'Easier Than Pirating Container Ships ', Said Abdi - How Somalis Conned The Entire State Of Minnesota

Mohammed Farah had been pirating Western shipping for years.  He learned how to maneuver his country craft outfitted with twin Mercury Marine 350 HP, fire AK-12s, the most powerful assault rifle on the market, outrun cargo ships, and climb aboard. 

He had begun as an apprentice to his uncle Abdi who had been a member of the LS-22 militia, the most powerful in Mogadishu, who had with his brothers run a profitable drug running operation through Djibouti, Egypt and on to Europe, but who turned to offshore pirating when the Liberian flag European vessels headed from Oman to Mombasa increased their traffic and, hewing to international law, remained unarmed. 

Furthermore, the navies of the United States and the European Community had very restrictive rules of engagement, and not anxious to get into naval military action, left it to insurance companies to underwrite the increasing risk.  While this was a tacit agreement to let Somali piracy continue unchecked, it was considered a win-win situation for all concerned. 

'Like sitting ducks', said Uncle Abdi to the young Farah as he took him out on his first engagement in the Indian Ocean off the Somali coast.  'Like shooting fish in a barrel' he went on, showing off the English he learned while living in the United States in the large Somali community of Minneapolis. 

Farah and Abdi had the Maersk Athena in their sights, a container ship loaded with everything from computers to frozen foods, electronics, clothing, and machinery.  This particular ship was carrying a load of rare earth minerals mined in East Africa, stolen by Hutu gangs in eastern Congo, and transshipped to Oman and on to Mombasa, the African mainland and there to Western Europe - a circuitous route, but given the high value of the cargo, the extra mileage and diversions were worth the effort and the risk. 

The twin Mercuries were almost too much for the simple Somali boat, but with the well-known ingenuity of the African villager, and with counter-weights and balances, ballast, and a careful seating of the crew, the craft could easily overtake even the fastest container ship. 

The roar of the engines was almost too much for the young Farah and more than once he was almost pitched over the side, but he held his ground as the boat approached the Athena.  Once they got within range, Uncle Abdi and his crew began firing their weapons, more as an intimidating warning to the captain rather than with any damage or injury to the ship's crew.  They were well-armed and serious, the clatter of bullets on the foredeck announced, and following protocol, the Athena slowed and allowed the pirates to board. 

The ship was rerouted to Mogadishu where Farah, Abdi, and their mates were welcomed as conquering heroes with the prize ship of the Maersk fleet in their control.  Goats were roasted on the beach, women danced, children ran around the bonfires, and praises were given to Allah. 

This idyll was to be short-lived, however, for the rules of engagement were modified for both commercial shipping and naval warships. Israeli paramilitary forces were recruited and hired to provide security on board all Maersk shipping in the Indian Ocean off the Somali coast, and European and American warships were given orders to patrol the waters and take decisive action if an act of piracy was occurring. 

'It was a good ride', said Abdi as he decided to 'hang up his spurs' and find other employment. Now, Somalis, having lived so long in a lawless, ungovernable country with few chances for legitimate enterprise, had learned and honed every trick in the book.  They had gone to Lagos to learn the art of credit card fraud, were tutored in Ponzi schemes, high-finance shell games, and the art of the scam in cities like Kinshasa and Nairobi and in the underworld of Paris and London. 

Stealing, conning, scamming, fraud, and electronic thievery became part of the Somali ethos.  There were no moral questions asked because the country had for so long been without any moral or ethical code, that the 'anything goes' philosophy was the only one in the canon. 

So it was natural that the Somali community in Minneapolis found ways and means to take municipal and state governments for a ride. The stage was set by a series of liberal governments at both municipal and state level which favored 'inclusivity' and 'diversity', and welcomed foreign newcomers to give spice and color to the largely Scandinavian heritage residents of the state. Understanding the impoverished life that Somali immigrants had in their mother country, Minnesota was particularly eager to give immigrants, legal and undocumented, a helping hand. 

As a result they handed out money to false front Somali daycare centers without a second look.  All it took was a correct submission of paperwork including addresses, business plans, and officers, and millions were allocated.  Under the assumption that investigation into the actual operation of these daycare centers might be considered racist and hostile, those few state employees who were concerned about the unsupervised flow of millions were told to back off. 

When Abdi and his nephew arrived in Minneapolis and were briefed on the possibilities of making tens of millions of dollars for nothing - a no risk, all reward opportunity - they jumped at the chance. Scamming the white fools in the statehouse and city hall would be a pleasure. 

When they found that the government was willing to grant millions of dollars a year for one false front, empty enterprise, they doubled and tripled the scam. Investigative reporters found 5-10 registered daycare centers at one location, nothing but a nameplate here and there, and as they said, 'Not one child's footprints in the snow'. 

Seeing an almost limitless opportunity, Farah and Abdi expanded their operation to so-called 'transportation centers', services for the aged and infirm providing transport to and from medical appointments and public transportation.  Since no one in government was looking, Farah and Abdi never bothered to buy any vehicles, cooked the books to show fictitious rides, and pocketed the money. 

A Lamborghini Countach was Abdi's first purchase and an Aventador for his nephew was second.  To avoid IRS and the SEC from questioning these purchases, Abdi used laundered money cashier's checks, a reasonable amount of cash, and high-value equities as security.  A few phone calls, and both Somalis had the rides they had always wanted. 

'There's a sucker born every minute', said the American circus entrepreneur and impresario, P.T. Barnum but there were never more than in the state of Minnesota.  The level of blatant ignorance, total naïveté, and unimaginable credulousness was something that even Barnum would have marveled at.  State and municipal officials, so besotted by the progressive woke agenda, the blind obeisance to people of color, the brainless assumption that immigrants only brought the wealth of diversity and the enterprise of hope, could do no right. For the Somalis it was like stealing candy from a baby.  

Of course it take two to tango and without the entrepreneurial genius of the Somalis, the largesse of the State of Minnesota would have been wasted in incidental programs; but as it was, the two danced beautifully together, and billions of dollars of taxpayer money was bilked by the canny Somalis. 

Thanks to the same viral woke infection that allowed such a massive fraud in the state, it wasn't hard for Farah and Abdi to get American citizenship.  Fast track approvals were given to the most needy, and the State of Minnesota guaranteed the neediness of all Somalis who had escaped hell on earth. 

With an equally canny understanding of how to finagle banking laws, Abdi managed to secure his millions in offshore accounts.  His Aruba holdings alone were valued at over $100 million. Just as he got out of pirating just in time, so was he able to stay one step ahead of the law in the childcare Minnesota fraud. 

