Bomb Them Back To The Stone Age - The Allure Of Total Destruction

President Harry Truman didn't exactly want to bomb the Imperial Japanese back to the Stone Age, but close; and so he dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and shortly thereafter the Emperor offered his complete surrender. 

 

During the Korean War, Douglas MacArthur wanted to show the Red Chinese little mercy and advised Truman to go north of the Korean border and bomb them to smithereens.  

During the War in Vietnam, General Curtis LeMay, military advisor to Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater advised LBJ's government to bomb the North Vietnamese 'back to the Stone Age'.  Johnson of course wanted to do so, eliminate the terrorist North in one fell swoop, but the 'hearts and minds' policy of the US Government - i.e. protecting civilians at all costs, thus encouraging them to switch sides and become partisans instead of Viet Cong insurgents - made that impossible, 

Instead, Johnson and his successor Richard Nixon unveiled Rolling Thunder, the air campaign in which fleets of B-52 bombers dropped massive explosive payloads on North Vietnamese positions in the South and on Haiphong harbor.  That show of might would either bring Ho Chi Minh to the negotiating table or force him to surrender. 

Truman, angered that General MacArthur went against his orders, and considering him a dangerous man, a loose cannon, relieved him of command - a bad decision as it turned out because 'The Red Menace' was exactly as the old soldier expected.  Mao and his legions became strong enough to become a serious threat to the region and to America. China went on to be the biggest arms and materiel supporter to North Vietnam, prolonged the conflict, and contributed significantly to the North's victory and the Communist reunification of the country. 

Donald Trump's hawkish generals advised the same Stone Age policy in America's war with Iran.  Regime change was obviously not enough, they said.  We eliminated the Ayatollah and mutilated his successor, but Iranian rockets keep falling on Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the trucial states. Iranian missile silos have been carefully distributed throughout the country and are hidden well underground, so surgical strikes cannot totally eliminate them.  Armed drones are similarly deployed, and despite the best CIA and Mossad intelligence, many remain undetected. 

Iran has shown resilience and no fear.  They not only killed thousands of their own civilians during street protests, but have lashed out at friend and foe alike to show their military power.  It is a hateful, brutal, totalitarian regime which knows only violence; so there is only one way to eliminate the terrorist threat of the Iranian theocracy, say the hawks, and that is total destruction, reducing every official hiding place, every arms facility, every energy stockpile to rubble. 

The problem with total war, say more moderate military chiefs, is that the Iranian people are our allies, unlike the complicit Germans and Japanese in World War II.  We cannot afford to wipe them off the map, nor would we want to. 

So what to do? There isn't a day that goes by that Donald Trump doesn't want to pick up the phone and tell the Armed Services Chief of Staff to pull the trigger and unleash hell, destroy the country, then shelter the refugees and rebuild the country in America's image. 

The same holds true for Gaza and Lebanon.  Hamas has shown itself to be a worthy client of Iran, attacking Israel, arming and rearming itself to continue its avowed extermination of the Jews.  Hezbollah in Lebanon is no different.  They are implacable enemies of Israel, faithful clients of Iran, and have vowed to continue their aggression until the last man standing has fallen.  

Israel has done the needful.  It has not reduced Gaza to rubble, but nearly.  Netanyahu has his hand on the Stone Age trigger and is ready to pull it, eliminate Hamas, its tunnels, its armories, its depots, and its barracks.  There is little hesitation in his war room, for the population like that of Nazi Germany is not only complicit but collaborating.  Blowing the whole place off the face of the earth and making the region safe for Jews and enabling Jewish expansion might not be such a bad idea. 

There seems to be no end to war, and wars have always been fought for the same predictable, expected, familiar reasons - territory, resources, and geopolitical influence, all the international expression of human nature.  From childhood to adulthood, the same ineluctable, irresistible forces for dominance and survival persist. 

What is less widely acknowledged is an attraction to the power and glory of war - the Sturm und Drang, the apocalyptic fires of devastation, the savagery, and immense godlike power of raining death and destruction down on the enemy, seeing a fireball rising to the sky, pillars of black, cumulus smoke, and bits and pieces of the destroyed target spiraling up and up and back down to earth. 

Wars could not happen unless they satisfy some primal urge  It is not enough to say the Rhineland, Czechoslovakia, and Poland were needed to complete a German historic circle; or that the Pope's legions marching across Europe were only to annihilate the Muslim invaders in the Holy Land, that Russia simply needed a warm water port, that Iran felt a Persian destiny to control the Middle East, that the United States feared the Communist threat in Southeast Asia. 

The allure of war is primal, primeval, responding to urges set in ribonucleic acid chains in the first homo sapiens and long before in those genetic sets of the jungle, the ocean, and the veldt. 

So not only are the generals in the war room anxious to use the magnificent store of arms under their control, they must use them.  They are just as programmed to blow things to smithereens as their counterparts in the past. 

One Vietnam War fighter pilot described his experience this way:

There was nothing like it.  I was God, Shiva the Destroyer, a master of the universe flying no more than a few feet  over the treetops, unloading death and destruction, howling in the cockpit over the roar of the engine and the explosions below, dropping napalm and seeing the forest explode in a firestorm with great orange clouds of fire, ascending to 5000 feet, looking down on the smoke and ash and burning, incinerating carpet below.  It was magnificent.

 

World War II was the first fully modern war, for it combined classic military tactics with a full complement of armaments – planes, tanks, artillery, riflery, rockets, mortars, and bombs. Soldiers had a cause – Hitler had invaded their countries and they were determined to drive him out – but they were part of a military machine, cogs in its wheels.  

Battles were hard-fought, territory often gained by feet, not miles, and battle lines shifting by the week.  It was an ordinary war until the Biblical nuclear destruction of Japan. This was the apotheosis of war. Atom bombs dropped on the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki destroyed them completely in a few minutes of unthinkable power.  Wars of annihilation and Genghis Khan were back.

It was not until Vietnam that the spectacle of a fiery superhuman war again appeared.  F-16 jet fighters were Apocalyptic as they rained terror down from the skies.  The destruction was Biblical and epic.

The Founding Fathers of America were brilliant in their understanding of human nature and therefore wrote a Constitutional provision for civilian oversight of the military.  They understood that if generals had control of a large store of weapons, they would want to use it.  As importantly Jefferson and his colleagues understood that using this military might is a fulfillment of the most ineradicable male desire- to blow things up.  

