The Cult Of The Black Man - A White Woman Seduced And Bilked By A Canny Nigerian Scammer

Vicki Cabot gave unusual love a try - not today's meme of lesbian and transgender love and Folsom Street Fair S&M - but love with a Nigerian.

Her mother warned her against the relationship.  'They are scammers to a man', she said.  Her husband who worked for the World Bank had a No Nigeria clause in his contract.  So many of his colleagues had negotiated the same codicil that finding loan officers for the multi-million contracts concluded with the Nigerian government was well nigh impossible. 

'A shithole', said Frank Cabot who had learned his lesson the hard way, traveling to Lagos as a Bank intern, harassed and shaken down at the airport with not enough money to pay the bribes demanded by the taxi driver and hotel clerk, he sought refuge in his embassy after he had given up his silk ties, Rolex, and Armani suspenders.

The reputation of Nigeria was well deserved.  No one came out of there in one piece, thousands were conned by online fraud every day, and most savvy Washingtonians checked cabs for Nigerian drivers before getting in. 

Lagos was a stinking, festering slum.  Whatever money had been realized from the sale of Niger delta oil - before Exxon, Shell, and Gulf had pulled out, went into offshore bank accounts with nothing left to run the country.  In short order the whole country had become a toxic, gang-run, miserable, lawless place. 

'He's a professor', Vicki told her father who was unmoved.  A scam too, he said, informing her of the thousands of fraudulent CVs the Bank got every day from Nigerian 'professors'.  'They scam you coming and going', her father said, 'corrupt, dishonest, shady and nasty from the word go'; but Vicki had been charmed by this suave, polished African who treated her like the Queen of Sheba, and who was as far from the stereotype painted by her father as the man in the moon. 

Or so she thought.  The man, Adrian Adebayo, was as crooked as they come, in the United States on an overstayed tourist visa, and on the prowl for susceptible, credulous, and naive young women like Vicki.

'I hit the jackpot', he told his friends back in Lagos, for Vicki was the heiress of a considerable fortune.  Her father might be an international civil servant on salary, but her inheritance was unimaginable.  The offspring of one of Boston's finest families, first in line among the grandchildren of the patriarch of the family, she was the jewel in the crown. 

Now, why Vicki got caught in this tender trap is a simple story of doing the right thing. At college she had been convinced that the black man was at the top of the human pyramid. but because of slavery, Jim Crow, and persistent racism, he foundered at the bottom.  With effort, desire, and hard work, American society would be soon reconfigured and the black man would be restored to his primal place. 

Nonsense, of course. Brown University was not exactly an unbiased institution of higher learning, and had been coopted by social reformists and was now fully in their hands.  The administration, the faculty, and the students were all part of the same political cabal. The whole campus marched to the same drummer, flew the same flag, and prayed to the same gods. 

Where possible young white girls hooked up with black men, admitted to the university under a liberal affirmative action program, and who like every pimp from the ghetto were on the prowl for nubile white girls. There was a pecking order among the student body at Brown.  At the top were girls dating black men, then girls in lesbian relationships, then gay men together, and finally bi-sexual students who were testing the waters but had not yet committed to one side or the other.

Vicki, was an unfortunately homely girl who might have inherited Grandfather Cabot's money but none of the patrician, graceful look of the women of the family. Somewhere along the line she got a Jewish look - sallow skin, prominent nose and lips, and untamable hair.  She was often asked by her Brown classmates if she had changed her name. 

She was the perfect mark for Adrian Adebayo - a homely woman trained in the fantasies of cultural diversity and the myth of the black man.  The way into her treasury was as simple as could be.   

Vicki was not Adrian's first score.  He had been quite the man about town, showing up at progressive conferences, seminars, and public events.  He had enough money to keep him above water until he hit the jackpot - his second cousin had made his fortune in a devious but impressive Somali-like fraud in Atlanta, a Ponzi scheme where millions were invested in shell companies, and all of it siphoned off to Aruban banks. 

He had almost made it.  If it hadn't been for an annoyingly investigative father, he would have tied the knot with Alison Parker, a girl like Vicki born and bred in a culture of privilege and wealth and a graduate of Duke (where she had been immersed in the same cauldron of diversity and black idolatry as Brown).  

To her tears and flapdoodle, he left town before the old man called in ICE; but he had learned his lesson.  Chicanery has its limits, and the careful plotter must cross all the American t's and dot all the i's. 

Adrian and Vicki got married over the wild protests of her parents. His visa was regularized, the path to citizenship assured, and the marriage contract concluded without punitive codicils.  In short order he was legal, free, and rich, and was never heard from again. 

Now, Vicki, chastened, humiliated, and shamed should have at least admitted her 'miscalculation' as she called it, apologized to her father for having dismissed his warnings, and gone on to a more stable emotional and political life.

But she insisted that Adrian was a good man, and to throw him in with a bunch of thieves and worse to condemn an entire country and a whole continent was wrong, exactly the kind of racist opinions that set back the cause of the black man for decades. She had been blinded by his attentions, his demeanor and yes, although the hated to admit it, by his extraordinary sexual endowment.  

This had always been the worst racial stereotype in the white grab bag, but when it turned out to be true, she was as surprised as any white, liberal woman would be, but quite happy about it.  Serviced by this black man every night was a pleasure few women could imagine. 

No, Adrian might have had his faults; and yes, she was bilked and deceived by him, but all the more reason to blame colonialism for the persistent underdevelopment of Africa. He was a victim of oppression and racism, and it was white people's duty - her duty - to fight for the black man wherever he lived. 

Vicki was a defiantly unreconstructed liberal.  The roots of progressivism planted during her Brown days were still deep and strong.  Other weaker, less committed women might have turned conservative, tossed aside the whole idea of cultural diversity, and stuck to their own kind; but not Vicki. Political commitment and the philosophy which provides its foundation are not so easily dismissed.  She would be lifelong progressive, a believer in racial justice, and the lover of a proud black man. 

