No Kings, No ICE, No Trump - The Whites Only Political Jamboree Of A Small Southern Town

Bridget Pitcher fixed the last of the cucumber sandwiches, poured the unsweet tea into thermoses, and fixed her hair.  This was to be the rally of the year, an all-purpose, big tent affair where everyone from her small Mississippi town would come out to protest the antics of Donald Trump. 

Bridget had arranged protests before - the last one that made the Columbus Dispatch was Occupy Wall Street, a heady affair to protest the concentration of wealth in the New York investment banks and to proclaim a new era of redistribution. 

That event was less well attended than Bridget had hoped, for someone had brought up the fact that Morgan Stanley had invested millions in Columbus Iron and Steel - a failing business unable to keep up with the robotic age and still noisy with lathes, mechanical presses, and power drills. 

'Invest' is not quite accurate - Morgan Stanley bought up Columbus Iron and Steel, reconfigured it completely, balanced robotics with skilled labor, and under a new name, Columbus Dynamics, Inc., hired two hundred workers. 

That and the fact that workers' 301k retirement accounts were flush with cash thanks to the surging stock market, made possible by Wall Street investment, dampened enthusiasm for the protest.

'These Jewish bankers don't keep their money under the mattress', said Alden Phillips, haberdasher, civic leader, and pastor of the Mt. Olive Baptist Church of Aberdeen. 

It was not a question of antisemitism because ninety-nine percent of the town knew that Jews were responsible for the ungodly trash coming out of Hollywood, why it was difficult to get a homeowner's loan, and how Congress had been bought by George Soros, the Rothschilds, and the Jewish bankers of Florence. 

Yet here was Phillips saying that if the Jews wanted to invest their money in Columbus, the town should take it and send them flowers, not protest the 'fulcrums of productivity', one of his stock phrases spoken from the pulpit when it came to Jesus and the Baptist Church. 

One member of the committee to organize the Occupy Wall Street protests suggested, given the idea by Phillips, that the town should be protesting the international Jewish conspiracy which was at the heart of most of America's problems. 

Bridget took the floor to politely disagree.  The Jewish conspiracy angle was a good one, but what the town was protesting was Wall Street's manipulative powers, the dangers of concentration of wealth, and the cabal of trigger happy capitalists ready to make a buck - Columbus Iron and Steel notwithstanding. 

The skein of wool, however, came unraveled, and no one could agree on just what Occupy Wall Street was or what was the purpose of the protest, so although the event went on as planned, attendance was desultory at best. 

The No Kings rally that Bridget organized was far more successful.  She recruited everyone - Walmart greeters and checkout clerks, dime store cashiers, telephone linemen, and housewives, all of whom were convinced by Bridget's impassioned appeal - Donald Trump was an autocrat, a dictator in waiting, a man bound and determined to become king, establish an imperial kingdom, and destroy democracy. 

No Kings had a nice ring to it, something more palpable and immediate than the Wall Street thing, and so it was that a good crowd, still more sparse than Bridget had hoped came out on a bright May Sunday to protest. 

As the townspeople joined the procession from the four corners of the town and from nearby Westport and Aberdeen, Bridget's colleague from the local community college said, 'I see nary a black face', and in fact none had any intention of showing up.  Although the town was now over 40 percent black, few showed any interest in Bridget's politics and less in her public assemblies.  

Years after slavery and Jim Crow, black people were still yessum and no suh darktown tarpaper shack nonvoting residents, contributing nothing in the way of taxes, leadership, ownership, or responsibility; so it was no wonder that not a soul among them had any interest in wasting a Saturday afternoon baking in the sun for some white cockamamie nonsense. 

This time around - that is, for this Big Tent affair which was going to be one grand, one-size-fits-all protest against Trump and for the environment, the black man, and the transgender - Bridget made a special effort to rally the black community. 

'I don't do no faggot shit', said Pharoah Jones to which Bridget smiled and quickly made her exit.  It took quite an effort to get her out of her white neighborhood, but in the interest of solidarity and communal solidarity she made the trip.

'I'll never do that again', she confided to her colleague.  'It was awful'.  She and the Big Tent organizers had to be satisfied with a whites only crowd. 'Just like the old days', said Bridget's 100 year old grandmother who remembered the white settled time before the diversity hoopla. 

Bridget promised to wheel her to the best street corner to watch the march, and would set up her own beach umbrella and make her special sweet tea. 

The police closed Main Street between 4th and 15th to make way for the parade, refreshment stands were set up at convenient intervals, and the football field at the high school where marchers were to end up, listen to speeches, and cheer, was festooned with banners, flags, balloons, and signs. 

There was no particular order to the event - no particular corner of the field for climate, another for black rights, and another for the gender spectrum - so it was a hodge-podge of parochial protests.  Nevertheless the spirt of protest was universal and engaging.  People hugged each other, commiserated, and prayed together.

'What is the purpose of the event', Bridget was asked by a Dispatch reporter.  'What do you intend to accomplish?'.  The reporter was recently hired by the paper because of his credentials.  He had been a journalism major at Columbia but wanted to return South to his roots.  It was a Northern, Jewish question, and Bridget fumbled and scrambled until she gathered herself and said it was about America and the dangerous direction it was taking.

The reporter, despite his polite, genteel Southern upbringing had forgotten his manners during his years in New York and pursued the issue until Bridget blurted out, 'You know quite well, sonny' and walked away. 

The whole event was not about meaning or purpose but about solidarity, camaraderie, and togetherness.  Piqued and upset by the interview, she went back to her cucumber sandwiches and hand-painted signs until her anger passed. 

This event, supposed to be the jewel in the crown, was even less attended than No Kings.  It was a ragtag affair at best, only half of the sandwiches got eaten, most marchers gave up even before they got to the football field, and the speakers spoke to only a scattering of diehard believers. 

When she was approached by a progressive community organizer from Jackson to organize another event to protest the wars in Gaza and Iran, she demurred.  

She never gave up her passion for progressive causes, and wrote letters to the editor of the Dispatch on a weekly basis, but all in all she retired her public persona and tended to her husband, Irish Setter, and two grandchildren.

The Senator's Fortune - How A Canny Politician Made Millions From The Gold Mine Of Political Office

The most liberal Senators in Congress - Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren among them - have three houses, a multi-million dollar bank accounts, and a quite handsome lifestyle. Some like these two have been in office for decades and in so doing have managed to acquire considerable wealth.  What they declare is a fraction of their total worth, for canny investment counselling comes with the turf.  

It is rumored that Sanders has untraceable accounts in Aruba, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Bimini.  It might not be the wealth of Croesus, but when Sanders eventually retires, he will be able to live high off the hog. 

All this might be expected from  a conservative Senator whose contributors are numbered among the top corporations in the country.  A little walkin' around money to grease the wheels of government in their favor was well worth the investment; but for a diehard socialist, a man who every day preaches taxation of the rich, redistribution of wealth, and punitive financial restrictions on Wall Street investment unlimited offshore wealth is unexpected. 

This is a story not of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, but of another Senator who flew beneath the watchdog radar, who was marvelously ingenious about diversifying his sources of income, his investments, and his very unique and profitable financial instruments.  