Just as Hamilton argued for and got a provision in the Constitution for an intermediate legislative body to protect the nation from the will of the rabble, Jefferson insisted upon civilian control of the military - a buffer, a safe zone.  Of course both men are turning over in their graves.  The rabble rules and the military always wins out. 

'How much can we blow up?', Trump was reported to have asked his Joint Chiefs, hoping for 'A lot' as the answer, but modern warfare since WW II has always been political, complex, and often unclear.  'The fog of war' as Clausewitz said, and the President had to listen to opinions all over the spectrum. 

If Iran pisses him off, Trump is likely to unleash hell and be done with the bloody mess; but the days of the Crusades, Genghis Khan, and Hiroshima are long gone.  Still, the red button is still armed and waiting on the President's desk in the Oval Office, and only time will tell. 

Why Beauty Will Always Turn Heads - And Inner Worth Will Always Play Second Fiddle

Frances Laughton was a beautiful woman.  She had been a beautiful, adorable child, a stunning runway-ready adolescent, and a promising starlet in college.  She had been fawned over, admired, chased, and desired for as long as she could remember.  Such was her remarkable beauty that no one ever bothered to look past it and and inquire about her intelligence, moral code, perceptiveness, or creativity. She loved the attention as a little girl, but as she got older it rankled. She was nothing more than a gussied up doll, and that had to change.

 

For a while she flirted with a femme fatale persona. Her beauty, her sexual allure, and her feminine irresistibility had men wrapped around her little finger, and with that mystical power she knew she could really go places, do things, be somebody.  Beauty greased the wheels of power. 

Yet she was always bothered by the fact that if getting ahead in the world was nothing more than trading on genetics - she had done nothing to get or deserve her good fortune - then success was worthless as far as social justice, honor, or moral rectitude were concerned.  For true personal integrity and to be a model for right action, the irrelevancies of God-given gifts must be dismissed and removed. 

At Brown she had tried to become part of Students For Democratic Action, an influential campus group that took its inspiration from SDS, a radical student organization of the Sixties, strong enough to engineer the takeover of Columbia University, energize the civil rights movement, and influence the outcome of the war in Vietnam. SDS members were outspoken and never shy about the use of violent measures to promote progressive causes. 

 

Brown's SDA was a far cry from its militant forbears, but it still cause enough of a ruckus to force the administration to at least consider a quota of twenty-five percent gay, lesbian, and transgender faculty and to double the admission rate for minority students.  

Consider they did, but not much came of the hoopla.  Brown, not among the elite of the Ivy League but still an influential junior partner, had enough wealthy alumni to reject any such politically-driven, idealistic, and ultimately nonsensical moves which would further erode the academic integrity of the university and tarnish the reputation of its founder. 

Outcomes never matter to idealists who are in it for the ride, the identity, and the self-awareness; so campus activism was just as meaningful as if it actually produced results; and Frances tried to join in.  She not only thought that it would be a way for her to challenge those who underestimated her while promoting an important political agenda. 

Yet, such a wish was clearly impossible.  She was treated as someone special rather than an integral part of a group.  No woman on campus came anywhere near her stunning beauty.  She was truly one of a kind, a unique combination of classical physical perfection and a nubile, languorous sexual allure.  She was tall, naturally graceful, with an inbred, untutored elegance.  As such she was treated as the goddess that she was. 

 

Everyone knew that they were in the presence of a generational beauty - or even more, since her symmetry, litheness, and female presence hearkened back to ancient Greece and Rome.  She was Venus, Aphrodite, Helen every Roman copy, and the most beautiful women painted by Leonardo and Botticelli. 

No one was interested in her inner self, and why should they be?  They were in the presence of a miracle; and so it was that Frances, from the beginning a deeply serious, committed, and intelligent woman took the first step of redemption. She would changer her appearance and become indistinguishable from the women of The Movement as unappealing as they were. 

Progressivism in its embrace of serious things, rejects anything that smacks of the false, the superficial, the nonessential.  The use of cosmetics is tantamount to treason, both a disregard for the existential nature of the progressive cause and giving in to the predatory, misogynist male.  The more a woman can resemble her Paleolithic forbears and become a natural woman linked to nature and the environmental forces around her, the better. 

One woman, Frances thought, did look like the throwback so often limned as the progressive model - prognathous jaw, prominent forehead, narrow-set eyes - and indeed she was the leader of the campus activists, chosen to lead demonstrations, to speak at forums, and to be the image of university progressivism. 

'Brutal', Frances thought; but the woman had what Frances wanted - belonging to a group that mattered and being taken for the responsible, dedicated, committed woman that she was.  And so it was that she began her transformation from magnificently beautiful starlet to fiercely ugly partisan.  She would not - could not - go so far as to regress ten million years, but she would at least alter her looks enough to conform to those of the group. 

The transformation of course had to be gradual.  It couldn't be a sudden as a nose job, going away for the summer with a beak and coming back cute and pert. No, the change would have to be progressive - tweaking and coloring of her hair, tattoos, studs, and rings, a dismal look, bad posture, and a sobering, snarly attitude.  By the time she was finished, her classmates would have forgotten how she first came on campus, would anoint her as one of theirs, and her future of mission, identity, and political integrity would begin. 

As much as she felt at home now that her 'inner self' had been exposed, seen, and appreciated, she felt out of place and irritable.  These ugly women and skanky, brutally sexless men and the environment they enabled were miserable. She preferred the company of the best and the brightest, the most beautiful, charming, and desirable.  She loved being a starlet, a prima ballerina, a goddess. 

She graduated with honors, said goodbye to her classmates and fellows activists, and headed to Washington to take up a position and Scientists for Social Responsibility, a nonprofit which focused on the environment and climate change, but dabbled in black causes and lesbianism as well. 

It was more of the same - the tedium of good causes, serious and fractiously ugly people, and the depressing, burrowing environment of gloom.  Why progressives had to be ugly, think ugly, and worry ugly was beyond her; but she had cast her lot among them for personal reasons, flying her inner flag, and she was not ready to take it down. 

As chance and circumstance would have it, she happened to be walking on Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House and saw one attractive, young blonde woman and stage-handsome men after another walk up the drive to the West Wing.  They had nothing like the stunning beauty of her former incarnation but at least were a welcome change from the dour, misshapen lot she worked with.  