Why Hate Feels So Good - Social Justice And The Happy Jamboree Of Trump Loathing

Vicki Marks hated Donald Trump with a passion, and so did her friends, neighbors, and colleagues.  It was a friendly cabal of hate - nods on streetcorners, stories over the picket fence, knowing smiles, and bus rides to rallies.  

It felt good to hate, and never before in her lifelong progressivism had it felt so good.  This time around it was a soul-cleansing release.  After scouring the pots for so many years, rasping away at conservative backwardness and ignorance, now she could be as mad, foul-tempered, unrestrained like never before.  There was evil in the White House and nothing but exorcism would do. 

Each one of her venting moments with Margot down the street or Beatrice in the office or Henrietta at the gym was satisfying in a way simple political commitment was not.  There was a fire in her belly like never before.  Her life had new meaning, a clear and present purpose, a clear line of fire, an unquenchable desire. 

She was a glutton for news about Trump and flipped channels between CNN and MSNBC every morning over coffee, watched the news on the monitors at the gym, surfed the dark web for information about Trump's insider trading, collusion, corruption, and moral failure.  She fueled her hatred from the moment she woke up until the moment she went to bed.  Even her dreams were feverish with hatred. 

As counterintuitive as it may sound, hatred was happy time, an emotional orgasm for a crackly, older single woman who had been too picky to settle for second best, and a first best man had never come her way - not in the coffee houses of the East Village, not in her 9th Street non-profit, not on the barricades, and not in holding pens.  Politics is not simply a matter of preference or logical conclusion, it is the heart and soul of a person, and enhances or deforms as if it were a magic potion or vile poison. 

Vicki's hate was oxymoronic - it both rotted and corroded her insides and twisted and deformed every aspect of her outer self but gave her unlimited joy.  She might be as unappealing as a Wicked Sister, but she was bursting with joy every time she sallied forth with one of her untethered, bitter attacks on those who strayed from the progressive canon. 

The more bile that built up, the more venom that filled her viperous sacs, the more hate she felt, the happier she was.  Such hate was not a perverse obsession but the emotional force behind her sense of identity, self-esteem, and worth. 

Today was No Kings rally day on the National Mall, the biggest, most exuberant anti-Trump jamboree in the nation.  It would be featured on national television, covered widely in the press.  Thousands of women like herself would join hands and lock arms in solidarity and in mutual hatred for the incarnation of the devil. 

She couldn't wait, got up early, fed her cats who were surprised at getting fed before sunup, took her morning run under the streetlights, and waited on the stoop for the bus to come by. This was to be her day, a day like no other, a halcyon day. 

It felt so good to be with her sisters on this sparkling clear May day that she wanted to kiss them, hold them tight, go off with them and be happy forever.  They shouted, waved banners, chanted in a chorus of powerful women's voices, so much so that they almost forgot the object of their calumny, the beast in the White House.  The thousand voices ringing out from the Capitol to the Washington Monument was life-affirming, joyous, and spiritual. 

There was nothing like it.  Hate had become a raison d'etre, an expression of personhood, existential worth, and faith.  Vicki, tired but fulfilled after hours on the Mall and pub-crawling with her sisters up and down K Street, she went home. 

Few if any of these women could articulate exactly why they hated the President so much.  His policies and programs were classically conservative - closed borders, small government, private sector, strong military, traditional social values, patriotism, and individualism - and while he demonstrated a particular and unusual resolve in implementing them, he was well within Constitutional limits.  It was his opponents who resorted to fictitious claims, frivolous, unfounded lawsuits, left field impeachment attempts, and baseless information. 

Most of Vicki's friends when asked gave that 'Are you kidding?' look and railed on about racism, misogyny, homophobia, and mindless crony capitalism.  They refused to be pinned down because no pinning down was necessary.  The man's villainy was obvious, uncontested, there for all to see. 

Vicki's house seemed particularly empty this time around, perhaps because of the unbridled joy of such a large gathering, an epiphanic moment of solidarity and pure happiness; but there was a shadow of a doubt that fleetingly darkened her mood.  She was alone with her cats.  The plants needed watering. 

She shook off these morbid thoughts, rattled uncharacteristically around the kitchen, emptied the refrigerator and ate leftovers, put her head in her hands, and cried. 

'What am I doing?' she shouted, embarrassed, chagrined, and angry at herself for letting such pedestrian emotions overtake her.  She needed no man, no towheaded children, no backyard barbecues, not church dinners to make her happy.  She was as fulfilled as any woman could be. 

She looked at the calendar and saw every day filled with appointments, events, conferences, and seminars.  Every day was metro, boulot, dodo - yes, with more purpose and meaning than her neighbors who hopped on the N6 and spent laborious days at meaningless jobs; but somehow missing something, something she sensed was important but couldn't put her finger on. 

For the first time in months, she felt the bilious hatred for Donald Trump slip away.  She tried to conjure up images of him as a destroyer, a child killer, a Gestapo thug, a tyrant; but the old vaudevillian shtick was falling flat. Thank God tomorrow was the climate conference. 

Life went on like this, desultory, passionless, and increasingly morbidly without respite or recourse.  The die had been cast years ago and there was no wiggle room now.  A leopard cannot change its spots. Too many sunken costs, too much water under the dam. 

Furthermore, hate had become her personal zeitgeist.  It was as hardwired as any exogenous factor could be.  It was part of her persona.  How could it be dwindling away like this?  How could her very lifeblood be trickling from her veins?

'Is it too late?', she wondered, but could not finish the question.  Too late for what had never had to be asked; but too late for something other than this! A cat jumped on her lap but she threw it off into the corner, screeching and climbing up the curtains.  'So this is what it feels like', she thought; but there was still time to regain her footing, to rekindle the old fires, become a social justice warrior in the avant garde, the first phalanx. 