This tale will be about how he managed to acquire vast undetected wealth.  His time may come, so adept is he at this subtle chicanery that decades may go by without federal investigation and indictment, but while he is still as free as a bird and enjoying his wealth, the story begs telling.  

Senator X - or 'Bob' as he will be called here - was from a small farm community typical of many in rural America a few decades ago but disappearing quickly as agribusiness bulldozes family farms and employs fancy robotics to till, sow, and harvest all in the corporate interest. 

Rather than be discouraged by this commercial juggernaut, he was impressed by how efficiently wealth was created.  His father had worked long, hard hours just to keep his head above water, secure the land, the farmhouse, the livestock, and his reputation; while in one fell swoop the multinational company with its bottomless resources, paid bottom dollar to family farmers, deployed their high-tech machinery, turned unprofitable wheat fields into soy and corn acreage for processing and export to China. 

Money was to be made in America, easy money, and it only took enterprise, a feel for risk and opportunity, and a silver tongue. Investments came forthwith to those with a tale of profit to tell. 

He decided early on that politics would be his path to fortune. He would benefit from the wealth of others rather than have to create it himself.  Political office was exactly the place, for the more he studied the mechanics of politics  - how to win, how to stay in power, and how to enrich yourself while doing the nation's business - the more he was convinced this was the path he would take. 

He was smart enough to earn a scholarship to a well-known private university where he majored in finance, went on to business school where he honed his financial talents and studied both the legitimate operations of high-end investment and the schemes of Bernie Madoff, Jeffrey Skilling, and Enron.  There was little difference between the two - only a question of which side of street you were working. 

As a promising intern for the Congressman from his district who happened to be a member of the powerful Ways and Means committee, Bob learned the intricacies of federal revenue, investment, and rate of return.  Not surprisingly the mechanisms of financial management in the private sector were the inverse of the private.  No one cared about results only the appearance of doing good, doing the right thing.  A hundred million dollars could be allocated and disbursed with good will and heady promises, and then forgotten until it was time to reallocate more funds. 

'Tricks of the trade', the Congressman shared with his ambitious intern turned aide thanks to his quickness and financial acumen.  Disbursed monies were not exactly forgotten, especially his favorite, 'block grants' made to states for a particular purpose but not tied to any particular project - i.e. none of the usual rigmarole require for specific grants. Governors knew the value of such block grants, cash cows they were for them and their retirement accounts. 

It was understood that a certain proportion of each block grant would come back to its Congressional sponsor - in this case Bob's Congressman - and everyone would be happy. 

The case of the recently unearthed Somali scandal in Minnesota was a case in point. A portion of the millions that were granted to the Somali fraudsters came from federal grants. The Democrat administration of Joe Biden was eager to put money where its mouth was, stop talking about diversity and inclusivity and invest in it.  As usual there was 'leakage' all along the way and politicians from influential Congressional committees to state and municipal authorities took a cut. 

How, Bob wondered, could he take advantage of both corporate America's wealth and influence, and the bounty of unaccountable progressive largesse?  He could become an Independent, but would be cut off from the centers of partisan power; and in these days of divisive political alignment, being a moderate anything was not in the cards; but if he played these cards carefully - for example convincing corporate interests that he would drag his feet on restrictive legislation and at the same time promising poor constituents of his passion for social reform - he could make money. 

The American electorate, as credulous and gullible any, first voted Bob to the House and then to the Senate.  He ran brilliant campaigns promising something for all.  'I am a man of the people', he said, 'all people' and went on to detail how he would work with both the private sector and local community organizations to make the state a more productive, equitable place.  It was marvelous, and people of his state were taken in hook, line, and sinker.  

Now, kickbacks - the stock in trade of any enterprise - cannot be the crude cash-in-envelopes for Senators as they are for municipal aldermen, ward council members, or mayors; but given the high-tech, sophistication of online, encrypted, coded transfers, money 'exchange' can go undetected. 

To go into politics, one has to leave moral concerns at the door.  There is no place for whining about doing the right thing. Bob's intricate schemes did no harm, were part of the cost of doing business, were pieces of the 'share and share alike' ethos of American public service and corporate enterprise - so even if he did care about ethics, which he didn't - he would be covered. 

For all of his years in office, he pleased both progressive activists and corporate investors.  He was the go-to man for all comers.  There were always accounting loopholes in federal allocation and disbursement rules, and Bob learned how to take advantage of all of them.  He continued on his way, charming and charmed, feathering his nest, and accumulating a wealth beyond the dreams of any Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. 

He was beyond suspicion and beyond reproach. If your intention when becoming a politician is to make money, just like any other American entrepreneur, then you spend your time and best efforts in so doing.  Governance is simply a matter of covering all bases. 

So when Bob retired, he was feted, honored, and praised.  There'll never be another one like him, the people of his state all said in unison.  They were surprised when he did not return home after resigning from the Senate and found his residency in the small Caribbean island of Bequia unusual; but little did they know.  A tax haven, a convenient private airport from which he could fly to the rich watering holes of Miami, Rio, St. Bart's, and St. Thomas, Bequia was the perfect place for him. 

Visitation - Why Earthlings Need Aliens, Lourdes, And Miracles

Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov tells his brother that Jesus Christ sold out the world when he met the Devil in the Judean desert.  'Man does not live by bread alone', he told the Devil who offered him riches beyond imagining, but in so doing he made promises which he could not keep.  Man needed bread, didn't have it, led a life misery, pain, and misfortune, and with his divine power he could have set the world straight. 

 

Miracles, mystery, and authority was what he gave, and because of it the Church - a manipulative, exploitive, authoritarian - arrogated to itself authority for all moral and ethical principle.  To maintain its power, it gave the credulous, deceived, and ignorant masses what Christ promised, but did nothing to alleviate their suffering - to ease the earthly pain which was humanity's hallmark.

And so it was that Our Lady of Lourdes and Our Lady of Fatima was said to be seen in grottos in France and Portugal, and why saints were granted the right to heaven thanks to the miracles that they performed; and all through this magic, this vaudevillian show of immense appeal, the Church grew to a size and importance which challenged kings. 

Alyosha, Ivan's devoutly religious brother is shocked at Ivan's apostasy.  Alyosha has given his whole life to Christ, had believed completely in Christ's divine mission to offer salvation, redemption, and forgiveness of sins. 

'Ha', said Ivan, unconvinced and cynical of his brother's piety and went on to tell of the most horrendous, brutal, and inhuman treatment of children in the world - beatings, rapes, forced labor, starvation, and early death.  Christ said, 'Let the children suffer unto me', but behind this seemingly innocent and generous gesture, this expression of love and kindness, lay the most duplicitous deceit.  Christ could have eliminated suffering and yet he made it a pillar of the Church. 

To each and every one of Ivan's accusations of Christ's bribery - giving candy to childlike believers but deceiving them in his real intent by offering spiritual renewal and a place beside the Lord, Alyosha could only respond with the simplistic, superficial, patently false platitudes of the Church. 

