The Fourth Of July, Patriotism, And Love Of Country - Do They Really Mean Anything Today?

Despite the fireworks and the spectacular drone displays, the Fourth of July seems a rather tepid holiday compared to those of the early post-WWII years when there really was something to celebrate.  America had single-handedly won the war against Japan in the Pacific.  After landing at Normandy, American forces pushed the Nazi armies back to Berlin and forced the unconditional surrender of Germany.

                    
Despite a seemingly implacable and resolute enemy,  American soldiers fought their way from island to island across the Pacific to Japan.  Against an equally determined military force, they fought their way across France to final victory in Germany.  Over one million American soldiers were either killed or wounded during World War I, but Asian and European imperialism had been defeated.

In the post-war period, America was universally respected and admired for its collective courage, determination, and will.  Not only was tribute paid to the American military, to the civilian leaders who had quickly mobilized industry and managed the economy in difficult times, and to the American people who had joined the war effort on the home front without complaint or cavil.

Americans felt rightly proud of themselves.  They had given their lives to defeat Hitler and his genocidal, arrogant, and mad effort at world domination, and had fought back against the Japanese after Pearl Harbor with an absolute will to annihilate the enemy. 

The Fourth of July was a celebration of American victory, but also a loud cheer for the greatness of America itself.  The world was a better place after  George Washington and his colonial armies defeated the British and the Founding Fathers declared independence.  From 1776 until 1945 the history of the United States was one of unparalleled economic growth, social ambition and diversity, and military strength.  Commitment if not devotion to the principles of democracy and private enterprise never wavered and America was indeed exceptional.  Not only did the national economy recover quickly, but thanks to American aid and support, both Germany and Japan were helped back on their feet.

After 1945, world acclaim became more muted and tempered by American misfortune.  The Korean War ended in stalemate after nearly 150,000 casualties.  The Cold War intensified and the possibility of nuclear war increased the more nuclear warheads were aimed at the enemy. 

Vietnam was a military and political disaster.  American supremacy had not been challenged by a superpower but by a small Asian nation.   Americans were stunned that ‘a nation of pajama-wearing little men who crawled through tunnels and ate rat meat and cold rice’ could have beaten them.  Ho Chi Minh and his loyalist supporters were having nothing of American arrogance and exceptionalism and neither were people back home.   The Sixties and early Seventies were a time of political and social upheaval, animated by what many thought was an unnecessary, brutal, and mindless war.

No longer economically premier, the US struggles to find common ground or at least conciliation with a newly-confident and powerful Russia and a China whose economic, political, and military power grows stronger every year.  Radical Islam remains a potent enemy, although military action with Israel has neutered Iran and its clients Hezbollah and Hamas. North Korea rattles its sabers but is chronically poor and despotic. The United States is at best primus inter pares and at worst simply one of an increasingly competitive international mix.

At home, the once-celebrated principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights have become eroded by political and social divisions.  The polity of the nation has fractured.  The individualism that Jefferson envisaged – individual enterprise within the context of community and civic responsibility – has been replaced by a more venal and selfish one.  Alexander Hamilton would be abhorred by the radical populism that characterizes the United States today. He deeply suspected Jefferson’s ‘will of the people’ and argued strongly for a buffer of elite, intelligent, and insightful men against it.

The chaotic America of 2026 is a far cry from that of 1945 when America was indeed whole, solidly united, and visionary.

Once patriotism is delinked from the reasons for it, it becomes dangerous.  Patriotism in an era when a nation is weak, threatened, and no longer great is a rallying cry for leaders who are befuddled by world events and a refuge for their constituents who feel threatened by them. Patriotism soon becomes xenophobia, and xenophobia always leads to war.

It is no wonder, then, that the Fourth of July has become an empty celebration of fireworks, cookouts, parades, and flags.  Most Americans have only the dimmest appreciation for the nature of their Revolution, the philosophical principles instituted in the Bill of Rights, or the vision of the Founding Fathers.  More importantly, many feel adrift in uncharted geopolitical and cultural waters.  What is there to celebrate except celebration itself?

Today freedom, justice, the pursuit of liberty and happiness, fairness, equality – all 18th Century principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution – have been co-opted and misused.  Little thought is given to what they really meant or mean.  The words alone are enough when couched in the call to patriotic duty.  The words to Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, and Hamilton were not empty but vital:

The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy the gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people; then shall we both deserve and enjoy it.  While, on the other hand, if we are universally vicious and debauched in our manners, though the form of our Constitution carries the face of the most exalted freedom, we shall in reality be the most abject slaves (Samuel Adams).

Freedom was not just a vague concept, a given right, part of an American’s legacy.  It was a responsibility, and there was always the danger of falling from freedom to ‘abject slavery’.  Adams and others, particularly Jefferson who was influenced by John Locke, believed that freedom and ‘the pursuit of happiness’ had little to do with personal satisfaction or venal interests.  They were the foundation for civic liberty and justice to be nurtured and cared for.

This nurture and care was everyone’s responsibility.  If freedom, justice, and fairness were to be guaranteed for all Americans, then each American had a duty to promote them, secure them, and protect them:

I know of no safe depositor of the ultimate powers of a society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.  This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power (Thomas Jefferson).

Patriotism has a sorry history. Henry V rallied his troops before the battle of Agincourt with calls to patriotism, the greatness of England, and the absolute rights of the English to the French throne.  In his famous ‘band of brothers’ speech before the final battle, he not only appealed to nationalism and country, but said that fighting together in this most righteous of causes would unite both nobles and common men.  It was not only duty and honor to which Henry appealed, but the communion of English souls.

Later in Shakespeare’s play Henry in disguise discusses his decision to fight the French with some of his troops, common soldiers commandeered into service.  He looked for approbation from them on the rightness of his cause – one which was tortuously and tenuously justified through long academic history.  

He hated the fact that his grandfather, Henry IV, might have been a usurper, and now he might also be an illegitimate pretender to the throne of France; and so when the common soldiers suggested that he was committing thousands of Englishmen to a probable death because of his rarified, barely justifiable, and esoteric noble goals, Henry was shocked.  Weren’t they part of his valorous band of brothers, together in goal and spirit?

Despite his reflection on the questionable nature of his cause and on the moral question of sending thousands to their death for such an improbable claim, he  executed his plans.  He took Agincourt, secured French lands and power, and went on to be a great English hero.

He relied on patriotism – the ideal of fighting for the glory of country and the rightness of its cause – to consolidate the support of his troops; and the call to action in the service of one’s country was no more than a silver-tongued, impassioned exhortation to take the first bullet.