Yet, the next morning the funk had not disappeared and she had to face the day without that marvelously joyous hatred that greeted her as soon as she opened her eyes. 

'I couldn't have wasted my life', she said to herself, but that niggling doubt was there.  If after years of fighting the good fight for civil rights, gay rights, the climate, redistribution of wealth, diversity, and equity, conservatism was now the ethos of the land, the zeitgeist, the meme, what were her struggles worth?

Very little of course.  Epictetus had been right all along.  Take what comes, let it be, what goes around comes around.  La Dolce Vita is not so bad after all; but these a posteriori thoughts didn't do Vicki much good.  'You made your bed, solie in it' her mother used to say, and that was as pithy a nostrum as there ever was. 

Which didn't do Vicki any good whatsoever. 'I'm stuck'. she said; and like many old spinsters before her, fixed herself a lovely cup of tea. 

Trump In China, Haters Delight - Egg Foo Young, Chop Suey, And How Was I To Know? They All Look Alike

President Trump landed in Beijing yesterday (5.13.26) to fanfare, ceremony, and high expectations.  With him were thirty of America's top businessmen, the most influential leaders of the tech and information revolution in the country if not the world.  This was a delegation of import, weight, and influence, and it made clear that the President was bringing the captains of the new industry not only to advise him, but to show the Chinese that America was a world tech power and that concluding a favorable economic and political agreement would be in China’s interest.

 

As soon as the trip was announced, Trump haters raised a ruckus. Crony capitalism, they shouted, a Jewish cavalcade of stars, an adolescent-minded buffoon sent on a man's errand, a fool who thinks egg foo young is the jewel in the crown of Chinese cuisine, an idiot who said that he was unsure who to shake hands with 'since Chinese all look alike'. 

Maggie Flynn was well-armed for her anti-Trump screeds.  After saturating herself with every bit of damaging evidence that the trip was only in Trump's self-interest, and concluding that he was simply paving the way for post-Presidential deals for himself and his family, how could any reasonable person doubt his treachery?  

He had corralled the big men of Silicon Valley and strong-armed them to come on the China trip, threatening them with sanctions and federal investigation if they did not comply. With The Gang Of Thirty in tow, he set off on Air Force One. 

Of course he was in it to make money but for America. What else was there?  China held all the cards.  They held a whopping big piece of America's debt and could pull the plug at any time, thanks to the trillions in foreign currency and gold they held in reserve.  They, in a short space of time had become a world economic and military power, and thanks to Confucianism, their Mandarin empires, and a long history of racial and social unanimity they were strong, unified, and impregnable. 

As much as the American president at home was rolling back the worst of the divisive, corrosive, and damaging Leftist woke agenda, the country was still a side show of freakish identity politics - a clown show, the venality of Congress reeked with smarmy self interest, and the nation had lost its moral ethos.

Trump was going into the Chinese negotiations behind the eight ball and with not much of a leg to stand on.

Yet, who better to try than Trump, a man who made his living out of threat, intimidation, coercion, quid pro quo compromise, and favorable deals.  The best man to have in a card game where an opponent has all the cards - a card sharp, a bluffer, an intimidator - and Donald Trump, billionaire victor of the most brutal battlefield in the world, New York real estate, is just the man Americans should want at the table. 

 

And yet, but not surprisingly the Left wants him to fall on his face, to shame himself and the country, make ludicrous, outrageous statements far beyond the pale of diplomacy and making backroom deals with Chinese oligarchs.  

'Jews', said the haters.  There was no better sign of the international Jewish conspiracy than this stable of of Jews Trump was bringing along with him.  Icons of high tech? Yes, but in a conspiracy with Jewish bankers and financiers in collusion to establish a sub rasa power cabal of unimaginable proportions. The military alliance between the United States and Israel was no more than a cover for the expansion of world Zionism for the benefit of the Jews and the President of the United States. 

Maggie snarled at her husband who wished the President well.  'So do I', she said, but meant not a word of it.  The sooner the fool was exposed as the bigoted, capitalist tool that he was, the better.  She was as glued to the television as Nixon haters were in the days of Watergate, watching for, hoping for the stake that would be driven into the heart of the vampire of the Oval Office. 

She flipped channels and surfed the web.  CNN and MSNBC were not enough, BBC was too compromising. Commentary, The Nation, Politico, and the Daily Kos went straight to the point - the moral corruption of the President and his sycophantic family - but they too pulled their punches; so she went deep web and found arcane sites barely visible but untamed in their exposure of the President as man in the clutches of the international Jewish conspiracy, an autocrat in waiting, a bulldozing enemy of the people.  

The comments heard in Maggie’s neighborhood - a universally rock solid progressive enclave - were not surprisingly anti-Trump but this time their scorn and bilious hatred was completely unhinged.  'How will he know whose hand to shake', they laughed.  'All Chinese look alike'.  

His parade of high-tech entrepreneurs was nothing less than Robber Barons redux - a collusive billionaire cabal of men with no restraint, all marching together to engineer an AI takeover of industry, destroying the working man and his unions, creating financial instruments that beggared those of Enron, Jeffrey Skilling, and Bernie Madoff, deployed data centers in the heartland sucking energy and water, and helped engineer a two tiered American society - they, the billionaires, and everyone else. 

'Where's the egg foo young?', they chortled, 'and the chop suey?', imitating the President, a man who had not one sophisticated multicultural bone in his body and was bound to make a fool of himself in front of the world.  Yes, it would be embarrassing, but if it hastened the end of this bottom-feeding goon the better.

The Chinese politburo, reviewing the state of affairs in America had a good laugh over the No Kings rallies, the march of the transgenders on the National Mall, the hoopla over former slaves who were touted as the world's best and brightest hope, and the campus political frenzy which eroded any ethos of learning and academic excellence. 