Didn't he miss Somali, he was often asked; but his reply was simple.  'I love Somalia, but I love America more'. 

Political Prisoner - Trapped In The Short, Unhappy Life Of Doing Good

Bob Muzelle looked out the bay window of his modest suburban home and over the small backyard - the old, rusting swing set, the untended rose garden, the bird feeder, and the rotting maple. 

It was not much, he admitted, but then again the fight for social justice pays no immediate dividends nor any compensation for hard work, long hours, and parsimony.  It is a fight that must be fought, no matter the consequences, the hardships, the deprivations.  It was an existential cause that had to be recognized. 

Bob didn't consider himself special - it was his duty, after all, as it was for anyone who saw the truth.  The warming climate, the persistent discrimination against oppressed minorities, rapacious capitalism, the arrogant trampling on civil rights, and the bullying foreign policy - all would not go away unless a concerted effort was mounted. 

He smiled as a cardinal flew to the birdfeeder, almost tipping it over as he pecked at the seeds, spilling more than he ate, a fine feast for the squirrels who would soon gather below.  Bob had worked hard to find and install a feeder that was squirrel-proof, but was happy that incidentally they got fed.  After all, why should he discriminate?  

Born and raised a Methodist - the Biblical injunctions of which he, no matter how ingrained his latter day secularism might be, could never fully forget. God notices the death of a sparrow, he remembered. 

 

Bob was now in his advancing years, well beyond most men's pull date, still in his traces pulling a heavy load.  Decades of social justice could not simply be packed away, shelved, and forgotten.  There was such a thing as moral inertia.  Once you started on a career of doing good, it picked up steam and was hard to stop.  While others retired to Florida, Bob tirelessly spoke, wrote, and acted in the name of progress. 

The N6 was filled as usual with young women on their way downtown, many to work for the new administration, others simply making their way and hoping for a break.  Washington was no different from Hollywood or New York where opportunity was everywhere but hard to grasp and harder still to hold on to. 

Bob smiled, wished them well, and as he did every morning allowed himself a bit of fantasy, what it would be like to be loved by one of these sweet young things, taken care of, admired, shown off.  What he wouldn't give to be years younger, to lean over the aisle, to join them, squire them...And there his daydreams turned to the inevitable luxury of imagining himself in bed with the most beautiful. 

The decades of good works were not without their limitations.  The progressive crowd had always been unpleasant and unkempt.  Since it was bourgeois to spend time or money on something as superficial as one's looks, by and by a certain ugliness became the physical zeitgeist of the movement. Beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed women such as those on the N6 would be looked at askance, not trusted, outsiders, a marginal, incidental bother. 

Bob smiled and remembered his days at Yale, his bright college years spent without a care in the world. The trips to Smith and Vassar, the long weekends on the Cape.  What was the name of that inn? The one with a white picket fence and a trellis of roses...? or am I imagining it, something I missed? So stock an image, it couldn't have been real. 

By the time the bus reached Farragut Square Bob had shaken off this allotted twenty minutes of reverie and prepared for the day ahead - LaShonda Evans from the Black Women's Caucus, Ahmed al-Zarqawi, Deputy Director of Free Palestine, Bobbie Benson, a former truck driver recently transitioned and looking for work in advocacy. 

Bob's wife was repeatedly asking him if he hadn't finally had enough.  A man who had given his whole life for the uplift of others deserved a rest; but Bob was adamant.  The problems facing the country, especially now that Donald Trump was wreaking havoc could not be ignored.  If there was ever a time for social activism, it was now. 

Yet, while that might be true, there is something about advancing age which makes such things less compelling, less important, less worthwhile; and Bob found himself distracted and uneasy.  

Death? The Great Void? Never had that thought been anything but a distant personal possibility.  Real death resulted from starvation, at the hands of Trump's gestapo, from viral infection, from earthquake, fire, and the rising seas, and had nothing to do with him, certainly; but yet there it was, hard to shake, impossible to come to grips with. 

'You've done all you could', his wife Corinne said to him in a particularly disconsolate moment. 'You have left a legacy', but the words 'Fuck legacy' were almost out of his mouth before he nodded and thanked his wife for her commiseration.  

On his way up the stairs long after Corinne had gone to bed, he said them out loud again and again. 'Fuck legacy, fuck it, fuck it fuck it' and shaky from the effort, held tighter to the bannister. 

The Yale Alumni Magazine was where he had left it on the night table. He picked it up and leafed through to the pages where his classmates wrote in about their lives.  Huntington Cabot was enjoying skiing at Gstaad, 'not bad for a man of my age', he added, 'but more suited to my grandchildren'.  

'Fuck him', said Bob. 'And fuck his grandchildren', which he immediately regretted saying in an act of contrition. Just because his life of social duty had been too important for Wall Street, a Park Avenue marriage, and homes on St. Bart's and Palm Beach there was no reason to carp about others' good fortune. 

 

At the same time there was no doubting his regret.  His office was no mahogany-appointed boardroom, his suits were not tailored and many, his wife was not exquisite, and he had no mistress, no cinq-a-septs, no affairs. 

LaShonda Evans came bursting into his office unannounced, full of something nasty, some issue about black this or that, racial umbrage, hatred of white people.  Her eyes, already her worst feature - yellowish, protruding, and set as far apart as her face could manage, were as wide as could be.  She chicken-necked a 'Whassup, muthafucka?' which was supposed to pass for congeniality but which Bob hated, and he gripped the arms of his chair waiting for it. 

This was not what he signed up for long ago on the Freedom Rides with Martin and Ralph, the halcyon days of racial integration, side by side with his black brothers and sisters marching across the Pettis bridge singing We Shall Overcome.  This uppity bitch was ruining his day like she always did and he wanted her out and gone, but  he had to sit there patiently while she aired her gripes and demanded action. 

'It's not too late to live a little', Corrine reminded him. 'We do have a bid on thatTampa Bay condo', her hedge against a life leading to the same airless, featureless place they had lived in for so long; and for once Bob paid attention.

The raggedy, ugly women of his social justice years were a fact, his choice, his community, his colleagues; and no matter how much he dreamed of the blonde young things on the N6 they were nothing but reminders of the emotional and sexual penury of his younger years.  'Wasted', he thought; but of course that idea had to be shaken loose or it would bugger him for all of his final days.

It wouldn't have been so bad if Donald Trump had not been in the White House destroying every last one of the pillars of social justice he and his colleagues had worked so hard to erect.  Had he retired during the Biden years when the progressive dream was still vital and very much possible, the condo would have looked very different; but now that the house of cards came falling down and his progressive vision had been erased, he was faced front and center with the fact of a life that had indeed been for naught, wasted, irrelevant when he could have been Huntington Cabot. 

