I'm Sorry, Who Are You Again? - The Selectiveness Of Memory, Filtering Out Irrelevant People

Hanna Barbera couldn't believe it.  Her husband who had sat at the dinner table with Joan Perkins, ate a three course meal, and laughed about the Grand Canyon, could not remember either Joan or the dinner. 

 

When his wife had reconstructed her friend - her origins, profession, looks, attitude - and Arthur still couldn't remember, she shook her head and said, 'You're impossible'. 

Of course he couldn't remember Joan Perkins.  Why should he?  She was one of a long list of incidental guests invited by his wife to fill Saturday evenings.  There were some he remembered for a while - the Barkers, for example, a nasty, dissatisfied couple who picked at each other; Helen Redding, a tarty member of the DAR who kept talking about George Washington; or Martha Overton, a grizzled woman with a barking laugh - but that was only like an irritated stomach lining, reflux at bad moments.  As far as the rest who ate his wife's pot roast and flan, nothing. 

Hanna on the other hand remembered everyone who had ever crossed her path.  'You remember my second cousin, Rachel...you know, the sister of my Aunt Betty's husband Dick...' and, 'We should go back to Rehoboth, we had such a good time with Bea and Penny...'

She could recall each and everyone of her mother's cousins, what they wore at birthday parties, how stringy the chicken was at Uncle Harold's birthday party, or what Granddad wore with his starched collars and boutonniere - a string of incidental, random memories stored for unknown reasons and recalled for reasons equally unknown.

Arthur Barbera didn't have the heart to tell his wife that the reason he couldn't remember any of these remote relatives or passing acquaintances was because they meant nothing to him. There was nothing about the litany of Alice Lipton recited by his wife that vaguely interested him.  Her interest in bears, or her delight at finding spotted spurge on the prairie, or her grandson Dick, the only pharmacist in Lone Lake who compounded drugs. 

As for everything else in the human experience there is a spectrum.  Some people have a catch-all, indiscriminate memory - everything seems to stay put once archived - and others have a very selective memory. Why clog the pipes with unnecessary drainage? 

Vladimir Nabokov called himself a 'memorist'.  From a very young age, he had an instinctive sense of the importance of the events he was living, and deliberately, carefully, and painstakingly committed to memory people, places, and events he suspected would be seminal. Summers at the family dacha in Russia or at their villa in Cannes; the dresses his first love Elena wore on Sundays; the color of the water off St. Tropez.  

Nabokov never explained in his memoir, Speak, Memory, how he knew what would be important for future recall, but suggested it was a preternatural sense of belonging to a time and place.  As child of ten, he could have none of his later philosophical constructions of time ('The present is but a matter of milliseconds, the future only a possibility, but the past, lived, experienced and remembered is real, the only reality') but he could sense importance like a feral animal.

Most people's memory without the disciplined reconstruction of Nabokov is more fiction than fact.  When all the Barbera relatives ate Easter dinner at Aunt Leona's, no one could agree on what Lou Lehman did or didn't do to the Lincoln or why Aunt Tilly ran off, or the color of the Ponte's first house on Whalley Avenue. 

Eyewitness accounts never tally.  In a recently publicized criminal case three people witnessing a drive-by shooting saw completely different things.  The driver was either black or white.  The car was either a Ford or a Chrysler.  They either wore ghoulish masks or no masks at all. 

Robert Browning, Lawrence Durrell, and Kurosawa all wrote about how different people see and remember different things depending on their past, their character, personality, and what they ate for breakfast that day. 

So it should not have been surprising to Hanna that Arthur did not remember what she did, but she had the niggling suspicion that his feeble memory had something to do with her.  She, despite their long marriage, might have been peripheral to his vision. 

She was right, of course. There was no one in the parade of friends, acquaintances, and colleagues invited to 71 Lincoln Street of the slightest interest to her husband.  Out of courtesy and longevity, he showed some interest no matter how desultory - a balm, an unguent for suspicion. 

Of course she was just as dismissive of his sharp recall as he was of hers.  His life was being led abstractly, disinterestedly, hypothetically - what else could his collation of verses from abstruse poetry be? His life was largely fictional, novelistic, impressionistic with no grounding in reality.  He was indifferent to things as they were, only interested in how someone else saw them and confected them into poetry or drama. 

This 'faulty hinge' as his wife called it was troublesome only once.  When he worked at one of Washington's international banks, a woman called him up and wondered if, after so long, he would like to have lunch.  He had no recollection whatsoever of ever meeting the woman let alone knowing her, but since her greeting was so warm and familiar, he agreed. Besides, once he saw her in the lobby, he would recognize her and everything would come back. 

On the day of the lunch, he waited for her call and took the elevator to the lobby, but he could recognize no one in the group of people milling about.  'Arthur!', an attractive woman in her mid-fifties exclaimed when she saw him, and putting her arms around him and giving him a kiss on both cheeks, said, 'My, but it has been a long time.'

It would come to him, he reasoned, as the lunch went on.  He nibbled around the edges, indirect questions about her work, her travels, her colleagues, but nothing conclusive.  He was as lost as he was an hour before. 

Their lunch was enjoyable, lots of talk about books, movies, and restaurants; and they left promising to 'do this again soon'; but Arthur still had no idea who she was. 

What did that mean? he wondered.  The other people who passed unnoticed and unremembered in his life were strangers or minor acquaintances. This woman and he had obviously had more than that.  How was it that he had not even recorded it at all? All the more perplexing because he actually liked the woman. 

'I had lunch with a woman who knew me but whom I couldn't remember', he told his wife. 

'Not surprising', his wife replied, an old sore reopened. 

Because Nabokov was right - the past is relevant and intimately personal - people are destined to lead separate lives and attempts to coincide will always fail. Communication is based only on the present and the future - plans, programs, anticipations - but can never touch the reaches of the past that are the only levers to open consciousness. 

'And don't forget', she concluded, a familiar dig, 'we're having dinner with the Roberts tonight'. 

'Who?', he replied.  

Cancelled For Calm? - The Perils Of Stoicism In A Rabid Political Age

Baxter listened to his friend go on about the state of the world - wars provoked by an arrogant, intellectually disinherited President, black people still oppressed by white supremacy, gays, lesbians, and transgenders scurrying for cover to flee a Christian Gestapo, desperate asylees hunted down like dogs, and a warming climate 

'What? Have you nothing to say?'

