Juan tomfoolery which wasn't going to fool her.  She knew who he was and she would soon topple him from his high horse. 

Yet, like all women before her, she was captivated by his charm, his good nature, and his clear interest in who she was, not just what she looked like. He asked about her studies, her family, her outside interests and not once did he push, maneuver, or deceive.  He seemed truly interested, and beneath that interest was that unmistakable sexual interest which had tempted so many women before her. 

Marva's years at the university had been solitary ones. True, she had her sisterhood, but it was community without empathy and certainly without warmth.  Her life had been uniquely political, filled with meetings, demonstrations, marches, and protests.  The sisters were passionate about the cause, and the brothers kept a respectful distance. 

So in the company of a man who appreciated her, who found her attractive and inwardly appealing, she melted.  Her refusals, her prepared animus, her predetermined suspicions and mistrust vanished.  She was all smiles, and when they went to bed, she was delighted. 

Her colleagues didn't know what to make of Marva's transformation.  The 'costume' had become hers, her persona decidedly feminine, her attitude, demeanor, even language betrayed a true reversal.  She was not the feminist harridan of a month ago, but one of those blonde prom ditzes who smelled of department store perfume. 

Needless to say Marva was dunned, dismissed, and forgotten.  Her former colleagues circled the wagons and armed themselves for protracted battle.  The fight was going to be more challenging than they ever thought, 

They had been so convinced of the progressive canon of social reform, progress, and the eventual Utopia at the end of the line, that they were blindsided by the Harlan-Marva affair.  Not only did she fail in her mission to destroy the enemy, but she became a turncoat and joined his forces of evil. 

Worst of all, they were forced to entertain the thought that perhaps Nature did rule.  There was an ineluctability about male-female heterosexual attraction and that there were potent purveyors of it. Harlan was not a one-off pop-up, but a permanent fixture. 

The next in line, the woman who took Marva's position of leadership wondered what all the fuss was about, leveling the male fool could not be all that hard, but still, all in all, she looked forward to meeting him. 

Cowboys And Indians - White Wolf, White Massacre, And Manifest Destiny

White Wolf was a Comanche chief whose savage, bloody massacres of white settlers on Indian land were legendary and feared.  Union troops ordered by the government to pacify the region hesitated.  Entering Comanche land regardless of strength of arms would be suicide.  The Army had seen nothing like it.  

White Wolf was as brilliant and bloody a warrior as Genghis Khan. White Wolf knew that a purposeful barbarity would intimidate the enemy.  Just as Genghis Khan posted severed heads on roads leading to conquered villages, gruesome warnings to the next settlements in his sights, so did White Wolf use unconscionable savagery as a tool of war.  He knew that the Christian soldiers would see his tribal, animist, ferocity, understand that they were up against a frightening, unfathomable enemy with no moral restraint and would turn tail. 

 

Jonathan Foreman, writing in The Daily Mail said:

S C Gwynne, author of Empire Of The Summer Moon about the rise and fall of the Comanche, says simply: ‘No tribe in the history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, and American occupations of this land had ever caused so much havoc and death. None was even a close second.’

He refers to the ‘demonic immorality’ of Comanche attacks on white settlers, the way in which torture, killings and gang-rapes were routine. ‘The logic of Comanche raids was straightforward,’ he explains.

‘All the men were killed, and any men who were captured alive were tortured; the captive women were gang raped. Babies were invariably killed.’

‘One by one, the children and young women were pegged out naked beside the camp fire,’ according to a contemporary account. ‘They were skinned, sliced, and horribly mutilated, and finally burned alive by vengeful women determined to wring the last shriek and convulsion from their agonized bodies. Matilda Lockhart’s six-year-old sister was among these unfortunates who died screaming under the high plains moon.’

Not only were the Comanche specialists in torture, they were also the most ferocious and successful warriors — indeed, they become known as ‘Lords of the Plains’. They were as imperialist and genocidal as the white settlers who eventually vanquished them.

When they first migrated to the great plains of the American South in the late 18th century from the Rocky Mountains, not only did they achieve dominance over the tribes there, they almost exterminated the Apache, among the greatest horse warriors in the world.