Patriotism was the South’s call to arms in the Civil War and it fought to preserve the plantation- and slavery-based, aristocratic system of the English cavaliers.  Like the soldiers of Henry V, those of the Confederacy knew or cared little about the patriotic sentiments expressed by their commanders.
They were sent to the slaughter under a banner of regionalism, the causes and principles of which they only vaguely understood.

All wars coalesce public opinion and strengthened the morale of fighting men through patriotism, and the honor and duty to country; and in all wars the principles enunciated by political leaders mean little to the common man.  It was only through emotional appeals to patriotism that these leaders were able to pursue their ends. 

How else would doughboys have poured over the trenches in World War I into a withering hail of bullets, dying at a rate almost matching that of the most deadly of conflicts, the Civil War?  Who understood the real reasons for the European conflict, Archduke Ferdinand, and petty border differences between the descendants of ancient kings?  Very few; but all understood the meaning of the tocsin call to arms.  Which of the 70,000 men who died at the Battle of Borodino understood Napoleon’s grand imperialistic schemes or the nature of Russian aristocratic claims to Europe?

            
Religious patriotism sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths in the Crusades.  All had to fight for Christianity against the infidel and to rid Europe of the scourge of Islam.  The Mexican-American War was not fought defensively or over issues of survival but Westward expansion, and many criticized President Polk for his aggressive attempts to take over Mexican lands in his march to the Pacific.  

The death toll and cost of the war were considerable; and yet the war was fought to support American interests.  A call to patriotism in this questionable cause was heard throughout the land.
President McKinley prosecuted the short Spanish-American War because of similar ‘national interests’, i.e. fighting to eliminate Spanish influence in the Pacific.  Again, a questionable war, with many dead and more wounded.

The War of 1812 had more justification, and despite the fact that it was fought over a simple issue – the impressing of American seamen – it really was about ridding the United States once and for all from English influence.  Once again, it was a war about territory, influence, and power, and patriotism was the now wearying call to arms.

Patriotism is even more corrosive in peacetime, for it appeals to a primitive, emotional center with even less justification than going to war.  In this election year, it is patriotic, say the Republicans, for Americans to stand up for liberty and individual rights.  It is not enough for citizens to reflect on the principles, policies, and programs of the Right; they must vote patriotically, casting a ballot for higher principles.  Such appeals to patriotism plays on the ignorance of many voters, or their inability to sort through the complexity of today’s socio-economic and political world, and is manipulative and exploitative.

Patriotism was not an issue at the time of the birth of the nation.  Everyone  fought the British, and all suffered because of the harsh, rigid, and unfair administration of our occupiers.  There was no clarion call to arms for abstract reasons of patriotism, but to free our country from the yoke of British rule.  The revolt was real, immediate, and understandable. 

By inference, the responsibility of assuring an honorable and just nation is the role of both leaders and citizens; and that if the body politic weakens, both must act to strengthen it through reason and reasonable arguments.  What happens today is far removed from Jefferson’s sentiments. 

Why Love Demands A Second Opinion - The Tethers That Bind The Modern, Liberated Woman

Betsy Bennett was at the top of her game, Senior Vice President of a well-known Washington international consulting group, first woman elected to the board of the Cosmos Club, Washington's most prestigious social club and previously a men-only enclave, touted as The New Woman on the cover of Forbes magazine, and not far from the pinnacle of success.  What that success was, Betsy was not sure, but she was confident that the clouds would part and the future would be made clear. 

She was still unmarried, although she had had her share of lovers, all of whom had left before she had had her fill. There was something simply too forward about the woman, too demanding, and too insatiably hungry for them to tolerate for too long. 

Even Roland, aide to the House Ways and Means Chairman, Lothario, and Washington's boulevardier, could put up with only so much of Betsy's offerings.  Yes, at first her clawing, hungry sexual appetites fueled his, but after a week of this, charged and recharged in antiseptic parlors of Washington, he wanted no more.  He felt used, handled, bought and sold by a woman who was motivated by nothing but a willful desire for 'expression'. 

'Let her find it elsewhere', said Roland for whom the complaisant, nubile, and impossibly willing young blonde women who had come to town on the Trump juggernaut were more than enough. 

Meanwhile Betsy kept camping out, roughing it in the wild with willing young men who at first thought she was a prize but soon, wilted by her excesses, and finding nothing post-coitum even marginally companionable, left. 

Betsy was at sexual sixes and sevens after Roland's abrupt departure.  She thought she had one, an equal, a Lawrentian epiphanic partner, if not a soulmate; and was bemused and troubled by his leaving.  Hadn't she given him every possible sexual delight?  Pleased him more than an Arab princess in the Arabian nights or the consort to the Sultan Suleiman the Great?

'Still working it out?', Abraham Katz, her psychiatrist asked at their next session, referring to the age-old, classic female conundrum of reverse Oedipus love.  Betsy had adored her father, wanted to be with him forever, loved by him, by his side; but was caught up in the fang-and-claw feminism of the day and had to dismiss father-worship as a pathetic throwback to the woman of yesteryear. 

'Not really', Betsy replied, pulling a tissue from the silver box placed  on the console next to the psychiatrist's couch for his best, most troubled patients.  

'Go ahead, have a good cry', said Dr. Katz, looking at his watch.  He had had quite enough of these coddled, privileged women who wanted sex and their fathers, and left men hanging on the possibility of more.  

He corrected himself, restored his professional propriety, and tried to listen patiently to Betsy's increasing despondency. 

There was no hope for these women, he knew, brought up in privilege, educated to be the best they could be, challenged to outdo men in every way, but tethered to an old arriere garde, persistently Victorian way of marriage, fidelity, and social eminence. 

 

He yawned and asked again how Betsy was doing; but by this time she was at loose ends, unraveled by conflict and compromise.  Here she was at the top of her game but still looking for Mr. Right?  How ridiculous, how demeaning, how discouraging.

There it was. After board meetings to decide hundreds of millions, after internal shuffles to increase productivity, and after Wall Street meetings to decide her future, here she was still looking for some romantic novel fantasy, her Prince Charming, the glorious young man who would joust and defeat all suitors, and take her to bed his prize and her marvel. 

She couldn't even bed Arnold from HR a lithesome, desirable young man from Ohio when her male colleagues daily reaped the harvest young women come to Washington for opportunity, fortune and love.  She was a tethered, cosseted, moored woman in a sea of undesirable mates. 