Baxter was worried about his longtime friend, a man he had known since childhood who was seemingly coming apart at the seams.  The friend reached into his briefcase and pulled out a sheaf of clippings, reprints, and dog-eared reports, and thrust them in Baxter's face.  'What's wrong with you?', he said.

Bob never used to fly off the handle like this.  Something had come loose somewhere and it showed. 'White around the gills' was the way Harry Angstrom described his son in Updike's Rabbit at Rest. Bob instead was purplish, a worrisome cardiac color in a man of his age which only deepened the more he insisted on Baxter's complicity.  

 

Bob had not always been this way, and in his bright college years was a happy-go-lucky Yalie, eager to please, a comedian, a dissident angry only at Paul Weiss's 'adumbration' and philosophical quagmires. 'Speak English', Bob hollered at the painting of John Trumbull, patron of Trumbull College, imitating the firebrand he imagined himself to be, harmless, outspoken, with the proper diffidence in the presence of the great man. 

It was only when the Reverend William Quimby Parsons, university chaplain and civil rights activist convinced him that he was nothing without commitment, and wasting his time parsing Blake and Coleridge was not exactly it.  Join me, the parson said, on a Freedom Ride; and from that moment on Bob got religion. 

  

Baxter on the other hand had grown up 'Mediterranean' - la cultura de la hamaca, let sleeping dogs lie kind of sybaritic leisure - a pleasurable, enjoyable, uncomplicated love of mild interest in church, passionate interest in family, and an equal love for cooking.  'Ronzoni, sono buoni' the advertising slogan for a popular Italian American macaroni became the meme for the family - not Italian exactly but adopted in spirit, an eclectic mix of Latin que sera sera and the sunbaked ease of the Mezzogiorno. 

The Stoic ethic espouses a deterministic perspective.  In regard to those who lack Stoic virtue, Cleanthes once opined that the wicked man is "like a dog tied to a cart, and compelled to go wherever it goes." A Stoic of virtue, by contrast, would amend his will to suit the world and remain, in the words of Epictetus, "sick and yet happy, in peril and yet happy, dying and yet happy, in exile and happy, in disgrace and happy," thus positing a "completely autonomous" individual will, and at the same time a universe that is "a rigidly deterministic single whole. 

 

And so it was with Bob, thought Baxter, a dog tied to a cart and compelled to go wherever he goes. Nothing in his upbringing could have led him to such fidelity, such political certain, such impossibly prophetic visions.  No, Bob liked bladderball, trips to Smith, summers on the Vineyard, and panty raids on Hadley Hadley Hall.  

'It was Quimby', said a classmate, who reminded him of Cotton Mather and the New England Puritans who had a hand in founding Yale - 'sour, dried up old men who couldn't get enough of God, horny bastards who burned women at the stake because they couldn't have them.  Quimby paraded through campus like he owned the place, sanctimonious prick that he was, and Bob fell for him hook, line, and sinker.'

Baxter wasn't sure.  Such a transformation from the Mediterranean devil-may-care spirit he inherited somehow to the impossibly sanctimonious tart he had become could not have been the work of one man, no matter how seductive he might have been. 

In any case shortly after Bob's harangue about the horrific state of the world, he cancelled Baxter. It was bad enough to have former colleagues who were Republican, conservative, and right wing, another altogether to have one who simply didn't care. Diffidence in the face of evil was the worst sin of omission. Commission - political activism although on the wrong side of right - was far more acceptable than this lack of will, this sickening flotilla of indifference. 

Baxter wasn't surprised and saw it coming.  Bob had definitely turned a corner from around which there was no return. His timbers had been shivered, he danced with St. Vitus and Turkish dervishes.  He had become untethered. 

Nick Carroway, a principal character in Fitzgerald's book The Great Gatsby, expresses this patient, respectful stoicism of Baxter this way:

In my younger days and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. 'Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone', he told me, 'just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages you've had. 

He didn't say anymore, but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that.  In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me a victim of not a few veteran bores. 

 The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men...The intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.  Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. 

And so it was that Baxter made his way easily through life until the American culture became toxic and politically unbearable when good people like Bob became fevered and intolerant and had no use for the kind of Christian stoicism practiced by the fictional Nick and the real Baxter. 

'Keep your head about you when those around you are losing theirs and blaming it on you', said Rudyard Kipling in memoriam of the calm resolve that characterized good breeding and self-confidence; but warned that the composed, non-judgmental person may misunderstand the nature of such ignorance. 

Baxter did not misunderstand or misjudge Bob.  On the contrary he understood quite well the nature of true belief, a seditious infection, a viral disassembly of reason and judgment from which no absurdity was surprising. 

Well, let it be, said Baxter characteristically.  His summers were delightful, his winters cozy, and his unencumbered life a pleasure. 

How's That Iran War Workin' Out For Ya? - Genghis Khan, Hiroshima, And The Perils Of Limited Engagement

Donald Trump, his Secretary of War Pete Hesgeth, and his aides were meeting in the War Room of the White House to discuss progress in the war with Iran. Memories of George W. Bush on the deck of an aircraft carrier smiling at the camera and saying, 'Mission accomplished' were vivid.  The mission in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein was by no means accomplished, for not long after Iraqis danced around the toppled statue of the dictator, militias quickly armed themselves and set out to gain control of the country. 

 

Instead of imposing military rule and a draconian 'shoot-to-kill' order for any civil disobedience and putting in place an indefinite military occupation, the US packed up and went home.  The result was predictable - the rise of Islamic militias and the descent of the country into chaos. 

It was 'hearts and minds' all over again.  The persistent Vietnam era policy of avoiding civilian casualties and winning the populace to the idea of democracy and civil rule - a policy which not only did not work but in its military reticence led to Viet Cong and North Vietnamese victories. 

The Viet Cong had their own means of winning hearts and minds - terror and intimidation. In the movie Apocalypse Now the Kurtz character describes it.  The American army had vaccinated the children of an entire village, and when the Viet Cong learned of it, the chopped off the vaccinated arms of every single one of them.  'The will', says Kurtz. 'The absolute, powerful, bright, brilliant will'; and with that knew that the war would be lost. 

