Clausewitz, Conflict, And Human Nature - War As A Permanent Feature Of Human Society

Clausewitz said that war is the continuation of diplomacy by other means.  Every empire, nation, kingdom, and regime has kept their armories full, their armies at the ready, and their populations prepared for war, for it has always been an inevitability. 

 

Wars have been a constant since the first human settlements, growing in size and number as technology improved, as geopolitics became more complex, and as the prize became more valuable. The Trojan War, The Mongol Invasions, the Peloponnesian War, the Hundred Years War, the Greco-Persian War, the Punic Wars, the War of the Roses, and the Taiping Rebellion are just a few.  World War I and World War II were continuations of the trend, and lesser wars - Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, and now Iran - never miss a beat. 

Wars are permanent feature of human society and will continue ad perpetuam, ad infinitum. In fact there is no better expression of the innate, hardwired, ineluctable forces of human nature than war. Until and unless that violent, aggressive, territorial, and self-interested nature is no more, wars will continue. 

A sequela of this axiom is that peace has only resulted in two ways - first, if one nation, empire, dynasty, or kingdom has complete and utter military and economic control, i.e. Pax Romana; and second, if two nations are equally matched, i.e. the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War.  Otherwise conflicts, skirmishes, wars by proxy or by frontal assault will continue unchecked and unabated. 

There is no difference between playground antics of toddlers - 'That truck mine!' - marital squabbles, municipal disputes, regional conflicts and all-out wars.  They all arise from the same valuation, desire for hegemony, and the willingness to fight for it. 

If violent human conflict is not hardwired as part of a Darwinian imperative, then what is?  Conflicts over territory, power, money, and influence are endemic in individuals, families, clans, tribes, and nations.  Why should anyone ever assume that they will ever disappear? 

History takes no sides - human events have never been moral or immoral, but amoral only, the result of swings and sways of power and influence.  'To the victors go the spoils', and in the give and take of geopolitical conflict the winners established their culture, their language, and their religion until they were the defeated.  Things have a way of sorting themselves out. 

In such an inevitable world, the advice of two preeminent thinkers is pertinent - that of Clausewitz who accepted the inevitability of war, and as such nations should always be prepared to fight; and that of Machiavelli who said war, while inevitable, should be fought only in cases of national self-interest. If competing forces are not looked at as evil, immoral, or anti-social but simply extending their national interests, they can be stopped, delayed, or mitigated.  Nations that understand this fundamental motivation will also always be ready for war. 

 

Those who preach world peace, Utopianism, and compassionate progressivism only do a disservice to nations who should be listening only to Clausewitz and Machiavelli.  When Josef Stalin was told that the Pope might contribute his moral authority to discussions concerning post-war Europe, he said, 'How many divisions does the Pope have?' He, Stalin, and his Red Army were the ones who defeated the invading Nazi forces at Stalingrad, not the Pope.  There is no room for moral questions in matters of war. 

Mao Zedong thought no differently. 'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun', he said, always putting national interests, geopolitics, and territorialism first and foremost when it came to national sovereignty. 

It is revisionist historians, especially those educated and raised within the moralistic culture of today, who talk of Stalin and Mao's 'evil'; but they were only following their natural human inclinations.  More brutal than most?  Hardly.  Genghis Khan when he marched from the steppes to conquer the world from Japan to Europe left only mayhem and ruin in his wake.  Millions were slaughtered in his Mongol-Turk conquests.  

 

'Peace in our time' was the infamous statement of Neville Chamberlain whose idealism and political myopia grossly misjudged Adolf Hitler and the Nazi threat; but he has not been alone.  The same idealism and historical blindness have infected generations. 

Vicki Parker was a lifelong advocate for world peace and felt sure that it could be achieved.  If we all just reasoned together, she said, worked out our differences, sat around the table and listened, conflicts could be avoided.  She believed this heart and soul, but there was always that niggling doubt, memories from childhood

Ever since she was a girl she had been aware of the aggressive and territorial nature of the animals.  She was awakened in the middle of the night by hissing, screeching cats in the back alley.  In the morning her cat came in bloodied.  Patches of fur had been bitten off, and one day he had only half an ear.

Dogs were no different, and in those days they roamed as freely as cats. Most dogs had only one eye, half a tail, and a scarred snout.  They roamed in packs on Arch Street where most of the Chinese restaurants were, and fought over pieces of lemon chicken or stringy beef gristle. They fought among themselves for dominance, females, and food; and fought enemy packs who tried to invade their territory.

Blue jays are an invasive species, fearless of taking over other smaller birds hunting grounds; but Farley watched sparrows, starlings, and buntings dive bomb the jays when they entered the yard.  Squirrels chased each other and bit. Fighting fish were best sellers at the pet shop, and if left in the same water for too long they would both be ragged, torn, and dying. Vicki's best friend Filler liked birds and wanted a companion for his cockatiel. His parents bought him a budgie, and despite the difference in size, the budgie beat up on the cockatiel until he had plucked his plume and all his head feathers.

