Iran And Lessons From Hiroshima, The Civil War, Vietnam, And The IDF - Wars Are For Winning

President Trump and advisors - Secretary of State, Secretary of War, Secretary of Energy (needed to weigh in on Iran's oil), Secretary of the Interior (once we get Ukraine's rare earths, the future of American lithium mining), and others met in the war room to discuss the ongoing wars.

Back in 1968 when the War in Vietnam was at its hottest and American anti-war protests were at their height, George Wallace, Governor of Alabama, ran as an Independent.  His far-right, segregationist, ultra-nationalist party was unlikely to win the election against Richard Nixon, but a statement had to be made.  The course of the country was going very wrong, and it was time to stop the hemorrhaging.  The country's white heritage was at stake and Thomas Jefferson's warning about the divisive, destructive release of African slaves into American society had come true. 

America was shilly-shallying in Vietnam, said Wallace, letting a force of black-pajamaed irregulars, the Viet Cong, run American military forces ragged.  It was a shameful display of American pusillanimity and downright weakness. 

To convey the message of American might and the need to show the Vietnamese, their Chinese patrons, and the Russians that we mean business was Curtis LeMay, retired general, World War II hero known for his military absolutism. He firmly believed that the enemy should be shown no mercy, its country reduced to rubble, its military obliterated, and its complaisant, complicit population given a lesson they would never forget.  

 

Years before in WWII he had been placed in command of strategic bombing operations against Japan, planning and executing a massive firebombing campaign against 66 Japanese cities, and Operation Starvation, a crippling minelaying campaign in Japan's internal waterways. He was a firm supporter of President Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and firm advocate of the firebombing of German cities, most notably Dresden, a campaign which did indeed reduce the city to ashes. 

LeMay had grown increasingly impatient over the American prosecution of the War in Vietnam.  He let it be known that the Hearts and Minds strategy of the military - i.e. the war cannot be won by military force alone but only if the peasantry, the people of Vietnam, understood and demanded freedom, social justice, and the benefits of liberal democracy - was deeply misguided. 

The implacable Vietnamese enemy were in those same Hearts and Minds villages ensuring loyalty through brutal intimidation, torture, and public executions. That was the key to allegiance in war, not candy and soft furry bunnies.

It was all a waste of time, this American mollycoddling policy.  Wars are for winning. Although he was supportive of Rolling Thunder, the Johnson-Nixon campaign of massive B-52 bombing of the North and Southern supply lines, he said that it didn't go far enough.  He saw how the Viet Cong hid in deep tunnels while the bombing went on, then emerged to rebuild the Ho Chi Minh Trail and went on to disrupt American operations in the South. 

It was a start, said LeMay but nowhere near enough. Only total annihilation of North Vietnam, the seat of power, the base of Ho Chi Minh and his brilliant General Giap would do. Just like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, massive bombing - yes, even strategic nuclear bombing - would be just the right ticket for the path to victory.  'Bomb 'em back to the Stone Age', he said. 

LeMay was considered a wacko, a loony, an unhinged maniac whose finger should be kept as far from the nuclear trigger as possible.  If had his way, said liberal critics, the United States would be known as a merciless killer, a nation without compassion or mercy, a brutal regime no different than the authoritarian murderers Stalin and Hitler. 

Of course LeMay was nothing of the sort, and the same allegations could be made of Harry Truman for incinerating Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the A-bomb.  The war against Japan was almost over, critics said,  American forces were working their way towards Tokyo, the Japanese military was in tatters, so there was no reason to destroy these cities.  

Yet Truman, 'to save American lives' but more importantly to show the Soviet Union what they could expect if they caused trouble, without hesitation, remorse, or second thoughts let Fat Boy drop from the Enola Gay. 

General MacArthur pleaded with Truman to let him take the Korean War to the Chinese.  They were the problem, not the pesky Koreans and only if the Communist Chinese were destroyed now, they would be an increasingly powerful adversary and enemy in the future.  LeMay was of course supportive of MacArthur.  There was no way that a stalemate on the Korean peninsula was going to be in America's interest.  Finish it once and for all, he advised. 

This same military strategy was embraced by General Wm. Tecumseh Sherman in the Civil War.  Sherman marched through Georgia and South Carolina not only to rout the remaining Confederate Army troops but to send the South a lesson.  'The South shall never rise again', he said as he laid waste to everything in his path. 