Kowtowing to a race of racist pigs', Maggie’s neighbors said, referring to the Chinese Han hegemony.  'Tell it to the Uighurs', they said, unaware of the Muslim fundamentalism of the region which as everywhere else in the world threated civil order and social unity.  Trump wants to join the international cabal of dictators, Putin, Xi, and Trump, in an unholy alliance of soulless Machiavellian ambition, they added.   'Down with Trump', these otherwise recondite neighbors shouted.  

This China charade was the last straw, the neighbors agreed.  Destroying the federal bureaucracy in an attempt to distort and finally eliminate democratic, popular rule was one thing; sending SS Storm Troopers into American communities to round up and deport peaceful asylees was another, but this...this blatant, outrageous international collusion was more than they could take.  The guillotine was too good for this pretender, this usurper, this morally deformed creature. 

Maggie panted, breathless with the anger and hatred which had overcome her.  She stood there, open-mouthed, trembling, and lost in feverish apoplexy.  

She slowly made her way back home, but it - in all its quiet suburban charm - now seemed out of place.  Trump had defiled it, had corrupted it, had robbed it of any decency.  'What's a mother to do?' 

She rummaged through the medicine chest to see if any of her husband's hip replacement Oxycodone pills were left over, accidentally knocked the Tylenol and witch hazel into the sink, scrambled on the bottom shelf for that familiar brown plastic CVS container, and finally found them, a bit past their expiry date, but who was counting.  This day could not continue as it started. 

Trump didn't seem so bad after two Oxy, nothing did actually, so why not top it off with a stiff drink. 'I know it's a no-no', she said, 'but what the fuck', and with that she headed off into never-never land as happy as could be. 

The Success Of A Simple Man In Troubled Times - The Vacancy Of The Dull, Danglers On The Bell Curve

Doug Brandon was a simple man.  Born and raised in the shadow of the Tuscaroras to a simple family, he never lost his stolid approach to life.  'Hard work is all there is' said his father, echoing that philosophical vacancy that had characterized the Brandons for generations, a kind of unschooled nihilism which sheltered the family from the hardships of poverty and isolation.  They had been dealt a bad hand from a stacked deck, but took life as it came, the good with the bad, days sunny and stormy. 

As such Doug was never filled with unrealistic expectations or vain hopes. Someday he would leave Barkerville and make something of himself, but that something would be necessarily modest and down to earth. 

Doug was not the brightest boy in his class by any means, and he managed to make his way with some effort through the grades, ending with some distinction as the top mechanic at Lewiston juncture high school.  Dougie, as his parents knew him, was good at fixing things, especially small motors - outboards, lawn mowers, hedge trimmers - and he worked summers alongside Bill Baxter of Baxter Repair Service.

 

Baxter suggested two years at Lewiston Community College where the discipline of a technical education would stand him in good stead.  He could move from small motors to large ones, and perhaps one day he might find himself on an airline maintenance crew. 

He did as Baxter suggested - the college's fees were nominal and no strain on his family's modest budget - and he graduated with a technical diploma that was indeed his union card for employment, even in down times.  He applied for an apprenticeship with Southwest Airlines which serviced Lewiston, was accepted, and after a few years was a bona fide airline mechanic. 

The story, however, is not about Doug's career, but about the particular psychological configuration which got him through troubled times.  Being a dull, uninspiring man of limited intelligence and insight, he was able to weather the storms of a difficult economy, social dislocation, and the radical shifts in political ethos which were affecting the country. 

Now, the character of the Washington-based political opposition to the current president is well-known. In a canny but so far ineffective campaign to discredit him as a racist, homophobe, misogynist, and capitalist tool, the political left hammered away at him for over a decade.

Lawfare, impeachment, smear tactics, innuendo, and fear-mongering were all tried but failed.  However for very action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and because of the ad hominem assault on the President, the country itself became angry, divided, harshly and reflexively critical, and unquieted. 

Lewiston was small city, like many in the country not known for anything in particular, but still a reasonable place to live and work.  The county of which it was the seat was growing, and a number of major firms opened plants there.  Hankook Tires, for example, moved in thanks to a deal with Doug's community college which promised to train prospective workers if the company would hire them. 

All well and good, but Lewiston could not avoid the divisiveness, racial conflict, and social disturbance affecting the country at large. As a matter of fact, it became the locus of the most aggressive, often violent protests against the President's radical agenda.  The press took notice, and its concerted efforts to rid Washington of this menace to democracy, were well-publicized. 

Although the protests in Lewiston were seen from the outside as unified and a true political collective, they were anything but.  Black Lives Matter holdouts in one corner, angry white, deeply progressive women in another, and organized labor in a third.  These factions were constantly at each other's throats and each angrily assertive about their interests. 

The protests became routine, police barricades and crime scene tape common.  Arrests were made and talk was heard about the deployment of the National Guard.  Things went from bad to worse as a militant group firebombed a military depot causing little damage but giving the restive, angry Left the visibility it wanted. 

Doug had been approached on a number of occasions and asked to join this or that faction; but he politely demurred.  There was nothing in him - not in his character, personality, background, or life - that was suited for such a political activism.  To be brutally honest, although Doug could rivet and repair, he was as dumb as a stone.  Only thanks to his natural affinity for screws, bolts, wrenches, and hammers was he able to manage as well has he did.  Other than that he was as clueless as the day he was born. 

A co-worker at the airport, a union man angry at the administration's moves to make airport maintenance a right-to-work zone, tried to enlist Doug in his activism; but Doug, unsure what right-to-work was - the fact that he had a good job was all he knew - and constitutionally unable to parse the simplest articles of democracy, again refused.