Kurtz ruled his mountain region of Cambodia with such will.  As Willard and his crew sent by Saigon to assassinate Kurtz motor up the river to Kurtz's headquarters they see bodies hanged from trees, corpses lying decapitated, and smell the stench of death everywhere. 

As Willard read in Kurtz's dossier, Viet Cong activity under his command had dropped to zero. His summary executions of suspected Viet Cong and heartless pogroms did the trick. 

The accounts are fictional, but based on fact.  The movie was based in part on Michael Herr's firsthand account of the war - atrocity as an instrument of war was used without hesitation by the Viet Cong. 

'Hearts and minds' persisted in Afghanistan where the United States, in its exceptionalist view of foreign policy, set up a puppet 'democratic' government and made overtures to the Taliban to join the 'new' Afghanistan.  Of course the Taliban, like the Viet Cong were fiercely nationalistic, and having beaten the far more powerful Russian invader were in no mood for compromise.  The war ended, the Taliban regained power and Joe Biden brought the troops home.  Another war lost because of reluctance, hesitation, and overconcern. 

General of the Union Army, William Sherman had no such doubts.  His scorched earth campaign through Georgia and especially South Carolina, the state which began the Civil War, was brutal and effective.  'The South shall never rise again', he said, and the lesson was clear - raise a finger against Washington and all hell will rain down upon you. 

The emperor of all emperors, Genghis Khan marched down from the central Asian steppes with his Mongol-Turkic armies and conquered the world from far eastern China to the Danube, the biggest empire the world had ever seen. 

There have been many successful armies in the world.  Julius Caesar, Scipio Africanus, Pompey the Great, and Marcus Agrippa were as brilliant generals as Genghis Khan, and brought Roman organization, discipline, and management to the battle.  They won because of superior ability, armaments, and military thinking; yet it was Genghis Khan who, with an almost untamed savagery, conquered the world. 

Genghis Khan was a brilliant strategist, canny politician who through tact, intimidation, and offers of great spoils, enticed the warlike Turkic tribes to join his armies, nearly doubling their strength.  However, it was not only the might of his imposing armies, nor his ability to manage, discipline, and control such a large and diverse military force; nor even his tactical acumen and understanding of calculated risk which assured victory.  It was his indomitable, absolute, unalloyed will. 

Khan had no qualms, moral reservations, or ethical hesitancy.  Wars were for winning, civilians were complicit enemies, and total annihilation of any opposition was his modus belli. Not only would defeated populations be without the wherewithal to mount a resistance or counterattack, they would never dare to incite the bloody, murderous, savage wrath of the conqueror.

Curtis Lemay, US Army general and independent candidate for Vice President in the electoral campaign of 1964, was known for his hawkish views on military action. Impatient with Lyndon Johnson's measured approach to the Vietnam war, he proposed to 'Bomb 'em back to the Stone Age'.  Although he was ridiculed, he had history on his side.  The United States did exactly that reducing Hiroshima and Nagasaki to rubble with atomic bombs and firebombed Dresden and Tokyo, incinerating both.  

Populations were considered complicit in warfare, so Harry Truman had no compunction whatsoever in using the A-bomb against the civilians of Japan.  That would show Hirohito that we meant business. 

Donald Trump's war in Iran is different because the Iranian population is in full support of regime change, having suffered for almost fifty years under the oppressive theocratic regime of the ayatollahs.  A Hiroshima/Nagasaki attack is not possible; and because the current Iranian regime knows this well, it holds many cards. The limited response by the US and Israel is unlikely to annihilate the Republican Guard, the Secret Police, and loyal factions of the army. Winning a war of total destruction while destroying the population along with it is an impossible option. 

There can only be 'acceptable collateral damage' - i.e. blowing all headquarters, government buildings, military and oil depots, missile silos and above-ground installations to smithereens with minimum but significant civilian casualties. 

'This is the compromise the Iranian people will have to accept', said one military adviser in the War Room with the President. 

The aide's hawkish options were 'off the table', for the Administration was confident that with total control of Iranian airspace, precision bombing and the neutralization of missile defenses was possible. 'This is not total war', said the President. 

Yet of course it should be. If Iran is as dangerous an enemy as Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, then it should be destroyed and like the American South, never allowed to rise again. 

Under President Richard Nixon, the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign was unleased.  Giant B-52 bombers released full loads of high-powered explosives up and down the Ho Chi Minh trail to completely eliminate the enemy's north-south supply lines and destroy him in the process. 

This massive bombing campaign such as the world had never seen, did no good.  The little black pajama, bowl of cold rice Vietcong, simply went deep underground during the bombings, came up when the planes had returned to base, and rebuilt the damaged trail.  Because air power was ineffective and land troops were hamstrung by 'hearts and minds', the war was eventually lost. 

'Boots on the ground' - that last ditch effort to search and destroy the Iranian enemy - will undoubtedly be necessary.  The war in Europe was won thanks to D-Day, the Normandy invasion and the march of Allied troops across the continent to Berlin. 

The lesson of Iraq is unavoidable. Even if the regime leaders are eliminated, armed militias fighting on their home territory will be a resistant, difficult, implacable enemy.  Urban combat as American troops learned in Hue, is bloody and discouraging. 

So, 'Bombs away and praise the Lord' is the modus operandi for now; but the Iranians are not stupid, and more than likely will pause their missile attacks hoping to give the impression that they are destroyed. Absent American ground troops, the Iranian army and Republican Guard will be able to regroup, and just when the Israeli-American axis feels confident enough to send in occupying troops, the Iranians will exhume their deep underground missiles and begin combat again. 

Iran is no patsy.  It has spent nearly fifty years in offensive and defensive armament, creating an extensive political machine, and used its oil wealth to pay for absolute fealty.  It will not roll over and die, and is likely to fight to the last man. Particularly now with much of its infrastructure destroyed and images of its destruction gone viral, the will to resist is even stronger. 

Most of those in the War Room wished that it wasn't so bloody complicated, and many channeled old Curtis Lemay.  Bombing the suckers back to the Stone Age would be too good for them; but reality bites, and after much consideration, debate, and lack of consensus, there was only one option - move more firepower into the region and all hands on deck. 