Which brings us to the present day and America's war with Iran.  What started off as a decisive military operation to depose the theocratic regime of the mullahs, to restore democracy, and return the rightful heir to the Persian throne, has faltered.  Under political anti-war pressure, President Trump has opted for a peaceful solution.  The war would end if the Iranians gave up all nuclear ambitions. 

Of course the ayatollahs refused, for they had enough missiles and drones to keep both the US and Israel at bay; and they also knew that a peace option would simply allow them to rebuild, rearm, and continue their support of regional terrorism, with or without the bomb.  Unless Iran was completely, irrevocably destroyed, it would continue to be a problem. 

Yet, the President - despite Israeli President Netanyahu's objection - continued on this path to settlement when the only viable option was military.  Iran must no longer exist, said Netanyahu. 

Israel and the IDF showed the world what it meant by total victory, bombing Gaza to a rubble, knowing full well that if it showed any hesitation, let alone mercy, Hamas would simply rearm and renew its attacks on Israel.  A stated policy to destroy Israel and annihilate all Jews would not easily be shelved by Israel's resolute enemy. 

Yet Israel too has taken its foot off the gas.  A ceasefire which would 'bring both parties to the table' is in place and only beneficial to Hamas which already has the support of worldwide anti-Israel, anti-Semitic propaganda.  Netanyahu's advisors, Israeli versions of Curtis LeMay are urging him to renew IDF attacks on Gaza and remove the enemy once and for all. 

President Trump should finish the job he started.  While he may have underestimated Iran's resilience and will to fight, let alone its significant arsenal of missiles and drones, and as importantly its control of the Strait of Hormuz, he should not hesitate to bomb Iran, completely destroy the ruling theocratic junta, devastate its civilian and military infrastructure, and bring the country to its knees - exactly as America did with Japan in World War II. 

The outcry from the progressive Left will increase, but Trump should not listen.  The world will be safer without the mullahs and their repressive terrorist regime. 

Extreme Measures When Quacking Is Not Enough - A Progressive Woman Dreams Of The Sixties

Belinda Harper was getting on in age, not so old as to be forgotten, but with enough bark missing that it was time to act.  The world had not improved much since the halcyon days of yesteryear, especially with Donald Trump in the White House but there was still time to ratchet up the machinery of justice and forge forward.

Yet the great progressive movement of recent years had fizzled.  It's not that it burned itself out, but that its presumptions never amounted to much.  Climate change, the cause celebre of her era was outed as hype. The seas had not risen, temperatures either hovered around normal or dropped below, and there was no increase in the catastrophic storms, and the Antarctic was gaining ice. 

The black man, supposedly the answer to the world’s hopes, remained mired in poverty, crime, and dysfunction in miserable inner cities.  The gates of the southern border had been opened wide to asylum-seekers and refugees, but simply gave a ticket to ride to welfare seekers and  gangbangers.  Gender realignment, the most outlandish presumption of them all, went baroque, and tricked out men in drag became poster boys for a more inclusive sexuality.  

The stock market boomed as Wall Street investors juiced up the economy, gave the AI revolution legs, made employees flush with retirement money. The Occupy Wall Street anti-capitalist jamboree turned out to be as starstruck as No Kings!, the idea that the sitting president was plotting a palace coup to uproot democracy and replace it with monarchy and a succession of kings. 

Economists talk of sunken costs - investments so significant that even when the purpose for which they were intended has turned out bust, those who counted on success just dig their heels in.  Throwing in the towel would mean they were wrong all along. 

This is where Belinda was now.  She had spent the better part of her life fighting for social reform, so many hours on stinking Freedom Ride busses, so many more in dingy basements plotting overthrow and planning for a new age of peace, harmony, emotional well being, and universal justice.

Worse, she clambered out of those cellars and joined the above-ground progressive movement, years in miserably paid jobs in tacky non-profit organizations dedicated to creating a more verdant, accommodating, inclusive world.

Her very youth had been spent without showers.  Sex had been no more than rutting.  Romance had been dismissed as bourgeois fantasy, a comic book dream; and tossing around with Isaac X on a flimsy cot at 432 N Street was little more than human interest. 