 

When the protests threatened to shut down the airport, Doug's co-workers became more insistent on his support. Doug again thanked them but no thanks, and returned home to wait until the dust cleared so that he could go back to work. 

'What's up at the airport, hon?' his wife asked one afternoon. 

'Not much', Doug replied.  The sirens of police cavalcades down Egbert Avenue were heard day and night, but Doug slept well.  

Now, this was not from a practiced, educated stoicism or a survivalist reaction to violence.  Beyene Wolde-Gabriel, a co-worker from Ethiopia had survived the civil wars, the brutality of the dictator Mengistu, the pogroms, midnight hangings, and street mayhem by keeping his head down, a partisan of no cause but known as a quiet supporter by all.  

Such political courage and savvy was foreign territory to Doug who had trouble placing Ethiopia on the map, and as far as the territorial struggles with Eritrea and the Somali terrorists who had joined forces with both sides, he was one hundred percent ignorant.  In fact, if his co-worker had taken the time to explain the situation, his words would have gone in one ear and out the other, passing through the complete vacancy of Doug's mind. 

 

That vacancy, as little as Doug could appreciate or even acknowledge it, was what kept him afloat in troubled times.  Conrad in his novel Victory wrote about Heyst, a refugee from civilization, preferring a life of incessant wandering, devoid of attachments and commitment to entanglement.  Graham Greene in The Comedians and The Quiet American wrote about the same calculated indifference in his main characters, a kind of existential stoicism. 

All these characters are drawn into concerted action, to engagement, and to entanglement with good and bad ends; but Doug had none of their calculated indifference.  He was too ordinary, too vacant for any such ideas.  He stayed outside the fray because life propelled him that way.  He didn't so much resist his co-workers' pleas for engagement, but simply demurred.  Not the path of least resistance, nor the easy way out, but a simple complaisance, the congenital aspect of his dullness. 

There is a bell curve for everything, and intelligence is no different.  Lack of intelligence, grouped at one asymptote has many expressions.  From the persistent dysfunction of the ghetto where generation after generation intermarries within a confined, uninspired gene pool, to class dullards, clueless adolescents, one-issue politicians, minor criminals...the list is endless.  Most of these sub-par individuals cause harm, lesser or greater; but those like Dougie whose lack of brains is expressed only as vacancy, cause nothing, and in so not-doing, survive the worst of times. 

The novel Being There by Jerzy Kosinski is a satire on American politics where a simple man of limited intelligence is taken as a genius.  Chance the gardener, used to talking about the lifecycle of plants, bushes, and trees in the simplest, organic terms is thought to be speaking in brilliant metaphor, and rises up in the political world thanks to the credulousness and intellectual myopia of his handlers. 

No one ever found or recognized the advantages of vacancy in Dougie Brandon.  He just carried on, head down not out of political savvy but habit, hands always busy, emotions always on an even keel. 

Yes, Doug was as dumb as they come, and not one salient, interesting, or provocative thought ever entered his head, but such dumbness is often overlooked, rarely singled out as a positive aspect of diversity. 

The Dougies of the world are everywhere, and most lead lives of remarkable dullness - impossible to be around because of their mental immobility, they are thudding bores.  Worse even than Del Griffiths, says the Neil Page character in the movie Planes, Trains & Automobiles about his boring co-passenger. 

'I could sit through hours, days, and weeks of insurance seminars with a smile on my face. "How do you do it?" my fellow conferees ask. "Because I spent a week with Del Griffiths"'. 

Dougies are suburbanites, office workers, bank tellers even professionals - occupation is no disaggregating filter.  The hopelessly dull are everywhere unaware of their own boundless vacancy.  At least for Dougie it was a survival mechanism.  For all the rest just an empty stare.

Wind In His Hair - A Bike Lane Prophet Cycles The Great Outdoors, Dopey And Without A Clue

Doug Burnett was an ordinary man - born and raised in a coal town to a pharmacist father and a second grade teacher mother, he was well-behaved, dutiful, and an obedient student.  He couldn't make heads or tails of anything past arithmetic, so he repeated a grade or two, but since there was nowhere else to put him, he moved up and out, and one day found himself at Montgomery College, MK as it was known because of the fourth-grade level of its students. 

The college was a congenial place where there were no unrealistic expectations about Harvard or academic excellence, just a pleasant holding pen for those who would never make a mark, but would just fit in nicely. 

Doug muddled through his two years - MK was a junior college - and was anxious to get on with life, but he had no idea about what or how, so he took a job as a stock-and-errand boy at his father's pharmacy in Chillicothe, cleaned dusty bottles of chloroform and peptides in the storage room, waited on the occasional customer, and had no more ambition than a split-level, a wife, and two children.

Circumstances being what they can be, capricious and unpredictable, Doug found himself in Washington, DC thanks to a chance meeting with the representative for the Second Congressional District of Ohio.

Now, Doug was not a youth of any pretense, and had no thoughts about democracy, contribution, or investment; but when approached by the august member of Congress who invited him to join his staff as an intern, he readily agreed. 

He had no idea whatsoever what the job entailed let alone the role or importance of a member of Congress, but he had been brought up to respect his elders, so acceptance was simply the only right thing to do. 

He had been singled out not because of his intelligence, political savvy, or social appeal, but because he was a working class voter from the eastern half of the Congressman's district and would do well as a poster boy for his rural poor constituents. 

 

Doug was a faithful amanuensis, little more; and when the Congressman finally retired, Doug found himself out of a job.  With few qualifications but willing and able; but with a good recommendation, he joined Scientists For Social Responsibility, a non-profit group organized around 'planet health' a catch-all ethos which gave them cover to advocate for environmental protection, climate change, and social responsibility. 

Doug understood none of the ideas proposed, but was happy to do good; and was a loyal and hardworking member of the team.  