The Odd, The Perverse, And The Unthinkable - The Real Diversity Of America

On the surface New Brighton was like any other small town in America, much like Grovers' Corners, the fictional town described by Thornton Wilder in his play Our Town.  There was a pleasant downtown with a City Hall building, Zackin's pharmacy, Dot's Kitchen, a barber shop, a nail salon, one clothier, a furrier, doctors' offices, and Jimmy's Smoke Shop. 

  

People went to church on Sundays, joined Rotary and the Lions Club, volunteered, supported the local police, and lived a quiet, peaceful, and uninterrupted life. 

To the casual observer New Brighton was a model town - one of rectitude, propriety, and community. People greeted each other on Main Street, men tipped their hats to ladies, children behaved, and the downtown was festooned with wreaths at Christmastime. The clothing store always had a display in the window - an electric train with a real whistle and smoke, a Nativity scene, and Christmas music. 

Bread, milk, and breakfast cakes were delivered weekly and newspapers brought to the doorstep.  Mowers and trimmers kept front yards neat and presentable in the summer, children built snowmen and snow forts in winter, and the smell of burning leaves filled the air every October. 

Mrs. Fender's next door neighbor, Mrs. Helander noticed that she was getting milk delivered three times a week instead of the usual one, but never asked why.  Mrs. Fender did have two growing boys and it would not be unusual for them to drink more milk than usual, so Mrs. Helander went back to her baking and never gave it a second thought. 

Until she realized that the milk truck was parked for over a half-hour each delivery.  Again, New Brighton being a small community where everyone knew each other and where class distinctions never prevented friendship, it was quite likely that Mr. Benson, the milkman, had been a client of Mrs. Fender's husband and had gotten to know the family. 

Again, Mrs. Helander went back to her baking and did not give it a second thought.  The community's well-deserved reputation for respect and understanding kept gossip, rumor, and innuendo at a minimum. 

The truth of the matter was, of course, what anyone but the good citizens of New Brighton might well have expected.  Anita Fender entertained the milkman every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and it was only when Bobby Fitch walked into the kitchen looking for the baseball he had thrown through the window and saw Aldo Benson coming down the stairs with his trousers at half mast and shirt unbuttoned, was Mrs. Fender's secret out. 

Bobby Fitch was a blabbermouth, and before long word had spread through the community about the goings-on at 71 Lincoln Street. 

For some time Mrs. Fender's milk deliveries returned to once a week, so the rumors died down and eventually were largely forgotten. 

Only much later did it turn out that Anita Fender was what was then called 'a nymphomaniac'.  Since most women in those days in proper middle-class, middle-American towns were settled, untroubled homemakers, such aberrant behavior was assumed to be a psychological disturbance. 

Nothing could have been farther from the truth.  Anita Fender was as hot and bothered as a bitch in heat, and if it wasn't with the milkman it was with the roofer, the gardener, and the mailman. 

'Where was ol' Harry Fender when all this was going on?', wondered the town.  No man in his right mind would put up with such things; but little did they know about Fender's own 'preoccupation', a seedy, trashy, day-closeted gay man who cruised the back alleys of Arch Street every night buggering, sucking, and cornholing his way through the week. 

In fact the couple was the model for Jeffrey Epstein-Ghislaine Maxwell, ahead of their time for smarmy promiscuity and illegal pandering.  The Arch Street cruising and afternoon quickies with the milkman were only the tip of the iceberg.  The sex ring (prostitution, pornography, underage sex) organized by the Fenders was remarkable not for its range and profit, but that it existed in such a tightly-buttoned, conservative time and place. 

This was nothing compared to the Rabinowitz scandal - a scam of Bernie Madoff proportions, although far less spectacular in scale. Ira Rabinowitz was the town furrier who sold mink, ermine, fox, and Persian lamb, but whose real income was from 'investments', unsecured, high risk, high profit financial commodities brokered through a network of shysters in New York.  The furrier's store was the perfect venue for the operation.  The business was clean, Rabinowitz was a model citizen, and New Brighton was just a stone's throw from New York. 

From the basement of this modest establishment was run one of the most successful financial scams of the Fifties extending far beyond New Brighton and even New York.  When finally uncovered by the SEC and FBI, the operation was worth several hundred million dollars, a king's ransom for those days. 

As surprising as this level of corruption seems, it was par for the course for New Brighton whose cheating was endemic.  There was not one public works project without a line of contractors, judges, police, and public service employees with their hands out.  Toxic landfills were plowed under and buried and housing developments built on 'reclaimed land'.  Drugs flowed through the hands of white middlemen to the black dealers of Corbin Avenue.  The Catholic Church was a gay jamboree, and their boys' summer camps a pedophilia paradise. 

All this is by way of preamble - today's diversity is way off the mark.  The real diversity of America has nothing to do with race, gender, and ethnicity but a spider's web of untoward illicit complexity. The American ethos of the good guy, the patriot, the volunteer, the church goer, the family man is the perfect cover for a vast underworld of bad behavior which has no limits to sexual ingenuity, financial tricks, and political corruption. 

Ivan's devil in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov tells Ivan that he, the devil, is a vaudevillian, a comedian, a player of tricks and games.  Without me, says the devil, life would be a bloody bore, an eternity of Sunday Mass, a lifetime of doing good.  You need me, he says, to stay awake. 

A future cultural historian will look at New Brighton and the thousands of other likeminded American communities and see the real America, the savvy, canny, ingenious Americans who so successfully used the gabardine cloak of polite respectability to cover outrageously uncivil behavior and had a good time doing it. 

No one really cares about the black man, the lettuce picker, the lesbian, or the transgender; and even less about raising them to epic status.  Diversity is not this charade, this cavalcade of color and sexual identity; nor is it even the richness of artistic, scientific, or entrepreneurial talent.  It is in the underbelly of America, the adulterers, philanderers, cheats, tarts, deviants, and seductive predators.  Any country can produce robber barons, financial wizards, and garage geniuses; but nowhere is the real diversity of human behavior more clearly seen that just under the surface. 

Shakespeare knew this and was fascinated not with the predictable scope of history but in the stories of the greedy, malicious, ambitious, murderous characters who populate it.  It is Richard III who holds our attention, not the lives of saints. 

Kurtz, the main character in Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness says on his deathbed, 'The horror...the horror' as he understands that the savage barbarity of the cannibalistic tribes among which he lived and profited was universal.  We are they. 