The story of Christianity is a remarkable one - the evangelism of St. Paul who travelled from Palestine to Rome, preaching the gospel of hope and establishing churches in Galatia, Ephesus, and Corinth, small household gatherings of those whose lives held nothing but penury, sickness, and death. 

These churches could not be left on their own in an age of apostasy, so priests were created, and when the churches grew in number they were given bishops, then archbishops, then cardinals and popes. A quite secular, geopolitical, authoritative institution was created. 

And still the credulous masses blessed themselves, told ordained priests their sins, believed whole-heartedly in the pagan ceremony of transubstantiation, turning bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ as asking believers to 'eat of it'. 

This ritual sacrifice was to evoke the suffering of Christ on the cross where he died a painful, suffocating death.  Suffering had become the mainstay of the Church - a necessary feature of life to make one worthy of admission to heaven. 

Muslims deny that this painful, torturous death on the cross never occurred.  How could the Almighty permit such barbaric treatment of one of his prophets?  How could suffering be made the central feature of human life? 

Yet this was the genius of the Catholic Church - by making suffering the cornerstone of salvation, it was not obliged to relieve it in any way, and so the credulous became even more so.  Every new infliction of pain had divine purpose. 

The Church also knew that it could not sustain its majesty without proof, and so invented the ideas of mystery and miracles.  Go to Lourdes, the Vatican said, and there witness the magnificence of the Virgin Mary come down to earth as a messenger of Our Lord and Savior, and come to Holy Mass to witness the invocation of Christ through symbols, metaphor, verse, and magic. 

Protestant fundamentalism took a page out of the Vatican's book but added a note of urgency.  If you read the Bible, believed in its inerrancy, prayed, and took Jesus as your personal savior, he might well come to you - a visitation, an invitation to glory. 

In churches all over the South, congregants became ecstatic with unbounded joy when they saw Jesus appear before them.  Heaven was real, they now knew, and their path there was assured. 

Over the centuries the spiritual authority of the Church and in fact belief in God himself waned, and the most recent statistics confirm that much of Northern Europe is agnostic, demurring when asked the question, 'Do you without reservation believe in God'; but in Mississippi and Alabama there are no such doubts and questions about divinity are considered traitorous apostasy. 

Yet modernization - what closed the door on spiritual cant in Scandinavia - will happen in Mississippi and Alabama and the thousands of churches that seem to be everywhere will disappear. 

But the Church knew something about human nature and the desire of human beings to believe in something bigger than themselves.  There is no way that human beings could have no need for divine authority, a higher intelligence, a superior force. 

Conservative critics have noted the erosion of a central Christian ethos in America - one, universally accepted credo that unified the varied and diversified population of the nation.  It was there at the heart of the Republic when created after Independence, God-given rights, the declarers of freedom said, drawing inspiration from European Enlightenment. 

Now America is a playing field of secular identities, promoted as the new ethos.  Diversity, equity, and inclusivity became the mantra of the new Left.  God is immaterial, unnecessary, supernumerary in the struggle for a utopian, secular reality. 

The Left of course - like its Communist forbears - wants the State to assume the mantel of absolute authority, and progressives have preached the gospel of statism.  There is nothing that government cannot do, and in an ironic reprise of Dostoevsky, certainly more than God can provide. 

Americans of every living generation grew up on comic books, and alien invasion was a common theme.  Creatures from outer space, fleeing their own dying planet were looking for new worlds to conquer, and earth with its verdant landscapes, abundant water, and generous climes was the perfect place.  These creatures were superior in all ways, but human beings always found ways around their dazzling intelligence and superpowers. 

Arthur C Clarke wrote 2001 - A Space Odyssey and Stanley Kubrick turned it into an iconic movie about human contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence.  This story was a sophisticated antithesis to the dime store fantasies of the day.  It suggested that the universe did indeed contain intelligences far more advanced and superior to our own - intelligences which had evolved far beyond physical form and space and were simply pure intelligence, existing everywhere. 

Clarke admitted that he found inspiration in Hinduism where God is simply the One, a universal, inexplicable force that suffuses the universe with its being.  Hindus despite the profusion of their many gods is a profoundly monotheistic religion.  Siva, Krishna, Vishnu, Ganesh, and all the other gods are but manifestations of the One, the understandable transformation of the unknowable into knowable form. 

These more sophisticated notions often do not find currency in Christian America.  Judeo-Christian tradition insists on palpability, knowability, approachability, fear, respect, and duty.  God and Moses talk to each other in Exodus.  God wants Moses to lead his chosen people out of Egypt, but Moses says he is not worthy.  He stutters, is just a poor man, and not a leader. 

God and Job speak.  Job wonders why he has been chosen by God to suffer so.  What have I done? he asks God, but God refuses to answer and send another pestilence to test Job. 

All of this leads to the obvious question - if all human societies, every last one has believed in religion, deities, higher powers, supreme, authoritative intelligences, can our modern one survive without it?  Can there ever be a completely atheistic, secular society that lives and breathes on its own?

The Russian Communists tried.  Marx and Engels conceived of a utopian secular society without God. God and belief in him were obstacles to progress; and American progressives are no different.  Yet religious belief persists, at least in pockets especially in the South.  What has always been a human need cannot easily be eradicated.   

 

There has been talk recently of UFOs, and the current administration has promised to open formerly secret files about them, giving at least some currency to the notion of extraterrestrial, highly intelligent life.  

And what if there were some truth to the rumors?  Given Clarke and Kubrick - and Hinduism - it seems highly unlikely that aliens of a supreme intelligence would be riding around in flying saucers. 

Nevertheless Christian fundamentalists are preparing for first contact and deciding how they would evangelize these alien visitors.  The assumption that a human god - Jesus Christ - a very accessible divinity with human and celestial origins but very much from our planet could have relevance for a evanescent, transcendent intelligence is arrogant and presumptuous at best; but that is the nature of true belief.  An absolute conviction of rightness. 

The advance of Artificial Intelligence adds a new twist to Ivan Karamazov and his cynical dismissal of Christianity.  Before long AI will become more than human.  In its self-replicability, its boundless intelligence and complete authority it will become God, perhaps not worshipped but accepted as a higher power. 

Only time will tell.  Believers insist there is a God, an all knowing, all powerful being; but have a tough time distinguishing it from a future, although not so remote artificial intelligence.  God has always been a human abstract if not a creation, so let's see what new form 'he' will take.  

Increasing Polar Ice, Healthy Coral Reefs, No Rise In Sea Levels - A Climate Activist Loses It And Goes 'Round The Bend

 'Mighty cold for May, isn't it?', Edgar the gardener remarked to Cheryl Biggs, a bit of a poke in the eye to a woman who was always screeching about climate change, global warming, the rising seas, the melting ice caps, and the coming environmental Armageddon.  

Of course it was none of his business, but as he trimmed the hedges and raked the lawn, he could hear her go on about how soon Miami would be under water, the Maldives would disappear, southern crops would be incinerated, and life in cities would become unbearable. 

People will run their air conditioners full steam, energy output will be at maximum capacity and the air will be filled with billions more tons of hydrocarbons fueling even more heat and existential destruction.  Before long, there will be no stopping the inevitable.  Even Canadian crops will burn up, the Colorado River will run dry, Sacramento Valley will be a charred wasteland, and Los Angeles gangs will roam the city looking for water. 