Territorialism, aggression, and brutality were the hallmarks of the animal kingdom. Ant colonies were the most impressive.  The battles between soldier ants of different competing colonies were fought to the death.  There were advance scouts, rear guards, forward phalanxes, and lines of supply.  They used implements, chemical warfare, and the use of overwhelming force.

Everywhere she looked there were pigeons with their throats ripped out, birds nests taken over and occupied by invading interlopers, gnawed squirrels, and swarms of dead ants.

Vicki never got over these childhood images; and even at her  most passionate about World Peace, the images of the insatiably barbaric animal kingdom were as vivid as ever; and the comparison with human societies could not be more appropriate and relevant. Human beings were just as aggressive, territorial, and warlike as ants, baboons, or piranhas. War and hostility were as integral to human society as reproduction.

Yet there was something morally wrong about America's blasting Tehran to smithereens, killing its leaders, destroying its arsenals, military infrastructure, and supply depots.  The sight of fiery explosions, clouds of billowing smoke, and the rain of debris was upsetting, and she tamped down all thoughts of human nature and her earlier convictions that aggression was at the very core of human expression.  This was untenable.  War was untenable; and so out into the streets she went, down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House where she stood with her sisters defying the President. 

Where does such idealism come from? For one thing it is related to longevity and the expectation of living a long life.  When Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and recreated the Battle of Borodino where Russian and French troops fought a decisive, pitched battle, the life expectancy was only a little over thirty.  One expected to die young so why not go out in a blaze of glory rather than from an foot infected by stepping on a thorn? 

Life was valued differently then and human life was calculated within the same algorithmic context as animal life.  Jack London's 'Law of Club and Fang' or its corollary the law of tooth and claw were life's only permanent axioms, and in an age when death came sooner rather than later, they were embraced.  Why look for peace in a world designed, organized, structured for conflict. 

When Darwin arrived a number of decades later, these assumptions were codified.  Not only was conflict part of life, it was responsible for its evolution.  All the more reason to leave aside the airy nostrums of peace. 

In a world where we expect to live to ninety, of course we become risk averse and look at peace as a means of prolonging our lives; and so Vicki's remonstrances are understandable - vain and senseless given the trajectory of history and the fundamental nature of human activity, but expected. 

She felt good about demanding peace in our time and found no irony in advocating for it. Although the Iranian theocracy was no different from Naziism - the ayatollahs and Hitler had the same inspiration, motivation, and purpose - and the reasons for going to war should be clear enough, Vicki still resisted. 

'This can't be all there is', she said; but of course it was.  However, peace was not irrelevant or impossible. It could happen under either of the two enduring conditions, Pax Romana or the Cold War  but even those required the force of arms.  Nothing comes without a price. 

Idealism is another permanent feature of human life.  There has always been a tendency to ignore reality and believe in something detached from it.  Do this at your peril, is the lesson of course, but that did not deter Vicki who kept up the White House vigil until well after dark. 

The Viral Infection Of Trump Hatred - Why Political Hysteria Is Catching And Is Now Epidemic In America

Vicki Edison had been brought up in a quiet, reserved, respectful family - modest in practice and aspiration.  They were patriotic but never xenophobic, Republican but centrist, ambitious but never greedy, religious without possession. 

This was the ethos of the times, and while there were murmurs of dissent, ragged fringes to such settled, reasonable behavior, they remained out of sight; and as ethos has it, it was assumed to be permanent, the way things should be.  Neighborliness, national pride, politeness, courtesy, and good nature were more than just social currency, they were absolutes.  It was as if everyone drank the same elixir from the same goblet from the same shelf. 

 

Arthur Edison was a pharmacist and compounded his own drugs.  This was in the days before national chains and before pharmacies were all-purpose convenience stores, and Mr. Edison was more than just a technician. He was there to counsel, to advise, and to prescribe.  In most cases bad colds cured themselves, flu ran its course, constipation, flux, and catarrh resolved themselves with diet, time, and patience, but Mr. Edison was considered a minor miracle worker. 

One would never think of not tipping one's hat to passing ladies or opening doors for them.  Handshakes between men were sincere, not hail-fellow-well-met routine.  Children were allowed to play by themselves but never talk back.  Church was a place of spiritual asylum and community association. 

No one had to enforce these practices, for they were accepted by all.  There was no moral police, no vigilantism, no need for a harsh word.  Trash was disposed of properly, traffic rules were obeyed, and voting was a privilege. 

Coming from this background of rectitude and good citizenship, it was particularly difficult for Vicki to make her way in today's world - one as far removed from the temperance and good will of her youth as she could imagine - but in many ways it suited her.  As a child she was never really happy in white organdy, First Communion, piety, and discipline.  There was something missing in the settledness of it all, something dampening, something unpleasant. 