Conrad saw the horror, Shakespeare saw the inimitable irony and humor.  However you look at it, the goings on in New Brighton are well worth the price of admission. 

Why Place No Longer Matters In A Virtual World - Except To 'The Comanches Of Martha's Vineyard'

'The Comanches of Martha's Vineyard' was how an editorial writer for the New York Times described the Old Guard there who had built bulwarks against assaults from the mainland. These Islanders, all descended from patrician New England stock, all securely aristocratic in outlook, attitude, and culture, wanted no interference from the outside, and resented and resisted any attempts to open the island to market forces. 

'It is ours.  We built it, we own it, we maintain it, and we will never give it up' 

The issue came to head when certain New York financial interests began buying properties on the island. Families who had lived there for a century were now running out of steam - intermarriages, off-island romances, ambitious moves to California and Florida all meant no heirs to take over the waterfront estates, to invest in the well-being and cultural longevity of the island; and so the last residents sold out, made a fortune, and restocked diminishing trust funds. 

'Jewish money', said one of these Comanches citing a commonly-held belief.  It was one thing to have New York real estate interests to take a shine to the Vineyard.  It was another thing altogether to turn it into a crass, gross distortion of its patrician roots.  

Even the liberal establishment, ordinarily adamant in their belief in diversity and inclusivity, kept silent on the matter.  They too could only imagine the streets of town crowded with mink coat-wearing, bejeweled, garishly made-up Bernsteins and Rabinowitzes  - Collins Avenue north, a grotesque parade of Jewish princesses.  Unthinkable!

Yet there was nothing they could do because their own kind were turning traitors to the cause.  They were being just as moneygrubbing, selling out with no regard to the cultural integrity of the island. Old, grey-shingled, pristinely landscaped homes were being turned into absurd plastic mansions, and golf courses, Cadillacs, and furriers would follow. 

Billings Eddy was the leader of the Comanches - a descendant of one of the oldest families on the Island turned nativist firebrand.  No 'outside money' - he had the good sense to keep his prejudices in check when speaking politically - would despoil the island. 'Imagine', he said, sprawling, garish, crude, tasteless mansions perched on our headlands, golf courses instead of quiet wetlands, tacky, bourgeois stores replacing our legacy establishments.  A nightmare, a horror show, a twisted, unholy future'

However push came to shove when one of these New York investors offered him a king's ransom for his property, tempting beyond belief.  He demurred and promised to think about it; but the damage had already been done. Once infected with the virus, it was impossible to get rid of it. There wasn't a day that went by without a 'Fuck it, I'm in' crossing his mind.  He of all people.  He at once felt ashamed and stupid.  What was he doing?  The Vineyard was just a place after all, and all the historical legacy fol-de-rol was just cover for insular, elitist intentions. 

Yet Billings in all his prejudice and bilious social conservatism was on to something. As The World Turns, the treacly tearjerking soap opera that his mother used to watch came ironically to mind. He was fighting eventuality with inertia.  He was an old fool, tethered to fanciful notions. 

'My name is Ira Goldblatt, Mr. Eddy', the silk-suited sharpie said, 'and I hope you have considered my company's offer' to which Billings, already at sixes and sevens because of the existential crisis, could only stammer and bumble when he wanted to yell, 'Get out you...' but the slur wouldn't come, and for that he was additionally frustrated.  Not only was his emotional livelihood at stake, he had been clotured, shut up, and silenced. 

The Vineyard will remain as it has always been if there is a demand for its particular brand of patrician cachet, but that is just whistlin' Dixie, for those who have an eye on buying on the island only want a view, ocean access, and yes, golf courses. Billings Eddy and his cousins will be soon dead and buried and with them the sepia-toned, grainy images of an America that once was.  The Vineyard might not exactly become Miami Beach, but there will be no stopping its move in that direction. 

'Place', reflected Billings in a quieter moment, that was what mattered.  Somewhere with roots, a permanent place, a consistently familiar place, a cultural home, a secure emotional harbor; but that very idea was being challenged by the 'outside money'.  Before long not only would the Vineyard no longer be the Vineyard but no place would be the same.  There would be no more cultural preserves except for a few designated historic streets. 

Billings was too old to appreciate the real existential crisis of the day - AI and virtual reality.  With the advent of universal cyberspace, brick and mortar let alone private enclaves like the Vineyard will become irrelevant as cultural places, homes to return to.  The will be functional anchors for virtual commerce, perhaps not data centers, but functional units, residences, retail, government - all interchangeable, fungible, without inherent value, only serving the needs of the new virtual world. 

The Comanche Chief White Wolf was the most savage, bloody, brutal killer of whites the Union Army had ever seen. His approach was simple - rape, slaughter, behead, eviscerate any white settlers that squatted on Indian land, and no more would follow. 

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

 

Jonathan Foreman, writing in The Daily Mail said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

'That's who I am', said Billings Eddy, admiring an early 20th century photographic portrait of the Indian chief.  'He took no prisoners'; but of course the patriotic territorialism of White Wolf's day was no longer.  There were no boundaries or demarcations, bastions or bulwarks, perimeters or lines of defense.  Everything was permeable and change was the only constant. 

Worst of all few people except for alte kockers like Billings cared a whit for place.  Weather mattered, better mild winters than not. Taxes mattered as did proximity to grandchildren, good Internet connections and health care; but not place in Billings' sense - somewhere with an unbroken, storied history, with a recognizable, durable culture, with solidity and meaning. 

At last notice, Billings was still holding fast and had not yet sold his property. 

He would soon because he was tooth-by-jowl with the new golf course and the condo village that had gone up next door.  It was only a matter of time. 

The Dame, The Sex Toy, And The Politician - A Washington Tale Of Sexual Obsession

Mrs. Longworth Cabot was descended from a long line of American patriots.  She was the chairwoman of the Washington Daughters of the American Revolution, a member of the Society of the Cincinnati, latter day Pearl Mesta of Georgetown, and a scintillating noteworthy of Capital society. 

Cabbie, as she was called by close friends and family, was of early middle age, a bit doughy but still attractive made all the more so by her elegant wardrobe.  She wore only designer dresses, Cartier jewels, Manolo Blahnik shoes, and had her hair done once a month at Jean-Pierre of Fifth Avenue. 