In an ironic article in the Rocky Mountain Times Gazette written when the Washington Redskins were choosing a new name for the team, staff writer Hardy Lane wrote:

The Redskins front office should consider changing the team name to White Wolves in honor of the brave Native American who valiantly defended his land from opportunistic, territorial, white invaders.  He embodied the best of American courage, patriotism, pride, and valor. He took scalps not as a matter of barbarity - how white America saw the Indian - but as a matter of defiance.  His savagery - the disemboweling, raping, decapitating, and dismembering of white settlers - was a matter of legacy, honor, and rectitude.  He was truly American in spirit, energy, and devotion to tribal integrity. His name on the burgundy and gold and his image displayed prominently would be a fitting tribute to a great American. 

 

Harold Jacobsen, a prominent Democrat and tireless promoter of the progressive canon of Diversity Equity Inclusivity, when asked about the Gazette article completely missed the point, hemmed and hawed, and babbled on about Native American rights, the unholy genocide of the Indian by white oppressors, and the like.  When pressed about the article's suggestion that the Redskins should be named for White Wolf, he said, 'A fitting choice of an honorable American'. 

When the New York Times picked up the exchange on the wire services, its editors also so blindered and captivated by the progressive meme of Native American inclusion, noted that finally the Indian would get his due. 

Journalist Lane didn't stop there.  From the Boulder, Colorado Archives of the American Indian, he found early photographs of White Wolf's massacres and after editing out the worst bits - e.g. the bloody entrails of disemboweled women being picked over by prairie dogs and crows - printed them in a follow up piece called, 'White Wolf, Champion of the World' in which he lobbied even more strongly for the renaming of the Redskins. 

When the Times editorial board realized their mistake - yes, they were for the Native American, and yes they honored his courage and defiance of the white man, but they never realized how absolutely barbaric, and unconscionably 'primitive' White Wolf and his Comanches were, and said so. 

Which of course got the paper into hot water.  No one was to speak of the Native American as 'primitive', a harshly ignorant, demeaning term.  In other references in the paper the Indian was described as 'a sentient traveler of the Plains...a personage of dignity and respect...a soul in tune with the environment...' and so on. 

The Redskins ownership dodged the issue and renamed the team the Commanders, a name without history, relevance, significance, or pride. Although the choice of White Wolves was obviously made tongue-in-cheek by the Western journalist - no self-respecting owner would ever dare to claim allegiance to a rapist and baby killer - the idea of a heroic Native American enshrined on the national team might be a good idea.  Ownership bailed, however, capitulated, and ended up with the most trite and indifferent name possible

 

The American Left has always been in tears about Westward Expansion and Manifest Destiny, President James Polk's ambitious program to extend America's borders from east to west - an initiative that was nothing less than genocide, said progressives, a heinous, unconscionable assault on the indigenous population of the land. 

Of course, this was all nonsense, a canonical ignorance of history, and ex post facto political hysteria. Expansionism, territorialism, and occupation were the sine qua non of empire.  When Pope Urban II send the Crusades across Europe to Jerusalem, the purpose was to kill Muslims, slaughter them, eliminate them, and return the Holy Land to its rightful owners.  

Genghis Khan, the Mongol emperor who led 50,000 troops from the steppes across Europe and Asia to establish the biggest empire the world had ever or would ever see, was no more genocidal than White Wolf or James Polk.  He had his own version of Manifest Destiny. 

The Persians, the Ottomans, Muhammed's Islamic colonialism, and a hundred lesser but no less determined territorial regimes were no different. If you got in the way, that was your problem. 

The ranchers of the Southwest killed any Indians who threatened their sovereignty. It was cowboys and Indians until every Indian was either eliminated, pacified, or removed to a reservation. Genocide? Hardly, just the give and take of human nature, and not without a fight.  There were plenty of White Wolves among the Indians who defied the cowboy ranchers who had taken their land. 

The Indians of the Plains were so ferocious, tenacious, and warlike that in modern times their names and images were adopted by American sports teams, symbols of courage, manhood, dignity, and valor.  Only in the recent years have the heroics of this noble people been erased in a self-righteous, revisionist view of history.  Instead of fortitude, patriotism, and honor, Indians became victims - colored people alienated and murdered by the white oppressor. 

The whole Redskins flap and the selection of an uninspiring, unimaginative, and spiritless name illustrates the ignorance of the Left. In forcing the Redskins renaming and putting every other Indian-inspired sports team in their sights, progressives have done their best to remove every semblance of the courage, valor, tenacity, and heroism of Native Americans.  They thought they were doing them a favor, and instead further consigned them to the reservation. 

Were Native Americans killed by white settlers, ranchers, and the Union Army during Westward Expansion? Yes.  Was this territorial expansion any different from any other in recorded history? No. 