 

She made her way from a good Catholic childhood to serious student to campus unrest thanks to that restiveness - that sentiment of individual worth, identity, and the conviction that personal investment in social change mattered.  By the time she was on her own, she had left the harness and traces of her past behind and embarked on a life of activism.  

At each step of the way and in each distinct period of her life, there was the same sense of zeitgeist and ethos.  The Sixties were no different than the Fifties, for there was the same assumption of righteousness, community, camaraderie, faith, and American ambition.  There was a canon, a liturgy, a prescribed order, and received wisdom, and few denied it.  One belonged to a social religion in the Sixties just as one did in the Fifties. The new generation was drinking from the same chalice, on the same altar, using the same incantations. 

Vicki lived in an urban commune in the East Village, had indifferent, incidental lovers, despised the bourgeoisie, and joined Columbia students in their takeover of the university.  It was a heady time, one like the Fifties, where everyone belonged to each other. 

The elision to progressivism was smooth.  The well-meaning, principled, but inchoate convictions of the Sixties became more codified.  Social reform needed organization, structure, rules, and leadership.  At the same time, this post-revolutionary period was just as generic, shared, and righteous.  Once again, everyone prayed at the same communion rail. 

Vicki had her ups and downs, doubts and highs, but kept the course; and before she knew it she was part of the new American political scene - an angry, contentious, and deliberately mean one.  There was no room for compromise or accommodation in the Donald Trump era.  The future of the black man, the environment, the lesbian, and the farm worker was at stake. 

Like all periods before it, this one had its own communal solidarity all built around hatred for the President.  Contrary to the past where social reformists had a positive agenda, a definitive program for progress, today's activists were negative in spirit and purpose.  Of course they didn't think of themselves this way, and felt that they were beacons of hope for the future of an America with no kings, peaceful, and accommodating to all. 

There was something in this feral hatred, this implacably vicious animus, and this universally condemning culture that set it apart. While the same viral effect was felt - an infection that spread widely and fast - the symptoms were disturbing.  It was more hysteria than commonly-held beliefs spoken forcefully.  It was voodoo drums, candomblé, war dances, human sacrifice, cannibalism, and totems.  It was if the whole country - or at least the most ferocious believers - had been possessed. 

Before she knew it, Vicki was one of them.  She boiled with hatred for Trump, shouted j'accuse! at anyone who strayed, spat on American flags, transparent symbols of MAGA membership, gathered in basements, on the Mall, and on streetcorners to vent their anger. 

Everywhere in University Park, the leafy upscale Northwest Washington neighborhood where she lived, people shook their heads, gave each other knowing smiles, talked about 'him' with no reference needed, walked with confidence knowing that everyone was in solidarity.  The virus had completed its rounds, was now endemic and spreading. 

However, this brain disease was taking its toll on Vicki.  At times she could not hold back her tears.  She could no longer speak coherently but spluttered.  She felt all tight and wound up inside as though a time bomb were ticking and about to explode.  The very thought of 'him' produced uncontrollable rage, and she felt like running into the street, tearing off her clothes and shouting. 

She was not alone in her anxiety and febrile hatred.  Her neighbors were feeling the same possession, the same uncontrollable hatred, the same frustration and indignity.  The whole of University Park became Bedlam, an insane asylum without bars and screened windows. 

Vicki was close to delirium as she wandered from bath to garden, in the front door and out the back, muttering, slamming her fist against the wall, beseeching God for salvation, tearing her hair, and imagining the most horrible, murderous thoughts. 

Her fortitude cracked, her crucible of hope split apart, her whole world rocked and tilted and finally crashed.  She emerged from a drug-induced stupor to realize that she was not home, but at St. Elizabeth's a state mental hospital in Olney.  She tugged at her restraints, shouted for help, and was sedated once again. 

She was one of the lucky ones, institutionalized before she harmed herself or others; but how many more like her were on the verge of madness, at the tipping point hovering between insanity and political rabidness?

The hysteria shows no sign of abating and women like Vicki are still parading the streets demanding the demission of Donald Trump.  They wanted to see him in a tumbril headed for the guillotine, getting his final due, freeing the good people of America from his tyranny.  Their faces twisted into maniacal grimaces, their hair as wild as Medusa's, arms flailing, spittle flying; but there is no paddy wagon big enough to carry them to Bedlam, no battalion large enough to corral them all, tether them, and get them off the streets once and for all. 

'Where am I?', Vicki asked the attending physician on duty in Ward C, the violent ward; to which she received only a smile, a pat on the head, and a dose of clozapine. 

You Can't Go Home Again, But You Never Give Up Trying - Thomas Wolfe And The Oases Of N'djamena

Berkeley Arnold had led a successful life.  He had won no military victories, led no nation, nor probed the mysteries of the quantum world but he had been a good father, and a respected teacher and that had to count for something. 