When you end up with nothing to show for your life, where are you? and what are you? A historical cipher at the very least, an emotional pauper at best. 

'The Gulf shrimp at DiCarlo's is to die for', said Corinne, anticipating her first real night out in years and on the beaches of Florida at that. 

Faith And Evangelical Terror - Islam, American True Believers, Idolatry, And Political Excess

 'Muslims are wacko', said Donald Trump, never a man to mince words, always full of hyperbole and wild accusations; but he was, as always, expressing a common belief among many. In the name of Islam, an evangelical religion more so than any other, the most radical groups - al-Qaeda, ISIS, al-Shabab, Boko Haram, and the Houthis among others - have terrorized populations from Western Europe to Mindanao. 

    

They know no temperance, no considered thought; have no reflection, historical understanding, logical exegesis, or simple, basic rules of tolerance.  They believe that God handed the Koran, complete with references to the Pentateuch, Moses, David, and Jesus, outlining proper behavior and making clear His intention to wipe the slate clean, eliminate all apostasy and infidelity from the earth, and create a brave new world of true belief. 

The book, written in Arabic and given to an Arabian peasant who could neither read nor write but who, upon opening the book became literate, infused with the true word of God, and filled with a missionary ambition to spread it worldwide. He raised an army and set off on a bloody crusade across north Africa and up through the Middle East, and in less than a hundred years had brutalized, murdered, and tortured his way to Islamic hegemony. 

Thanks to Charlemagne, Frankish armies defeated the Saracens at Roncesvalles, and Mohammed's military assault on Europe was halted.  To this day France considers itself 'the eldest daughter of the Church' for having saved the continent from barbarism. 

The religion is simple, without the complexity of Christianity.  There are no mysteries, no philosophical conundrums, no mythical underpinnings, no legacy of high intellectual and academic thought. Islam has no Augustine, Aquinas, or Athanasius because it doesn't rely on sophistication. Submission to the will of Allah, conviction that Islam is the world's only true religion, and promise to defeat and destroy the infidel is all that is required. 

First appealing to the ignorant masses of the deserts of the Middle East - nomads, camel drivers, raiders, and bandits, Muslim evangelists soon discovered that by joining politics and faith, the vision of a worldwide unified faith and a political caliphate was possible.  Thanks to its heady mix of true belief nd political liberation, Islam spread to developmentally backward regions beyond the Middle East. 

 

To this day Muslims are evangelical, insular, rabid, and intolerant.  Fueled with the belief that Allah, the Koran, and Islam are indisputable, true, right, and permanent, they have continued to defy secularism and democratic societies.  The law of God supersedes all, they say, and have no patience with or respect for other laws. 

Now a case can be made that modern American progressivism is no different from radical Islam. Its adherents are convinced that theirs is the only way, that all else is apostasy, and that those who deny its fundamental, absolute truths must be eliminated. 

Progressivism has its Koran - a canon of reformist beliefs - and legions of evangelical crusaders for whom the end of history, a righteous secular caliphate, is more important than the means.  Anything goes in progressives' pursuit of their vision of Utopia. Antifa militias, armed and dangerous, are the frontal edge, the first phalanxes of true believers to confront the infidel.  The current violent attacks on federal officials deployed within a Constitutional framework to address issues of crime and illegal immigration, is but one example of this faith-based brutality. 

The reflexive hatred of the infidel and the desire to eliminate the scourge of conservatism, and to establish a unified, centric, perfect world of communal and collective harmony is no different than radical Islam's intentions. 

Muslims believe that Mohammed is God's last prophet, i.e. the end of religious evolution, disparity, and disagreement.  Islam by extension is the world's last religion, and God's will must be obeyed.  Until the last days of judgement and the fiery holocaust of Armageddon, Muslims are bound to spread the world of true belief. 

Progressives believe no differently.  Anything but this communal, collective, socially-inclusive world is impossible.  The ethos of individualism, free enterprise, opportunity, competition, and Darwinian progress is simply wrong and unacceptable - absolutely, totally, irrefutably wrong, and as such must be destroyed. 

In order for such a caliphate to be realized, not only can there be no dissent within the Muslim community, but that community itself must be at the heart of revolutionary conquest.  There must be an invincible solidarity, an unbreakable common bond of true belief, an irreproachable unity. 

American progressives value community like no other.  Each jamboree on the National Mall, heady protests for transgenderism, abortion, the black man, or the dismantling of private sector, predatory interests is an expression of good feeling, conviction, and solidarity.  

All progressive causes are welcomed in the big revival tent.  All fighters for climate change reversal, unrestricted abortion, socialism, the gender spectrum, open borders, and the distribution of wealth among other causes are welcome.  The common denominator is capitalism - all the ills of America are a result of the most aggressive, oppressive, manipulative, and exploitive economic system ever developed.  Destroy capitalism and replace it with socialism, and America will be well on its way to a progressive idyll. 

'Intellectual idolatry' was how Theodore Mackay, a leading political scientist, described the American scene - a conviction that one's political theories are no less than divine, received wisdom.  Progressivism and Islam are no different, he went on, in their absolute belief in an anointed mission; and given the holiness of that mission, any and all means to achieve its ends are legitimate expressions of purpose. 

The hatred for Donald Trump comes as no surprise.  Not only was a Republican elected to the White House despite the progressive campaign run against him, but he is dismantling each and every program, policy, and political initiative instituted by the opposition. It is not the usual changing of the guard, moving the needle a little to the left or right; but a counter-revolutionary putsch.  At this rate not only will no vestiges of progressivism remain, but the entire country will be under a malevolent dictatorship of the radical Right. Venomous hatred is par for the course. 

While conservatism has its core political beliefs its philosophy is one of Epictetus and the Stoics, a deterministic nihilism that supposes nothing but change and nothing of absolute value.  There is, nor has there ever been a Stoic evangelist. 

It is only progressives who have been infected with true belief, a viral epidemic, a personal, unavoidable nastiness that is the result of a kind of native intolerance.  The Biden years were awful - hectoring, badgering, insulting affairs all over confected, impossibly irrelevant and downright silly propositions taken as articles of faith. 

Thank God they're in the rearview mirror, and historical perspective, Machiavellian insights, and Nietzschean have replaced them. 

The Lolita Of Mayberry Hill - The Tale Of A Sexually Irresistible Girl Who Changed The Ethos Of A Godfearing Town

It was neither nature nor nurture that produced the likes of Angela Murphy, concluded her parents, good Catholics from South Philadelphia, church-goers, and respected members of the Irish-American community. 