Not quite an epiphany but an eye-opener.  Conservatives take things on face value and easily fit them into a clearly defined, neatly organized policy matrix.  There is no need to probe and parse when it comes to small government, a muscular foreign policy and traditional social values.  One can be beautiful and still be taken seriously.  No dredging up of muck, no hand-wringing, no tears and flapdoodle necessary.   

Although it took a while to make the elision from stunningly beautiful woman to sloppy, bangingly unattractive progressive, it took only a morning to put back the pieces.  She emerged on Tuesday looking like what God had intended her to be. She flashed a smile at Scientists for Social Responsibility, said her goodbyes, and contacted her Republican Congressman in the hopes of moving quickly across the aisle into more congenial territory.  

The Congressman like all men was bowled over by her beauty, charm and sexual allure.  Anything she wanted was hers, and so she took it, and back in her element was adored, admired, and desired. 

Her inner self? Well, that wasn't much to write home about in the first place, so it mattered even less here, whatever it was.  She moved about as though she were born for the job, used her native skills and remarkable genetic gift to her advantage and that of the Party, and could never have been happier. 

Superficial? False promise? Ignorant idolatry?  Nonsense.  Beauty is as beauty does, beauty rules, and she was enjoying every minute. 

The Doors To The Insane Asylum Open - And A Former Inmate Finds A Political Home In Washington

Harlan Banks had been interned for nearly a decade at the State Psychiatric Hospital.  His case for release had come before the Board of Supervisors a number of times, but since the necessary unanimous decision was never reached, he remained in the hospital. 

Harlan's illness began early, but the symptoms were too generalized in the population of young boys to be noticed as anything special or warranting attention - dismembering insects until they died on a skewer, electrocuting frogs with the transformer of his Lionel train set, crushing robins' eggs and writing 'shit' on Mrs. Helander's front door. 

A matter of discipline was all it was, nothing more serious; and although his erratic behavior had been noticed by the nuns at St. Maurice, the teachers at his elementary school, the bus driver, and the local patrolman, Mr. and Mrs. Banks sought no counsel.  A behavioral issue, a matter of early adolescent rebellion, the sign of a curious mind, they agreed. 

When in a PTA meeting his parents were advised that their son's behavior went beyond a reasonable doubt, and they might consider professional guidance, they had to face facts.  Their son was not normal, a hard pill to swallow for a family which prided itself on right behavior, prudence, and sociability.  

Perhaps most importantly, neither Mr. or Mrs. Banks had any disturbing behavior in their family history - if you discounted Uncle Harry, as nutty as a fruitcake but genteel, telling off-color jokes at Christmas dinner, wearing fright wigs at the weddings of people he never cared for, and wandering around Corbin Square in the middle of the night. 

No, Harlan's parents agreed, old Uncle Harry might be batty, but genes don't travel that way.  He was his own, lovable fool who had nothing to do with their boy.  Yet, the mystery of their son's increasingly mental behavior was always on their mind, and they finally decided to seek professional advice. 

After the personal interview with Harlan, the child psychologist frowned, and told the nervous parents that there was nothing serious to worry about, just a mild 'dissociative dissonance'.  In layman's terms, the boy was having trouble 'processing' and was circling about in his own world, trying to make sense of things most people had already figured out.  Watch and see, he said, and come back in three months. 

This was in the days before overdiagnosis and over-prescription, so the Banks did not leave the office with any medical conclusion or drugs to address the problem. The situation only got worse.  The boy was given to strange out-of-body experiences, claiming astral projection, whirling like a dervish in the rose garden, and howling at the moon in the middle of the night. 

His schoolwork suffered and his parents were told that he was too disruptive to remain.  It was time, they realized, for serious professional care.  Fortunately they lived near a major teaching hospital, one renowned for its psychiatric service. Dr. Fein, the Chief Attending Physician in the Department of Child Psychiatry, agreed to take the case, and Harlan began intensive counselling almost immediately. 

Dr. Fein and his staff were able to corral and tether most of the boy's aberrant behavior, so much so that he was able to complete an online high school program and be admitted to the county's junior college.  

He managed reasonable well there except for the occasional fugues where he bolted loose of the emotional restraints which bound him, and go amok - not in any way dangerous to himself or to others, but still concerning.  He had read a book on the ancient Aztecs who incorporated the spirit of wild animals and fought as panthers, cheetahs, and wolves in their battles with enemy tribes, and felt that he too could become the animals of the wild.  Whooping and hollering, hopping and jumping, crawling on all fours, he was found by the County police on a number of occasions lapping water out of the catchment basin of the Patriots' Fountain. 

Psychiatry and drugs having no effect on the young man, his parents had no choice but to agree to commit him to the state hospital where, as mentioned, he spent a number of years.  Thanks to progressive policies which had their birth in Washington, but were adopted statewide, most patients of the hospital were released, ready or not, and the community at large was asked to welcome them. 

Now, Harlan's 'aberrations' had quieted during his stay at the hospital - his animal ravings were few and far between, he ate from a plate with knife and fork, and could make sense like a normal human being; and so his elision into society was easier than for others.  The hospital out-patient services helped find him employment, and he managed to make a go of a normal life. 

It was then that he was contacted by a member of his Congressman's social welfare committee.  The Congressman was one of a group of progressives who insisted that the mentally 'other-abled' were as worthy of inclusion in the party's DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity) policy as black men or transgenders, and he needed a poster boy for his efforts.  The hospital recommended Harlan - a young man of reasonable intelligence who was still significantly disturbed but quite manageable.  He might do the trick. 

And so it was that Harlan was invited to Washington to serve as an intern in the Congressman's office, to help translate his mental experiences into legislative terms, and even to speak on certain occasions.  He would be an advocate for inclusion into the mainstream, an example of how the mentally ill should not be pariahs but members in good standing of society. 

Now, despite Harlan's outward composure, he was still as batty as could be.  He had visions, often fantastical ones of harpies and ghouls and others of Turkish harems in which he was a pasha in a sultan's palace, and he often painted himself with great mustaches and beards and marched around his room holding an elm branch as a royal scepter.  He was no more competent to serve in any official capacity as the man in the moon but such was the ethos of the progressive party - anything goes in a world of infinite diversity. 

At first his female colleagues kept him at arms length, fearful that he might lose his marbles and go after them in some fantasy of the Rape of the Sabine Women, but then he became not only accepted but a valued partner. His observations were regarded as unique, particularly insightful, and relevant - something that 'normal' people were incapable of.  There was something about the untethered mind that allowed for special perception and understanding. 