She had been married twice, both disastrously.  The first to a minor British count, and the second to a Texas oilman, both of whom grossly underestimated her character, fierce loyalty to her legacy, and unquenchable sexual desire. 

So when she met the Congressman from an important Midwestern district, she was diffident.  There was really nothing that a politician could offer her by way of money (her fortune was immense and secure), social standing (she was in Who's Who in America), or glamour.  Politicians are and always have been a dour, lumpen lot.  

But never one to let an opportunity pass nor a chance for a bit of fun, she returned his glances, accepted his offer for a drink, and promised to meet him again - this time someplace not so predictable and ordinary as the the Mayflower Bar.  She suggested the Lady Lay Lounge in Petworth, a gentrifying neighborhood still black around the edges, far enough away from downtown to cover both their tracks and an ideal place for a cinq-a-sept. 

The Congressman was as expected - toothy, earnest, and simple - but there was something in the fact of his willingness to go off the grid with her suggested something more; and when he asked her about her preferences, referring not to Chablis or pinot noir but to something far more delicious and tempting, she was surprised, delighted, and willing. 

One has to keep in mind that Mrs. Cabot was not just anyone.  Bred of impeccable English royal stock, American aristocratic forbears, and with the blood of kings, she was noteworthy - a woman whom one would suppose to be careful about her associations and passe-temps - but her legacy, wealth, and untouchable privilege gave her unlimited license.  Being who she was, anything she did was factored, parsed, and written off as perks of high standing. 

It turned out that the Congressman was as queer as a three-dollar bill - not queer in today's modern, sexual sense (the man was as horny and bull-riding a male as any), but 'unusual'.  'Preferences' it turned out meant any number of sexual curiosities that one might find in the redwood forests of Coeur d'Alene or the San Francisco Folsom Street Fair. 

The kicker is this - the Congressman simply got off on the patrician likes of Cabbie Lodge. He could have cross-dressed, done himself up in rubber and leather, and whipped himself silly for a hundred Marges from Accounting, but the idea of doing the unspeakable with a member of one of America's first and finest families was irresistible.  It was like fucking Martha Washington. 

How the Congressman had gotten this far, given his sandy quirks was a story in and of itself.  Everyone in Congress was diddling someone other than their spouse, enjoying the perks of power; but all were hewing to a rather straight line - an afternoon tryst, a weekend in the Bahamas, a getaway to New York. None, as far as anyone could tell, had crossed that line and gone over to the unheard of side as far as Cabbie's Congressman had.  

It was only because of his patience, discipline, and political instincts that he kept clean and his real desires cloaked and closeted.  Now that he had influence - he had become a member of the powerful Ways and Means Committee - he could afford some outing.  He had the power to consign even ranking members to holy hell if they called him out for sexual impropriety. 

So the affair between Cabbie Lodge and the Congressman was made in heaven - exactly the woman that the representative from _______wanted, and the plaything the lady from Beacon Hill had always imagined.  

Petworth was only the beginning.  Their escapades went far afield, always at the edge of official Washington to give the affair pique, but not too far out to feel cornfieldy and removed. 

He was finding it a bit tricky to explain his absences from office and home - the best philanderers are always caught with their pants down - but Cabbie had no such tying responsibilities and goaded the Congressman to ever more challenging meetings.  Whereas he had always brought the paraphernalia, the sex toys, whips, fetters, and chains, she began to reach out and surprise him. 

The episodes thanks to his perpetual desire and her irrepressible playfulness remained incomparable.  The two of them rutted like barn animals and came back for more. 

The telling difference was that while Cabbie could care less about Congressman X, he was becoming deeply dependent upon her. She had tapped some underground resources he never knew he had and once discovered, could not do without. 

Why not up the ante? thought the marvelously devious Cabbie, extract some national secret and put him on the rack with threats of full disclosure unless he capitulated and gave her everything.  The lasting, complete sexual conquest. 

Strindberg's Miss Julie is a story about such demanding influence.  The aristocrat Mis Julie is brought up by a proto-feminist, man-hating mother who encourages her daughter to engage and then dominate men.  She decides to seduce and entrap Jean, her valet.  She treats him like a trained animal jumping through hoops while he enjoys - like the Congressman - sexual to-dos with her.  He falls short, cannot resist the age-old call to service, and returns without her to the role of faithful, dutiful valet of the Count. 

 

It was in the oversized bathtub in the bridal suite of the Waldorf, that she grabbed the rubber ducky, brought him to ecstatic climax, climbed out, wrapped herself in a soft, multi-ply bath towel, dressed, and said goodbye. 

The Congressman was disconsolate, disheartened, and felt absolutely alone. What had happened? and why?  Everything was going along swimmingly. 

The story would not be complete unless the denouement - the revealing of state secrets attributed to the Congressman - had not been made public. 'Taking down the citadel of Boston', Fergie says to his crew before their audacious robbery of Fenway Park, 'priceless'; and it was with this same pride and joy that she saw the unravelling of the Congressman happen before her very eyes. 

A true Nietzschean, Cabbie Cabot.  Why did she do it, she might have been asked.  'Because I could', would have been her reply. 

A remarkable woman, none like her, a genius, a brilliant conniver, a one of a kind. 

Sins Of Commission, Omission, And Occasion - The Politician's Seduction By All Three

Father Brophy loved 9 o'clock Mass, for then he was at his best, a fire-and-brimstone prophet of the Old Testament with a messages from the New. His passion was for sins of the flesh, and the moral turpitude of his parishioners that could be seen on their faces every Sunday.  Fornicators, self-pleasurers, adulterers, addicted to unholy pleasures all. 

Father Brophy danced around his interest in young Peter Adams, chief altar boy at Sunday Mass, a fascination innocent enough, but not without desire.  As much as he groped his way up the aisle to the crucifix of Our Savior, begging for forgiveness and release from this seditious, damning passion, he saw only the sweet young Peter before him.  

'I am a sinner, Lord!, he shouted and heard his plea echo from transept to choir in the empty church. 'Hear my prayers.'

That is neither here nor there, for there was enough 'normal' sin in the world for a thousand sermons, and Brophy hammered away each and every Sunday with Sturm und Drang that would have impressed Abraham. 