Or did it? He should have been on the concert stage or in the operating theatre.  What was a life led within some vague Hobbesian existential notion worth?

 

Doing mattered little in a short, nasty, brutish life - there were no such things as happy anodynes only fictions, religious faith, progressive idealism, fairy tale mornings.  No, the best that the philosophical world could offer was Epicurus or Nietzsche, and he was no Ubermensch. 

Vladimir Nabokov was a self-styled memorist - a man who understood that the present was only a matter of microseconds and the future only a probability at best.  Only the past had some substance, some relevance, some clue to meaning and identity.  

So, from a very early age he did his best to capture those moments of the present which he knew would be defining and essential to give meaning to his later life.  He deliberately fixed Cannes, Biarritz, St. Petersburg, and Paris in his memory, playing scenes over and over again until they were indelibly fixed to be recalled years later. 

And so it was that Berkeley Arnold, now an older man with few adventures ahead of him, embarked on his journey into the past.  He had not fixed events, lovers, scenes in his memory like Nabokov and relied only on mnemonic devices for recall - returning to N'djamena, Nairobi, Port-au-Prince, and St. Tropez would resuscitate the past and be the inspiration for recovering it. 

Lovers of course were at the center of his return journey.  What had happened to Artemis de Meuron a young Swiss cartographer in the mold of Almasy, the model for Michael Ondaatje's novel The English Patient, a man mapping the desert but hoping to find a world without maps?  She had arrived in the Chadian capital without caravan, seconds, or equipment more than a compass, early 20th century maps drawn by German adventurers, and inspiration. 

She was brilliant, a prize, so far removed from the debutantes and Park Avenue arrivistes of his youth that she would have stood out anywhere; but here framed against the unimaginable beauty of the Sahara, she was a visitation. 

Their affair was brief - just a taste - before she went off into the desert, bound and determined to follow the old salt routes of Arab traders and find the mythical Wadi-al-Haroon.  Where was she now, Berkeley wondered.  Did she ever make it out of the desert? Was she still alive?

N'djamena today of course is not what it was.  Thanks to decades of corruption, mismanagement, and amoral disregard for the governed, the capital had become a palace and a sinkhole side-by-side in horrific irony.  The Hotel de la Paix, the small pension-like hotel run by French ex-colons from la France profonde no longer existed, nor did the Lebanese restaurant where Berkeley and Artemis enjoyed meze, grilled lamb and vin gris.  The streets of the capital had been paved but never maintained and were thoroughfares in name only, patches of asphalt amidst the potholes and ruts. 

Most importantly was the air of mistrust everywhere, an insecurity, the fragility of being a foreigner where foreigners were not wanted.  There would be no soft, Sahara wind, no courtesy, no affection for each other in this last outpost of civilization.  Whatever romance there had been, it was gone. What had he been thinking?  Why did he return, and why didn't he keep the memories as is, unbothered by what had come afterwards?

He thought of travelling to Bern where Artemis was from - a small chance of finding her but what worried him was not the failure of the search but the success.  Did he want to see an old woman scrubbing the stoop?  Better leave well enough alone.  It was bad enough that the images of their idyll had been ruined - defiled - by the reality of N'djamena.  If he were to see an old Artemis, the entire vision would be erased. Thomas Wolfe:

You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood...back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame...back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time - back home to the escapes of Time and Memory 

He had met Blanche de Castille, namesake and descendant of the medieval queen of France, in Port-au-Prince during the period of the Duvaliers.  He met her at the Olaffson, the old Victorian hotel made famous by Graham Greene in his novel The Comedians and as attractive a place as he described - rum punches on the verandah, the martinet Petit Pierre, the sounds of voodoo drums in the hills above Kenscoff...and the gingerbread houses, meringue, the dancehalls of Carrefour, and the beaches of Les Cayes. 

 

This cannot have changed, thought Berkeley.  This was the heart and soul of Haiti, the Afro-Caribbean culture, vestiges of Dahomey, candomblé and voodoo, zombies and mock funerals for the dead...It could not change; but of course it had.  Haiti today is as chaotic and lawless a place as Somalia - ruled by gangs and drug lords, a city in name only, a miserable, desperate, feral place. 

He and Blanche had stayed in the Douglas Fairbanks suite of the Olaffson and never left.  With the windows open, Haiti was there.  From the rooftop they could see the harbor, the downtown, the cruise ships and the port; and from their balcony see the far hills above the city.  

The affair was as it should be - brief, temporal, but permanent - the kind of affair that is indelible, a Nabokovian one, one easily recalled.  Berkeley knew that he could not go back to Port-au-Prince but certainly he would be able to find Blanche in Paris or Versailles where the family lived in the same chateau as their famous ancestor; but what would be the point?  