His ramblings about the natural world - the law of tooth and claw in particular - were considered metaphorically accurate.  Conservatives in their eagerness for battle had reverted to the law of the jungle and were no better than wolves.  His vivid descriptions of the savagery of the plains, the evisceration of the kill, the aggressiveness of the beasts were clearly about Israel's own inhumanity in Gaza and Donald Trump's massacre of thousands in Iran. 

Somehow Harlan's peculiar mental disability gave him unusual clarity - not logic by any means, but a sharp vision.  He could actually see lions ripping organs out of wildebeests or eagles ripping the hearts out of their prey.

When he looked out over an audience gathered to hear the Congressman talk about diversity, the superior, natural, tribal energy of the black man, the new age of sexuality ushered in by the transgender, he could see a primeval scene of flying pterodactyls, thundering triceratops, and hundred foot long snakes. 

When the Congressman addressed a group of black people he could only see them naked whooping and hollering around a fire, shaking their spears and raising their arms to an animist god.  If it was to a group of gay men and lesbian women, he saw an orgy of sucking, buggering, scissoring, and muff-diving as vivid as scenes from a Fellini movie. 

He didn't just imagine these scenes, they became real. The audience had been transformed by his power. 

Again, who is to say what mechanisms control the addled brain, and as soon as the Congressman ended his plea, the audience in Harlan's eyes returned to normal, and in the few words that he was expected to say, he offered encouragement, counsel, and good will. 

He was welcomed by all divergent groups as one of their own, and for that the Congressman received warm praise.  He had done his job and then some. 

When the mechanisms that were keeping his insanity in check began to falter, and he was given to tics, shakes, and Tourette's outbursts, nothing was thought of it.  If they, good progressives, had included him in their community, then it was unconscionable to criticize him for his diversity. Even when his meanderings became incomprehensible - no intimation of metaphor was possible - and his behavior became side show erratic, they said nothing.  This deranged, unhinged, wild man was just as welcome as a ghetto queen, pimp, or San Francisco bathhouse male whore.  

When word got around the Congressman's constituency that he had a wacko on his staff who had become one of his closest advisors, and this word got back to him, he realized that perhaps he had gone too far, and Harlan was progressively deleted from the program and finally cashiered.  Progressivism is one thing, but electoral victory is another. 

Harlan hardly knew the difference, so completely around the bend that he was after leaving Washington.  He couldn't tell heads from tails, shit from Shinola and the world was just one jumble of outlandish visions.  He finally was scooped up by the mental dog catchers - the nasty name for the outreach service of the state hospital - and interned once again.  There really was no other place for him, but for him it was no different than Congress, so he was as happy as a clam. 

A White Woman Marries An African Man - And Finds That Diversity Is Not All It's Cracked Up To Be

Vicki was not old, but not young either.  She was moderately attractive and intelligent, reasonably successful, but unlucky in love.  Time was passing and no good man had come her way.

Vicki was also a committed progressive and for years had fought for the rights of the black man who, she and her colleagues believed, was soon to be back atop the human pyramid where he belonged.  A sentient being of the African forest, attuned to nature, of primal intelligence, tribal loyalties, strength, and natural virtue, nothing but racism kept him from his anointed place. 

She had fought long and hard for racial justice, had called out systemic white racism, joined the forces of Black Lives Matter, voted for every racial reform that the DC city council proposed, and tried her best to integrate within black society. 

This last goal proved difficult. Washington was no different than Botha's South African apartheid (east of Rock Creek park black, west of the park white; north-south busses white, east-west busses black) and as much as she tried to befriend black people, the door slammed shut before she could get her foot in.  The very identity politics that she and her progressive colleagues had promoted gave black people license to swarm together and keep white people out.

And to be honest Vicki was afraid of the ghetto - a nasty, horrid place of ho's, pimps, drugs, and violence despite the inherent, innate superiority of the black man - and although she had no doubt that the miasma would soon lift, the inner city would become the social and cultural center of America, and life would be better for all, she hesitated to set foot across the Anacostia river. 

She hated herself for such timidity and hypocrisy.  How could a woman who stood for racial justice and the dignity and honor of the black man not be willing to go where he lived?  Yet her better judgement told her to stay clear, to remain a loyal activist from afar, no less passionate, but far safer. 

None of this dimmed her desire to be with black people, to live the diversity and inclusivity that she had always promoted, and to join them in their struggle, their culture, and their way of life.  Perhaps most of all she wondered what it would be like to be loved by a black man.

Although she rejected the stereotype of black men as sexual dervishes, more well endowed, confident, and eager than whites, she knew that there had to be a scintilla of truth to it as there was in all stereotypes. 

She had never been satisfied by white men who had been whipped like slaves by feminism and MeToo charlatanry into timid, hesitant lovers.  Again, it was the fault of her and her radically progressive sisters, but the law of unintended consequences has no limits. 

When she asked her neighbor, a World Bank economist whose countries were all in Africa, where she might go on her African journey (she did not confide in him the real reason but talked only of cultural diversity and historical interest), he said, 'Don't bother'. 

Vicki would never have taken him for a prejudiced man.  The World Bank after all had a development mission to raise the poor out of poverty, to improve its socio-economic and judicial systems, and to hasten Africa's emergence as a legitimate member of the commonwealth of nations.  Wasn't that mission enough to dispel any thoughts of prejudice?

One by one the economist reeled off Africa's failures.  From top to bottom, east to west, the continent was failed space, ruled by big men in arbitrary, autocratic rule; socially backward, tribal, primitive, and medieval; venal, corrupt, and morally empty. 

Vicki couldn't believe her ears.  What racism will do to an otherwise intelligent mind.  The economist was blind to the truth and had become hardened with prejudice and racial hatred. 

The tour companies were less critical but more diffident than she expected. Lindblad, Avalon, Abercrombie & Kent, Trafalgar, and others had nothing on tap for the kind of sub-Saharan cultural tour she had in mind, but could possibly configure a personalized tour for her.  In the meantime, why didn't she consider something much more interesting, like a Nile cruise or a Serengeti safari?

She found a tour company which was delighted at her request.  They were proud of their eclecticism, their adventurous spirit, and their encouragement of off-the grid travel.  To be sure they could not offer the luxury of the big companies, but their experience would be far more rewarding.  They promised her 'an insider's tour of Africa' where she would be free to roam and at the same time would be well-taken care of. 