One of the propositions of the group was to encourage dedicated bike lanes in urban areas.  Cars were polluting interlopers and their rampaging takeover of roads and highways needed to be stopped.  Scientists for Social Responsibility intended to be at the forefront of the biking New Age, and Doug, coming as he did from a rural, undulating, bike-perfect region, was asked to be a part of the Bikes Are Our Future team. 

They bought him a bike, took him with them on casual rides on the C&O towpath, and urged him to go farther up the trail to the Cumberland Gap. 

He had only ridden a fat-tired Schwinn in his boyhood so was unused to the 21-gear hi-tech two-wheeler he was given, but quickly took to it.  Riding up the same kind of hills he had struggled over on his bulbous Schwinn was a dream.  If this was climate change advocacy, he was all for it. 

The mystique of cycling escaped him - as simple as he was, there was no vision or epiphany in it. It was simply pedaling, sometimes hard up, other times light and repetitive, nothing more.  When he sat at the Old Ebbitt Grill with his colleagues over a beer, he was lost when the chat turned to mountain vistas, expansive prairies, farm houses and cows in pastures.  

He had taken to biking as a matter of duty - if his organization was all in for bikes, so would he be - but he found nothing particularly uplifting or elegiac about it. 

As a matter of fact, bikes were a pain in the ass. Driving from here to there in Bethesda was slow, interrupted, and interminably blocked because of the presumptive Rulers of the Road, dedicated bike lanes, and the inevitable accidents.  

'Perhaps I'm missing something', Doug said, not giving bikers their due, not appreciating the particularly heady, transformative experience of rushing down a mountain pass, wind in the hair, guided by the natural winds, inclines, and vistas of the open road. 

He gave it a go, joined a weekend biking group that headed north to Poolesville, stopped for beers at a local tavern, then cycled home for dinner.  All without anything more than traffic, impatient drivers, potholes, and dreary, endless trees. 

He gave urban biking a try as well, cycling from his suburban home to his downtown DC office; but that was a gantlet, a medieval joust, a mudwrestling ugly tour better left to others. 

Perhaps because Doug was so limited, so simple and unpoetic, so straightforward, practical, and nose-to-the-grindstone, he decided to chronicle his biking experiences as a kind of clinical record. At first he did it to illustrate his organization's vision and principles, then as a down-to-earth account of the order of biking.  Whether he understood it or not, whether he got or didn't get the essentiality of the open road, it was his duty to paint the picture. In the end, as dull and prosaic as it was, it became his raison d’etre - which of course everyone needs regardless.

 

His chronicle, his biking memoir, his record of traipsing Appalachia and suburban Maryland was the most horrendously boring saga imaginable.  It was a story of gear ratios, brake linings, torque, tire resistance, and ball bearings and nothing more.  A tedious recollection of bike trips in the most predictable places, a soggy, watery saga of nothing but grinding up and down the hills of Western Pennsylvania and points west. 

Why he ever bothered, why he even tried was a mystery.  Why would this man of limited means, desultory intelligence, and without a drop of insight, creative vision, or personal feelings ever think that it would be of interest let alone be inspiring?.

Such is the nature of true belief - febrile, airy, satisfying, and overarching.  It matters not to the believer whether or not his ideas have currency or relevance; or whether his passion and obsession will encourage other to action.  He speaks, promotes, insists because righteousness is hardwired and absolute. 

No one of course paid any attention to his wandering, incoherent, fantastical memoir.  Not only did few care about biking; not only were most people pissed that their civil rights were being infringed upon by the unhinged two-wheeled few, but the fact that some actually believed the absurd idea of a biking heaven . It was a consignment to a Barnum & Bailey side show. 

Doug - Dougie to his diehard friends - never quit, and in all forums, informal dinners, roundtables, conferences, and on streetcorners he hammered on about bikes, bike lanes, and bike heaven.  His old friends tolerated it all but waited for the day that he and Mary Beth took up their residency in Avalon Quarters retirement village, but even there anyone within earshot thought the old man queer and ready for the glue factory. 

Bike Lanes, Recycling, And Electric Cars - The Happy Life Of Doing The Right Thing

Del Barrow was a bike advocate - from dedicated lanes, rails-to-trails, and cycle-friendly rules of the road he was a passionate partisan.  He spent long hours preparing his bike-friendly petition before the City Council, contributed time, efforts, and money to 'Bicycles Are Our Future', the leading bike advocacy group in the Washington metropolitan area. 

 

According to Del bikes could do no wrong.  As inheritors of the climate change legacy, in the avant garde to reduce vehicle traffic on the nation's roads, and the new Thoreau, Walden Pond, Emersonian poets of the soon-to-be pristine urban environment, bike advocates were insufferable  They were pedantic, insistent, hectoring, critical, and tedious.  And yet they never stopped their hammering about the new world of bicycles. 

Bikes were a nuisance. They slowed traffic, caused accidents, and forced unnecessary public investments in bike infrastructure - boondoggles and public scams by green authorities anxious to show their commitment to a better, more verdant, considerate world.  The famous Montgomery County 'bike lane to nowhere' rankled commuters every rush hour as they funneled into a one lane thoroughfare, reduced by half because of bike lane of 500' that ended in traffic, that no one used, and was an example of politically-inspired waste.

Bikes were vehicles when they felt like it, pedestrians when it suited them. Prejudicial laws favoring cyclists passed in the days of radical environmentalism made drivers automatically, ipso facto, guilty in any accident involving cyclists.  This sense of undue privilege and entitlement, particularly when cyclists disobeyed all rules of the road dared cars to hit them. 

Yet Del never once wavered.  Those who complained about bike-share racks lined with unrented bikes, confusing on-off, only sometimes downtown bike lanes on the capital's busiest streets, play-as-you-may observance of traffic laws, the lack of any of the safety equipment standard on cars are ignoramuses, said Del, troglodytes, throwbacks, and inconscient fools.