She was heir to a misogynist culture - the men around her wanted only sexual pleasure and ignored women's essence, and her innate, ineradicable worth - but now in her early forties she found herself willing to settle for less.  Apostasy, travesty, treachery, and a traitorous abandon of feminism as it was, she wanted to be loved. 

She read Victorian romances, dreamt of being taken away by a knight on a white charger, let herself be swept by an impossibly seductive vision of castles, handmaidens, and the love of her life. 

Imagine! Betsy Bennett in the romantic thrall of treacly Victorian novels? A strong, defiant, indomitable woman at the feet of a handsome suitor? God forbid, and yet in her heart of hearts and in the middle of the night, yes, that was what she wanted. 

Was this the final judgement?  Were women destined to be the playthings of man? Was there no finality to feminism? 

'Calm yourself', said Dr. Katz to a particularly agitated Betsy Bennett. He had seen this before and had counselled and cured many women who had come to him.  The answer was not to fight socio-biological destiny, but to accept it. 

Betsy had taken out her sexual frustration on her minions who railed at the thought of a one-on-one with 'The Harridan of K Street', but thanks to Dr. Katz she had come to a compromise  She needn't take out her sexual frustrations on her inferiors - they had enough on their minds - but try to live with contradictions and, if possible, give way to her femininity. 

Katz had been dunned within the profession for his Freudian sexual premises, but he was on solid ground,  Millennia of history had shown the way.

Betsy spent many nights tossing and turning.  Sexuality, especially in these halcyon days of gender recovery, was not an idle pursuit; nor was it the simple heterosexual algorithm it had been in her youth.  it mattered.  If she was still a daddy's girl, umbilically linked to an outdated, discredited sexual identity, then how could she hold her head up in feminist councils? How could she even pretend to be a liberated modern woman?

 

Nature-Nurture the old perennial conundrum - what was more important to your being, your life, your future? Were girls ineluctably tied sexually tied to their fathers? Or would mother-love right the balance?

A moot point Betsy concluded, what's done is done, what is to be will be; and however much she was sexually determined by Daddy, she had foundered, stumbled, but found her way to her own sexual identity. 

Be that as it may, and sexual epiphanies being the apertures to maturity as they also may be, one was stuck with the cards one was dealt; and for better or worse Betsy was a calculating, succubus for whom men were only targets on a proving ground.

She sought  second opinion - a young man of strong progressive instincts who was reported to blend Freudian origins with New Age dynamics who was able to look women in the face, listen to their psycho-social conflicts, delve into Freudian antecedents, but come out with an accommodating, practical solution.

In Betsy's case it was Dr. Cassius Barnum with whom she fell in love - a no-no in Freudian analysis, but encouraged in today's psychiatry.  Cass Barnum was a purveyor of good counselling, intimacy, friendship, ketamine, and professional fellowship; - and above all he was a canny, sharp entrepreneur who saw a bonanza in this demographic bubble of unhappy women. 

At first Betsy was wary of visiting him in his one-room office off Dupont Circle, but eventually gave in to the blandishments of well-meaning friends.  Dr. Barnum was a dreamboat, and he changed her life. 

They went on trips to Barbuda together, then St. Bart's, and finally Aruba where they decided that ying and yang belonged together, after which Betsy was no longer the boardroom matriarch of, Fletcher & Co., and New Age wanderer on Haight Street, no longer the nexus of hippiedom, but still counterculture enough for her to put down post-capitalist roots.

 

The doctor soon left her - her injured histrionics were fine and dandy on his couch but not in his bedroom; and with a wave over a carafe of Sonoma rose overlooking the Bay, he was gone. 

Once a cunt, always a cunt, goes to the English cockney adage, and after years of reform, rehabilitation, and social resetting Betsy had not changed an iota.  She might have some intimations into her distant past but she was still the partnerless, childless, spinster she had always been destined to be. 

A sad tale?  Far from it.  Betsy swallowed the bitter pill, kept intact, and was known as the Harridan of Stony Hill, her retirement home. 

Good Fences Make Good Neighbors - Despite The Political Cant, Keep 'Em Out Is The National Meme

Marfa Potter supervised the construction of a stockade fence around her property, a seven-foot tall perimeter exactly like that around Fort Apache.  Better safe than sorry, and although the Andersons had been good neighbors, they were moving out soon, and who knew what was next.  University Park was one of Washington, DC's most affluent neighborhoods, so there was no danger of undesirable buyers, but still, fate is not always kind.   

The generous loans offered by the District of Columbia to 'less fortunate' families of the city, an affirmative action housing program didn't even come close to the nearly two million dollars these homes cost, and 'affordable' housing was still a thing for the outer suburbs.  No, that was not the issue.  It was just...

Here Marfa paused, for she never could articulate why exactly she wanted to fence herself and her family in. Perhaps it was her mother who hated her next door neighbors and wasn't happy until her father accepted her ultimatum to move 'away from prying eyes' and build her a proper house.  

Neighbors simply couldn't be trusted, her mother said, and there were more cases of bad neighbors than good.  The Phelps' dog - a barker, yes, but not an incessant one - had been poisoned, found stiff and legs up in the rose bushes behind their house; and all signs pointed to the recluses across the street, Arabs of some sort or Turks which was enough in those days to suggest guilt.  Marfa's mother spread the rumor up and down the street, and from then on neighbors kept an even greater distance from the outsiders. 

The Foxes were drinkers, Harold Arlen was a philanderer, and Lou Ann Michaels a tart, and the nightly fights, often from all three houses, could be heard from Commonwealth Street to Barker Road especially during the summer during which, in the days before air conditioning, all the windows were kept wide open. 

The move to the West End did not turn out quite as her mother had hoped.  The next door neighbor, no longer in tooth-by-jowl proximity - she lived across the small road between the houses - had a bulldog and a deaf son, and if she wasn't yelling at one, she was yelling at the other. Her voice carried, loud and clear, and even the traffic on Lincoln Street could not dampen it.  It was like living next to the Madwoman of Chaillot.  

When Marfa accompanied her father to visit poor relatives in New Haven, all living in tenements smelling of garlic, cod liver, and coal oil, the fighting in the narrow hallways or out the windows was impressive. There was nothing Streetcar Named Desire romantic about it. She could never forget the mayhem, the noise, and the sound of shattering crockery.

So, now that she had married well and was living well, she had the means to assure that such memories would not be revisited and that she would have the quiet, secure, and private life she had always wanted. 

Now, the neighborhood of University Park, if residents had been asked, would have been quite happy to erect a walled perimeter around it - a pipe dream of course, but an expression of their concerns about being intruded upon - invaded - by the undesirable elements which were edging closer.  