Edgar shook his head when he heard the worst of it - the shrieks and lamentation, the anguish, the palpable pain - but he had to laugh at this flailing caricature of a mad woman, Sturm und Drang, sound and fury, lights out craziness, the end of days, repentance, and anticipation of a fiery, all-too-soon Judgment Day. 

He pulled up his collar against the unseasonable chill - global warming, said climate activists.  The melting polar ice was cooling the Arctic Ocean and currents were bringing cold water to the East Coast of the United States, chilling the air, disrupting normal Spring patterns, and keeping sweaters and mufflers from mothballs. 

Edgar was old enough to have heard it all, from Al Gore's dire predictions of environmental doom, to periodic updates citing bird migrations, hurricane activity, and coral reef erosion.  The drumbeat grew louder and more insistent. It was no longer just a bass line increasing in tempo, but a thundering crash of timpani, snare drums, and cymbals.  Climate warriors were in the streets in phalanxes, shouting, beseeching, pleading for environmental sanity. They howled like Old Testament prophets and latter day Doomsday sayers.  There is little time left. 

 

Of course none of this was true, all confabulations and very inspired demagoguery.  Harping on about something so beyond human reach but insisting that if we all pulled together and bought electric cars, turned down the heat and raised the thermostat in the summer, used prudence and good sense and gave our all for the planet, maybe...just maybe...disaster could be avoided. 

Meanwhile the polar caps gained ice, flawed, biased reports predicting dramatic rises in global temperatures were uncovered for the shameless screeds they were, new underwater high-resolution spectrometry showed that the Australian coral reefs were thriving, sea levels were not rising but holding steady.  

While most Americans who had been unbothered by all the climate fol-de-rol, kept their thermostats where they had always been, and kept Ford-350s at the top of the list said, 'I told you so'. They had just made it through the unconscionable government shutdown of everything during COVID, the senseless six-foot rule, outdoor masking, vigilantism and totally freaked-out housewives - all fabricated and cockamamie - that the climate change hoopla was to be expected. 

Edgar was old enough to remember the Hong Kong flu, a savage, highly infections virus, when he and his young girlfriend took turns at the stove, so weak were they; but when able out they went, no masks, no distancing, no panic. Every so often a flu strain got out of hand but it would die out, would take its toll but would not be an extinction-level event. Life went on, schools remained open, businesses bought and sold, it was a challenging time but soon over. 

'Soon we won't be needing you, Edgar', Cheryl said as she paid the man.  'All this...', and here she pointed to the luxuriant skip laurels, the chrysanthemums, the thick grass, the magnolia, and cherry trees all in bloom, 'will be history'. 

Edgar nodded, smiled, and said, 'Not for a while, Mrs. Biggs, see you next week', and with that he loaded up his gear and headed back to Maryland.  He put an Iron Maiden tape in the deck - why he still loved heavy metal was beyond him and his children but he did, dutifully almost...a statement? - swung on to the Beltway and headed for Poolesville. 

'What's a mother to do?', Cheryl said, remembering the old ad for Velveeta cheese or some other spread, but this was no time for idle fancy. The climate emergency had not disappeared, just lost traction given the various wars going on, the financial scandals in Minnesota and California, and the wild doings of Donald Trump.  Climate change would soon be back in the news once the seas started rising, the ice caps went back to melting, and the coral reefs began again to degrade. 

Yet the ethos, the zeitgeist of America had changed once the harbinger of bad times, former President Joe Biden, was out of office.  Trump had tapped a chord - Americans weren't the worriers progressives had made them out to be.  Live and let live, and make hay while the sun shines had always been tried and true adages. Unbelievably, they not only didn't care about climate change, they thought the whole thing was a hoax. 

Worst of all, the nation was building energy- and water-sucking data centers at an unstoppable pace. The demand for AI was growing by leaps and bounds, and the country was desperate to find ways to fuel it.  Solar and wind power simply wouldn't do, nuclear would take years to build back up, so it was dig, baby dig for coal and gas.  

The climate would heat up despite the new, soon to be discredited evidence that it is not, and this greedy, inconscient demand for energy to make Google searches a bit more thorough would only accelerate the trend.  Not only was the climate crisis still upon us, we were even closer to disaster. 

What if...what if...what if the naysayers were right and the earth was not warming, then what?  The last twenty years of activism would have been for nothing, a waste of time, a buy-in to a total fabrication, a victim of the worst scam on record.  Perish the thought, she said, and went about her business; but the juice had been squeezed out of the orange.  

The climate and environmental conferences were airless, spiritless, poorly attended affairs. Could she simply say, 'Let bygones be bygones' and turn her attention to something else which needed fixing? Hardly.  She was an old lady now, and the time for change had long gone.  It was chaise lounge time at best. 

'You gave it your best, dear', her husband said to her as he sprayed the rose bushes for aphids.  'It was the effort that counted'. 

How could he say that, Cheryl wondered?  Effort without result is wasted effort, nothing less, so there he is self-satisfied, spraying away without a care in the world when the wind had been completely taken out of her sails.  

Her husband picked her an American Beauty, and the gloom lifted.  Little things, she thought.  I must learn; but she couldn't let go of that visceral need for social change so part of her life for decades.  Is it too late for the black man? she wondered, or the mestizo? 

 

True belief had taken its toll, and once engrained in the credulous soul, there's no getting rid of it. 

The Senator And His Courtesan - An Unapologetic Libertine In A Censorious Age

Haley Windham grew up on a farm in a small farm community of Presbyterians who had moved there in the early years of the 19th century, prospered thanks to hard work, faith, and singular ambition.  Hiram Windham, the family patriarch, had settled on land newly platted thanks to the Lewis and Clark expedition that explored and laid initial claim to the lands west of the Mississippi.  Plat 454 once bought and titled became the Windham family homestead, five hundred acres of fertile eastern prairie on which Hiram husbanded livestock, grew corn, and tended to goats and chickens.

By the time Haley was a young woman, the rural life of the Midwest no longer held any interest.  She had had her fill of eggs, milking, drawing water, and tending to her five brothers and sisters, and after a spell at Franklin Pierce junior college, headed east to Washington to seek her fortune. 

Haley was a modest girl and 'fortune' was not a mythical wealth of Croesus, a spectacular marriage, or good fortune.  It was only getting what any young, bright, attractive young woman deserved.  She had no particular long term goal in mind, but had the good sense to approach her Senator and apply for an internship.  She would be loyal, diligent, and patient; and he would find her a most able and apt assistant. 

Now this Senator was unusual for his times - a censorious, accusatory, puritanical era of MeToo supposition of male deceit and misogyny - for he cared nothing for such rectitude.  Women were women who all looked alike with their clothes off, who all had a peculiarly female ambition, but who were still in the thrall of male protectorship - easily seduced by men who took them seriously, explored their inner rooms, and treated them with respect and dignity. 