Bikes made life more worth living, said Del, who suited up in his brand-festooned Lycra biking suit for his weekend peloton, or strapped himself into his beater Schwinn to pedal to the Metro, or volunteered up at Cabin John to fix flat tires.  'Bikes 'R' Us' was the lawn sign Del had put on the front lawn with a bar code and a number to call for more information. 

His wife, initially supportive of Del's efforts to promote cycling was becoming tired of what had become his obsession.  While she approved of the principle, she had become annoyed at his non-stop banging on about bike lanes, car fools, and the dilatory attitudes of government authorities.  From dawn to dusk, Del whinged and complained, and it had become a tedious slog.  He needed help. 

Del wasn't the only one in the neighborhood who had gone 'round the bend for doing the right thing. Margot Billings was a terror about recycling.  Not only was she careful about sorting - she was proud to never mix cans with glass, paper with organic waste, and newspaper with packaging, but she meticulously washed every can she recycled, removed every last bit of dried tomato paste, stray lemon seeds, and stray plastic wrap. 

 

She ran out into the alley at Christmastime to give the garbage men generous tips, arranged her bins so that that they would have an easier time hooking them on to the forklift, and waved to them every Thursday morning as they came by. 

She, like Del, was passionate about her cause, but carried her obsession a step further.  She was a recycling vigilante who called out her neighbors for irresponsible mixing. She left signs on those recycle bins with indifferently sorted trash (she peeked under the lid on her neighborhood walks).  

This vigilantism came naturally, for she was a veteran of the COVID wars during which she was the first to shout j'accuse! at neighbors without masks, disregarding the six-foot rule, or waiting unconscionably long before getting vaccinated.  She was known as The Harridan of Butterworth Place, a woman who still in her bathrobe, but double masked, gloved, and wild, stormed out of her house to confront a COVID denier. 

 

It felt good to be part of a movement to save the environment, and both Del and Margot were happy people.  Because their anger at those who did not comply with biking or recycling was righteous, it was not the bilious kind, the kind that kept you awake at night.  It was part of the passion, the commitment, the progressive faith.

Shannon Biggs drove a Tesla and her husband a fully-electric Toyota; and they were as outspoken and determined as Margot and Del in their desire to help others join the mission for a more livable planet. She wrote letters to the editor, spoke at formal and informal gatherings, and distributed reading material at libraries. 

Now she, like Del and Margot took her cause at face value.  A car with no carbon emissions was ipso facto good.  There could be no doubt, denial, or objection.  Of course this was all idealistic fantasy. Lithium mines were just as environmentally invasive as open copper mines, child labor was used in nasty, war-addled countries like the Congo, coal-fired plants generated the electricity needed for recharging, the added weight of electric cars because of their batteries took its toll on tires and roads, and much more. 

 

Cost-benefit was a fiction for recyclers, electric freaks, and bikers.  Their good was taken as a matter of faith, and no comparative economic analysis of waste disposal or reconfiguration of traffic for a desultory interest in bike travel was necessary.  In fact to do so was to challenge the very premise of a warming climate. 

That - the warming climate - was the issue that brought Del, Margot, and Shannon together.  Despite growing evidence that global warming might not be the apocalyptic threat it has been touted to be - ice sheets in both the Arctic and Antarctic are increasing not decreasing; new evidence from sophisticated AI analysis suggests that man's influence on climate variations is far less than concluded by climate activists - environmentalists are more passionate than ever, and have dug their heels in even more deeply.  Climate change is not received wisdom.  It is fact. 

So, not only does involvement in sectoral environmental issues feel good - biking, recycling, and electric cars - but that advocacy for a reversal of global warming feels even better.  It is the big tent, the big issue, the one idea that puts it all together.  The fact that the three neighbors were one on climate change added to their sense of identity and purpose and gave them a universal camaraderie.  

Hobbes's famous notion - 'Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short' - may well be true, but social activism is a good anodyne.  It may not change the existential nature of a penitential life, but it at least takes your mind off it.  So, although the excesses and febrile enthusiasm of people like Del, Margot, and Shannon might be amusing if not laughable to some, some credit is due.  How different is climate activism any different than a round of golf or bass fishing?

University Park, the neighborhood where all three live is an amusing place thanks to its very visible political commitment.  Hate Has No Home Here, BLM, Democracy Matters lawn signs are everywhere.  Compost bins are place in front (not in the invisible alley) of houses, electric cars are charged up on driveways, and bikers pedal up and down the main streets.  

There is nothing quiet about political philosophy there.  Own It, Show It is the mantra, commitment requires evangelism, good works are impactful.  

Yes, it can all be tedious at times, but a side show right around the corner? A must. 

Why The Trump Era Is Revolutionary - Politics Are Secondary Amidst Fundamental Changes In Ethos And Culture

Bob Muzelle gathered his co-workers in the small conference room of his non-profit offices on 9th Street.  The Democratic Party had just suffered another defeat - not just a minor one over tariffs or regulation, but a Constitutional one.  The Supreme Court of the Commonwealth of Virginia had just rejected a radical redistricting plan which would have eliminated Republican electoral districts; and in so doing paved the way for conservative victory in the state in the coming 2026 elections. 

This at a time when the Party was being exposed for fraud, corruption, and intellectual chicanery.  The mouthpiece of the radical Left, Ilhan Omar, Representative from Minnesota, was being implicated in the trillion dollar Somali fraud in her state. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, another of the 'Squad', a far left progressive group of foreign-born women Congressional representatives, was being exposed as Senator Kennedy from Louisiana likes to point out, 'the reason why instructions are put on shampoo bottles.'    

 

Other parodies of legislative power, Senators Sanders, Schumer, Warren, and Booker have in Congressional hearings been outed for their duplicity, hypocrisy, and playground bullying. These senators who have been behind the lawfare, impeachment votes, and fractious innuendoes and ad hominem attacks on Donald Trump were shown to be not models of progressive righteousness but clowns. 