Belle De Jour - D.H. Lawrence, Sexual Epiphany, And Woman, Incomplete

D.H. Lawrence perhaps more than any other writer, understood the epiphanic possibilities of sex.  Of course Tantrism and mystical ying-yang Buddhism reflected the idea of spiritual epiphany, but Lawrence translated it into recognizable, natural desire. 

 

Connie Chatterley did not sleep with the gamekeeper Mellors with this in mind.  She only wanted release from the chattels of marriage to a physical cripple and emotional child; but found in the increasingly passionate adulterous affair a psychic release that went far beyond simple sexual satisfaction and touched the possibility of true spiritual satisfaction.  

It was the coming together, Lawrence's sine qua non, that escaped her at the beginning but when realized, turned a sexual coupling into something tremulous, exciting, and without parallel. 

It wasn't that Mellors was an ideal mate - the two lovers were from different worlds, of different composition, different zeitgeist, and different social expectations.  It was that there was an undefinable, illimited, sexual attraction that when realized and consummated produced an indescribable, insurmountable release and feeling of completion. 

Life of course is not the stuff of fiction, and such epiphanic sexual ecstasy will always be a matter of speculation and hope; but there are real Connie Chatterleys out there - women for whom sex is not only a matter of marital duty or even adulterous adventure, but something necessary, obligatory, and absolutely compelling. 

Barbery Byfield was such a woman. Married to a scion of Wall Street, direct descendant of colonial Anglo-American aristocracy, son of a first family of both Virginia and Massachusetts, she was secure enough in a prescribed alliance of the best and the brightest. 

 

For the first years of their marriage, she was contented with her profession, her social circle, her support of the arts, and her family; but as time went on she felt disquieted - not quite restive or unhappy, but feeling a twinge of regret at her choice of a settled life and a desire to at least stretch its perimeter. 

This was all window dressing for what she really wanted - a sexual life that went far beyond obligation and ventured into diversity, risk, and reward.  Her breeding and temperament were brakes on such bohemianism but her desires were female, primitive, and clawingly demanding. 

Her first lover was a cut not far from the base of her social tree - an attractive young man with turquoise belt buckles but with an old Pacific heritage.  Her second was a naval officer, Annapolis trained, battle-proven, a derring-do Navy Seal who had once infiltrated well beyond Iranian lines and taken out the high command.  Her third was simply a man who loved women, who reveled in their sex, rutted until the cows came home, passionate beyond belief, as insatiable as she, a real find. 

The marriage stayed put, a kind of Nicholson-Sackville West open affair.  Her husband had frequent, although desultory affairs of little consequence.  Neither he nor she had to bother with explanations or excuses.  Both were more than adult in their negotiated freedom, and both brought some of the spice of foreign lovers to bed with them; but both had desires well beyond the bed chamber. 

It was not long before Barbery's lovers became more than just afternoon diversions, but the most important part of her life; for it was at this time that she realized that her extramarital sexual escapades were not the usual break from routine and boredom, but essential. 

She became Catherine Deneuve in the movie Belle de Jour, the story of a well-to-do Parisian matron by day and an impossibly accommodating prostitute by night.  It was not love for money for both the Deneuve character and Barbery. The five hundred francs left on the dresser were insignificant, finalities of contractual obligations nothing more. The real episode was flesh and blood and the search for that special assignation that Lawrence had described. 

Could a woman find this mutuality with a random lover? Was there any chance of a Lawrentian epiphany with a john? Was Barbery simply stochastic - one in a hundred, but that one would be the one she was looking for?  Perhaps but there had to be something worthwhile in the ninety-nine, and as much as she claimed she was searching for the diamond in the rough, there was something about the seriality of the sex that was - in the best deconstructionist terms - signifying.  

 

In fact, this insatiability, this insistent sexual itch was defining.  She was becoming a woman of easy pleasure, a neighborhood courtesan, a prostitute however one might call it; and despite her pedigree, her stable and respected marriage, her affection for her husband, and her social currency she found nothing unseemly in what she did. 

Her husband, as progressive as he was, a partner in the open marriage he and Barbery had concluded, he was still a man, and as jealous as any.  The more he realized that her liaisons were not just occasional but compulsive and necessary, the more he was tempted to rein her in, to stop what had become infidelity. 