The Senator had been gifted with a silver tongue, useful both for the seduction of young women and for political election.  The constituents of his state loved him, and his career from state legislator to attorney general, to Congressman to Senator was one of easy elision and happy outcomes.  They liked him for what he did for their state, but loved him for his charm, easygoing sexual confidence, and sincerity.  As such they not only forgave him for his sexual dalliances, they loved him for it. 

Now every Senator since Alexander Hamilton's day has had lovers, mistresses, and concubines.  One remembers the origins of the august Upper Chamber and Alexander Hamilton's debate with his colleague Thomas Jefferson over the dangers of populism. 'One must be wary of the mob, my dear Thomas', he wrote in a letter to Jefferson, 'lest they enslave us and send us back to Africa along with the Mandingos here to pick cotton'.  S

Such respect for breeding, education, and intelligence provided a buffer to the ragged peasantry that Jefferson so loved, and gave a certain privilege and social immunity to those who legislated there.  Sexual pleasure was by and large the currency of the realm. 

Times change, and such patrician privilege went by the wayside as the Senate became much like its little brother the House of Representatives, 'a bunch of rubes' said Hamilton, 'hayseeds, chicken farmers, and wool gatherers'.  Along the way these Senators got infected with the same puritanical fervor as their friends in the Longworth building and led - at least in public - lives of moral rectitude and self-censorship. 

Things went from bad to worse, and by the time that Joe Biden was president, the country - let alone the Senate - was dominated by a cabal of shrewish vixens who lambasted men and their misogynist intentions at every turn.  Men, whether Walmart greeters, plumbers, or Senators were to hew to the same moral line.  Keep it in your pants or there will be hell to pay. 

But these Congressional vixenish bullies were still women, and they gave the Senator a royal pass.  He not only gave them the time of day but convinced them that he was firmly in their camp. Gender must be aligned to protect women, chastise men, and allow for freedom of sexual choice. 

Of course this was all a contrived scam. The Senator neither believed this feminist cant or paid it any mind.  Women were women, a distinctive, historically consistent class, to be used when convenient, praised when advantageous, and seduced whenever possible. 

It was tribute to the Senator's canniness and ingenuity that he led the live of a Lothario, a Casanova, a Count de Valmont in the midst of such hysterical sexual fol-de-rol.  So when he took the lovely Haley Windham as his lover, every single one of the watchdog harridans on Capitol Hill looked the other way.  If they had any second thoughts it was because the handsome, desirable Senator had not chosen them. 

The Senator was married of course to a charming woman in her own right who, both seduced by her charming, irresistible husband and politically ambitious also looked the other way.  A marriage of convenience; and only by taking lovers of her won did she escape the opprobrium of deceived wife. 

Remarkable for 21st century American politics, the Senator acted no differently than Francois Mitterrand, former President of France at whose gravesite mourned his legitimate daughter and wife and his lover and illegitimate adult child.  He was as open as Mitterrand, Sarkozy, and presidential pretender Dominique Strauss-Kahn, famous sexual libertine and sexual adventurer. 

He was the very epitome of 'diversity', that overmarketed, hapless, divisive, and rudely ignorant deformation of heterogeneity. As much as many progressives hated to admit it, he occupied one of the  sexual points on the gender spectrum - not only a straight, white male, but one aggressively so, a virtual sexual wolf on the prowl. 

Haley Windham was well taken care of by the Senator, often seen at his side, but never demanding attention.  She was his consort, concubine, lover, and confidant and she wanted no more.  There is chivalry in adultery and the Senator treated Haley like a princess, and for that his constituents loved him even more.  He was never dismissive or disregarding of his wife - on the contrary she was always with him at official functions, respected as his partner and sexually liberated individual.  

It was a bit like the English Victorians Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson who enjoyed the pleasures and privileges of an open marriage and were accorded no censure for it. 

The affair between the Senator and Haley Windham lasted longer than anyone - particularly he - expected, but when it did there were no tears shed.  They parted friends and both went on to successful individual lives. 

It all goes to show you - there is no such thing as absolutes.  Life is a series of comings and goings and the most able, morally accommodating, and considerate people will not only survive but profit. 

As for the MeToo harridans of Washington, the old maids, shrewish, embittered women of the Left, they were left to whoop and holler, castigate and excoriate to no avail.  They had been so snookered by the Senator that if not for his charm and warm, engaging manner, would be the hated enemy.

And so it would always be.  Savvy men have never taken feminist screeds seriously, and used the perennial feminine desire to be taken seriously to good advantage.  No harm, no foul.  The Senator went on as if the brouhaha on the Left never existed, and the cabal of wicked sisters never knew how unimportant they were. 

Donald Trump's Mistress - Joining Putin And Xi In A Geopolitical And Sexual Triumvirate

Vladimir Putin's mistress, Christina Belenkaya - or at least his No. 1 mistress, his favorite and mother of two daughters, is well taken care of by the state, no questions asked.  Not only is this care a product of Russian security, but Russian tradition.  The Czars since Ivan the Terrible all had mistresses, considered the most beautiful women in the land, above comparison, prized possessions part of the royal treasury. 

So it was no surprise that President Putin had his choice of beautiful, desirable women - nor was it a surprise that these young women readily agreed.  Although they knew that their time in the palace would be short - an emperor has the right to exchange old goods for new - the riches, cachet, and sybaritic life would be memorable.  Better to have loved and lost, etc., especially when it comes to the concubines of the czar.  

For all this sumptuous royal tradition, President Putin is far more sexually recondite than, say Presidents Mitterrand and Sarkozy of France, men who invited their mistresses to live in their own chambers at the Elysees.  The French public thought nothing of these affairs - it was only normal for a French president to take his pleasure after a long day of looking after the Republic, and in fact, having a mistress was de rigeur for the normal, healthy French male.

Even the working class had their cinq-a-sept liaisons more often than not with the ladies of Pigalle - a working man spent his salary on food, wine, and women; and just like President Sarkozy, after a hard day at the factory, deserved a bit of a respite from metro, boulot, dodo. 

The Chinese imperial tradition was no different.  The emperors of every dynasty for thousands of years enjoyed harems of the most beautiful women of the realm.  The Emperor Tzu-Ling was particularly proud of the women in his charge, chosen from each of the many distinct regions of China.  Every night he took out his map of the Middle Kingdom, circled his finger with his eyes closed, placed it blindly on the map, and selected a woman from the region on which his finger had landed. 

The long Communist regime under Mao Tse Tung was a peculiarly chaste one.  There was no room in the Communist canon for sexual dalliance.  Work was the ethos of the era, work, work and more work; and the forced labor, internment camps, and failed agricultural communes made life so penitential for the Chinese peasant, sex was the last thing on his mind. 

However with China's entry into the modern capitalist world, money, time, and leisure became once again coins of the realm, and the members of the politburo were free to choose their lovers.  In fact, the current President, Xi Jinping, not unlike his Russian counterpart, has a reverence and respect for his imperial past where concubinage was part of the royal tradition. 

The President's mistress, Fei Fei Wang, is a young woman from Shanghai who came to the President's attention during a routine tour of the provinces.  Polite inquiries were made, respectful overtures advanced to the girl's parents and grandparents, and a generous donation made to the memory of the family departed. 