She marched, she protested, and she assembled only to see every one of her hard missions come to nothing.  Sales of Ford F-350s, the pigs of the highway were booming.  Sales of E-vehicles became stagnant and on the verge of desultory. What university wanted to scrape the bottom of the barrel in affirmative action and end up dumbing down the student body and losing millions in alumni donations? 

The few and far between success stories of immigrants let in by the former president were overshadowed by the Minnesota, New York, and California scandals where illegal 'visitors' scammed the taxpayer out of billions in fake day care centers, senior transport services, job training programs, and drug rehabilitation vocations.

What could she do?  She couldn't possibly pull up and watch her hard-earned reforms simply go down the drain.  She had to do something, but what?  Her goody bag was empty. 

H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X and all their clones were dead and gone, imprisoned, exiled. The takeover of Columbia University by Mark Rudd and his student radicals is only a footnote to history. Columbia now, the throes of violent anti-Semitism finally put down, is a shadow of its former progressive leadership. 

The leaders of Black Lives Matter - heralded as the new black avant-garde- are all in jail for fraud, corruption, and misuse. Antifa January radicals have been outed as thuggish frat boys

All that is left of progressivism is cant. Conservatism, always considered a retrograde, anti-social, fascist movement is back. Smoke and mirrors, fooling most of the people most of the time while she and her colleagues can only wail like Cassandras, shrewish women hating men and all they have done.

'Let's pack it in, Belinda', said her comrade in arms, 'and move to Florida'. The most fascist state of the fifty, palms, beaches and prejudice? but the metaphor was clear.  Didn't girls just want to have fun? Or at least let their hair down after so many years of penury and pain?

'Absolutely not!' replied Belinda, speaking for sunken costs rather than commitment. Showing the white flag would mean that all those years of righteous anger and protest meant nothing at all.  If there was even a flicker of hope that the marvelous ideals of the past could be revived, she would be the first at the barricades. 

Isaac X - now and for many years Isaac Rosenbaum, had left the Movement many years ago.  Enough was enough - his rabbinical training kicked in after only a few years in the basements of the East Village, he straightened out, went to Harvard Business School, and became a successful securities analyst and then investor at J.P. Morgan Chase.  

They had met again quite incidentally - paths, as dissimilar as any two can be, can cross. There are occasions and venues where the most unlikely partners listen to music or verse together 

Belinda felt shabby. Isaac was the model of Wall Street prosperity - well groomed, impeccably dressed, with a confidence bordering on hauteur but carried neatly - and she was still in Mother Hubbards and sensible shoes. 

'Are you still...' Here, Isaac stopped, searched for the right, most polite and considerate way of asking whether or not Belinda was still flogging the same horse, riding the old plug nowhere but back to the stables...'busy as ever?' 

Belinda noted the pause, thanked him silently for his demurral and consideration, and went on to more neutral topics. Yes, he was married, living in New York, three children, 'helping to run things' at J.P., he said with modest reference to his senior executive position. 

He had been her lover those many year ago, but what he had become was the enemy, and here he was out in the open, bully proud as he could be, dashing and confident, a man she could fall for if it wasn't for his occupation. 

It was Isaac who indirectly cut the tether that bound her to her progressive past, that kind of strange, unexpected epiphany that comes out of nowhere but shows you the light.  They would never see each other again, but that in itself didn't matter.  Maybe the cut of his suit...

In any case, Belinda did indeed what her colleague had suggested and 'packed it in'.  Never a big earner her portfolio was meager, but pumped up a bit by dear old childless Aunt Mary who had given her everything.  

In the old days she would have refused such capitalist gains, but now in her new skin, she was thankful for it, replaced the picture of the old lady on her dresser and moved to Florida.  Yes, Florida of all places; but the new Belinda was not about to live in some rainy Humboldt County group yurt.

She convinced herself that she had not become conservative, that she still held fast to progressive principles.  It was just time to turn the reins of protest over to the younger generation; and so what if it looked like she had become right of center.  

Her inner self was unbowed; but as she grew fonder of the weather, the easy beach-going vibes, the Free State mentality, and the growing crowd of similarly liberal refugees, she had to admit that things were indeed different.  The smarmy basement past was just adolescent folly.  The climate, the black man, the immigrant? Sunken costs were not what they were cracked up to be. 