Of course there was the chance that they both could suspend disbelief, forget their old bones and relive the memories of the past.  That was all Berkeley was after, not a recreation of the past but to relive it in whatever way he could. Yet she might not have been captivated by the day and nights at the Olaffson as he had.  It might not have met the same thing, and the Lawrentian epiphany that he hoped for might be only his desire, not hers.  The successive years after the Olaffson might have intruded in ways that erased it completely. 

 

After his affair with Petra, he replayed it in detail in his head again and again.  It was like replaying a videotape, rewinding it, and replaying it again, stopping to correct a detail, recalling a smell, a view or words.  He did this for months until he forgot to do it, and when he tried again, things got muddled, events reversed, extraneous bits had intervened, disrupted the flow, turned it into a travelogue; and then he never bothered with it.  A trip to Copenhagen, like to Haiti or N'djamena might revive it, her, the place and time; but probably not, a hopeless vanity. 

'There are all kinds of love in the world', wrote Fitzgerald, 'but never the same love twice'. True enough thought Berkeley; but when age had take its toll and there were to be no more future, different, engaging loves; and when there was only the past to rely on, then what?

'The past is a flimsy excuse for the present' wrote Antiochus. Perhaps, but as life fades and the present is just 'a waiting room for eternity' what else is there? 

Bats In The Belfry - Was It A Passionate Desire For Moral Justice Or Was She Just Nuts? The Tale Of A Trump Hater

Vicki Barker was a settled woman in most respects - a tenured white woman at a Historically Black University, a published author (Slave Journals From Georgia), a cute house in the suburbs, a dutiful husband, and two children - but there was always a raw nerve that irritated, a dissatisfaction with the very America that gave her academic prominence, financial security, and comfort. 

Ever since her college days Vicki was a member of the Left, an outspoken advocate for the black man, women, and peace; and in her later years the climate, the environment, and a more equitable allocation of wealth.  This political temper did not come from either her parents or her schooling.  Mr. and Mrs. Barker were quiet Republicans from Chicopee, and Vassar was a serious academic parallel to Harvard and Yale in the days before co-education. 

It was also the stepping-off point for finding a husband - the college had even rented a bus to take girls to and from New Haven on weekends.  There were no campus revolts, no Columbia student take-overs, no massive civil rights protests, just study in the rural setting of Poughkeepsie, and the chance to suss out prospective suitors from among the best and the brightest. 

It was at graduate school in Chicago that she began to see things differently.  Perhaps it was because of her choice of study - comparative literature, a discipline which had come under the influence of French deconstructionist philosophers Lacan and Derrida - or because of the growing unrest on campus among a small, but restive minority for whom the modest progressive policies of the time were nothing more than empty gestures; or because some inner chord had been struck, an innate sense of justice, righteousness, and rectitude. 

It was likely all three, the perfect storm to change Vicki from dutiful scholar, proper citizen, and suburban wife to political activist.  Yet many girls of her age and background paid little attention to the blandishments of campus radicals, sailed through the straits of good fortune and hard work, and ended up respected matrons of Greenwich, Shawnee Mission, or Lexington. 

Professor Langston Petrie of Princeton studied the nature and origins of political dissension in the young, and had described 'the nexus of revolt' - an innate psycho-biological empathy; post-adolescent identity 'neediness'; and demographics, the bulge of under 25s - as the perfect storm of 'irritable dissatisfaction'. 

The origins of the Dissatisfied Woman are in her medulla oblongata, a particular brain configuration common in those given to a stern moral rectitude and an uncommon, inflexible, and unarbitrary conviction about right and wrong. As girls, these women are often stubborn, defiant, and willfully opposed to their parents when they felt wronged; and as young women take the moral ills of the world at large upon their shoulders. 

Vicki was indeed a pissy little child, a pain in the ass, her father admitted with a smile.  Her temper tantrums were volcanic, her refusal to give in was heroic, and her will was Herculean.  All admirable in a way, but in a toddler, insufferable. 

 

She grew out of the Terrible Twos which in her case lasted for years but like Job who was wrestled by God and brought to his senses, Vassar did what parents, priests, and school teachers could not - it tamed the shrew.  There was something comforting and stable about the college - a kind of informal zeitgeist of privilege and brains that was settling.  

Yet, as Professor Petrie went on to say, 'the irritable gene' does not disappear and needs only random forces to stimulate and revive it. 

The Irritable Gene experiences periods of dormancy - a kind of sleep function that gives the troublesome dissatisfaction to retreat for a period before it reemerges even stronger and more pronounced. 

And so it was that after the rebellion of graduate school the gene receded and Vicki took associate professorships at minor colleges in the Midwest before a final landing at her university where her serious academic bent and her social justice ambitions were felicitously joined.  What could be more satisfying than promoting scholarship among black students?

Yet, the fires of reform were only banked, never put out; and the irritable gene kept niggling, bothering, and annoying.  At times she felt like tearing off her clothes, running naked through the campus, and angrily defying God for his indifference. Of course she never did a Lady Godiva-Mad Prophet ride but the sentiment was still there. 