Fei Fei was installed in the Royal Suite of the Presidential palace, provided all the perks of her station but kept out of sight.  Things had changed in China since the dynastic emperors - the sexual conservatism of the Mao years still had currency, and so Xi found himself betwixt and between - anxious to enjoy the privileges of the old emperors, but cautious because of still modest populace. 

American Presidents have not had mistresses as much as they have had sexual dalliances.  Only Franklin Roosevelt had a longtime mistress with whom he developed a special, loving relationship.  The other presidents had no interest in sexual fidelity and picked and chose as they went along.  JFK, thanks to his youth, energy, and beauty had his pick of the most beautiful Hollywood starlets, and Marilyn Monroe was the jewel in the crown. 

LBJ used the Secret Service to pimp for him, and he was known as much for his herculean sexual appetite as for his workaholic approach to the presidency.  Even dour, sour, jowly Richard Nixon was reported to have a mistress - a woman in Dupont Circle who visited Camp David and spent long weekend with him.  

Henry Kissinger, a fat, rumpled, ugly Jewish man had his pick of the litter.  He famously observed that power was the greatest aphrodisiac and he benefitted mightily from it.  Women who ordinarily would have paid him no mind were anxious to share his bed once he was Secretary of State. 

Bill Clinton lowered the bar.  From trailer trash to fellatio under the Lincoln Desk with an intern, he was the laughing stock of the world; but at least he didn't suffer painfully like his successor Joe Biden who, with the scourge mentality of MeToo and under the watchful eye of a cabal of censorious progressive shrews, made fidelity a point, not just a circumstance. 

Which leads us to Donald Trump, a man who loves beautiful women, has squired and bedded them as long as he can remember.  He had women from Hollywood, Las Vegas, and New York - actresses, producers, real estate giants, call girls, and international beauty queens; but now that he is a second term president and nearing eighty, would that fire still be burning?

Konstantin Levin, a principal character in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina lamented God's irony for creating an intelligent, sentient, creative, insightful being, given him a scant few decades to live, and then consigned him for all eternity in the cold hard steppes of Russia. 

A worse irony say many is that God gave men a lifelong desire for women, but granted them but a few years to satisfy it; and so it is that Donald Trump, like the rest of us, thinks about women all the time, and given Presidential authority, a mere gesture can have them in the White House. 

The man is politically incorrect, dismissive of the uppity, censorious women who consider men a predatory evil, and is unconcerned about his political or economic future.  He cannot run for president again, has no particular concern for historical legacy, and has billions in his bank accounts for when he retires. 

Eliot Spitzer, former governor of New York who was caught in flagrante delicto with a high-priced call girl in the Honeymoon Suite of the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, said that he had done nothing wrong. 'I'm too busy running the state to chase women, he said, so an hour or two with Mrs. Longworth's ladies is all I can afford', he said or words to that effect, but was dunned out of office by a critical, censorious public. 

So Trump could have his way with any one of Mrs. Longworth's girls - she runs an absolutely tight ship and with the one exception of the New York governor, has maintained complete secrecy for the afternoon affairs of Washington's power corridor elite. 

This, however is not Trump's style. He wants his own arm candy, female admirers, women who love him, so why not?  In the few years remaining in the White House, he could certainly become an octogenarian Al Pacino or Robert Di Niro who have young lovers and children by them. 

There have been rumors about Trump's sexual dalliances, and few doubt them. If Trump has joined Putin and Xi in a geopolitical triumvirate as powerful as the world has seen, then why not join them in enjoying the perks of Emperors, and Czars?

Not only does Trump want to feel his oats for perhaps one last time, he could care less if he is caught with his pants down.  The tone deaf presidential candidate Gary Hart dared the press to catch him in an adulterous affair and they did.  Hart withdrew from the campaign and was forgotten. 

Not so Trump.  In fact he would love to be caught - 'Powerful man with beautiful woman not his wife' would be just the headline for him. 

Mariposa Robbins And The End Of Days - Why Progressives Secretly Hope For Armageddon

Travis Bickle in Martin Scorsese's movie Taxi Driver says, 'Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets...I think someone should just take this city and just… just flush it down the fuckin’ toilet'.  Mariposa Robbins agreed, but secretly wanted more - the incineration of the planet in a fiery judgement that would allow new life, a good life, a pure and simple life to regenerate, populate, and thrive. 

Now, Mariposa was mixing her metaphors.  Revelation prophesies a fiery Armageddon but there will be no regeneration.  The world has been a sinkhole of rot, sin, and apostasy for so many millennia that there can be no turning back.  The end of days is exactly what it means - the end. 

Of course given Biblical history, God's past annihilations may simply go awry.  The Flood, his first attempt to rid the world of infidelity, injustice, and inhumanity did little good, for when the waters subsided life returned no different than before - pitiful, abhorrent, and faithless.  He tried again and destroyed the sinful cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.  That too was little more than divine pique, destroying what he could not control, but the lesson was not learned, and the world went on in its sinful, deceptive, godless way. 

Then, realizing that annihilation, total destruction led nowhere, God changed his approach and sent his only begotten son, Jesus, to earth to preach the gospel of forgiveness and salvation.  Jesus would take the sins of the world on his shoulders and die so that men could be redeemed.

That too did not work, for the world is as sinful, faithless, and desperately violent and sadistic than it ever was. 

Be that as it may, Mariposa was not an orthodox Christian who believed in the received word of God, and took the Bible as metaphor, allegory, and principle.  Yet there was something appealing about The Book of Revelation, the thundering hooves of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, the magnificent incendiary end to the world, the cataclysmic final accounting.  

T.S. Eliot in The Hollow Men says that the world will end not with a bang but a whimper, but that lambent, discrediting idea did not appeal to her. She wanted Sturm und Drang. The world as defiling, godless, hopelessly and shamelessly ignorant and arrogant as it was deserved better. 

Now, Mariposa was a lifelong progressive, a tireless fighter for Negro rights, the black man, gender fluidity, refugees, climate change, and the distribution of wealth.  She was a progressive's progressive, a warrior, a soldier in the cause of progress, a crusader for a better, more verdant, more peaceful, and communal world. 

But now after so many decades of liberal purpose, Freedom Rides, days and nights at the barricades, marches on the National Mall all without success, her thoughts turned more to a final solution - end the troubled, pestilential, sick world and start over again. 

A remarkable percentage of Americans believe that Armageddon will come within their lifetimes.  The Bible never specified when the end of days would occur, but said there would be unmistakable signs - natural disaster, war and civil conflict, famine and disease, and moral decay; and who could doubt the appearance of these signs. 

At first Mariposa dismissed such prophecy as religious chicanery - more prayer, more money in the collection basket, more churchgoing - but there was the niggling retainer, the impossible-to-ignore likelihood of destruction. 

After all she and her fellow progressives had talked of nuclear and climate Armageddon with conviction. If the human race were capable of self-destruction, then imagine what God finally exasperated and fed up with his own Creation could, would, and might well do. 