Pro Wrestling Comes To The White House - Outcrassing The Arch And The Ballroom, And The Left Still Doesn't Get It

The Left was horrified at the pictures of the transformation of the South Lawn of the White House into a a wrestling ring.  If the construction of a giant 250' Triumphal Arch, a tacky, bourgeois ballroom, the Disneyland National Garden of American Heroes, and the Rococo remake of the Kennedy Center wasn't enough, Donald Trump was turning the elegant, rolling, green, gardened lawn looking out over the Potomac into a venue for the most lowbrow, trailer trash, mindless entertainment that America has ever produced.  

  

Professional wrestling is fake, marvelously fake, outrageously fake.  Americans know it and love it even more so.  Olympic wrestling - set positions, timing, classic maneuvers, and patriotic cheers - is boring, unwatchable.  Sweaty bodies in tights grappling and tussling.  Impossible. A waste of time. 

But professional wrestling, comedic and vaudevillian is the greatest show on earth.  Thunderous smackdowns, Herculean body slams, Marvel comic figures bulging with steroids, grimacing like Maoris or Kali, posturing, threatening, intimidating...now that's entertainment. 

Winning and losing have no place here.  Lions and lion-tamers trade places. No one cares who wins just who ends up on top, and how the man on the bottom will rise up in full ferocious glory the next time and pins his opponent to the mat with a volcanic, earth-shaking, crushing slam.  

The combatants are doo-dadded up, tricked out, pimped up - face painted, tattooed, and savage-looking.  They are superhero supervillains, giants as big as trees, massive muscular mammoths.  

And this is will be the featured entertainment at the Trump White House. No Pablo Casals playing Bach or Robert Frost reading his verse. Not the literati, the intelligentsia, artists, ballet dancers, opera divas but a gross inversion of everything cultured or sophisticated. There is no beauty here, no elegant gracefulness of Swan Lake, no poetry, no operatic arias - it is bearded women and two headed babies, sword-swallowers and contortionists, a Fun House chamber of horrors. 

Trump hatred - Trump Derangement Syndrome - is nothing new.  The American Left has hated the man since he first appeared on the political seen.  He has been vilified, caricatured, smeared, and attacked by the Left for more than a decade.  The man is inherently, irreconcilably evil, they say.  An autocrat with intimations of kingship, a destroyer of all that is sacred and holy, a travesty, a satanic interloper, a man without a democratic bone in his body. 

Yet the real reason why he is so hated is because of the ballroom, the arch, and the wrestling.  It is one thing to be conservative and out to undo all the progressive programs of the Biden era, to dismantle the bureaucracy, close the borders to the needy and the destitute, and to enrich crony friends while so doing; but it is another thing to be an expression of the worst, grossest, most uncivilized culture. 

This is what has thrown the Left into such apoplexy - the outrageous, unconscionably bourgeois taste of the man.  It wasn't just that the classic architectural purity of the White House would be destroyed by the addition of a ballroom, it was because it was going to be garish, Rococo, all glitter and gilt, mirrors, and marble, chandeliers and sconces...an abomination, a travesty.  How could he have?  How could he have destroyed the very fabric of American culture and turned the White House into a whore house?

'A travesty...a nightmare...a garish, trashy redo...an architectural bouffant hairdo...a tarted up, faux glam, cheap, flimsy fantasy...' were some of the gentler comments heard on the street.  This was the last straw, the final expression of the total crass unsuitability of the man in the Oval Office, a bounder, a charlatan with not a gracious, charming, sensitive bone in his body. 

The ballroom, so outrageously tacky and out of place in the old, historical, revered building, would be one mighty fuck you to the presumptuous, elitist, insular cadres of progressive Washington.  

Yes, it would be decorated with appointments from Walmart and Target, yes it would have the faux grandeur, the preposterous imitative look of the grand ballroom of Versailles re-imaged by Hollywood, yes it would be bourgeois, lowbrow to its very posts, lintels, and sconces. And this was the point. 

 

The Kennedy Center, a reflection of the patrician tastes of the former President who gave state dinners for the literati, the upper class, America's aristocracy and heirs to the cultural heritage of Europe, will be turned into a theme park, another Disneyland, a horror of bad taste.  

Worst of all, the most unbelievably crass, outlandish, gross, and disgusting display of boorish lack of culture is Trump's plan to build a 'monument to America', his term for an Arc de Triomphe-looking monstrosity, a tower of pure ugliness and horrific taste. And now wrestling. 