Infidelity is not restricted to the one-off affair or even philandering.  Anything outside the parameters set in a marriage is a breach of contract.  One lover or a hundred, no one is counting.  In Barbery's case the sheer voracity of her sexual desire defined her infidelity, and her husband was upset. 

'You might as well charge for it', he said. 'A little egg money'. 

Barbery was so far gone into her sexual hejira that nothing could lever her from the rails.  She had become not just a Biblical harlot or a Freudian hysteric, but a self-fulfilling prophecy.  She was goddess, Woman, satisfier, and what God had intended her to be; what she would be until she found out differently. 

A man with a hundred lovers would be called a Casanova, a Don Juan, a Lothario; but a woman with a hearty sexual appetite, a whore.  Why is that?  What social construct could be more oppressive and patriarchal?

Was there some number of lovers beyond which became prostitution even if money was not exchanged? Certainly a man could graze to his heart's content and even be in demand by women who wanted to know what he offered that could seduce so many women; but a woman?  Salacious, incontinent, immoral, and reprehensible. 

There was a bit of Freud in Barbery, some driven quality which bordered on the psychotic but never drifted fully into that category.  There was a drop of feminism to be sure, a businesslike approach to supply and demand; and there was uniqueness.  She had simply come out of the womb more sexually sentient than most other women. 

Whatever it was, Barbery persisted until she was let go by her husband and dunned mercilessly by her peers.  Whatever were the parameters of social propriety, she had overstepped them.  She was, as Father Brophy would have said, 'a fallen woman'. 

Time has a way of smoothing out irregularity, and Barbery ended up on a chaise lounge on a Miami beach just like the old Jews of her mother's generation, reflectors under the chin to get a nice tan. 

Why should this be a surprise? Nothing lasts forever, nor should it.  She had had her fling, or whatever anyone wanted to call it, and few of us ever get anywhere near that particular epiphany. 

An Atheist Runs For Office - An End Run Around God Has Many Takers, The Path To The White House Clear

Herbert Fitch grew up in a devoutly Catholic home, so his rejection of God and religion in later life was surprising to all but him.  As a young child, when taught to adore Christ, he couldn't look at the gory, bloody body hanging by nails on a floor-to-ceiling cross on the altar.  He heard the priest's homilies about how Jesus suffered to save the world from sin, but the story of the Crucifixion was more than he could take - whippings, stabbings, blood dripping down on his face and the near breathless, dying man in front of him.  

 

'Do we have to?', the young Herbert pleaded every Sunday morning, but his father was adamant. 'It's a mortal sin if we don't go', the father said, explaining that mortal sin meant eternal hellfire, the crackling, burning fire that tortured you forever. 

The boy, as young as he was, wondered at this.  For just missing Mass? The equivalent of murder, even mass murder? And so it was that the seeds of disbelief were sown. 

It should be remembered that the injunctions of the Church were taken quite seriously, and that adults like his mother and father never once wavered from doctrine.  Even when Father Brophy got on his high horse and lit into the congregation for their sinful ways. ' Adulterers, fornicators, liars, cheats, and ne'er-do-wells', he shouted, mopping his brow in the stifling summer heat of the church.  'Apostates, unbelievers, reprobates', he yelled, pointing at individuals in the congregation. 

The old priest was not supposed to reveal the secrets of the confessional, but he saw no danger in calling out the worst of the lot and watching them squirm. 

Sex was his thing, and every Sunday he sailed into this, the most offensive sin of all.  'Vile magazines', he smirked, 'the defilement of the Holy Mother of God, objects of prurience and Satanic lust...Infidelity, cheapening the sacrament of marriage for a few moments of bestial gratification...salacious, invidious thoughts every day, all day...', on and on the priest went until exhausted from the effort, spent, and empty, he made the sign of the cross and proceeded to the altar. 

Herbert like most boys his age could only think of sex, girls, and doing 'it', whatever 'it' was, and he was told again and again that he risked hellfire with these damnable thoughts.  Once again, niggling doubts crept into his head.  Imagining love with Mary Beth Kravitz would damn him to eternal hellfire?

And then as he grew older and began to think about the foundational premises of the Church - the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection and the Holy Trinity - he wondered if his parents had gotten off on the wrong foot.  Did they really believe all this? And worse, was there really a God who looked down upon his creation and saw horrendous acts of sadistic violence, horrific abuse of children, and barbarism from one end of the earth to the other without intervening?  