Her eagerness was such that she failed to dig any deeper than the agent's promotional pitch. Had she given even a cursory look she would have found that Ottaway Tours had filed for bankruptcy twice, recovered, repositioned themselves, rearranged their priorities, and rejiggered management. However no one but the most naive Americans hoping for adventure on the cheap, would have looked at Ottaway Tours. 

Vicki was one of these credulous, idealistic Americans, and Ottaway Tours said that they would fashion the tour to meet her particular, personal objectives.  When she said she wanted to meet 'ordinary' Africans for friendship and even intimacy, the tour agent immediately understood her meaning.  From start to finish she would be guided to the most popular African watering holes where the best and the brightest Africans meet.  

The bar at the Amitie Hotel in Abidjan was one of those places.  Wealthy Ivoirians from Yamoussoukro, the new capital far inland, came to the more cosmopolitan coast for a reprieve, and gathered at the Amitie and the Palm Bar to meet and greet, drink with old friends and meet new ones.  It was a sophisticated place with an Olympic-size pool, illuminated at night, festive, and filled with beautiful people. 

 

'Why not start there?', the tour organizers agreed; and so it was that Vicki was housed in a modest hotel somewhere between the foreign enclaves of Le Plateau and Treichville, the popular center of town.  It was far enough from white privilege and close enough to native reality to give Vicki the impression that she was finally in Africa. 

After a quick wash and freshening after the long flight, she was met by an Ottaway agent who brought her to the Palm Bar, deposited her, gracefully left and promised to pick her up when she called. 

It was there that she met Ibrahim who showed her every courtesy, every bit of African generosity, charm, and attention.  This could only augur well, she thought, meeting such a wonderful, attractive African man on her first night in the country; and went back to the hotel feeling happier than she had been in a long time. 

Now, Ibrahim was not just an incidental African, but a businessman, one who like his Nigerian counterparts was a master of the scam.  However he did not deal in financial instruments, but in women.  Vicki was not the first American woman to come to Africa looking for bi-cultural adventure, men, and political justification.  

His conquests, however had only been partial.  He was given gifts, bought five-star dinners, and paid generous emoluments by eager women, but his goal - to marry well and go to America - had not yet been realized. 

Vicki was so blinkered by her desire to meet real black men that she was as careless about her male company as she was about her choice of tour agencies.  She was delighted with Ibrahim, found him cultured, sophisticated, attentive, and overwhelmingly sexy.  

They were all like this, these American women, Ibrahim learned early on. He was delighted that his American brothers had done the prep work.  With women like Vicki who were convinced that Africa was the cultural motherlode and that African men were soon to sit in the citadel of honor, seduction was a piece of cake. 

Vicki was a wealthy woman who had recently inherited stock in both Amazon and Nvidia, and was easily able to extend her stay in country.  Cote d'Ivoire Immigration had no problem extending her visa, delighted as they were to see American tourism increase after so many years of civil unrest.  

And so it was that she and Ibrahim became an item, and coaxed by him to upgrade into his real Africa, she moved to a suite at the Amitie overlooking the ocean with all the amenities of a first class stay.  

Ibrahim stayed with her there, and after a month of growing intimacy, the ultimate prize - marriage - was broached.  She would travel with him up country to meet his mother and his family, they would be married in a village ceremony and then one officiated the American consul, and would then sail to America. 

Vicki couldn't believe her good fortune.  God had indeed smiled upon her.  She had not only found her man but found an African one! 

After arriving in America and moving from her small apartment in Dupont Circle to a more spacious home in McClean, Ibrahim continued the scam he had learned so well, and with his Nigerian lawyer worked out a very favorable financial partnership with his new wife.  

When his residency was well established, his marriage official and documented, and his financial future set, he announced his departure.  He took thousands of dollars from their joint account and secured it in an Aruban offshore bank account, redeemed the millions of dollars of Amazon and Nvidia stock he had had cannily transferred to himself, and disappeared. 

He had done nothing wrong - he did not steal anything nor had he taken anything that didn't belong to him so he was not a wanted man, just a rich one thanks to - yes, his native intelligence, cultural superiority, social sophistication, and primal African sentience. 

Vicki's World Bank neighbor wanted to say, 'See, what did I tell you?' when he learned from his colleagues what had happened to her, but held his tongue.  She had learned a hard lesson, and would never forget it. 

However, he underestimated her progressive idealism and true belief in the rise of the black man.  The misfortune was entirely her fault, she admitted.  She was too smitten, too much a naive, desirous woman, too much in thrall to men and sexually deprived, too ambitious in her desire to champion blackness to protect herself. 

Some thought that this was an example of Christian charity, forgiveness, and absolution.  She had made peace with herself, had forgiven her predator, and returned to the higher values of life.  

The reality was far different.  Once afflicted by cultural myopia and infected with an untouchable idealism, her return to the canon of social reform was a given.  Ibrahim was her doing, not the black man's, not Africa’s.

Back in Abidjan, Ibrahim's family was delighted with their monthly checks from America and were as proud as punch over the success of their brother.  He was a true hero and his fame spread far upriver, encouraging young men to make the trip to the capital and to try their luck with white women. 

A development success story, not exactly the kind envisaged by the World Bank or USAID, but a success story nonetheless. 

Looking For A Husband - Danube River Tours, Castles, And Eye Shadow, The Feminine Mystique Of Travel

Vicki Brice squawked all the way up to Vassar for the reunion.  'This time will be a charm', she said referring to the Danube tour where she hoped to find her a husband - or rather a companion - for at her age romance was a thing of the distant past.  So dim in fact that she had to dig deep in her reticule of memories to sort out Michael from Phillip, Robert from David - or was it the other way around.  Never mind, doesn't matter. Let bygones be bygones, and let life begin again. 

Her husband of many years was not yet cold in the ground before Vicki began to plan her future.  'God only knows how many years one has left', she mused to her classmates, limning the praises of Lindblad Travel, a savior in disguise, the happy refuge for still-young widows like her.  She was not going to sit on her behind and watch the clock tick her hours away, not on your life, so it wasn't long after Arnold was in the grave that she began her romantic journeys.

The reunion would be a lot of old cows mooing about some bull who took them in the pasture, but old times are good times, and along with the fragments of trips to Yale, the Old Campus, the parties at Davenport and Silliman, reunions were silly, happy, girly things.  