Just when Mariposa thought that there might be progress towards a more gentle, forgiving, and charitable world, in comes Donald Trump, harbinger of disaster, undoer of good, arrogant fool. Every reasonable policy and program put in place by progressives was being dismantled, discarded, and trashed.  Liberal reformers would have to start all over again; but if such reversals had been so easy, as easy as a few votes at election time, then it would be better to scrap the whole electoral system, eliminate the fanatics who put the man in office, and release a virus that would leave America a desert, a void. 

 

There have been mad prophets throughout history, unhinged, mentally untethered zealots who demand repentance before it is too late. Mariposa passed one every morning at Farragut West as she left the Metro for her office.  The man was as wild looking and deranged as could be, the very image of an Old Testament prophet in loin cloth and weeds, shouting Biblical verses and holding signs of extinction and the end of days.  He was gaunt, almost skeletal, fiery-eyed and tireless.  She couldn't look him in the eyes, for the one time she did, he smiled and gestured to her.  Was that a sign?

Meanwhile Mariposa never gave up her advocacy for social reform.  Without immediate action, she shouted at a climate gathering, the human race is doomed.  We were never intended to be mired in heterosexuality...the black man will soon be atop the human pyramid, his rightful place...war is evil...and so on and so forth; but at each outing she looked around her and saw, like Travis Bickle, nothing but filth, scum, ordure, and rot.  Let a hard rain come and wipe it out, wash it down the sewer.

Progressivism is itself an unhinging affair.  There are some who have become so addled by Trump hatred that they literally come apart at the seams, become obsessed, knowable to husbands, wives and children.  They cannot believe the visitation, the evil residing in the White House, or that a viral pestilence could spread so quickly through the land.  His every action, every utterance, every policy was antithetical to justice, compassion, reason, and goodness.  

There are others like Mariposa who looked more systemically - the retrograde policies of conservative administrations are more expressions of a universal American sickness - a bourgeois lassitude and bottom-feeding cultural anomie.  It is this cultural obtuseness, this adamantine ignorance which is ineradicable by normal means.  Annihilation is the only answer, removal and regeneration. 

So, by and by Mariposa became just as crazed and unhinged as her Trump-hating colleagues.  Both had gone around the bend never to return. 

Mariposa wondered if Armageddon would be anything like the scenes from Terminator II.  Probably, and about time. 

Image Is Everything - Why The Left Is So Apoplectic About Trump's Ballroom And Triumphal Arch

'What a boor', said Vicki Parsons about Donald Trump. 'A bourgeois clown, a lowbrow dolt'.  The President's new White House ballroom, was in her opinion a showy, tasteless, pseudo-Baroque monstrosity, a garish, overdone monstrosity - just like the man himself. 

And that was just for openers.  His 250' tall triumphal arch, a monument to himself in all his regal glory would dominate the landscape, obscure the view of Lee mansion and Arlington Cemetery, dwarf everything in its shadow, an unnecessary monument to arrogance, self-importance, and cultural obtuseness. 

The 'renovation' of the Kennedy Center, now renamed the Trump-Kennedy Center would be in the same vein - a rococo monstrosity with Italian sconces and chandeliers, Roman statues, reflecting pools, arbors, and canopies. 

The Field of Heroes, Trump's plan to destroy a park overlooking the Potomac and replace it with an array of statues of 'remarkable' Americans was unconscionable, a travesty, a violation of Capital sanctity, a destruction of heritage, and an absolutely lowbrow testament to his own lack of cultural significance. 

Closing the southern border, destroying Iran's nuclear capability and its machinery of terrorism, its removal of a brutal socialist dictator in Venezuela, the restoration of American energy independence, the removal of punitive restrictions and taxes on private enterprise, and his dismissal of insidious, baseless claims of gender neutrality and his outing of the biggest scam of all, climate change all go without notice in the face of the ballroom, the arch, the Kennedy Center, and the Field of Heroes. 

The American Left has never been able to get over Donald Trump, to treat him as a political adversary and enjoin him in debate about the economic, financial, social, and geopolitical future of the United States.  The hated what he represented from the moment he arrived on the scene.  He was nothing but a carny barker, a tout, a cheap vaudevillian, and a bourgeois cultural caricature.  

He was outrageously outspoken instead of following Washington protocol.  He was calling their media shills 'stupid fools', denigrating the press as fake and unnecessary, bellowing faux patriotism and faith when he was actually a money-hungry, graspy, Wall Street robber baron out to feather his own nest and that of his cronies.  He was a Borscht Belt comedian, as politically incorrect as Jackie Mason or Rodney Dangerfield.  He was gross, insulting, and mean. 

Vicki remembered the Kennedy Camelot days - an inauguration poem by Robert Frost, Pablo Casals and the best of America's high culture, the redecorating of the White House with respect to American history and tradition - Chippendale and Townsend furniture, Revere silver, Copley and Remington.  State dinners were elegant, proper affairs with waltzes, orchestral variations, and a sophisticated list of invitees. 

Now, that was America, she said; and he was a true American president.  America loved him for Camelot, a never-never land of make-believe.  Kennedy himself was the son of a mick barroom brawler, a valueless exploitative capitalist, and a Nazi sympathizer.  There was nothing Old England about Kennedy, but he made a good show of it. Americans loved the British Edwardian television series, Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey even though as a nation of Walmart greeters they had no more idea of aristocracy was let alone the high-toned English variety than the Elysian Fields. 

It didn't matter.  No one looked beyond Jackie Kennedy's sophistication and husband Jack's show of cultural wit.  No one cared how he got the presidency, how he bungled the Bay of Pigs, how he got the US entangled in the unwinnable war in Vietnam, and how he turned the Oval Office into a brothel, so indiscreet was he that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover got the goods on him and delayed any passage of a Civil Rights bill in return for his silence. 

All this at least partially explains why the American Left cannot look beyond the ballroom, Trump's lowbrow culture, his gross and unpresidential demeanor, and his withering ad hominem attacks.  Image is everything, cultural image above all,  For all Joe Biden's vacancy, the Left says, for all his stumbling errancy, and inability to put two thoughts together, he was a good man, a considerate man, a presidential man. 

There have been all kinds of presidents in the White House from cattle-rustling LBJ to Tricky Dick, and Trailer Trash Bill; but all of them hewed to propriety, acting presidential.  Donald Trump doesn't give a flying fuck about propriety and received wisdom.  He is the young Eddie Murphy in his anything goes excoriating humor; or D.L. Hughley or Dave Chappelle.  He says anything, anytime wherever. 

He is a breath of fresh air after the four penitential, sanctimonious, and censorious Biden years.  'These are my pronouns' expressed the arrogant emptiness of that time, and Trump and America were having no more of it. 

It didn't help that Trump was doing exactly as he promised.  Sending phalanxes of bulldozers down Independence Avenue and razing the bloated, inefficient, self-serving bureaucracies that for too long had sucked taxpayer money and done nothing with it, drove progressives crazy.  His deployment of ICE (Immigration Police) to round up and deport illegal aliens was the last straw.  This tyrant was forcibly removing sincere, needy, refugees from poverty and oppression. 