And he still had the malicious irony to offer phantoms to the faithful to deflect their doubts.  Thousands flocked Fatima and Lourdes waiting for a vision of Mary, smiling, arms outstretched in love and harmony to assure them of a celestial paradise. 

By the time he was in college, he had not only ceased to wonder, he ditched the whole kit-and-kaboodle. There was no Jesus, no Mary, and no God.  

Christopher Hitchens said it best

One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs).

Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think—though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one—that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.

 

'Once a Catholic, always a Catholic' had been the accepted wisdom of the day.  Catholic indoctrination, more canny, universal, psychologically astute, and profoundly penitential than the harshest Communist gulag was such that no one once trained could ever leave the Church.  Guilt, doubt, remorse, and fear would follow the apostate forever. 

Yet the few atheists on this crowded piazza of true believers are ones of a kind - they have with demanding logic, fearlessness, and unconcern with social mores, had said, 'Nonsense', and moved on. Even in the heady political environment of the university, the most radical of his classmates could never truly jettison the ideas of divinity so ingrained, so permanently fixed from an early age were they.  

Progressivism was based on secularism and the conviction that man, not God is responsible for the good and evil in the world.  It was easy to embark on the secular journey, not so easy to set aside the notion that God was watching, and many were uneasy with Herbert's uncompromising atheism. 

When pressed about his beliefs, Herbert did not hold back, and was at his most excoriating, dismissive, and ironic. His challenges, his blunt, uncompromising look at what he found so laughable and impossibly ignorant in the Bible made even the most anti-clerical of his progressive friends wince.  He had touched a chord.  He had posited the impossible.  He had spoken out as loudly and passionately as any Southern Baptist preacher, but in reverse. 

He had no truck with liberalism.  It was as canonical as the Catholic Church, complete with liturgy, doctrine, and doxology. Its faithful had more irrational, unfounded belief as religious fanatics.  They actually believed despite millennia of history that the world could be reformed and become a compassionate, considerate, tolerant, and loving place. A belief system even more fantastical and unbelievable than Christianity. 

Conservatives were far closer to atheism.  Their belief in the hardwired permanence of human nature, propelling Man to ever more expressions of aggression, territorialism, self-interest, and brutal defensiveness forced a nihilism that was close to a Godless universe.  

Of course most conservatives preached faith and prayed to a Christian God, but in private after leaving all the pomp, cant, and circumstance at the door, they were as atheistic as any. 

All of which encouraged Herbert to become a political conservative.  Why not make hay from one's convictions.  His message of atheism aligned seamlessly with Darwinian nihilism would be perfect for a religiously restive audience. 

Now, Herbert was not only smart, but savvy.  He knew that he would be swimming upstream.  Religion was big business in America and apostates were still burned at the stake.  But he was a gifted orator who could spin gold out of dross, make the most seditious arguments sound as innocent and acceptable as motherlove, and draw the most skeptical to his side. 

There is nothing threatening, new, or divisive about the Origin of Species, Darwin's masterpiece of scientific insight and logic.  We know that there is competition for the best place at the table, the best husband or wife, the most profitable and satisfying life; and we know that for millennia empires have vied for territory, resources, and influence.  We do not shirk from this essential, inescapable, but central principle of life. 

There is nothing in history but competition, the survival of the fittest, a process leading to the rise of the best and the brightest. We have never needed anything but our own, undivided, human nature to lead us.  No myths, no supernatural ethos, no divine inspiration.  We are architects of our own future.  

'A new voice on the conservative stage', wrote The Federalist, an opinion echoed by The National Review and social media gurus. Here was exactly what the conservative movement needed to moderate the MAGA excesses which were dividing the constituency - a sane voice of intelligent moderation, but one which never diverged from conservativism's central principles, in fact one which added to and consolidated them. 

Herbert never brought up God directly.  That wasn't necessary in his carefully embroidered speeches about competition, free enterprise, and the ordained individuality of Man.  Godlessness - atheism - was implicit, understood, but unspoken.  In time, he would be less circumspect, but for the time being he was content to weave his Darwinian nihilism into easily assimilable political ideas. 

'Now I understand', said one Iowan voter who explained that he had always wanted more of a foundation for his support of the Republican Party, and was getting concerned about Donald Trump's vaudevillian show.  'This Herbert Fitch makes sense'. 

And little by little, his message, at first thought too intellectual if not abstruse for the average voter, took hold. He never once had to explain himself, his atheism, his 'godlessness' because he was so deft and able in weaving it into every conservative speech he gave. 