The high school built decades ago to serve the well-to-do residents of the neighborhood and nearby Foxhall and Cleveland Park had become more fitting for an inner city neighborhood than for wealthy Ward 3. Its nastiness drove homeowners in the vicinity away, property values dropped, and less desirable families moved in. Marfa's far western side of University Park would soon being gradually encroached upon. 

The irony of all this was that the neighborhood was solidly progressive.  'Democracy Matters, Hate Has No Home Here, and Black Lives Matter lawn signs were everywhere. No American flags flew because they were the presumptive banners of Trump supporters.  The progressive meme of Diversity Equity Inclusivity was universal in University Park, and residents were up in arms about the ICE storm troopers rounding refugees and political asylees, locking them in gulag-era holding pens and then deporting them.

Yet when the DC Council declared itself a sanctuary city and unveiled plans to build residences for these foreign visitors in every ward,  especially Ward 3 where a number of old department stores had been abandoned and the owners were looking for buyers or public support, residents were up in arms. 

When Marfa and her neighbors got wind of the city's plans to built a refugee, affordable housing, affirmative action high-rise in University Park, all pretentions, all suppositions of inclusivity and racial and ethnic harmony were dropped, and residents began to meet in opposition to the city.  

A lot of shuckin' and jivin' went on in these neighborhood meetings as residents stumbled over themselves trying to justify keeping illegal migrants out while still promoting inclusivity.  It was a question of architectural and zonal integrity, they said.  Such a building would destroy the architectural fabric of the area, and high rise buildings - other than the luxury condos built along Washington's Rodeo Drive at the north end of University Park - would be disruptive to the historic cast of the area. Etc. etc., all transparently xenophobic arguments. 

Photographs of the highly-publicized wedding of footballer Travis Kelce and superstar Taylor Swift in New York's Madison Square Garden went viral - not inside pix which were copy protected and private, but of the phalanxes of New York City police, the extensive impenetrable barriers, and the photo ID security checkpoints. 

Swift was an outspoken critic of Donald Trump and his anti-immigrant, closed-border, punitive policies, a supporter of Defund-the-Police movements, and a vocal advocate of open, ID-less voting so the security measures at the wedding venue seemed hypocritical at best. 

Bernie Sanders, socialist Senator, and espouser of all progressive causes - especially the concentration of wealth and America's mindless contribution to climate change - flies to environmental meetings in a private jet, owns three homes, and as a net worth in the millions. 

So given the universal hypocrisy and NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) American zeitgeist, it is hard to criticize Marfa Potter or the residents of University Park.  Living on two planes was completely normal for them.  They saw no contradiction in preserving their hard-earned rights and privileges while arguing for macro socio-economic change.  Holding two opposing points of view at the same time was a sign of intelligence, after all. 

They would be quite happy to have Barack Obama move in next to University Park and no fences would have to be built because he was one of them - a good black man, a responsible one, married with children, a lawyer. In other words, not just any black man.  This not only showed their racial tolerance, they said, but pointed to the way to a universally inclusive world. 

Not only were University Park residents not unhappy that their tax dollars were being spent on the poor in the inner city, they felt these taxes were a form of reparation.  It didn't matter if the investment did no good - it did not - but that they were doing their part to repay the legatees of slavery for the inhumanity of white oppressors. 

Not one resident of University Park had ever set foot in Anacostia or any other of the persistently dysfunctional, crime-ridden, pestilential slums across the river, but that wasn't the point.  It was the principle of the thing.  

So, Marfa and her neighbors piled one hypocrisy atop another until there was only mountain of intellectual debt.  No one could take them seriously, nor could anyone suffer the larger political insanity of the progressive Left any longer. 

Marfa finished the fence. It blocked the sun so her skip laurels and rhododendrons died, but the privacy was worth it until the new neighbors, parents to two teenage boys moved in.  This couple left the house to the boys on weekends and their parties went on all night. 

She thought up all kinds of devilish things to do to these inconsiderate, intrusive neighbors.  She remembered what her mother had planned to do to Mrs. Helander's rose bushes and Mrs. Phelps' Studebaker - but felt impotent, put upon, and defenseless. Privacy was a chimera; but every weekend her heartburn increased, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and she began to hear noises when there were none.  She triple-paned all the windows, banged pots and pans in the garden when the next door parties began and became a nervous wreck. 

'Harry', she said to her husband just like her mother said to her father decades ago, 'I can't take it', but up and leaving a two million dollar house for a 'better one', even in this wealthy corner of Washington, was not that simple; so Marfa was left to her madness and her hate - which actually stood her in good stead with the neighbors who hated Donald Trump but not with the admirable, vicious, untamed, venomous hatred of Marfa Potter. Hate is fungible.  It bleeds like bad coloring. 

Blowing Things Up On The Fourth Of July - How Sparklers Define The New Anti-Patriotism

Randy Harper always looked forward to Fourth of July because he could blow things up.  Fireworks were available everywhere - Jimmy's Smoke Shop carried cherry bombs and ashcans - but the real McCoy was Mickey Finn's on the Berlin Turnpike.  Mickey carried military grade explosives packed into small packages. He sold something called The Killer a pirated clone of the M-80, an American class of large powerful firecrackers which were originally made in the mid 20th century for the U.S. military to simulate explosives or artillery fire. 

How Mickey got his hands on this explosive which did not hit the general commercial market until a number of year later was always a mystery; but there it was, flying off the shelves for the likes of Randy Harper and his father who intended to blow things up on the Fourth.  

Randy had always liked to drop cherry bombs into trash cans filled with water and watch the simultaneous bulging and bursting of the container and the sky-high geyser of water from the explosion, but now that he had The Killer, capable of a Hiroshima firestorm, he was particularly excited.  This would be a Fourth to remember. 

The only problem was to decide what to blow up.  Just setting off The Killer just resulted in a loud explosive sound and a small crater in the back yard, but figuring out how to make it really do some damage and send things flying like the epochal scene in Zabriskie Point was another thing altogether.  

A chain reaction was what he wanted - The Killers set off in sequence, blowing up old stumps, flower pots, trash cans and steamer trunks in succession.  A real life battlefield of terror and destruction. 

World War II had just ended and the young boy listened fascinated at stories of how his father blew things up on his way from Normandy to Berlin - tanks, armored personnel carriers, bunkers, and German military headquarters. 