Of course the Left turned a blind eye to immigrant Somali fraud, graft, and scams in Minnesota, Salvadoran Mara Salvatrucha MS-13 gangbangers, and hordes of criminals escaping justice in their own countries for a more congenial home in the United States.  The open southern border's influx was Castro's Mariel Boat Lift writ large.  The Cuban dictator opened the doors to his prisons and sent criminal outlaws, murderers and dissidents alike to our shores. 

In other words Trump was the worst possible president to sit in the Oval Office - a lowlife bourgeois interloper, a bully, a racist pig.  His image of demonic excess grew every day; but the sly old fox knows exactly what he was doing - he loved to outrage the Left, to give them shibboleths of low culture, fodder for their assumptions about kingship and autocracy, to enrage them with ballrooms and arches while he went about the serious business of restoring America to a position of world authority.

So the ballroom and the Arch will be built, bourgeois is back, and the unpresidential president will continue to go about his geopolitical mastery.  

Will he survive the coming elections? Or will millions of Americans have so bought into the Left's fantastical creation of the President that they pull the wrong lever on election day? What seems clear to many political observers and certainly to the vast number of Trump supporters, he deserves his day, a trouble-free completion of his term, and a congenial and supportive Congress. 

'Now, that's a stupid question', Trump retorted to the CNN White House correspondent asking about the coming midterm elections.  Of course there would be universal Republican victory!  Whether the American people have finally seen through the lawfare, the decade of slanderous, absurd allegations, the drumbeat of Trump hatred is unsure.  It seems as though the conservative juggernaut has finally gained momentum, but the American voter is a credulous, fickle one. 

Finding Love At Walmart - Closing In On Spinsterhood, Any Venue Will Do, The Romance On Aisle 19

Alicia Robertson was pushing fifty and she still had not found the man of her dreams by a long shot.  There was Bartleby, owner of The Second Read, an independent used book store on Dupont Circle, in the family for years.  Bart had shown her the classics, squirreled away in the back, guided her through Faraday, Bleecker, and Ochre.  

‘Nothing doing', she said when he asked her if she needed help, but was pleased at the attention.  The day had been long, dreary, and somehow always behind schedule, so the kindness of strangers was much appreciated. 

She was not looking for anything but old books, but there was an interesting peculiarity about the man, something hidden, literary, even romantic and she smiled warmly at him as he took her to the more straightforward classics of Thackery, Dickens, and Hugo. 

And that was how it began, but it wasn't long before that hidden peculiarity became full blown, obsessive, and off-putting.  He was a treacherous bore - the worst kind - and his lovemaking in particular became kinky and demanding.

‘Let's', he said, codeword for any one of ten Kama Sutra-like sexual games, more suited to the Folsom Street leather-and-thong S&M crowd, to which she first demurred coyly, then insistently, then with a finally slamming of the front door onto a baking hot August afternoon. 

And then there was Francis, an accountant, the perfect anodyne for her somewhat dangerous dalliance with Bartleby.  Francis was quiet, demure, reserved, and a gentleman.  

Still waters run deep she thought when his tentativeness began to become irritating, but there was no still or flowing water of any kind in this timid, shapeless man.  She took the lead, but his 'May I's?' and 'Would it be OK's' once they got started was an importuning, childish game; and so it was that he too was shown the door. 

There were many others...well, not that many. 'I'm not a slattern', she said, 'nor a tart'. 

She wondered if she was doing things right, in the right venues to catch a desirable man. Used bookstores and the Accounting Department were obviously blind alleys.  She needed to brighten up her search, go upscale; and so it was that she was often found by the Sargents at the Phillips, the Calder mobile in the East Wing of the National Gallery, and at intimate art seances in Bethesda. 

These last were arranged by a Vassar classmate Vicki Barnes, a woman who had also been unlucky in love but shelved the whole idea and turned to social justice.  There wasn't a progressive cause that Vicki did not embrace, and she was scene at every climate conference, gender seminar, and socialist workers councils.  

Such advocacy displaced - to use the Freudian term - her sexual desires, and while never entirely happy or satisfied, it took away the heartbeat, the flame of romance. 

This month it was to celebrate a local poet, a native Marylander who had written verse since she was ten, but never progressed much beyond her little girl's fantasies  - moonlight, sunsets, a summer breeze - but Vicki found her endearing and hoped that her 'Tea And Poems With Adela' evening gathering would do wonders for the poet, who was finally flagging after so many years of garden variety verse.  It would also be a chance to meet some fascinating people, she told Alicia. 

It was the most painful, penitential evening she had ever spent, two hours of puerile, insipid, treacly nonsense, and only out of respect for her friend and classmate did she hold out until the very end. 

Worst of all, there was no truth in advertising - there were not only no interesting men there, but those who did attend were as colorless and dull as sheet rock and without an ounce of charm.  

Barking up the wrong tree again, Alicia said to herself as she drove home.  'I must vet, suss, and choose more carefully', but for all her planning, all her GPS precision, and her AI reach, she struck out time and time again. 'I don't want to die an old maid', she said dismally. 

Serendipity, that was what did it. Unplanned, out of sequence, totally random and out of the blue came a chance encounter with Avery Phelps on Aisle 19 of Walmart where both were looking for lightbulbs.  'I am not a Walmart person', she explained as they both picked up and tried to rearrange the 100w incandescent bulbs that had come toppling down when they both reached for the top shelf. 

'Neither am I', said Avery, and that pride in dissimilitude did the trick, and soon the two were an item. 

Now, anyone who has been to a Walmart knows right off that it is not the place for romance.  It is a desperate, low-end junk store.  The poor shop there, the ones with two jobs of their own, straitened circumstances, and no time for affairs.  Overweight, dour, plodding, and determined, not a one gets a second glance, and admiring look; so the stars must have been aligned just right for Alicia, or a shooting star over the shopping mall, for there he was, and there he would be in her life. 

Mirabile dictu! the affair lasted into the Fall and the following Spring.  Neither his two ex-wives and four children rained on their parade, and they were seen everywhere together.  

Yet, there is a reason why there are spinsters - old maids, single older women - and that's because they are picky to a fault.  There were plenty of Yale men who came a-courting while she was at Vassar, men with pedigrees, promise, and hefty bank accounts; but Alicia always found fault - fibs became lies and the lies became congenital issues.  

Honesty became a cause celebre in her life and all things were judged according to it; but of course honesty like every other moral principle has a lot of give in it, and most tend to accept variability as a given not a game changer. 

Such judgmental attitude in such proportions exhibited by Alicia suggested something deeper.  Men were the problem.  Men by nature were irremediable liars, cheats, and brigands.  Untrustworthy, morally groundless, and not worth having.  This absolute denial had been neatly covered in pretty dress.  It surely seemed that she liked men, but nothing doing.  She was as misandrous as they come, an old maid for life and proud of it. 

Once this realization hit her, she was again a happy woman.  No more cruising the East Wing, no more brutally pretentious seances at Vicki Barnes, no more men. Why had it taken her so long?  So many tedious hours wasted, so much faux male idolatry, so much...bullshit.  Now she could retire gracefully from sexual pursuit, and do whatever pleased her, happy as a clam.