We are an ordained people - not in any traditional, discredited way - but in a positive individualistic way.  The inspiration of the Founding Fathers breathes again.  We are masters of our own destiny, taking our naturally endowed talents, energies, and ambitions, testing them in the marketplace, and applying them with force and commitment. 

'Naturally endowed', Herbert was careful to say, not 'God-given', a nicely crafted interpretation of Jefferson's words which resonated with his audience.  There was no divine presence guiding or determining human actions, only the irrefutable laws of natural selection.  The conservative wing of the Party was the purest example of political naturalism ever seen and as such gained currency.  Even the Walmart greeter understood this simple message of existential competition. 

Journalists wanted to know more about Herbert Fitch, where he came from, who were his heroes, what made him who he was; but none of them suspected his atheism.  This well-dressed, well-groomed, substantially handsome man with a winning, gregarious way was 'one of us' certainly; and so it was that his ascent to national office was virtually assured. 

Christopher Hitchens made a big deal of his atheism and made a lot of money from his public lectures, media appearances, and books; but Herbert Fitch was content to fly under the radar and accomplish far more than Hitchens ever could.  An atheist in the Oval Office? Why not? 

A Woman's Place Is In The Kitchen, Unless She Can't Cook - The Saga Of A Restive Housewife

Candi Barker was a happy , tucked nicely into her suburban split-level, adoring husband and two lovely children. Her husband gave her one of those frilly cocktail aprons he thought she would look cute in when she served canapes to their guests, and how proud he would be to show off his pert wife to his friends. 

 

Although she felt on the cusp of something big, she smiled and gave him a hug.  There had to be something beyond all this - the women's auxiliaries, the tea parties, the bridge nights, and the endless meatloaf- but she didn't know what; and worst of all, the more she tried to live up to her husband's ideals, she bungled everything.  She couldn't cook worth a darn or balance a checkbook, never managed a hospital corner in her life, scorched her girls' jumpers, dinged the car, let the aphids and Japanese beetles take over the rose garden, and could never finish anything on time. 

Now, if she was one of those dykey lawyers she read about in Ladies' Home Journal, a career woman, on her own in New York City making her way up the corporate ladder; but she didn't know the first thing about business, and was happy when the dinner party broke up into groups, the men to the den with cognac and cigars and the women to the living room to chat about children, fashion, and gossip. 

An article in the Journal summed up this betwixt period this way:

The career girl is one of a kind - determined, independent, canny, and resourceful - for she must be in a man's world.  She has to use every bit of her feminine charm, her sharp intelligence, and her well-honed practicality and no-nonsense assuredness to make her way.  She is at the avant-garde of her sex, a pioneer, an entrepreneur, a doer; and once the wind fills her sails, there will be no stopping her. 

  

The article went on to praise the housewife, for without her hearth and home would be a vacant, airless, dry and sterile place.  There was room for both, but the new winds that blew were to change womanhood forever. 

'What's for dinner, dear', said Candy's husband, seeing the usual disorder in the kitchen - hamburger blood dripping in the sink, potatoes unpeeled in the strainer, and nothing resembling dinner in sight. 

As much as Candi tried to organize her thoughts - first this, then that - the kitchen seemed to have its own life, a kind of mesmerizing stupor which clouded her thoughts and made planning impossible. Yes, she remembered to defrost the meat, but when exactly she had forgotten.  Perhaps when she woke up, that wouldn't be good with all the salmonella around; and the oven had to be fired up well before dinner to be sure the casserole was done in time, but that too was a mystery. 

'Take one of these at around four o'clock', said her neighbor, Jane, referring to one of the new sedatives freely prescribed to women with nervous disorders.  'Mother's little helpers' they were called in the lexicon of the day, phials of little blue pills in the medicine cabinet there if the day got too stressful. 'With a martini would be best', her friend went on; but after that combo she found herself in the chaise lounge in the garden watching sparrows in the birdbath, the cirrus clouds in the sky, and as happy as can be doing absolutely nothing. 

As pleasant as that was, it was no anodyne to her growing restiveness, a feeling of desperate futility and a growing anger at everything.  She hated the kitchen and all its maniacal powers over her. She hated the disgustingly patronizing cocktail dress, and she hated the fucking cat. 

The Sixties were still a few years off, so other than the desultory article or two about career women, there was no apertura, not even a glimpse of what might be other than Kinder, Kuche, Kirke the endless round of homemaking, childcare, and social obligation. 