 

'Mania is a sequela of this genetic configuration', Prof. Petrie wrote; 'and when conditions are right, it can be full-blown'; and so it was when Donald Trump came to town.  Suddenly, the lid to her emotions came off, the volcano erupted and spewed bile, hatred, and animus every waking hour.  

She hated the man with venomous, poisonous anger and vowed to do everything in her power to bring him down, to restore sense and sensibility to the Nation's Capital, and to move forward once again to a more verdant, peaceful, compassionate world. 

As Americans have seen, the phenomenon of viral Trump hatred is remarkable for its sense of absolute indignation and righteous anger - so virulent that it needs no logical exegesis of the President's policy, positions, or initiatives.  It has a life of its own. 

The Dissatisfied Woman and her irritable gene are not uncommon - the XX female chromosome link is significant and demonstrated conclusively (Baldwin, Epp, and Bristol, 2022; Phipps & Stone, 2023; and Arthur, Cambridge, and Lockley, 2024).  Women when they 'get their dander up' (Shecky Greene, Grossinger's 1979) and act in concert become a feral force. 

Vicki, in the social room at the Institute of Living, a private mental institution for the wealthy in Hartford, still deeply sedated but far from cured, begged her sister to have her released.  'The Evil is brooding', she said, grabbing her by the shoulders and shaking her.  The attendant nurse, always present during visitor sessions stepped in. 

 

'Now, now, Mrs. Barker, we must behave when we have visitors, mustn't we?, and with that led Vicki back to her room. 

'Untreated women may be in the tens of thousands', wrote Prof. Petrie.  'Vicki Barker was one of the lucky ones'. 

What about the other tens of thousands of women without Dissatisfied Woman syndrome and irritable genes who are in the streets protesting like rabid hyenas? 

'Contact high', answered Professor Petrie, referring to the infectious quality of being stoned - even those who don't take a toke feel high. 'These women feel the burn, and before you know it you have a hysterical crowd'. 

Petrie was taken to task for this 'hysterical crowd' comment.  The idea of women's biological febrility had long been discredited and now was an expression of misogyny; but Petrie was unapologetic. 'Call it what you want', he said. 'Women in a state of complete emotional anarchy acting in wild concert without control are...'

Here Petrie stopped himself before stating the obvious but for which he would be excommunicated; so he just whispered in the ear of an associate, 'nuts'. 

Enjoy The Greatest Show On Earth - Only The Left Still Flummoxed By Donald Trump Cannot Bear To Watch

Anyone paying attention to the Trump rise to power knew that his presidency would not be one of quiet rectitude - a Jimmy Carter presidency of sweaters, good will, and fireside chats.  Nor would it be that of patrician, Kennebunkport, George Herbert Walker Bush, or any one of a number of 'presidential' presidents who had preceded him. 

He was a vaudevillian, a tummler, a  Borscht Belt comedian.  He was as raw and hilarious as Jackie Mason, Don Rickles, and Joan Rivers put together.  He was the master of the personal parody, the caricature, the takedown, the smear.  He was a one-man band, a stand-up comic, a master of ceremonies of a circus act. 

His Washington would not be the old, staid, wood-paneled, protocoled Robert's Rules of Order Washington.  More at home with the glitz and glamour of Las Vegas, its bright lights, sequins, tinsel, and runways, he would fashion the White House in that image.  He would take down the old traditional icons of American history, get rid of Chippendale, Townsend, and Reynolds and deck the halls with his images - starlets, American baroque, and all the glamour and fantastical expressions of contemporary culture he could find. 

 

No one expected Pablo Casals or Robert Frost, icons of the Kennedy Camelot years, artists of the old, forgotten generation, no Ronald Reagan and George Bush II brush clearing, back-forty cowboy grit, no FDR aristocratic patrimony, no Jefferson Monticello.  The Trump administration would be a departure, a break from the ossified traditions of the past.  His years would be not just populist but popular - American popular culture is what defines the nation not the Washington ballet or the New York City opera. 

He was not a compromiser, an across-the-aisle supplicant - he was a bullying, aggressive, no-holds-barred street fighter who made his bones in the dog-eat-dog world of New York real estate.  'So sue me', was his calling card.  Braggadocio, empty promises, wheedling, and canny back-door deals were his stock-in-trade.  There was nothing genteel or reserved about him.  

Trump has made good on all his promises - the White House ballroom, the Triumphal Arch, beautiful people - not the Jackie Kennedy Euro-dames but blonde, blue-eyed, peaches-and-cream beauties from Iowa, young women proud of their simple heritage, patriotic to the core, and with an unmistakable American enthusiasm. 