'Never touched drop, he didn't, God bless him, Michael Murphy, nor his good wife Margaret who worked her fingers to the bone, taking in washing and ironing to help feed her five little ones with one more on the way'. 

The Michael Murphys, Angela's grandparents had come over from Ireland after the potato famine, they were sure after to tell everyone, not the bog Irish, the shanty Irish, the lace curtain Irish Americans were quick to say, not knowing how tough a life it was just to keep bread on the table, sure it was better than Mayo and the rain and fog chilling body and soul and the bloody bleating of sheep and goats day and night, but still by the love of God it was hard to see No Irish Need Apply signs everywhere. 

They did what they could, stayed put in their neighborhood, stayed away from the pub, prayed to Jesus every morning and every night, and made their way in their new country. 

Angela's father, Fearghal, was the oldest of the Murphy boys and the most responsible, for taking care of his four brothers and sisters it was that made a man of him said Father O'Reilly presiding over his marriage to Maureen O'Connell, as lovely a lass as you could find anywhere up and down the Main Line, and when they had a child, Angela, she was baptized in the same baptismal fount as her parents, her aunts, and uncles. 

'May God bless little Angela', the priest said kindly, 'God's own little angel and may He watch over her as she becomes a woman', and with that, loved and blessed, Angela entered the world. 

Yet something had gone wrong in God's plan for the little girl, for despite her chubby, rosy little cheeks, hers soft, flaxen hair, and bright blue eyes, Angela was not the angel everyone had expected.  She was a stubborn, ornery, nasty child, possessed by Devil, her mother said in moments of despair, not one of us said her father pointing to great Uncle Sean who had been the shame of the family.  

Sean had been a drunken lout, a blasphemer, a wife-beater, and child abuser.  Jailed a hundred times by the peelers for drunk and disorderly, imprisoned twice for more serious crimes, Sean Murphy was a bad apple, it was as simple as that, and Fearghal, Angela's father assumed the same about his daughter. 

'Don't give up on her, Fearghal Murphy', his wife said to him after he locked the little girl in her room after one of her volcanic fits, ripping pages out of picture books, standing there like a defiant queen urinating on the floor, splashing in it like a rain puddle and running away from her red-faced father as fast as she could. 

The nuns wanted nothing to do with her and insisted to Father O'Reilly that they would not have her in their catechism classes.  'No amount of penance, Father, can redeem that little devil', they said; but the priest felt it was his ordained duty to keep the girl within the Church and the Redeemer's blessed arms. 

Yet even he blanched when one day in the rectory where he had invited the now maturing young girl, she smiled at the priest, adjusted the folds and creases of his chasuble, and took his hand.

'Stop it, you little devil', the priest shouted and shoved her rudely out the rectory door.  'God help us all'; but the good father was immediately shameful and contrite.  How could he have treated such a young, innocent soul in such a manner?  Where was his divine calling when it was needed?

In fact this was the first time that the priest had been treated like a man, not a clerical cipher, and he worried more about his soul than that of Angela Murphy.  Vile thoughts ran through his head just as troubling but intensely pleasurable feelings ran through him as the girl touched him ever so lightly but ever so meaningfully. 

'I will set her straight', the priest said to himself, and invited the girl back to the rectory where he sat her down and began to lecture her on sexual propriety, the sanctity of marriage, and the promise of heaven to those who waited; but his heart was not in it, and he couldn't help looking at the young girl's legs, daintily but provocatively crossed, bare beneath her short, plaid school skirt.  She moved them ever so slightly, but enough to turn the priest entirely from thoughts of Jesus Christ to unholy congress with the sweet young thing sitting opposite. 

It wasn't long before Father O'Reilly gave in to his desires, and crossing every moral, legal, and divine line there was, entered into a sexual affair with young Angela Murphy, a passionate, epiphanic one - one of God's mysteries. Was populating the earth such a spiritual affair that He created a desire, half of which would have done the trick?  Was this part of his test of faith? A latter day test of Job? And why could he not free himself from what would inevitably and consequentially turn to disaster?

The desire of the priest was such that he took many risks, and of course one afternoon was caught in flagrante delicto by none other than Bridey O'Hara, old biddy, sour spinster praying the Stations of the Cross every Saturday before confession, a dry, uninteresting affair that took up a good fifteen minutes with nothing but veniality as the pews filled outside the confessional. 

 

Needless to say, the priest was outed, chastised, defrocked, and sent packing.  The Church of the Resurrection had to be once and for all cleansed of the evil that had grown within it.

Nothing was heard after Father O'Reilly's dismissal, and reports had him in the Idaho panhandle and Columbus, Mississippi, but there had been no sightings of him and it was doubtful there would be as he certainly folded himself into the fabric of America. 

Now, the mores of the town and America in general being what they were, it was assumed that Angela Murphy had been sexually abused, and as such was granted victimhood.  'The poor girl...that sweet innocent thing...that prayerful angel...' repeated the townspeople of Mayberry Hill; but the men of the town knew differently.  They knew a nymphet when they saw one, referring to Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita - preternaturally sexy, desirous, fully mature women at an early age; and Angela was one.  

Most of them, wary of the opprobrium let alone the legal consequences of advances to this desirable, infinitely approachable girl, stayed away from her; but some, breathing in the same irresistible pheromones as the departed Father O'Reilly had, succumbed, gave in to temptation, were in seventh heaven for a month or two and then suffered the same fate as the priest.  

While she was still in her adolescent years, she flew under the radar.  She was always assumed to be the victim, not the temptress; but as she grew older, the calculus had changed, sex was a mutual affair, a quid pro quo arrangement at worst, and a delightful fugue at best. 

Even in this modern day where feminism had finally gotten rid of the notion of a girl's reputation - that is serial sexuality was a matter of choice not opprobrium - there was still some residual suspicion about a woman free and easy with her sexual favors; but Angela by this time had learned how to negotiate psycho-social waters.  Her desirability was in no way diminished by her libertine ways.  In fact men were even more drawn to her to find out if the magic was real. 

There was indeed magic in the air when Angela walked into a room. Heads turned, wives were ignored, and all sense of propriety was replaced by one of urgency.

Now, it should be explained that Mayberry Hill, a small town in rural New Hampshire where Angela now lived, was a very proper place, hewn from old New England stock, educated in Puritan ways, and heir more to Cotton Mather than to entrepreneurs.  Not that they harbored any of the feelings of their Salem ancestors who burned witches at the stake in a fiery resentment of female sexuality.  No, although the residents of the town might think suspiciously about female duplicity and sexual forwardness they were far from the misogyny of Salem. 