Vassar girls however were supposed to be a cut above Smith, Holyoke, and the rest of the Seven Sisters - a place for the brightest, the future of women and not the usual marriage mills. Yes, the college did arrange busses to take girls down to Yale for the weekend, but that was part of the perks of a school like Vassar - differential calculus and the pick of the litter.  

If a Vassar girl had not found the man she was to marry by the time she graduated, something had gone awry.  God knows, there was no lack of opportunity. 

Now, Vicki was not exactly Miss Universe, in fact far from it.  She had gotten all the wrong genes from her Guatemalan father and Canary Island mother - a pairing which looked good on college applications just beginning to look for 'diversity' but which genetically speaking was a bad hand. 

She tried her best to make up for her genetic misfortune and spent a fortune on cosmetics, hair styling, and Lord & Taylor, but not even a makeover genius could have done anything for those narrow-set eyes, fright wig hair, disappointing nose, and thin as paper lips.  As much as she tried to convince herself otherwise, she was not much to look at.

Yet Yale was a big place, and the bell curve applies to everything; so although the number of chisel-jawed, blonde, blue-eyed Adonises skewed the curve and flattened it considerably, there were bound to be good men, just men, the right kind of men for her. 

She did find one, her recently departed husband, Arnold; and if there is little record of the couple, individually or together, it is because there are people on this earth who barely leave a smudge, men and women who come and go with barely a notice, folded into the run of the mill so perfectly that when they die, it is as though they had never lived. 

So Vicki's squawking was her war cry,  She might have been married to an emotional bookkeeper all these years - Arnold was never able to muster much more enthusiasm than turning a page - but her new life was going to begin, albeit far too late.  

All in all Arnold was a good husband, one of the very few who never strayed - but to be honest, this sexual sedentariness, far from honorable, made him even more unattractive. She had always had eyes for Lance Reventlow, Yale's prize, a Casanova, Valmont, and Lothario even as a freshman; but watched him fall into the spider web of Alexandra Cabot of the Boston Cabots, a tart, une pute, but a girl with money galore and Hollywood looks.  How could anyone compete with that?

There was first the Caribbean cruise, a very pedestrian affair. First Class did not do much to separate the wheat from the chaff, filled as it was with jolly old men from Dubuque more suited for excusing themselves for port and cigars while the ladies retired than anything romantic.  

Not a one of these 'men' was of any interest, the on-and-off stops at hot, steamy places was enervating, and the meals, touted as being prepared by a five-star chef, were as limp and insipid as her fellow diners. 

The second tour - the Aegean - offered more promise. It attracted a higher caliber of client thanks to a team of docents from Columbia University, a whopping all-inclusive price, and luxury accommodations; but the men kept their noses in their Baedekers and took copious notes during all lectures.  Who cared who did what to whom in the Peloponnesian wars, for God's sake? 

So this third tour, the Danube tour, seemed right.  Thanks to AI, Vicki was able search beyond the brochures.  There was no shame in asking ChatGPT anything, so she typed in 'I want a river cruise where I can meet, attractive, eligible older men' and Avalon was at the top of the list. 

To take a step back - why did these matronly women possibly think that trolling for husbands on a cruise ship was going to catch them a prize? Vicki had been saddled with her unhappy ordinariness for decades, and in that time not one man other than her bookkeeper husband ever looked her way. In fact Arnold rarely looked up at her at all. He was happy in the relationship because she, unlike most women, never forced the issue.  

Beverly Adams, for example, a woman of some stature in her former profession, married to a man whom she missed when he died, still needed male company.  Who said that women could be complete without men? Beverly wondered.  Probably some lesbian feminist who never needed men.   

So she went on cruises just like Vicki with little more in her bag to recommend her.  She was still attractive in an older woman kind of way, still as pert and vivacious as she was years ago, and while not beautiful, certainly attractive.  However she came up empty handed each and every time.  Divorced men obsessed about their wives, either disconsolate for having been left on the curb or angry that they had been; and widowers were still living in the shadows of the dear departed. 

Beverly was adaptable. Waverly was dead and buried, they had led a good life, but old age is unforgiving and the clock ticks faster than it did when one is young.  Yet for all her sanguinity and enthusiasm, she found nothing but dissatisfaction on board.  

Cruises are deliberately configured to encourage companionship, to make romantic interchange easier, to grease the wheels.  The cruise line membership algorithm was designed for compatibility.  It took the chance out of meeting.  Otherwise why bother? One might just as well cruise the National Gallery of Art or the Corcoran for well-intentioned, cultured men. 

Let's face it.  Most of these women, although hardwired to need men, socially programmed to seek them out and to live with them, were diffident about the idea at best. Decades of marriage only confirmed what their inner voices told them - men really aren't worth it, better to live without them, especially as one gets older and sex fades  as a desirable commodity. 

Vicki squawked all the way up 95, the Dewey Throughway, and Route 9W to Poughkeepsie.  This time would be different, she told her classmates.  She would come back refreshed, invigorated, renewed, and with a beautiful man in tow. 

Needless to say the Danube Cruise was just as much of a bust as the others, and Vicki was forced to regroup.  Maybe she was barking up the wrong tree. 

After the reunion she dropped out of sight, not a peep in the alumnae notes of The Vassar Quarterly, not a sighting anywhere in Washington; so it was anyone's guess what happened to her.

‘I hope she found someone',  one Vassar friend said to another; but Vicki would have been barking and yapping if she had.  No, a singular fate must have awaited her. 

There was nothing really surprising about Vicki's odyssey, regardless how she might have ended up. Women of a certain age are simply too hardwired to the man thing, the social thing, to do anything else.  All well and good for both sexes when both are plump and juicy, not so later on. 

Slave To The Kitchen, Slave To The Job - Why The Outrageousness Of Donald Trump Is So Appealing

Harlan Banks worked two jobs and a little on the side.  There was always something to deliver or dig or fetch, and he made ends meet.  His life in a small town in the Mississippi delta was unremarkable for its regularity and its sameness.  Everyone was in the same boat, paddling in the slow current of the bayou, watching time pass with little to show for it. 

Yes, he loved his children, put up with his wife and his in-laws, enjoyed a week on the Gulf every few years or so, but soldiered on like others in his regiment - born poor, raised poor, and lived poor.  Not colored poor, but poor enough, not trailer trash but living in a trailer. 