He and his staff have taken no prisoners.  When grilled by gotcha Democrats in Congressional hearings, they have tossed aside the old prayerbook, refused to genuflect, and have barked back retorts to their tormenters recalling their own smarmy ways, calling them out, refusing to sit back and toady to fools.  Trump's Press Secretary has shut up reporters with a summary 'Next', and the President himself has not hesitated to call opponents stupid.  

The Left has cried foul.  Trump is not acting presidential, they say.  Where is his sense of decency, respect, honor?  His arrogance and flippancy dishonor the office of the president.  His remaking of the White House in a meretricious, bourgeois style offends the spirit of the Founding Fathers.  His boorish, crude, barnyard behavior does a disservice to American exceptionalism and the righteousness of a nation of principle, responsibility, and good faith. 

His supporters, on the other hand, and most of America outside the liberal warrens of the coasts, cheer every takedown, every invocation of the real America. The WWF (World Wrestling Federation) will showcase its muscles and macho bravura at the White House, and nothing could be more Donald Trump.  Of course professional wrestling is fake, but what a show it is! Popular by any measure, and like stock car racing, very American.  

There are few scripted Trump presidential press conferences. Trump is the most accessible President in history, eager to answer shouted questions from reporter, turning the whole presidential scene into a marvelous three-ring circus. He is the ringmaster, but his spot-on caricatures of his political opponents - sharp, hilarious images, fit to a tee - are the stuff of Grossinger's comedy.  No one tunes in to the news to hear about his policy initiatives - they are clear, unequivocal, straightforward, and predictable - but for the show, the circus act.  What will he say next?

Everything he has done has been well within the margins of Constitutional government.  His deployment of federal troops to enforce the laws against illegal immigration and to halt the increase in inner city crime; his destruction of Iran's nuclear capacity; the current war against a murderous, terrorist Iranian regime, the removal of a brutal Venezuelan dictator, the opening up of oil and gas fields, the reversal of the corrosive social policies of the Left all are the other half of the show.  

Yet, the American Left cannot help themselves and conflate the two.  They attack Trump for his behavior and for their own unhinged, fantastical assumptions about him - a king in waiting, a tyrant, a dictator, a homophobic racist - not his policies.  Their hate has metastasized to the point where it has become viral, epidemic, with a life of its own.  

The Trump circus cannot be the exciting, anticipated extravaganza it is without the clown show of the Left.  They are the perfect foils, the dupes, the fools which make it fun to watch Trump's lashing of them. Everything Trump does is designed to enrage the Left to apoplexy.  Yes, a new White House ballroom is long overdue, but such a showy, glitzy bourgeois creation?  The Kennedy Center, home of opera, symphony, and ballet was also showing its age, but the planned Trump renovation, like the ballroom, was designed to madden his outraged opponents. 

The Great Washington soap opera would be nothing but reruns if it weren't for the likes of AOC, the Squad, Pocahontas, Chuckie Schumer, and the felines of Congress.  The Left is a caricature of leadership, a feral pack of scavengers, a hysterical mob claiming legitimacy.  Gender choice and reassignment? White supremacy? Homophobia? All fictions, balmy assumptions, a priori conclusions, nonsense and bad taste.  Americans get it, see it, dismiss it, and are glad that progressivism has been outed for the sham that it is. 

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said it best: 

Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence, and hence our form of government. It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from the government. It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a Constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights.

 

That's being polite.  What is on display is 'a romp of the addled' - a St. Vitus' dance of the obsessed, a ship of fools, a freak show.  It may come to pass that the  sage wisdom and historical understanding of Thomas and the wild crew of Donald Trump will finally come together in a perfect storm to eradicate the virus; but for the time being, the circus doesn't come around that often, so enjoy it while you can. 

Donald Trump And The Second Coming - No Kings Missed The Point, It's King Of Kings We Need To Worry About

Donald Trump posted a picture of himself as Jesus Christ curing the sick in a hilarious retort to Pope Leo XIV who criticized the President for his war in Iran.  

Of course the liberal press went apoplectic over the image.  How could he? Sacrilege’, they shouted. ‘Hateful…disgraceful!’ but of course these Gideon's trumpets were far out of tune.  

The Pope had conveniently forgotten the Iranian regime's slaughter of 30,000 peaceful protestors gunned down in the streets demanding the end of fifty years of oppressive theocracy. 

That was only the first twig of the Pope's ignorance as he also forgot the Allies' defeat of Naziism, the militant march across Germany, and liberation of thousands of Jewish internees in the camps, the Crusades led by Pope Urban I and his successors to forcibly evict usurping Muslims from Jerusalem, or the countless other wars initiated by the Vatican in the days of its geopolitical power.

Perhaps most telling of all was his omission of the Biblical history of the Jews - a violent overthrow of Pharoah, and the march of Moses' armies from Egypt to Jericho and the final, victorious battle over the Canaanites. 

Even Catholic intellectual and an early Church father, Thomas Aquinas, admitted there was such a thing as a just war, morally imperative, geopolitically sound, and inevitable. Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica, laid out the moral conditions under which war could be just. His framework remains foundational to modern just war theory.