The interesting thing about sin, reflected Father Brophy in the sacristy preparing his sermon of the week, was its diversity.  There were sins of commission, omission, and occasion - a deadly trifecta, the unholy triumvirate of the Devil.

Sin was everywhere, not just if you lifted a pack of gum or stood by when your friend did it, but the most insidious and dangerous of all - the occasion of sin.  Oh, he knew how many girls, as chaste and virginal as the new fallen snow had entered dens of iniquity with the confidence that God would protect them all the while hoping to be taken, abducted, penetrated.

Here Brophy's mind wandered again, and he could only see images of the ingenue Angela Booth with her skirt up above her waist, moaning in ecstasy as Bobby Perkins thrust himself into her.  'God forgive me', he said, grasping for his rosary and begging the Virgin Mary for moral sustenance. 

To be sure, the most titillating aspect of sin was that of commission - what Angela Booth and Bobby Perkins did in the cloakroom, and what his congregants were doing every other night of the week. What he heard in confession made his ears burn, and it was hard to keep his clerical resolution intact what with the tales of sinful sexual engagement told to him.  He had no idea of the vagaries of heterosexual sex, the infinite variety of lying, cheating, and vulgarity.  

He of course absolved the women who confessed - that was his duty - but only after exacting promises from them to abstain from their sinful behavior.  Privately he hoped that they would continue, for his prayerbook was annotated with the most impossible features of human sexual behavior, and he wanted to chronicle these brands of sin for future reference. 

The Church of the Redeemer of which Father Brophy was the rector, was a stone's throw from the Capitol where five hundred or so politicians debated the nation's welfare; but as far as Brophy was concerned, it was a sinkhole of depravity and deceit.  One had only to read the papers to watch the cavalcade of unthinkable depravity.  Everyone knew about Bill Clinton's fellatio, Mark Sanford's Argentinian fugue, John Edwards' bald-faced lies, and Newt Gingrich's hurried sayonara to his dying wife so he could catch a plane to Atlanta and be in the arms of his lover. 

The current governor of Minnesota sat back and marveled at the canny schemes of the Somali community which was bilking the taxpayer of millions, living off the fat of the land, and building a network of corruption.  'Not my problem', said Governor Walz who saw Somali activity as an expression of diversity and the immigrant's first step to integration. 

What could you expect from gun-running pirates? They needed space to grow and time to mature.  Meanwhile Omar Abdi and his family, friends, and colleagues all brought out the vote for Walz who justified the irregularity of their support by saying that the longer he remained in office, the more good he could do for Minnesotans at large. 

And then there was Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and their Caribbean island.  If there was a better occasion of sin, Father Brophy couldn't think of one; and yet politicians, world leaders, Fortune 500 businessmen, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and world's glitterati flocked there.  

'I just want to see what all the fuss is about', said a member of the British Parliament who despite his pedigree, wealth, and political standing had difficulty with women; and so wanted Epstein's tasty morsels there for the asking. 

Is it fair to judge politicians by a higher standard than the ordinary American?  Or for that matter condemn the Catholic Church for its buggery, pedophilia, and pederasty?  Of course not.  Politicians and priests are just men after all, and it would be unfair to judge the institution they represent by their individual and quite human actions. 

Yet when these men are caught with their pants down, it makes headlines.  After all, an affair between consenting adults is not news, but when the President of the United States gets blown by an intern kneeling under the Lincoln desk, the chutzpah, monumental ignorance, and the crass, gross sense of invulnerability is comic and epic. 

There is a well-known study of obesity carried out by researchers at the University of Texas which demonstrated the psycho-social dimensions of collective behavior.  Men who live, work, and socialize with obese men are likely to become obese themselves; and so it is with Congress. If you spend your time on a daily basis with men who are complicit in the worst forms of deceit, sexual impropriety, and underhandedness, you will inevitably become like them. 

So, Father Brophy's summary dismissal of the Capitol as a sinkhole of depravity wasn't too far off, so much so that theologians from the Vatican would have a field day studying the nature and variety of sin there. 

The irony of it all was that the Catholic Church and Jesus Christ himself were all about forgiveness.  If you honestly repented, the Church had no recourse but to forgive.  Of course there were mighty loopholes in that arrangement, for the perception of guilt is a very subjective affair.  

In Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy Clyde Griffiths plots and plans the murder of Roberta Alden, the factory girl he got pregnant.  He gets her into a boat on Loon Lake in an untraveled, desolate corner, but cannot kill her. Instead, he stands in frustration and anger, overturns the boat and watches while the girl drowns. 

Was he guilty of murder and had a mortal sin on his soul? Or was it an accident compromised only by a sin of omission - he didn't jump in after her?

The penitent leaving Father Brophy's confessional may believe that he has made an honest confession, but how can he break off his love affair with Marge from Accounting without destroying her heart and soul?  Surely a progressive withdrawal would be more considerate than an abrupt departure. 

The politician's life, a raft of sins of commission, omission, and occasion, is compounded by the most devious self-justification, shameless apologies, and quick return to infidelity, rutting, and misbehavior.  Politicians' bread and butter is Barnum & Bailey-esque. A sucker is born every minute and you can fool most of the people most of the time - the mantra of the talented politician.  Why the surprise when he is caught with his pants down and insists that they are not actually down, just that he is incompletely dressed? 

Father Brophy was a voyeur at heart.  He loved smarmy confessions, rumors of infidelity, images of Angela booth in the cloakroom with her panties down, and the imagined delights of Peter Adams.  He was lucky to have been stationed in the Washington area, the Nation's Capital, the heart and soul of America.  He wouldn't have it any other way, and to reach his audience with more relevance and insider know-how, he peppered his sermons with political wrongdoing.  His parishioners fidgeted and squirmed, so he knew he had hit home. 

Making Mountains Out Of Molehills - The Progressive Malady, Creating Problems Where They Don't Exist

'If it bleeds, it leads', has been the mantra of American television since the first grainy black and white images of the Fifties; and if nothing is bleeding, then something needs to bleed. 'Catholic Mass for Shut-Ins' will never have a large audience. 

'All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way' said Leo Tolstoy who understood the art of storytelling, the art of dramatizing unhappy differences.  The Greeks were the original masters at melodrama, the art of making human nature in all its jealousy, rivalries, suspicions, plots, greed, and violence the only show in town.  Greek audiences already knew the stories of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Helen, and Oedipus, but filled the seats of the Athenian amphitheaters to watch them unfold in all their gory glory. 