He was a complaisant, uncomplaining worker at Walmart and The Live Oak, a popular restaurant where he worked seven till closing. Living on the margins meant he could never complain, act up, or make demands.  He was as much a slave and no better off than Isaiah who had worked the Ottaway Plantation where his great-grandfather had been overseer.  Dawn till dusk in the cotton fields, cornpone and fatback, working his fingers to the bone for nothing. 

His family remained on the plantation during Reconstruction as tenant farmers.  It didn't take long for Harper Middleton, the former grandee of Ottaway, run off his property by the Freedmen's Bureau, to regain his land, and he was quick to hire whomever was still in the county, white or black, to work as tenant farmers. 

Life as a tenant farmer was little different from slavery.  Harlan's forbears managed a living on the fertile bottomland recovered by Middleton, but were as beholden to him as former slaves were to him as Massa. 

Life went on for succeeding generations of Banks until the present day when Harlan Banks reflected on his history. For how many generations longer would Banks be owned, tethered and tied, beholden and corralled? 

The election of Donald Trump changed everything.  Not that he expected to be a guest at Mar-a-Lago or at the White House, nor even that expected prosperity to come his way.  That might come once attention turned towards people like him - patriotic, hardworking, Americans of faith who asked nothing from government but opportunity - but the real reason for the fresh air was the personality of the President, a man who had nothing to do with the pedantry, sanctimony, and righteousness of the Left. 

He was a Super Hero, a comic book action figure come to life.  He was an Ubermensch with no patience for small minds and infantile idealism.  He was a Colossus.  It wasn't so much that Harlan would ever be like Donald Trump - his yachts, mansions, and arm candy - but that thanks to him he might regain his dignity.  

After years of being told he was a white supremacist, a racist cracker, a fundamentalist fool, an airheaded swamp rat, he was suddenly his own man.  After years of the configuration of society around the assumption of the black man's native superiority, the white man was once again in focus. 

He was again told that his Scotch-Irish roots were noble, that the European civilization from which his ancestors had come was valorous and built the foundation for liberal democracy; that there was no such thing as systemic racism; that there was no distinction between the working man and the leader of government. 

Most importantly, Trump was outrageous. He bulldozed his way down Independence Avenue and got rid of the do-nothing hangers-on in one bureaucracy after another.  He was building a grand ballroom, an Arch of Victory, and a Field of Heroes.  He was wielding a mighty Christian sword crushing the infidel and razing his cities.  He was reprising Joshua in the battle of Jericho, ridding the Holy Land of the heathen enemies of Israel. 

Professional wrestling matches would be held at the White House, and tinsel, sequins, and sparkle would return.  The days of ugliness, faux propriety, and absurdity would be gone and forgotten.  Harlan's America was back!

This of course was exactly what drove the Left to distraction.  It wasn't so much the President's conservative policies - lower taxes, freer enterprise, less regulation, a more muscular foreign policy, an embrace of capitalism and Wall Street investment - but his embrace of what they saw as a lowbrow, cheap culture.  

After years of progressive promotion of gay men, lesbians, transgenders and the black man, the beautiful people were back - the blonde, blue-eyed women and handsome, chisel-jawed men.  It was the return of a much maligned culture that they thought they had thoroughly disparaged and dismissed that rankled. 

The President didn't just change the cultural ethos on little cats' paws, but like gangbusters - with an in-your-face, fuck you braggadocio - and it was this that Harlan cheered.  The explosive anything goes ethos of the old America. 

Why, the Left asked, would anyone like Harlan Banks vote for Donald Trump, a crony capitalist whose policies would only benefit the rich and the privileged?  Their policies and programs would be designed for the marginalized, the disadvantaged, and the poor.  

Yet as Harlan knew these programs were fictions, enabling charades for minorities, giveaways in the name of equity but nothing more than posturing.  During the Biden years Harlan hadn't seen one dime of the purported equity money so widely promised.  Trump made no fictive promises, but only pledged to recalibrate and reconfigure the American economy to do its job, to spread prosperity.  

Harlan would wait but in the meantime was energized, spirited, and awakened by the President.  Every time he called out a reporter for their dumb questions; every time one of his Cabinet members refused to toady up to Congressional committee members and snapped back at their preposterous sanctimony, he cheered. 

This is what the Left missed.  America is not a progressive, serious, compassionate place.  It is lowbrow, simple, and honest about its lack of pretention.  It is a country of Las Vegas and Hollywood, con men, pimps, and charlatans, catfish noodlers and alligator hunters.  It is a country of men like Harlan who have limits - and they have had enough of the Biden progressive freak show. 

Northern liberals are proud of the fact that they have never set foot below the Mason-Dixon line, for to do so would be giving support to the racist, proto-segregationist, perennially Jim Crow cracker South.  They have never met a Harlan Banks and never wanted to do so.  Anyone born and raised as he was would not be worth their time. 

Progressive arrogance plus Trump outrageousness is the perfect political storm for continued conservative victory.  Americans like Harlan want their country back.  Let it become more 'diverse' but on Jeffersonian terms, terms of integration, patriotism, and subscription to a core moral ethos.  Not the progressives'  arrogant, politically expedient, absurd, and divisive 'inclusivity'. 

'Fuck 'em', said Harlan, catching the President's drift. 

What Makes A Progressive Or A Conservative? - The Tale Begins In Childhood

Progressives believe that with the right investment, continued commitment, passion, and a sense of righteousness, the world can become a better place.  Despite the lessons of history - perpetual, perennial wars, civil strife, palace coups, family jealousies, and the seeming ineluctability of human nature - Utopia is indeed possible. 

Conservatives claim that exactly because of these predictably similar millennia of history, and the hardwired, innate, unchangeable human nature within us, there is no such thing as progress.  Change, yes and by all means, but changing to something better, never.

While the two sides may quibble about superficialities - life expectancy, economic opportunity, social mobility - they differ fundamentally on the nature of human enterprise.  Conservatives say that faster cars, the Internet, medical advances simply mask the fundamental core reality of human nature.  That human conflict, competition, is not only fundamental but is the only way that the conditions of life - not its ethos or central purpose - can improve. 

Progressives dismiss this argument as self-serving.  Faster cars are indications of a better world, and that eventually the noble human spirit will find a way to harmonize ethos with material progress. 