 

Women were respected in Mayberry Hill, good wives and mothers, faithful to God and their husbands, never a cause of concern, in their place willingly and dutiful members of the community. 

Angela changed all that.  It was as though a sexual emissary had been sent by forces beyond the town's comprehension to reorder sexual priorities, to restore sexual congress as the inalienable, irrefutable be-all and end-all of Man's short life. 

What Nabokov missed in his story was that some nymphets never lose their preternatural sexual allure.  His Lolita in the final scenes of the book is a pregnant, barefoot housewife; but this Lolita, Angela Murphy, never lost that sexual divinity that defines very few.  The years only added to her allure, her sexual savvy, her confidence, and her Nietzschean way of riding above the herd. 

The small town was surprisingly but inevitably changed by Angela Murphy.  The annals of history are filled with stories of individuals who made a difference, whose intelligence, insight, or creativity changed the way others thought about life or acted within it.  Although Angela would never go down in history, she was nonetheless no less influential.  In her own way she rid the town of the last vestiges of old-fashioned sexual propriety, Salem, the church, and Godfearing itself.  She was the doyenne of a new republican era - nothing political but inestimably social.  She was quite something. 

'Democratic Discipline', A Brief History Of America's Mid-21st Century Military Rule And Return To Civility

The President looked out the portico window of the White House and admired the military precision of the phalanx of tanks arrayed along Pennsylvania Avenue.  This parade was to be the jubilant celebration of ten years of military rule, a Pax Romana in America, a decade of civility, order, and justice. 

The President smiled, proud of this achievement, and happy to see the fulfillment of a dream - a strong, internationally respected nation, nationally secure, a unified, cohesive society. 

His predecessors had only sat by as the nation fumbled and foundered its way through years of neo-Socialism, 'woke' social reform, and fairytale utopianism, initiating senseless programs designed with this febrile idealism in mind - radical environmentalism, racial parity, neutering of private enterprise, the decommissioning of military offensive weaponry, and a faux compassionate foreign policy. 

The second Trump Administration rolled back most of these programs and set the tone for a more disciplined, muscular governance; but much damage had been done.  The country had been weakened from within, and the Machiavellian powers of the world had taken advantage of it.  Years of political uncertainty, internal chaos, and weakened institutions followed until now, decades later, the United States had regained control over both national and international interests. 

The former British Prime Minister, historian, and political seer Winston Churchill had once said that democracy was the worst form of government except for all the rest, and that notion was retained as gospel for decades by the United States. The fallacy began to show as first quarter of the Twenty-First Century was one of civil disobedience, permissiveness, a corrosive and innately self-destructive culture of 'identity', and the limitless, unaccountable government largess.

Many in Washington and beyond wondered if, despite Churchill, this was the death throe of democracy; whether it had run its course, whether Alexander Hamilton had been right after all, and that the governed were no more than a fevered mob. In those days, Machiavellian powers - Russia and China, profoundly and militantly anti-democratic and recalling the halcyon days of empire - were ascendant, and despite the best efforts of President Trump, took more convincing control of international affairs. 

It was not until successive conservative governments took power in the United States, that the political complexion of the country began to change.  The Trump years were only a foreshadowing of what was to become a militantly nationalistic party, formed as an inspiration of the legacy of Donald Trump and former presidents Putin and Xi, but far more overreaching, dominant, and aggressive. 

Whereas the Trump Administration had used federal military and paramilitary forces to secure America's borders and return the country to one of internal security, law, and conditional rights, successive administrations extended not only the presence of these forces but promoted an ethos of military justice.  So much so that the presence of military personnel in American cities became accepted, acceptable, and normal.  Gangs of illegal immigrants had been completely eliminated, the ghettos had been policed with limitless authority and crime had been reduced almost to zero. 

The days of pimps, ho's, drug deals, and gang violence were over.  The inner city was no longer the metaphor for incivility, crime, and violence.  While the populations of these communities did not mature as many hoped to be as productive and well-integrated as white and Asian ones - removing the endemic dysfunction of the ghetto, a product of both nature and nurture was impossible - they were at least assimilated into the mainstream and caused no trouble. 

It was only with the current administration, now in power for ten years, that final, complete, and universal military rule was confirmed, in place, and irreversible.  Finally, and at long last, American presidents and official Washington, realized how right former El Salvadoran President Bukele had been when he used extrajudicial means to round up, arrest, and incarcerate all MS-13 Mara Salvatrucha gang members and return the country to its people.  

The civil rights of murderers, rapists, drug dealers, and violently anti-social elements were non-existent, he said, while the right of the millions of proper, morally, respectful citizens to live without fear were. 

Deng Xiao Ping, former Chinese Premier and the first to introduce radical reforms to correct those of the preceding, destructive Maoist regime, had been no different. His goal was to raise hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty, and he would tolerate no debate, interference, or insurrection while doing so. Prosperity was a civil right, not disobedience. 

 

It was not easy for America to secure this Pax Romana.  In the early days of military rule before national terrorist groups realized that the federal government meant business and that the days of moral supposition were over, there were clashes on the streets of America's cities; but military forces, now with the authority to quell any and all disturbances with the full right and might with with which they were disposed, soon restored and maintained law and order. 

Americans soon got over the umbrage and perceived insults defined by the Left and found that living with unlocked doors in an atmosphere of civility and moral community was what they had always wanted. Democracy, or rather the governance that was supposed to pass for it, was a thing of the past, a piece of the historical record.  Camouflage, automatic rifles, and armored personnel carriers became part of the zeitgeist, unremarkable and almost unnoticed. 

At the same time, America projected this unbending principle of disciplined rule to the rest of the world, and finally there was parity among the superpowers, each respecting the others' territorial rights and need for self-interested foreign policies without confrontation and military threat.  The world was ruled by a powerful triumvirate - America, Russia, and China - and it prospered.  

Poor nations were subsumed within this all-encompassing arc, paid their dues and managed.  Given years of misrule, corruption, and tribal primitivism, Africa only stumbled along, but unarmed, poorly organized, and undisciplined, posed no threat. 

There were naysayers of course, small cabals which could never accept the conditions necessary for peace and harmony; but each time they ventured in the streets, they were summarily arrested, incarcerated, and forgotten. The days of inchoate rebellion, such as the anti- ICE (federal forces for immigration control) riots of 2025 had ceased years ago, and while public, peaceful expression was tolerated, it could never take physical form. 

The private sector was delighted at this new militant federal control.  Along with military rule came other traditionally conservative polices - low taxation, few regulations, no bothersome lawsuits over diversity and inclusivity issues, and a laissez-faire ethos which allowed for the most free competition since the days of Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan.