There was nothing more satisfying that sending a rocket into the lead tank in a Nazi panzer division, watching to top hatch blow off spinning a hundred feet into the field, and gunning down the crew as they scrambled up and out. He remembered the smell of cordite, and how the muzzle of his Browning glowed a dull red with the heat as laid down constant fire, eliminating any and all who fled the destruction of the tank convoy. 

When the Fourth rolled around, Bill Harper taught his son how to fight with Roman candles.  These fireworks shot off balls of fire in a shower of sparks and light, and when coordinated, provided a backyard sound and light show the envy of the neighborhood; but when leveled and used as a firearm, they could simulate battle.  Randy loved them and they were sure to stock up at Mickey Finn's weeks before the Fourth to beat the rush. 

The Fourth itself on Commonwealth Avenue was like the Battle of the Marne - explosives going off in every back yard, shaking foundations, singing the bark off of old oaks, and sending curled, blackened leaves floating down to the ground. 

Randy, now a father and grandfather, remembered those days well especially because now the only fireworks available were sparklers - twinkie gay things that did nothing but spark and smoke and wither down to nothing.

Randy, a patriot, a Republican, and a defender of America's glorious history, saw the sparkler as the meme of a feminized America - insipid, tame, inclusive, diverse, and frilly. Risk - the be-all and end-all of manhood was being removed.  Playgrounds offered no challenges, competition was absent on field days, boys were cossetted and silenced by feminist teachers, drugged by complicit parents, and lost and fumbling about with their innate rambunctiousness neutered. 

The homes in his neighborhood - a leafy enclave in affluent Northwest Washington - displayed no flags on the Fourth of July or Memorial Day.  Flags were not only a sign of approval of what had always been a racist, genocidal, misogynist country and a Trump Make America Great banner. 

His next door neighbor, Marlene Flint, wanted no part of this year's Fourth.  Donald Trump had made it all about himself like he has done everything else - the ballroom, the Arch, the Field of Heroes, the makeover of the Kennedy Center - and this celebration of the republic's 250th year would be no different.  It would be the same posturing, arrogant travesty of American history that has characterized his presidency since the beginning. 

  

Besides, what was there to celebrate about a country which had enslaved the black man since 1619, had committed genocide of the Native Americans in its Manifest Destiny push to the Pacific, and had created the world's greatest threat to world peace with its exceptionalism and military adventurism. 

There would be no flag flying from her porch, nor would there be any flags and bunting in her neighborhood, solidly progressive, anti-Trump, and dedicated to a reversal of the current misfortune and the creation of a new, socially generous, verdant, and harmonious world. 

She was quick to call out the very hypocrisy of a country which encouraged the barbarism of enslavement, and went about its Gone with the Wind cavalier ways for centuries - mint juleps on the verandah, hoop skirts, and antebellum magnificence while African slaves toiled under the hot sun in Delta cotton fields.

  

She had no pride in American military victories - Jackson had sold out the Chickasaws and Choctaws in the War of 1812, using them as cannon fodder against the British and then exiling them west of the Mississippi after the war was over.  The victory over Japan in WWII was at the expense of hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese who were incinerated by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were ignoble affairs, carried out with some vague notion of democracy but were actually no more than pursuits of American hegemony. 

She felt no pride in American social history, for it had treated women as slaves until the early Twentieth century, and had closeted gay and lesbian Americans since the dawn of the Republic. 

What in fact, was there to celebrate?  What more arrogant, mind-numbing assumption of greatness could be imagined in the follies of the Fourth this year?

She would light a few sparklers for her grandson, have grilled fish and baklava for dinner, considering the backyard barbecue a bourgeois, faux patriotic tradition, and shut all the windows to block the bombardment of Trump fireworks. 

Marlene Flint was not alone in her silent protest of the excesses of American exceptionalism.  Other residents of University Park flew gay pride and Palestinian flags, deployed Hate Has No Home Here and Democracy Matters lawn signs, and shook their heads in dismay and disgust at the military aircraft flyovers - the very same bombers which had reduced Gaza to rubble and were killing Iranian patriots. 

Sparklers, 'inclusivity', compromise, compassion - signs of the end not the beginning of American culture.  The United States had just defeated an oppressive colonial regime, declared independence, and founded a country based on unequivocal principle - individualism within an ethos of polity; military strength to defend freedom; economic power to grow the new republic into the world's most productive. 

Many viewers heard Bill Maher's rant about our feminized society. Fewer have listened to Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism? and The War Against Boys, and a critic of modern feminism.



Progressives for years have worried about the war against women, how it has not been won, and how society must cleanse itself once and for all of the scourge of predatory men.  Men are retrograde, illiberal, and irremediable. They are obsessed with guns, violence, and competition; and are social throwbacks.  Only women have evolved to a higher state of being; and are the only bulwark against male social anarchy.  Their caring, compassionate, collaborative, and participatory ethos has saved us all.

As paraphrased by Dana Antiochus, Maher believes that

The inversion of nature that we have experienced as a culture, and the subversive aspect of flipping traditional roles, with its subsequent destruction of society, serves as a signal that we live in a dying system.  It has led to a pussified, sissy, pathetic, lovey-dovey/touchy-feely country of wimps, who put emotion over logic, feeling over reason, in our nurture-heavy/nature-deprived, culture

That and more, thought Randy. His old M-80 was still intact, on his desk along with other memorabilia. He thought that this would be the year he would finally blow it off, created one hell of a crater in his back yard or better yet that of his next door neighbor, set her squirrel-proof bird feeders a-swinging and putting a crack in the birdfeeder; but he had too many sunken costs to gin up what it takes to send a message which, given the universal tenor of the neighborhood would only strengthen their resolve. 

So to the consternation of his daughter-in-law, Randy sat down with his grandson and told him about the good old days of Sturm und Drang; but that just made him feel old. 

Romantic Fiction - Why Are Otherwise Intelligent Women Reading Soppy Stories About Love?

Belinda Carter borrowed sappy, treacly, impossibly romantic novels from the library - along with books on Civil War history and the plains Indians as cover. If any of her friends - professors, lawyers, doctors, and social activists - had seen what she was reading, she would have been immediately and irrevocably thought of as soft, a girly girl romantic who couldn't be trusted with the truth. 

Belinda lived in University Park, a leafy corner of Washington DC, solidly progressive, unbending and unflinching in their hatred for Donald Trump and his right wing, MAGA cabal, and committed to the rise of the black man, the gender spectrum, and world peace.  Books like The Flowers for Antoinette had no place in the pantheon of right ideas.  They were inane, anti-feminist, idealistic fantasies unworthy of anyone embracing the fight for equality. 