These contrary beliefs do not simply define politics, but the way one behaves. One's  understanding of man’s relationship to God, secular institutions, society, and the geo-ecological environment are profoundly different. Our reactions to and sympathy/empathy for others is determined by a moral philosophy which either blesses and anoints others as brothers and sisters; or sees them as evolutionary competitors struggling for survival, dominance, and genetic longevity.

How did we become so different? We are both from the same socio-cultural milieu.  We both went to elite preparatory schools and universities; and although our immediate socio-cultural heritage was indeed different, there should be no reason why our political philosophy should have so dramatically diverged.

Some researchers have suggested that political philosophy has a genetic basis.  Although society, culture, education, and upbringing certainly have a role, it is bits of DNA which align in certain ways to produce conservatives or liberals.  John B Judis writing in The New Republic says:

Over the last two decades, political scientists, and psychologists have used genetics and neuroscience to claim that people’s political beliefs are predetermined at birth. Genetic inheritance, they argue, helps to explain why some people are liberal and others conservative; some people turn out to vote; and why some people favor and others oppose abortion and gay rights. The field itself has a name—genopolitics—and it is taking political science by storm. In the last four years alone, over 40 journal articles on the subject have appeared in academic journals 

Children are remarkable little creatures.  Before they are out of kindergarten they already have a sense of how the world works, not in any detail of course - no exogenous and endogenous variables, social conditioning, genetic predisposition, human nature - but the combination of inborn personality and character, a sharp perception, and native, uncomplicated intelligence are enough. 

It is clear from even a casual observation that children - too young to have been influenced by environmental factors differ significantly, and many of their emotional responses correspond to adult political philosophy.  Some children are born with both high intelligence and a well-defined sense of self.  They come to believe at a very early age that they are superior to other children and that they can do anything they want. 

Others are born with a sense of empathy - they are social beings rather than independent engines of activity.  Accommodation, consideration, collaboration are important elements for fostering and preserving this worldview. 

Progressives deny any such innate characteristics.  We are nothing more than the product of nurture which begins from the moment we are born; and yet no parent, no matter how progressive in outlook can ignore the indomitable will, demands, and insistence of young children.  They have come out of the womb combative, territorial, and self-defensive. 

There is a bell curve for everything, and within this central, inescapable paradigm, the reactions to it vary. Some, the highly intelligent children with a naturally highly honed sense of self are at one asymptote. Those less intelligent and with an inborn 'outer-ness' fall on the other end. 

As they grow older, these children do not lose these innate, inborn traits but express them in adult ways.  They become conservatives or progressives. 

Such evolution is not just political but philosophical.  It goes far beyond partisan politics.  A philosophical conservative will look at social dysfunction, harsh traditionalism, inequality, concentration of wealth and ability as natural expressions of human nature and human dynamics.  All revolve around the essential, unchangeable foundation of competition, territorialism, self-defensiveness, and aggressive demands for wealth, resources, and security. 

A progressive insists that there is no such thing as hardwiring.  These social characteristics are products of the environment and can be changed, modified, or eliminated. 

Kevin Fells was a very intelligent boy who mastered numbers, reading, and the chess board with ease.  He was impatient with the classmates and teachers who slowed him down, got in his way, impeded his development, kept him from understanding and achievement. 

From a very early age he instinctively understood the bell curve.  Some children were smart and others were not, and the way for the smart ones, like him, must be kept clear.  

He grew up at a time when cooperative learning had been introduced into primary school education.  The more gifted children were to help the slower learner even at the expense of their own progress.  Keven saw the unfairness of this.  Why should the scales be tipped in favor of those who would always be behind when students like Kevin - students of ability and promise - were held back?

In middle and high school, he saw the same imbalance; but now it was not simply unfairness but injustice.  The high standards of the private school he was attending were being eroded because of the admission of unqualified students simply because of their race. 

The school was devotedly liberal, proud of its long tradition of opposing racial segregation, and committed to educating students not only in advanced theoretical concepts but in moral posture.  To demonstrate this commitment, a black student was chosen to open every colloquy, every assembly, every graduation, and every matriculation. 

Neither Kevin nor any of his middle school classmates had parsed the issue.  Its antecedents, Quaker abolitionism, pacifism, and One World advocates were distant, unquestioned elements of their affirmative action stance; but all the students could see was disparity, unfairness, and injustice.  More importantly it consolidated the residual racial biases they already had. 

The community from which most students came was decidedly liberal and most parents accepted the school's policies without question; but affirmative action was an important milestone in his evolving conservatism.  The point was that despite an almost universal embrace of black-first preferential treatment. white guilt, and colonial shame, Kevin' natural, inbred, inborn, and undeniable political philosophy had never wavered.  The environment - nurture - had done nothing to sway him from his instinctively finely tuned perceptions. 

The same was true of those children born with liberal sentiments - those for whom compassion, empathy, sympathy, and unquestioning inclusiveness were hardwired.  These children considered the Kevins of the world arrogant, selfish, and proprietary. Kevin's accusers absorbed the liberal ethos of their parents, the school, and their neighborhood as received wisdom. 

The dynamics of adolescence - the primacy of belonging, the importance of conformity, and fear of censure - are hard for anyone to resist.  The liberal cast of the society at large is one thing, but when the neediness of adolescence is factored in, independence is rare.

Which is why Kevin was unusual.  His instincts, as valid as a teenager as they were as a young child went counter to such group censure and opprobrium; but such defiance had its price.  Being a conservative in a deeply-steeped liberal environment is not easy. 

As he grew into adulthood in the present day, his situation was even more precarious. It was hard for such an intelligent, incisive, compelling man to live within a culture of identity - one which not only did not value intelligence, will, ambition, and ability; but championed the reverse.  Idealism and Utopian conviction made objectivity impossible.  The country was not so much divided by Left and Right, but by idealism and fact. Progressives saw the world as what it could be, conservatives as what it was; and never would the twain ever meet. 

Was Kevin devoid of compassion and social concern?  Far from it; but because of his absolute conviction that all efforts must be calculated and planned within a competitive, natural selection, he shed no tears.  It was that which expelled him from the liberal community in which he lived more than anything.  No tears meant no love, no compassion, and no understanding. 

Kevin could not help being a conservative any more than his liberal colleagues could help their idealism.  It was a matter of character and personality - the particular configurations of the same human nature expressed in radically different ways. 

There are conversions - given enough time liberals will become conservative - but few and far between.  Nothing as hardwired as political philosophy - the very way one sees the world - is likely to change.