 

The days of divisive, contentious, embittered, identity-obsessed society are over and have been for years.  Americans are now free to act according to the principles of the Founding Fathers of the Republic with innovation, ambition, respect, and faith. 

Democracy is still taught in schools, but as the short historical episode it was, not the trenchant political philosophy it had been touted to be. 

A Progressive's Canonical Dilemma - So Much Evil In The World, But How To Pick Where To Be Righteous?

Vicki Chalmers sat on her settee looking out at the cardinals perched on the bare branches of the sycamore tree on her front lawn. Donald Trump had committed yet another crime against humanity and laughed it off as though it were nothing.  Wherever she looked his morally bereft, intellectually corrupt, and politically abhorrent intentions were wreaking havoc on the American body politic and the international community.  

 

He sided with fascist Israel in the extermination of the Palestinian people.  He destroyed Iran's nuclear program designed for peace and provision. Jewish warmongering and Zionist hatred were the only reasons behind the attack; and now that Zionist terrorists are sponsoring and fomenting violent protests in the streets of Iran, he pledges to send missiles to rain hell and destruction on the only country devoted to promote profound religious values and to rid the world of Jewish tyranny. 

He illegally and immorally captured and arrested the duly elected president of Venezuela on phony charges and hauled the man in front of a tampered, corrupt New York court sure to convict him and sentence him to life in a Salvadoran gulag. 

He tramples on the rights of brown and black people immigrating to the United States only to feed their families, to work hard and live responsibly.  His SS storm troopers repeat Kristallnacht day after day, breaking into homes and workplaces in violent pogroms.  ICE, the American Gestapo, is an unholy extension of the arrogance of the President - brutal, incontinent, and murderous. 

The black man, the gay woman, the transgender are on the run, fearful for their lives and certain that they too will be deported or at best interned in the Pine Ridge Indian reservation - the poorest, most remote, most hopeless community in America, there to suffer with their red brothers for life. 

Global warming is accelerating as he opens vast lands to oil and gas exploration, frees private companies to build polluting refineries, lessens restrictions on carbon emissions, encourages power plants to return to coal, assures another Three Mile Island and Chernobyl with his aggressive support of nuclear energy. 

The cardinals in the sycamore pecked at the birdfeeder Vicki had placed on a sturdy branch away from the squirrels, happy as can be finding so much food in the dead of winter.  So simple, Vicki thought. So perfectly attuned to the rhythms of nature without complications, complex choices, conundrums, and moral dilemmas; and here she was in a quandary, immobilized by the choices she faced.  

Harrison Buckner (aka Hermione Buckner) was a transgender professor at the college where Vicki taught.  The administration had overwhelmingly approved his appointment although his academic credentials were sketchy.  Harrison, a woman who had transitioned to male would be an example of the feminine in every man. 

The faculty committee got more than it bargained for.  Harry Buckner went whole hog on the male thing, and transformed her/himself into a swaggering, foulmouthed, crotch-grabbing caricature.  Hermione had been completely fed up with female culture - the bitchiness, the seditious sexual allure, the faux glamour and deceit - and wanted to be the ur-male, the truck driver, the hod carrier, the iron worker, the trainman, the macho stud. He was so successful in his transformation that no one except the faculty committee would have ever guessed that he was a woman. 

Vicki, a friend of the dean, had inside information about the selection process, knew about Harrison, and went out of her way to befriend him.  But the pride she had in the university's welcoming of a person of alternative sexuality disappeared when she invited him out for a drink.  This hawking, farting, chain-smoking bully - transitioned woman though she might be - was disgusting.  Worse, he was the very image of the type of man against whom she and her feminist sisters had fought for years. 

This is what she meant by dilemma - transgenderism was ipso facto good; but its incarnations could be off the charts. Did this mean that transgenderism was not exactly the cure for retrograde heterosexuality that she had thought?  She preferred the other way around - sensitive gay men turned frilly girly girls, all swish and perfume, a caricature to be sure but an innocent, engaging one. 

The same was true for Ahmed bin-Ali, Palestinian, resistance fighter, former Hamas operative invited by the university to expose the student body to the reality of their cause.  He would be the leader of the campus protests to rid Palestine of the Jew.

But bin-Ali was a wife-beating, misogynist, bloody-minded Allah-worshipping zealot whose first goal was to kill the Jew, but second to return women to their God-inspired role of marital whore.  Once Hamas restored Gaza, he would return home to recreate an Iranian-inspired theocracy where women were in burqas, locked safely away in windowless chambers, and did men's bidding when demanded. 

Yes, the Quran had its troubling verses about the inferior, subjugated status of women, and many suras were bloody-minded at best and downright genocidal at worst; but it was the right of brown people to decide what and whom to believe.  In principle, the Palestinian cause, however knotted with inconsistencies, was a righteous one.

However, Vicki could simply not stand this rancid, goat-smelling man whose commitment to the cause might be admirable, but everything else about him stank to high heaven.  If he was what Vicki was protesting for, she wanted no part of it. 

Environmentalism, she thought, could be her place to make a difference.  There would be no tricky sexual dynamics to negotiate, nor transversals, no doubts, no noisy interference.  Man's influence on climate change was a given, and the fight to restore environmental sanity was simple. 

Yet, the environmental crowd was the most ugly, unsightly, ragged bunch she could ever imagine.  These women had found some kind of personal solace in community but had no idea whatsoever what the issue was all about.  They were as bad as the doomsday preachers on Union Square warning of the coming of the end of the world in a fiery Armageddon.  These women did not talk of God's incineration of mankind, but man's ignorant, senseless projection into a burning, overheated world. 

Vicki put on her coat and went outside to fill the birdfeeder.  There on the front lawn was the array of signs posted to incentivize her politically sedentary neighbors. 'Black Lives Matter...Hate Has No Home Here...Democracy Matters...Refugees Are People...' and many more.  In fact there was little room for her petunias, violets, and lilies of the valley she had planted last year. 

This political inclusivity was all well and good, but there were only so many hours in the day, and she had better choose her battles rather than run herself ragged. 

Why not Jose, the leaf-blower, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador she had hired?  Her home was his sanctuary, and she would do anything for him; but his performance was erratic, and attendance desultory.  He mowed without discipline, blew leaves and grass helter-skelter, and was drunk half the time.  Honorable immigrant guest though he might be, he was a low-shelf misery. 

The psychologist Abraham Maslow described the Approach-Approach Syndrome according to which many people faced with two or more desirable choices cannot make up their minds among them.  They are paralyzed by indecision. 