Yet half the women of University Park were reading books like this, hidden among more serious non-fiction, kept under wraps, and read late at night. These women were hopeless romantics who had never gotten over their adolescent fantasies of marrying princes and living in castles.  Most were careful to choose only those novels which had a historical link.  Flowers was set in revolutionary France but had nothing to do with Robespierre or the guillotine but the torrid affair between the namesake of the queen and a British nobleman caught in France like Dickens' Charles Darnay. 

If called out for her girlish fantasies, she could always say that the book was not a romance but a historical novel; yet every night she sobbed and sniffled as she read of the loneliness and rejection of Antoinette, her poverty, and her misery.  Belinda knew that the story would turn out well - they all did - but she couldn't help empathizing with the young heroine, so much like herself, destitute in love. 

'Turn the light off, please, dear', said her husband rolling over to the dark side of the bed - the husband of many years who increasingly paid her no mind, had been unfaithful, and was mindless and unconcerned about her happiness. 

This was the fate of many women in University Park whose bright memories of young love persisted well into late middle age and drove them to fictional romance.  At least there was that, Belinda, thought, putting down The Chalice of Love. 

She smiled at the other patrons of the library looking for books in the 'Adult' section, a parceled off corner of the library for romantic fiction.  Adult fiction usually meant pornography, but the head librarian, herself an aficionado of romantic fiction, knew that what women wanted was cover.  No professional woman wanted to be seen interested in the treacly stuff usually reserved for housewives in trailers. 

The women perusing the Adult section were together in their desire for romance - they were all women who resided in boardrooms, management consulting, or superior court but who could not give up their hopelessly romantic interests. Smiling at each other as they roamed the shelves said, 'We're sisters' another cover for slightly misandrous women who would rather be in a Bavarian palace then next to their husbands. 

'Oh, he's gorgeous', said Betsy Farquhar to Belinda over sherry at the Russian Tea Room when a graceful, beautiful young man walked in and sat at the bar.  'I would roll over in a minute for him'. 

'No you wouldn't', said her companion.  'Someone always gets hurt'; but that circumspection carried no weight with Belinda whose eagerness for the real thing had built up to a crescendo after emptying the shelves of Little Falls library.  Maybe it was time for some romance of her own for a change. 

Easier said than done of course, so locked in was she to a high-toned version of Kinder, Kuche, Kirche. Woman was the keeper of the hearth, responsible for family, worth, and happiness.  Far be it from Belinda to wander when her children and husband needed her. 

The tea room incident only whet her appetite for more imagined romance.  If she couldn't find true love herself, she would enjoy reading the stories of women who did. 

Professor Hyman Isaacson dean of the psychiatric faculty of the medical school at the University of California, Berkeley had been fascinated by this persistent phenomenon.  How could otherwise intelligent women be so drawn into the greatest moneymaking mill ever? Millions of ghost written, predictable tales of impossible romance flew off the shelves and not just to the low end reader.  In 2022 he wrote a monograph on his findings:

The mature professional American woman is a rare bird, psychologically speaking.  She was brought up by a strong, loving father and had the usual and predictable Freudian sexual attraction to him.  The onset of feminism changed the calculus and concluded that these fathers were oppressors, deniers of female legitimacy.  The liberated woman must seek her own, independent, sexually confident way. 

The conflict arises when this woman seeks adult love.  She wants the attention, comfort, and security of men like her father, but has been told to be wary of them; and frustrated, denied, and humbled finds solace in romantic fiction

 

'Nonsense' was the expected rejoinder from feminist critics who argued that Isaacson was a perfect example of the controlling, misogynist male they had always warned about.  He was the immature one, looking for the ideal woman but trapped within his narrow academic carrel. 

Yet no matter how much angry women decried the observations of Isaacson and rejected any of the assumptions he made about romantic desire, the shelves of romantic fiction remained stacked, and over half of the borrowers were like Belinda Carter.  Businesswoman by day, sobbing, sniffling, vulnerable woman by night. 

It was not unusual, the Professor went on to note, that fact and fantasy become indistinguishable.  The romantic novel set within a distinct period of history with all its trappings becomes reality, a complete suspension of disbelief.  To Belinda the lovers of Antoinette were real French aristocrats who realized her inner worth and rescued her from the streets and loved her forever. 

As such Prof. Isaacson continued, romantic fiction for the mature professional woman becomes an addiction, something she cannot do without; and even when actual romance might be in the offing, she turns to fiction instead.

 

It is no surprise in the academic world that men look at pornography and women read romantic fiction; and if there were ever a cloture to the debate about the differences between men and women, this would be it.  Women are desperate for love and romance.  Men want only sex. Those crossovers - men who have subscribed to feminism and have been dutiful, responsible, respectful husbands and women who try every position of the Kama Sutra to achieve a Lawrentian epiphany - are few and far between.  The record is clear. 

Belinda's husband never got the picture and was as dismissive and indifferent as ever despite the growing pile of romance novels by his wife's bedside.  He grunted and rolled over on top of her once and a while, she put up with it, and both thought of someone else, she her Prince Charming, and he the busty blonde from Accounting. 

Reality bites to be sure, and Belinda eventually slackened off the romance novels and made the elision back to actual history.  That righted her ship, and her coordinates were much better aligned.  Her professionalism and her emotional interests were in harmony. 

However again predictably and common, as she got much older the regrets of a loveless life hit hard, and for comfort, solace, and refuge, she went back to the Adult shelves of the Little Falls library. 

Fourth Of July - Celebrate A Racist, Genocidal Country? The New Anti-Patriotism

Marlene Flint wanted no part of this year's Fourth.  Donald Trump had made it all about himself like he has done everything else - the ballroom, the Arch, the Field of Heroes, the makeover of the Kennedy Center - and this celebration of the republic's 250th year would be no different.  It would be the same posturing, arrogant travesty of American history that has characterized his presidency since the beginning. 

 

Besides, what was there to celebrate about a country which had enslaved the black man since 1619, had committed genocide of the Native Americans in its Manifest Destiny push to the Pacific, and had created the world's greatest threat to world peace with its exceptionalism and military adventurism. 

There would be no flag flying from her porch, nor would there be any flags and bunting in her neighborhood, solidly progressive, anti-Trump, and dedicated to a reversal of the current misfortune and the creation of a new, socially generous, verdant, and harmonious world. 