'What's wrong, darling', her husband said to her as she moped more than usual over the sink; but men couldn't possibly understand the angst, the anomie that women felt.  They were as dumb as rocks when it came to women.  A peck on the cheek, a 'roll over honey' in bed, and a wave goodbye as they rolled down the driveway to work.  Why had she so willingly let herself be trapped in this inescapable prison? Not only was the routine deadening and brutally dull, it signified something.  Women were around just to tune things up, supernumerary otherwise, empty shells, clothes to be hung on a rack. 

Once again, the days of Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll were still years in the future, but their forbears were alive and quite well.  There was the neighbor's Librium and Beefeater's, Rosemary Clooney and the Big Bands, and love affairs. 

 

'I would never try that', said Candi, but what else was there?  She couldn't just moon around the garden, all doped up and loopy, and the music was sappy and ordinary.  Sex on the other hand was well within her reach, forbidden fruit, and at the very least an hour or so of 'elevation'. 

'Within reach' meant the milkman, the mailman, the roofer, the plumber, and the electrician, men she ordinarily wouldn't have given a second thought to, but what could be more convenient and discreet?  An affair with Harlan Powers, Senior Vice President of the New Brighton Bank & Trust might be more socially suitable, but the whole schmear of trysts, meeting places, stolen kisses and all the rest was off-putting and dangerous.  She wasn't in the business of destroying her marriage after all, just reconfiguring it more to her liking and satisfaction. 

It should be said that for all of Candi's devotion to husband and family, as random and ill-timed as it could be, she was no prude.  In fact she rated herself 'Extremely High' on the Freudian scale of female sexual desire explained in another article in the Journal. She might have little experience with sexual pleasure, but that did not mean diffidence or lack of interest.  On the contrary she delighted at the thought of any one of these tradesmen inside her, pleasuring her. 

And so it was that she invited Elmer Swensen, the Fresh Farms milkman into her bed, then Cabot Ilkins the gutter man, and Shohei Yukimura, the Japanese gardener.  Yukimura showed her Edo prints of the sexual escapades of shoguns and told her he would show her how it was done, and for an hour every other Thursday afternoon, they coupled in the most exotic way. 

No matter how recondite and careful lovers in a small town might be, word leaks out, morphs into gossip and before long she was The Harlot of Lincoln Street. 

The economic principle of sunken costs has its social application, and Davies Barker, Candi's husband after so many years of marriage, two children, and a hefty mortgage was not about to lose his investment. He would not divorce her if she shaped up in the kitchen, flew right as a mother, and welcomed him more than casually. 

In so doing, he ignored the first principle of marriage - if your wife is fucking someone else, dump her - but to his credit he was an openminded, surprisingly tolerant and forgiving man. The gossip eventually stopped and he was no longer the butt of jokes down at the gas station; but Candi knew she had him trussed, bagged, and secure, and after a cooling-off period, made her elision into the Sixties where it was she who whooped and hollered from the window of a hippy van pulling out of the driveway headed for parts unknown. 

Most Favored Status In America - Victims, People Of Color, And Bandits Are Heralded While Geniuses Are Reviled

The Left was very unhappy to see a photo of America's genius cluster - Huang, Musk, Page, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Bezos et al around the table with Donald Trump.  'Oligarchs' was the heading on one social media site.  CNN and MSNBC both featured the event, suggesting that it was exactly this concentration of political and commercial power that was at the heart of the dissolution of American democracy. 

Complete nonsense, of course.  This array of America's best was reminiscent of the great industrialists of the early Twentieth Century - Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, J.P. Morgan  and others who built the very infrastructure of modern America, the foundation on which its geopolitical power would be based. 

Thanks to them oil was discovered pumped, refined, and distributed, a railroad network the equal to none crisscrossed the country, steel mills produced thousands of metric tons each year and with it enabled the growth of cities, and Wall Street became the new financial capital of the world.  Yes, these men wielded immense power and together were an influential political force, but their contribution to America was incomparable and the sine qua non of the country's rise to economic and military power. 

The 'industrialists' of today are revolutionizing both America and the world.  Together they are creating an incomparable technological universe which will not only change the way America does business, but will usher in a generation more advanced in intelligence, more suitable and adapted to a changing environment, and linked to a cybersphere of unlimited information through which every human being will be able to live. A world of true virtuality, a complete interface between mind and machine. 