Artists did not invent these smarmy, twisted scenarios.  They simply took what they saw around them and gave them stage presence.  Aeschylus was a master of timing - he knew when to reveal the truth that everyone but the main character knew, and when to tease, tempt, and hold it back for maximum interest. 

The best Turkish soap operas are cut from the same cloth.  The producers are geniuses at timing, suggestion, and manipulation.  The central premise is that the audience knows of a character's dishonesty and murderous intentions, but the victim never does until it's too late.  The audience becomes partisan, urging the victim to see the plot unfolding around her, to open her eyes, to see what is happening; but the producer, writer, and director keep up the naïveté, the innocence, and the disingenuous belief. 

The audience is on the edge of their seats - when will she learn? and so it goes, episode after episode of the most devious trickery and bad intent. 

There is enough melodrama in human nature for a thousand tragedies.  The playwright never has to hold his head in his hands and wonder what next.  It is all there for him to choose.  

The literary critic Jan Kott noted that if one were to lay all of Shakespeare's Histories down in chronological order, one would be struck by their repetitious similarity - palace intrigues, murders, jealousies, family squabbles, the arrogance and ignorance of power and much more.  

But the particular and fascinating ways that all this is played out is what fascinated Shakespeare.  Richard III, Iago, Goneril, Regan, Dionyza, and Tamora are all villains, but each in their own mesmerizing way. 

There is nothing new about human nature.  It is hardwired, permanent, and ineluctable and as long as there are human beings on earth there will be murder, war, devilish plots, dishonest, and cruelty beyond belief.  And there is nothing new about the transformation of those human instincts into melodrama. 

What is new, or at least a modern twist to the obvious, is the creation of horrible things where they don't exist. As if there were not enough problems in the world. 

Progressives have made an art out of inventive fiction.  The world was quite happy with its blizzards and hot spells, floods and droughts, and the natural vagaries of the climate.  It was the way things were, ups and downs, surprises and catastrophes, and the way things would always be. 

Then climate change came along - an invented, seditious idea of political brilliance. If enough people believed that it was man who was causing atmospheric turbulence, provoking an early Armageddon, then billions of dollars could be spent out of public coffers to right the wrong. 

Capitalism itself was on trial, for what could be more polluting and environmentally destructive than corporate greed passed on in manipulative marketing to encourage more fossil fuel use?

Similarly human beings had gotten along just fine with two sexes - all that was required to keep the human race going - but then people were told that they should be suspicious of a heterosexual theory that has its roots in male patriarchy, bourgeois limitations, and white supremacy.  

There is no such thing as sexual normality, all is possible and all is available.  One need only pick and choose from the array of choices on the gender spectrum.  Reproduction is incidental, not necessary, and in fact the very cause of environmental destruction, war, and civil unrest. 

The movement did not just champion gay and lesbians, but showered the most attention and praise on transgenders, individuals born of one sex but emotionally, psychologically, and socially the other.  Identity, freedom, and individuality are not just constitutional protections.  They go to the heart of human sexual nature. 

Anyone who lived through the much more serious Hong Kong flu did not suffer the shutdowns, punitive regulations, and vigilantism of COVID. People got sick, recovered or died. Life went on. The Biden government however said COVID was The Big One, health Armageddon, and exploiting fear and deliberately concocted uncertainty, they expanded the reach, authority, and influence of the state. An invented crisis.

The fol-de-rol is quieting, and most people are no longer edgy and politically sensitive about being straight.  There are two sexes, male and female, and everything else is a freak show, two-headed babies, bearded ladies, dwarves, and midgets replaced by deep-throated runway queens, swish, and costume jewelry. 

Donald Trump is an aggressive, decisive, politically incorrect president who fits no mold of presidents past. He has changed the way presidents operate, disregarded old nostrums of proper behavior and prescriptive notions of right action.  He has no hesitation in using presidential power and is willing to run the risks and take the consequences.  It is not for nothing that he earned his stripes in the bloody battles of New York real estate. 

It is not enough for progressives to call out his questionable policy initiatives - his wars, his dismantling of the Washington bureaucracies, the opening the country up to unrestricted energy exploitation, and the rollback of social programs.  They have invented the concept of an evil man as an all-purpose mantle of irresponsibility.  The US has had presidents that stretched the fabric of the body politic - Warren Harding, Richard Nixon, and Ulysses S Grant were no sweethearts and dealt with summarily.  The system of American governance worked just fine. 

The idea that Donald Trump is evil is something new, not particularly unexpected from a political movement which likes umbrella covers (e.g. climate change=capitalism=exploitation=disaster), but still surprising from those who have disavowed religion.  Philosophers from Aquinas to Kierkegaard to Sartre have pondered the nature of evil, but none have been so pedestrian and insular in their attributions. 

Parsing evil has always been a pastime - was Hitler more evil than Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot who also murdered millions? Is human nature particularly given to evil given its bald self-interest, territorialism, and defensiveness? Etc. 

Few, however, have so distorted the concept of evil, whether religious or secular, as much as American progressives. 'Evil' in their politically disingenuous hands is nothing more than a catch-all for unacceptable political behavior.  An intellectual charade, a mighty boondoggle. 

The evil Donald Trump is a problem that does not exist.  It is 'if it bleeds...' tomfoolery, a fabulist creation from a party which still can't absorb the enormity of its electoral defeat and is fighting shadows and inventing goblins in its hysteria. 

Hindus have it right in one - the world is Maya, illusion, a place of false promise and hopeless dreams.  The sooner one realizes that the world is but a perennial, predictable vale of tears, the easier the path to enlightenment becomes. The Stoics said the same thing in essence - the world and all that it encompasses will forever more be a random succession of events, and each individual within it acts according to the way he has been buffeted by them. Nietzsche notwithstanding, individual will within a deterministic world is folly. 

Yet, progressives simply can't help themselves.  There is something in the air compelling them to do good where no evil exists, to reform what needs no reforming, to act where action is unnecessary. 

What's all the fuss about? Epictetus might well ask; which is why conservatives have more fun. If the world is the way it is and attempts to improve it is just whistlin' Dixie, then why not just enjoy the great human jamboree?