She was quick to call out the very hypocrisy of a country which encouraged the barbarism of enslavement, and went about its Gone with the Wind cavalier ways for centuries - mint juleps on the verandah, hoop skirts, and antebellum magnificence while African slaves toiled under the hot sun in Delta cotton fields.

 

She had no pride in American military victories - Jackson had sold out the Chickasaws and Choctaws in the War of 1812, using them as cannon fodder against the British and then exiling them west of the Mississippi after the war was over.  The victory over Japan in WWII was at the expense of hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese who were incinerated by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were ignoble affairs, carried out with some vague notion of democracy but were actually no more than pursuits of American hegemony. 

She felt no pride in American social history, for it had treated women as slaves until the early Twentieth century, and had closeted gay and lesbian Americans since the dawn of the Republic. 

What in fact, was there to celebrate?  What more arrogant, mind-numbing assumption of greatness could be imagined in the follies of the Fourth this year?

Marlene had gritted her teeth every Fourth of July, smirked at the flags and parades and barbecues.  The floats from which ex-genocidaires waved, a pompous, ridiculous show of patriotism for dismally failed country; but this year, the 250th was the worst.  It would be the most garish, insipidly bourgeois, demeaning show of faux patriotism the country and the world had ever seen. 

'Goddamn him!', she shouted as the Navy jets roared overhead and down the Potomac, practicing their tight maneuvers for the flyover.  'Goddamn him', she yelled when she heard the high school band playing march music on the football field.  

It was too much, and she was at the end of her rope.  She had done all the could, devoted decades of her youth to progressivism, and what did she have to show for it.  A fool in the White House and the dismantling of every noble, humanitarian policy she and her fellow progressives had fought long and hard. 

'Calm down', said her neighbor, a fellow progressive but one more tempered by a study of history; a friend who worried about the disassembly of a good woman. 

 

When she heard Marlene's frantic cries, she rushed next door to comfort her friend and provide whatever solace she could. Politics are febrile, changeable, predictably absurd and never permanent. 

This time, however, was different, and what she saw was frightening.  Marlene had become a madwoman, her hair wild and unkempt; her dress torn and the hems, now black and stained, dragged the floor.  She trembled and then shook with violent paroxysms of hatred.  She spat, foamed, and cried, her voice hoarse and miserable. 

She was not alone.  Professor Harding Phillips, Professor of Social Psychiatry at Stanford had recently written about the surprising depth of emotional disturbance in those who opposed the President and his policies and had recently written about emotionally existential events which pushed many over the edge. 

The American progressive suffers more than any opposition in American history.  Not even in the antebellum period when the country was preparing for war was there so much political hysteria. Plantation owners were hateful and resentful of the sanctimonious North but channeled this hate into political and military action.  The abolitionists in Pennsylvania and New England were incensed over the persistence of slavery and the militant defense of it by plantation owners; but organized a political movement to effect policy change in Washington. 

Today's social activists have no such reasonability.  Temperance and practicality are tantamount to treason.  The venomous hatred with no objective outlet has turned malicious and viral, just waiting for a casus belli.  The virulent and malicious expressions of hatred for America which erupted as Washington celebrated 250 years of statehood were understandable.  Only madness, complete abandonment of social propriety and probity would suffice.  It was as though every insane asylum on the continent had emptied its inmates. 

In her agitated, untethered state nothing in America over the last 250 years seemed good, praiseworthy and noble. If the United States became a world industrial power during the Industrial Revolution, its successes were built on the backs of the poor.  The Robber Barons had robbed the worker of his dignity, amassed great personal fortunes and let the poor suffer in miserable, intolerable conditions. 

The famous 'democracy' of America was nothing less than a chimera - a fanciful political creation to favor the wealthy and the white male elite.  Its economy built on individual enterprise was nothing but cronyism and bald aggressiveness leaving the less fortunate in its wake. 

Of course not everyone had been so infected by this viral hatred so common in American progressives. Nothing was perfect and as Winston Churchill said, 'Democracy is the world's worst political system except for all the rest'.  Historically mediated culture could not be dismissed.  Each period of American history - Westward Expansion, Manifest Destiny, Robber Barons, slavery, and the oppression of women all had historical antecedents.  Political philosophies were neither good nor bad.  They just existed, came and went, were replace by others which fell just as precipitously. 

To hate was to ignore history, philosophy, culture and the laws of chance.  It made no sense, it isolated people within narrow, unpleasant confines, robbed them of any real purpose or satisfaction. Hating was a miserable affair. 

 Marlene couldn't seek psychiatric attention, for that would deny the legitimacy of her hate; and hate was the only legitimate response to the predatory, inhuman, malignant presence of Donald Trump.  The 250th Fourth of July was her defining moment, the one from which there was no return, and so she was committed rather than admit herself to St. Elizabeth's.  She went in a straight-jacket, held by two hefty matrons, and was carried off in a van, not even an ambulance. 

This could be her only end - and that of the thousands like her who have so completely lost social traction that a normal life was no longer possible.  St. Elizabeth's was the end of the road. 

No one missed her, not even her progressive colleagues who had sympathized with her agony over the years.  They were sorry for her, but were glad that she was in a place where she regrettably belonged. Not good riddance exactly but she had given progressives an especially bad name. 

Diary Of A Scammer - The American Dream, A Sucker Born Every Minute

Mackintosh Peters was a snake oil salesmen in the Arizona Territory in the 1870s, and made a good living selling worthless gum Arabic and corn syrup mixtures to the Piute and Navajo.  'Works like a charm', Mack told the Indians, 'take a swig in the morning and one in the evening, and it'll cure what ails you'. 

Which was arthritis, impotence, scabies, catarrh, and suppuration and anything else he could conjure up.  He was long gone before the Indians knew they had been had, but the placebo effect has been around for centuries, so many of his customers told their friend and families how good they felt after only a day's dosage.  If for some reason he found himself back in the same village and was accosted by the Indians he had duped, he had a ready reply. 'Ahh, of course', he said.  'I said two swigs in the morning and two at night, not one.'

'What's a swig?' asked an elder of the tribe. 

'Why, like this', Mack said, swilling a half-bottle down in one gulp. 'Ya see, ya wasn't takin' nearly half as much', and with that, he lit out of town, his racks of phials and bottles clinking and rattling in the back seat of the wagon as he drove. 

'There's a sucker born every minute', said the circus impresario, P.T. Barnum, and with that under his belt, he made millions off the rubes who wandered into his tents.  His freak show was the most popular - two headed babies, bearded dwarves, and half-man, half-woman giants.  The gawkers always came back, sometimes the same day to see the unbelievable creatures assembled in Barnum's side show. 