 

Vicki felt trapped in Maslow's syndrome.  She wanted to act, to act responsibly, and to do good, but could not decide which path to take.  The paralysis was made worse by the unpleasant experiences she had had.  In fact she felt herself falling into the other Maslow syndrome - the Avoidance-Avoidance one. All the progressive angles she had explored turned out either distasteful or extremely unpleasant; so it was the perfect storm, trapped as she was within two defining syndromes. 

This was a good thing, mused her one and only conservative friend, a girl she had known in college and despite her solid Republican credentials, maintained a close relationship.  One less progressive hysteric to worry about, said the friend. 

Political paralysis was a blessing in disguise, for once Vicki got over the sleepless nights and daytime nightmares, she found herself edging into a new life.  What began as doodling turned into a hobby, then a pastime, then an avocation.  Her watercolors of trees and flowers were always popular, happy anodynes as they were to the troubled world outside her studio, and soon she forgot her dilemma.  She remained faithful to the canon, and never shied away from professing her progressive faith, but she was no longer obsessed. 

As the years wore on she forgot even that, retired to Florida, and either because of senility or resolution, was a totally untroubled old lady. 

Scams 'R' Us - America's Cons Made Easy Thanks To Billions In Corrupt Government Spending

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. 

'Let the buyer beware' was the meme of the times, and beware he 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. 

Evangelism was another classic American scam.  Itinerant preachers, following in the footsteps of Macintosh Peters and his lot, bilked thousands from naive farmers who filled their revival tents hoping to find Jesus.  These preachers were masters at oratory, drama, and duplicity; and since they were dealing with a product which could never be examined or returned, their job easy. 

'Prayer', shouted Isaiah Jones. 'Prayer is the answer'.  Here he paused, wiped his brow, looked to the' billowing folds of the tent, and went on.  'And Jesus will listen.  He, the magnificent, the forgiving, the loving, and the merciful will come to you only if you ask him.  Get down on your knees...go ahead, get down right now and ask his forgiveness, pray for his intercession, ask him to come down to this very place and save your souls...'

Hundreds of worshipers flocked in the aisles, raising their arms in supplication as they made their way forward to the Reverend Jones.  Some shouted that they had found Jesus, that he had come among them, and that they were saved.  Others simply cried and shouted thanks and welcome.  It was a jamboree, a parade, a marvelous event and when it was over, Jones counted his reward. 

Today is no different, nor why should it be?  Scamming is part of the American ethos, our way of life, the rough edges of our competitive free market.  Con men use the same entrepreneurial energy as the honest businessman, only with subterfuge and underhandedness. 

You've got to hand it to Bernie Madoff who bilked $17 billion out of wealthy investors, many of whom were his Jewish friends, in a Ponzi scheme the likes of which federal investigators had never seen. When he was finally caught, there was no money found at all. 

Madoff orchestrated the largest Ponzi scheme in history, operating it for over 17 years. His firm initially functioned as a legitimate brokerage but later became a front for his fraudulent activities. Madoff promised consistent annual returns of ten-twenty percent regardless of market conditions, which attracted a wide range of investors, including wealthy individuals, hedge funds, and charities.

Madoff claimed to use a 'split-strike' conversion strategy to generate steady returns.  However this was largely a facade.  In reality he was not making the trades he reported.  Instead he used the money from new investors to pay returns to existing investors - the classic Ponzi operation. 

To maintain an illusion of a successful investment operation, Madoff instructed his employees to create fake trading records and account statements.  These documents suggested that his firm was engaged in extensive trading activities when this was not the case at all. 

There is one inalterable rule of corruption - the more government spends on infrastructure and social programs, the more that will be siphoned off.  Before any completion of roads and bridges or before any brick in child welfare centers has been laid, contractors, municipal employees, program managers have taken their cut. 

The city council, Office Of Public Works, of major metropolitan city, authorized a $725 million contract to rebuilt perfectly good sidewalks in certain residential areas of the city.  These sidewalks were torn up and replaced with new ones of no better quality, and both contractor and city officials.  They followed it up with a Make Our Neighborhoods Safe program to tear up the city's alleys - the crisscrossing back ways that had characterized the residential neighborhoods since they were built - and made millions in kickbacks from it. 

The fraud recently discovered in Minnesota where Somali organizations took millions in federal COVID-era monies earmarked for childcare centers, and sent it back to Mogadishu.  The Biden Administration, so ineptly and venally interested in showing its sensitive response to the epidemic, poured non-accountable millions into municipal coffers monthly.  There was no oversight, no well-established record-keeping procedures.  All was done as a matter of faith; and only now is the extent of the fraud being unearthed. 

 

The Justice Department, waking up to the fact that if this happened in Minnesota, it probably happened in other states as well and has begun investigations in California which was a recipient of some of the largest federal grants. 

Now, every scam has a scammer and a scammee - it takes two to tango, and the network of corruption starts with an administration which is only looking for political returns and cares little for accountability. It only mattered that Joe Biden looked presidential and caring, treating his electoral base to millions in walkin' around money.  Such administered largesse is by nature corrupt, facilitating corruption on the other end. 

Washington DC Mayor Marion Barry was renowned for his municipal largesse - billions of white taxpayer money poured into the all-black wards of the city in return for their votes.  'Get over it', he told the voters of wealthy, white Ward 3 after he won an election hands down despite zero votes from it. 

Government is the only agency of a free market system which is never held financially accountable for its actions.   Billions go out the door and little is ever shown for it.  Worse, nothing by way of performance is asked.  If the principle of the thing was good, no questions about results need to be asked.  They are assumed. 

Is America a more corrupt country than others? Probably not although few countries have such an inbred, native tendency to scam, con, and trick.  What started in the Wild West, matured in the East, went up and down the socio-economic scale, and became endemic. 

What next?  The Trump Justice Department is sure to find evidence of massive fraud wherever it looks, good news for Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections this year (2026); but it took federal agencies seventeen years before they discovered Bernie Madoff's fraud - scammers are not stupid - so we'll have to wait and see. 

The lesson will never be learned - snake oil salesmen are integral parts of the American fabric, so even if you get rid of them, some other, far more ingenious cons will take their place. 

Head In The Sand Idolatry - Why Faith Always Trumps Reason In The True Believer, The Curse Of Social Justice

Vicki Chalmers would never describe herself as a true believer.  She was old enough to remember the book of the same name by Eric Hoffer in 1951 - a damning criticism of political mass hysteria generated by increasing numbers of adherents to a cause who believe that it undeniably right.  The true believer was described as a credulous, needy, emotionally desperate person for whom belonging and community approbation are his lifeblood.  