Worse, the President has gone beyond the words and hopeful promises of his predecessors and taken Iran to task for both its nuclear ambitions and sponsorship of regional terror.  He closed the border, reduced illegal immigration to a trickle, encouraged business through limiting regulation and taxation, and dismantled every one of the woke programs and policies of the Biden Administration. 

The world has caught on.  Conservative victories in the UK, France, Sweden, The Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Eastern Europe have included the same policies of cultural integrity, unity, and independence promoted by Trump.  Just recently, Reform, the ultra-conservative party of the UK won a resounding victory in municipal elections, forcing a likely stepping down of the current Labor Prime Minister. 

This movement is not just partisan politics - it is far more profound and fundamental.  Europeans, complicit in their governments' open border policy, have found themselves inundated with Muslims who want no part of European culture and have said basta! 

Sheltered by the former progressive ideology of inclusivity, Muslim fundamentalists have been allowed to create an Islamic subculture which rejects European values; and these immigrants have overrun formerly unified, peaceful, civil societies and turned them into hostile, crime-ridden places 

Everything that Bob and his progressive colleagues did to unseat the President, to discredit him, and to remove him from the political scene has not worked; and at least in part because of these untoward attacks, worse than any in an American history of smarmy, dirty politics, the President has vowed revenge. 

His entire Cabinet is made up of angry, loyal, unintimidated members who stand up to the bullying of Democrats. When called to testify on the Hill these witnesses pull no punches and when dealing with the liberal press, speak both authoritatively and 'incorrectly', shaming the questioners for their venality and faux entitlement. 

This was why Bob called the impromptu meeting in his offices.  Progressives were not only not making headway, they were losing ground.  Despite their assumptions, their convictions that Donald Trump was evil and that his policies were anti-democratic and fascist, they were on the run.  Something had to be done, but what?

The Democratic opposition consists of little more than Trump hatred.  They oppose, attack, and smear everything the President does without a policy response.  They are the party of 'No', the party without one reasonable, intelligent answer to conservativism.  They are an intellectually bereft party of whiners and naysayers.  This might have worked in the past, but was losing currency fast. 

Americans - even those who did not vote for Trump - are beginning to see that his invocation of foundational principals - Constitutional originalism, personal integrity, individualism, private enterprise, small government, patriotism, and federalism - is indeed a call for integration, not fractious diversity; for unity rather than identity; for honor and justice, not divisive ‘identity’. 

The cultural, moral and ethical zeitgeist is changing.  It is no longer just Democrat vs Republican or conservative vs progressive, but a sea change in world view, a return to a Revolutionary era ethos, nationalism, and Judeo-Christian values. 

Progressives are increasingly seen as not only those who  promote unusual, often outlandish ideas, but those who are out to destroy America which began nobly two hundred and fifty years ago and which is now foundering, losing its way, and becoming a joke not a model. 

The recent No Kings rallies - inchoate gatherings of older white Americans with vague ideas of autocracy and centralized rule who think Donald Trump is an anti-democratic usurper - are all progressives can muster in the way of opposition.  They are against everything and for nothing.  

Their identity politics have driven wedges between communities, their woke versions of sexuality have made the country a laughing stock around the world, their redistributive economics smack of the failed socialist experiments in Europe.  

They do not want to unify the country, make it a strong adversary to hostile foreign regimes, and reassemble the element of genius which had made it great but to continue to divide it, tether it to false idealism and adolescent wishes. 

There is no there there, no meat, no substantial meal, nothing but hatred, hypocrisy, and arrogant assumptions.  Hillary Clinton lost the first election of Donald Trump largely because of these assumptions.  It was not only logical and right that a woman should become President, she said, but that it was foreordained, part of destiny.  

A woman ipso facto was the right choice for President, and any woman would simply have to stand for election to win.  Hillary Clinton lost badly - her empty, soulless campaign exposed for the intellectual fraud that it was.

Kamala Harris the next opposing Democrat candidate for President against Donald Trump ignored the lesson of the Clinton debacle and doubled down on it.  Not only was she a woman but a black one. Now there was absolutely no way she could lose the election; but once again the voters of America were not fooled by the woman's arrogant suppositions and she, like Hillary, lost badly. 

The Democrats had two chances to make something of a party platform, to prepare something substantial and solid; but no, they chose to run on nothing but identity; and progressives are still praying from the same prayer book.

So Bob, standing before an eager group of young people looking to him for guidance and leadership, came up empty.  He hemmed and hawed, stumbled and bumbled, repeated old nostrums and reheated old chestnuts, but had nothing to say.  

The train had left the station, politics were irrelevant, and Bob had nothing in his suitcase but tired old clothes.  The very ground under his feet had shifted. The old signposts  were gone, and he didn't know which way to turn.  

The meeting ended badly, with hugs and kisses but no resolve.  They hated Donald Trump more than ever, but found themselves floundering, flailing, exasperated but without a clue.  They filed out of the conference room deflated, but young as they were, not hopeless.  There was at least the rally against injustice this Saturday, the protests for peace next week, and then summer vacation.

Bob went around the corner and had a beer at the Old Ebbitt Grill, the go-to place across from Treasury for the doers and comers of Washington, the place which was his  during the Biden years.  The bartenders knew him, the crowd was congenial and happily supportive.  Now the climate, the ambience, the culture had so changed he hardly recognized it.  

 

He quickly drank his beer and walked back out onto Pennsylvania Avenue, unsure which way to walk.  He felt discombobulated, at loose ends, at sixes and sevens.  How to gin up the old enthusiasm when everything had changed? The old Trump hatred wasn't even there any more, no pulse-throbbing, heart beating animus. 

He had thrown in the towel without even realizing it. 

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.