Along the trail with Mack Peters were scores of shell game wizards and con artists of every kind, fleecing unsuspecting rural folk out of their money.  There were get-rich-quick schemes, virility potions, games of 'chance', temptingly easy card games, and more inventive scams you can imagine.  It seemed that the business of rural America in the early years was the scam. 

At the same time as the nation industrialized, there was plenty of room for bamboozling. Real estate agents, mortgage lenders, horse traders, and used car salesmen all made a bonanza.  It was remarkably easy to bilk money out of consumers in those days, and even at the highest level of finance, trickery and chicanery was rife. Property owners inflated prices, hid structural defects, paid off inspectors and politicians and ran off with thousands.  When the buildings sold collapsed or rotted, they were long gone. 

Scamming was in Alvin Bard's blood.  Mack Peters, the snake oil salesman who had made thousands in Ohio alone before the revenuers caught him in a silo in Chillicothe was his hero.  Conning, scamming, fraud, and snake oil sales had always been a booming business.  The products might have changed but the principle remained the same - a sucker is indeed born every minute. 

Before turning to cyber-fraud he worked for Bear Stearns before they were shut down by the SEC.  Alvin had been the designer of the most sophisticated, intricate, devilishly complex and therefore impossible to trace financial instruments ever. 

Alvin was a natural.  As a kid before the days of social media, electronic, cybernetic revolution, he loved the con.  He used the upstairs phone to call his father's friend, imitate a mafia boss from New Haven, and ask for 'Patsy'; or solicit donations for the homeless from a wealthy neighbor, posing, using a well-practiced patrician accent as the Director of Christian Charity United; or let the neighbor with the barking dog know that Fido's days were numbered. 

After Wall Street Alvin could have continued as a financial investment consultant. Jeffrey Skilling, convicted of Enron investor fraud, operated a legitimate consulting business from his jail cell, secured millions in offshore accounts, and when finally released from prison was hired as a consultant for those many Wall Street firms who narrowly escaped prosecution and who needed to jump start the alternate financial universe. 

 

Alvin had made millions, all as protected and secured as Skilling's, and so money was not the object of his 'retirement'.  He wanted the thrill of the chase - a popular hero like Billings Callum, Bonnie and Clyde or Junior Johnson and the white lightning North Carolina moonshiners. The days of creative financial instruments and Bernie Madoff's ingenious Ponzi schemes were over and done with. A new age had arrived, an electronic, cybernetic, AI world of sophisticated, untraceable scams. 

Rudy Kurniawan was a young Indonesian wine fraudster, and before he was caught he had bilked millions out of credulous, arrogantly presumptuous connoisseurs.  He bought surplus French wine, bottled, corked, and labeled it as the most sought-after French vintages, convinced investors that there was no top to the fine wine market, and made a fortune. 

The 'connoisseurs' never drank the wine but traded it as a commodity, so the fake wine passed from hand to hand without ever being opened.  Every aspect of the scam had been carefully planned and executed - he learned how to 'age' labels and corks, and find bottles that defied provenance - all this helped by buyers who had been snookered by Rudy's exquisite palate and business acumen. 

Alvin knew that even such marvelously ingenious schemes were old hat.  The New Age had had no 'things', no physical traces, no safe deposit boxes, nothing of the kind. It was all in the cloud, in the rich air of cyberspace, subject only to the laws of quantum physics where velocity and position were relative and the bosons of the universe went circling and colliding leaving nary a trace. 

The Nigerians had started the whole enterprise.  Tens, hundreds of thousands of appeals went out at the click of a mouse and if only a fraction of one percent bore fruit, the Nigerian scammer would be set up for life.  After the genie was out of the bottle and the whole scamming landscape had quickly evolved into a barely recognizable, untraceable universe, there was no limit to the money that could be made. 

In the early pre-AI period of big data, researchers found out that if you crowdsourced a problem, that is open-sourced it and bypassed experts, the results were not only equivalent to what a stable of professionals could achieve but went far beyond.   When AI arrived and the cyber universe became even more vastly unimaginable and subject to equations that only a handful of scientists understood, scamming became the wizardry of the ages; and Alvin wanted to be the first trillionaire. 

P.T. Barnum made a fortune off the credulous and the gullible, and the old adage 'You can fool most of the people most of the time' or some permutation thereof was still universally true; so there was no stopping the new generation of scammers. 

'Let the buyer beware' was the meme of the times, and beware the consumer certainly had to be in an environment of endemic corruption, fraud, and larceny.  It was a free-for-all where if you were canny and deftly underhanded, you could become wealthy. Government watchdog agencies have made such chicanery a bit more difficult, but they have simply raised the bar.  It takes more than a silver tongue to fool millions. 

There were occasional throwbacks.  Somali immigrants bilked the state of Minnesota and the city of Minneapolis out of millions simply by creating shells - fake Learning Centers for pre-school children with not one enrollee nor one legitimate teacher.  It was all smoke and mirrors and the state and municipal government bought the scheme hook, line, and sinker.  Diversity ruled, and who was to doubt the integrity of black African refugees from one of the world's most pestilential places?

Alvin had no interest in such schemes.  They amounted to chicken feed compared to major cyber fraud. Both were based on the assumption of credibility, the complicity of buyer and seller and the complex almost indecipherable networks underlying the schemes, but one made immeasurable profits while the other bought a few Mercedes. 

The die was cast, and Alvin Bard launched himself into the heady world of fraud-in-the-cloud. He had gotten a late start - high tech never sits still and the few years that had passed since Madoff, Skilling, and the Nigerians were filled with accelerating means to fraudulent ends.  With every new remarkable innovation in cyber technology AI and virtual reality - innovations bound to help the blind see and the deaf hear among other things - someone was figuring out how to harness this explosive new technology to bilk, scam, fool and con. 

Alvin understood consumer dynamics, American culture, and the fundamentals of AI, cybersecurity, the ins and outs of both and most importantly how not to get caught.  Below board entrepreneurs had always outfoxed the revenuers, stayed one step ahead; and now, no matter how many resources were invested in public and private security, scammers always found a loophole.

The inner workings of the cyber-fraud that made him billions were never deciphered for Alvin was no longer around to to the decoding.  He had disappeared from the face of the earth and was reported to be living in as far flung places as Ndjamena or Port Moresby.  What was there to spend his billions on in these godforsaken places? Nothing, but that was not the point.  The thrill of the chase, victory under the noses of the best and the brightest, suckers taken for a ride without even knowing it.  

America, what a great country!