 

No amount of reason, objective inquiry, factual conclusion, or rational judgment can move the true believer off the mark, for to do so would be to rob him of his identity, self-esteem, and credibility.  Belief is the be-all and end-all of the true believer. 

As much as Vicki protested, the label fit her to a tee. She was a subscriber to the liberal canon without reservation.  She was in concert with progressives on the black man, the climate, immigration, sexuality, capitalism, and foreign affairs.  It didn't take more than a headline to send her to the barricades. 

She was so insular in her thinking that she refused to consider the opposition's arguments which, ipso facto were wrong.  Liberalism, nurtured over the years of a hermetically-lived experience, was the perfect solution for the world's problems; and conservative was the diametric opposite, the source of inhumanity, prejudice, and injustice. 

Vicki also resented the 'knee-jerk liberal' label. While it was true that she reacted quickly and consistently to liberal claims, this did not mean that she did not consider the alternatives; and while it was true that she dismissed these options out of hand, that did not mean that there was no modicum of reason in her conclusions. 

Yet up and down the line she showed nothing but a rock-ribbed inflexibility that denied reason.   The climate was changing due to human intervention, it was existential in nature, and that an end-of-the-world incineration was assured if nothing was done to stop its progress.  The black man was a sentient, higher order being of the forest, attuned to his primal instincts and attuned to his environment like no other.  He, thanks to this forest, tribal, animist legacy, belong on top of the human pyramid, not at the bottom.  

   

She believed on the basis of faith alone that the transgender woman represents the most advanced evolution of sexuality since the first Homo Sapiens.  Open borders are the welcome to the oppressed brown and black populations of the world that best expresses the real America. Crime is a result of white supremacy, oppression, and persistent segregation.

She believed in all this heart and soul and without hesitation and was willingly deceived in each and every case. 

There should have been more to Vicki than just political idolatry.  Graduate of a premier women's college, married to a wealthy attorney, and with homes in Bethesda and Palm Beach, she should have been more complex, or at least multivariant, interested in far more than political servitude and certainly less obsessed with the febrile notions of progressivism. 

But no, Vicki was indeed a woman possessed and happily so.  Her life, compared to her classmates who wandered and dithered, played golf, and arranged tea parties, was one of commitment, purpose, and ideals.  How could they possibly sit by and watch the evil of conservatism corrupt the hallowed institutions that she, her colleagues, and their ancestors had built.  She was a legatee of Brandeis, Lafollette, Gompers, and Hegel, and was proud of it. 

For true believers like Vicki progressivism was no different from a religion.  It had a canon, a liturgy, commandments, oratorio, sacraments, priests and a belief in the hereafter.  Vicki again refused the association - progressivism was all about secular progress and real religion was an obstacle in the path of reform - but had she taken a moment to reflect, she would have realized that The Movement was no different from Islamic evangelism.  The creation of a world Muslim caliphate and the conversion of the world into a socialist empire were cut from the same idealism and true belief. 

Iran is in flames, hundreds of Iranians are dying in the streets to reclaim their country, their freedom, and their human rights from the clerical dictators who have ruled for almost five decades; but Vicki and her colleagues remain quiet.  There are no outpourings of Free Palestine support for the Iranian people, and their silence is tantamount to support for one of the world's most abusive regimes.  The progressive canon states that Iran is an implacable enemy of Israel, the Jews are marauders and occupiers of Arab land and overseers of brown people who want only recognition.  

Hypocrisy has no limits when it comes to the true believer, the obsessive, the needy.  The Venezuelan people are cheering the capture and removal of Maduro, the President-for-Life who ruled the country with an iron hand, instituted socialist policies that ruined the economy, and turned an once prosperous country to ruin.  Yet, Vicki has been silent.  The extraction of Maduro was another overreaching, illegal, arrogant act by Donald Trump, and whatever the outcome, it must be condemned.  Trump hatred - absolute, reflexive, judgmental, and unthinking is central to the canon.  Nothing he does can possibly be right, so his every action should be outed for the sham that it is. 

ICE fires a shot, and they are no different from the prison guards at Auschwitz.   They are ipso facto in the wrong, and no patently self-serving claim of self-defense can justify the murder of an innocent Minnesota woman. 

 

The fact that she was an Antifa recruit, trained in violent opposition to ICE and all federal troops; and that she used her vehicle as a deadly weapon to run over a federal agent and kill him was irrelevant to Vicki.  The ICE agent was a murderer, pure and simple. 

Through all this Vicki was happy.  Tragedy, especially at the hands of Donald Trump, justified the progressive hatred of him and rejection of all his programs and policies.  She was happy when January went by with no snow on the streets, when northern India baked in insufferable heat, when federal troops were deployed in Washington, DC overstepping Constitutional authority and abrogated municipal authority.  Hard as it is to admit, she wanted disaster to happen. That would show 'em.  That would send an irrevocable message to Trump and his cronies. 

Progressivism is a movement based on misery, penury, fear, and intimidation; but its members are a happy, contented lot.  They may be righteously angry, but inside they are happy to see the rightness of their ways. 

Most importantly, Vicki and her colleagues are happy to share their lives with others of the same beliefs, for community is all - it is an identifier, a solace, a place of worship, and a center of goodness.  She couldn't wait for the next demonstration on the National Mall.  She couldn't remember what it was about, but knew she had to be there. She would pack lunches for her bus-mates and be the first to assemble in front of the Lincoln Memorial, just like in the good old days of Martin and Ralph and MLK's famous 'I have a dream' speech.  It felt good to be a progressive. 

Of course Donald Trump and conservatism was throwing a spanner in the works, and country after country in Europe and the Americas was turning right, adopting conservative social and economic principles, championing white, Christian, European civilization and calling out Muslim terror, insularity, and Christian hatred. 'We don't want them' is the meme in contrast to American progressives' cry, 'We'll take them all'. 

 

So the blush is off the bloom of the rose, but Vicki is undaunted, resolute, and still passionate about the progressive agenda, even more so given the rise of the Right everywhere. 

She lit a candle in her living room - not a votive candle exactly, but a light to shine in the darkness.  It meant a lot to her. Her hand trembled as she struck the match and lit the candle.  Was it old age creeping up on her? An unwanted vision of Trump's brave new world? A questioning of her life of immutable belonging?

We'll never know, but even if at this moment of epiphany she might have considered the Stoic, the Epicurean, the Nietzschean, the the Existentialist and wondered if they were on to something, she probably didn't, smiled, adjusted the painting of Dr. King on the mantlepiece, and sat down.