In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary.  First, the authority of the sovereign by whose command the war is to be waged.  Second, a just cause.  Third, a rightful intention. 

 

The war against the Nazis clearly meets all Aquinas' criteria as does the fight against Imperial Japan, but using the same philosophical rubric, so does the war against Iran.  The mullahs, like Hitler, declared war against the Jews and issued a call for the elimination of Israel.  Israel's war against Iran's clients, Hamas and Hezbollah was justified because of this existential threat.  

Israel’s partnership with the United States in a war to destroy the patron of such threats and to rid the region and the world of a terrorist regime determined to establish Islamic hegemony by force of arms, certainly falls within the ambit of Aquinas' reasoning. 

Anyone who has been following Donald Trump knows that the man is not your grandfather's president.  He is a tummler, a vaudevillian, a master of ceremonies of a three-ring circus, an untamed, unrepentant Borscht Belt comedian. 

Trump could have simply responded to the Pope's ignorance with a carefully-worded statement of disagreement, but he, typically and not surprisingly, posted a hilarious image of himself as Jesus Christ curing the sick, a sendup of the whole idea of the divine right of popes and their direct lineage to Christ himself.  

The image was reminiscent of the best political cartoons of Thomas Nast and Tom Toles - excoriatingly honest, brutal and hilarious depictions of American presidents.  Making leaders look ridiculous was their stock in trade.

This of course was not the first time Trump went after the Pope, and this image of him on the papal throne had the same reaction among the injured, offended Left. 

The Left simply does not get Trump and never will.  Already apoplectic about the President, ICE, the opening of oil fields, the trashing of race, gender, and inclusivity, and the attacks on Venezuela and Iran, liberals literally choked on this latest expression from what they see as an idiot, a boor, a political miscreant, and the Devil. 

Now, with the publication of the Trump-as-Christ image, American progressives realize they have a problem far more serious than No Kings to deal with.  Trump now believes himself to be a divine savior.  

The cartoon is not just Trump being Trump, liberals say, but an expression of his descent into complete and utter schizophrenia. He is not just alluding to his divine calling, he is taking the place of Christ, decommissioning him, relegating him and his Vatican chiefs to the  bottom shelf.

Donald Trump believes he is doing more to create a world of peace, harmony, and good will than Jesus ever did.  Jesus was a man of great promises but who never delivered.  He would. 

'He must go now!, spluttered one speaker after another before the gates of the White House, raising their fists in righteous anger.  This insult, this barbaric assault on a good man cannot stand.  The President, already convinced of his innate regal authority, is  now claiming divine right.  If there were ever a reason to believe his is off his rocker, this is it.  

The howling misery, boiling anger, bilious hatred against ICE and the man who deployed them was nothing compared to this.  Progressives' worst fear was coming true.  The man was possessed, psychotic, and completely unhinged.  

Wailing at an Italian wake was nothing compared to the caterwauling cries on neighborhood streetcorners, from the pulpits of normally quietly liberal churches, on college campuses, and on the National Mall.  

Nothing has energized the Left, feeling more and more marginalized and ridiculed as the fancy clothes of its queer agenda and renascent socialism came off, than this. 'See, we told you', said women who had still not gotten over the defeat of Kamala Harris, the Left's own divine one. 

Never before in American political history has their been such animus, such ad hominem hatred, such belief in the demonic possession of a president than with Donald Trump.  Policy, programs, political philosophy, geopolitical gamesmanship have all been overlooked in the miasma of feral attacks leveled at the President. This was the final straw. 

But it was the Left that was made to look ridiculous.  Most Americans knows that Trump is a showman, a comedian, an Eddie Murphy Raw performer, a Jackie Mason in spades, a hilarious man without a scintilla of political correctness, a crude, expletive-spouting hero; and the Left's apoplexy looked like the insane St. Vitus' dancers, hopping around in a crazy, demented, mad Virginia reel. 

It's not who can take Trump seriously.  It's who can take the Left seriously. The Congressional side show of Schumer, AOC, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker and their shills is just for openers.  Their crazed gotchas, wild stump speeches, and unhinged viral hysteria has spread.

Normally well-adjusted burghers, happy in house and home, politically engaged but never outlandish, have become whirling dervishes. 

The circus comes around only every so often, and no Barnum & Bailey big top can possibly match what is going on in Washington right now.  It's worth the price of admission and then some.  No need to spend money to see two-headed babies and bearded ladies.  No entry fee is required to see a freak show par excellence.  Schumer et al are providing all the freaky Fridays you will ever need. 

Trump as Jesus? Sure, why not.  Nothing the Left has thrown at Trump in ten years has stuck, but that has not dampened their enthusiasm.  'We must...we have to...we're bound and determined to...', but those intentions are just whistlin' Dixie.