Oligarchy?  How simple-mindedly dismissive of intellectual brilliance and ignorant of the revolutionary new world these men are developing.  The American Left has been so indoctrinated in the progressive canon that its observers can see only through one myopic lens. 

These men are creating the future, and the genie can never be put back in the bottle.  As much as naysayers howl about the end of life as we know it or the unholy concentration of wealth and power, the train has left the station.  

Never in history have technological innovations been stopped, reversed, or eliminated.  The telephone, the automobile, the computer, the smart phone, nuclear fission, space travel all were roundly criticized at birth - the upheaval of the settled order, the destruction of traditional family values, the corruption of children, the havoc of Judeo-Christian principles - but all are still here. 

These geniuses should be accorded most favored status - given full rein and authority to continue their unprecedented scientific achievements.  Like Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and Morgan, they are indeed the most influential figures in America, and in collaboration with a supportive government, there is no end to what they can accomplish.  

While the progressive Left refuses to grant these men even a modicum of appreciation or acknowledgement of their historic contributions, it accords most favored status on the least. Victimhood is celebrated, the black man is automatically placed at the top of the human pyramid, anointed thanks to his sentient forest roots and environmental intelligence.  

The transgender is hailed as the first of a new, lasting generation of sexuality.  Women are given an automatic, a priori status and can do no wrong, a more able, intelligent, emotionally mature, protected species.  People of color are ipso facto of greater value, social relevance, and moral stature than whites. 

When governed to maintain law and order, society is racist and exclusive, say progressives.  Crime is not a breach of civil and moral law but a legitimate expression of an oppressed people.  The police are the criminals as are their white, privileged, elitist investors. 

Everything is subject to the Bell Curve, the normal distribution of people and events. Einstein, Kant, and Shakespeare were at one asymptote representing those with intelligence so rare that it is shared with very few. Severely mentally retarded adults are at the other end of the scale, doomed by crossed and defective genes to never advance beyond the age of a child; and the rest of us are in the middle, under arc of the curve, sharing modest intelligence with millions. 

Artistic talent, practical genius, and religious insight all are subject to normal distribution.  

Wealth is a result of brains, creativity, savvy, and energy; and it is no surprise that it too is subject to the normal distribution.  The One Percent have made it to the top of the economic pyramid – or in statistical terms, to the asymptotic end of the curve – because of these talents.  

The American Left has not only focused on the low end of the curve, it has dismissed the mathematical configuration entirely.  Society's differences are not a matter of genetics but social influences; and as such can be addressed and eliminated.  Accordingly, the most privileged - there because of exogenous, predictably corrosive forces - must be brought down from their unfairly exalted position, and those least favored raised up to take their place.  Eventually society as a whole will homogenize and there will no longer be social distinctions. 

The Soviet Union tried this and failed.  There was no way of forcing mediocrity on the brilliant, and no way of raising the intellectually slow to positions of influence and productivity.  There is, has been, and always will be a bell curve and a division of society by the best and the brightest and the dimmest and slowest. 

Yet the American Left insists on beating a dead horse.  Socialism, the equalization of society through social engineering, is still alive and well and at the heart of the progressive movement. As in the days of  Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Enver Hoxha of Albania, the dismantling, discrediting, and dismissal of the most productive members of society comes first.  The raising of the masses with an open field ahead of them, can then prosper and grow.  

Which is why the American Left has been quick to criticize Musk et al.  According to the progressive canon, they are the problem, not the solution  Genius clusters are oligarchies, not assemblages of the smartest and most able.  They are oppressors not facilitators, dictators, not men of the people. 

Great civilizations have been created by great men, the kings, emperors, shahs, and shoguns of history; by Newton, Bohr, Einstein, and Faraday; by Palladio, Wright, Corbusier, and Gehry; by Aristotle, Plato, Kant, and Schopenhauer; by  Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Vermeer. 

The Left, in keeping with its socialist canon has dismissed Western civilization because of its colonialism and slavery.  All else is incidental, insignificant, and irrelevant; and this bias has spread to include genius per se.  There is something antithetical about genius, relying as it does on individualism, personal enterprise, and insight. 

This of course will not stand. History will not be denied.  As much as the Left may howl, whinge, and cavil, the genie will not be put back in the bottle.  The American geniuses will continue their intellectual juggernaut, the world will be revolutionized thanks to them, and the fitful attempts to restore socialism, a discredited, failed, and totally fantastical political system, will end.