The American Left - dour, sorrowing, and bitter - can't take it any more.  The heating climate is withering the land, and these Trump buffoons fill up their Ford F-350s and park two of them in the driveway.  Black people are suffering in the inner city, and the Trump White House is filled with white-only, blonde, blue-eyed runway-ready women. Gays, lesbians, and transgenders are struggling to come out and be counted, and they are cast aside, freaks in Barnum & Bailey side shows.  

And now, not only has everything they have worked for since the days of Lafollette, Gompers, and Brandeis being tossed in the gutter; the Left have to stand by and watch while the garish ballroom destroys the civility and historical importance of classical architecture, the magnificent unimpeded views of the Mall, the Potomac, and Arlington Cemetery are defiled by kitsch and plastic, and the high culture of America are derogated, dismissed, and replaced by a cartoonish vision of crude fantasy. 

Of course those elected to Congress are from the very lowbrow culture they now vilify.  They know nothing about Palladian architecture, Chippendale, Townsend, and Revere, or the principles of Rousseau and Locke on which the Republic was founded. They act on received wisdom - some archaic notions of what is 'presidential', and no clue about the origins, nature, and expression of American culture.  They are a stampeding herd, bellowing, moving this way and that across the prairie, dumb as animals. 

Donald Trump is the first real American president - a man of glitz, arm candy, and bourgeois glamour; a man of Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the streets of New York.  A brawler, a snake oil salesman, a vaudevillian.  In other words, a man of the people. 

He is the first president to understand and embody Americans' deliberately illogical preferences, passionate anti-intellectual populism, and anti-establishment rectitude. Issues never mattered for either him or his supporters.  No logic, issues, or moderation.  The way forward is visceral and absolute.  There is no on the one hand, on the other dispassionate consideration.  The circus is the message.

Few Americans can trace their heritage to the Mayflower.  Few are members of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Society of the Cincinnati.  Yet they, like Trump, are more American than the Camelot Kennedys or the Hyde Park Roosevelts.  They love mansions, yachts, diamonds, and private planes.

America is not a patrician country despite Beacon Hill, Rittenhouse Square, and Park Avenue. It is decidedly bourgeois in taste and aspiration, a nation of Walmart greeters, supermarket checkers, road house dancers.  We dress in faux diamonds.  We trick out our sedans. We still smoke.  We are bass fishermen, catfish noodlers, and NASCAR fans. 

So what did the Left expect?  Were they not paying attention?  Did they really expect a conservative version of Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter? Policy changes only, serious enough but confrontable? Did this outrageously lowbrow bourgeois street fighter come out of left field? What were they thinking? 

Trump, his ballroom, his arch, his remake of the Kennedy Center, his Garden of American heroes, and pro wrestling is exactly the reason why he was voted in. This cultural revision is the best possible refutation of progressives' cant and faux seriousness.  Image is the message - the hackneyed, discredited old chestnuts are done and gone, a whole new ethos, a new zeitgeist has taken its place. 

The Trump presidency was a long time coming.  Indeed the country has never seen anything like it.  Finally the real America, the arm candy and tinsel one, is finally out of the closet and on international display. 

Love Out Of The Box - A Ghetto Romance, Or Stick To Your Own Kind

In Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, the Broadway 50s musical based on Romeo and Juliet, a boy and girl from two opposing gangs, one white and the other Puerto Rican, fall in love. Anita, a friend of Maria, warns her against getting involved with someone from a different community.  She sings:

A boy like that
Who'd kill your brother
Forget that boy
And find another
One of your own kind
Stick to your own kind
A boy like that
Will give you sorrow
You'll meet another boy tomorrow
One of your own kind
Stick to your own kind

“Stick to your own kind” is her refrain. If you don’t, you’re asking for trouble.  Of course Maria does not listen, bad turns to worse, and the final scene is a melodramatic replay of the end of the star-crossed lovers.

In short, the story is about diversity.

The remake of Bernstein’s original, faithful to theme, music, and lyrics attempted to make the story one of today – all traces of racial and ethnic stereotypes removed and the upbeat, happy ending emphasized.  Although we may cling to outdated notions of cultural and racial separatism, we will eventually realize our common humanity and such divisions will disappear.

However, this will never happen – history since the first human settlements records the persistent identity of tribes, clans, religious sects, communities, states, and nations. Although recent DNA analysis has shown that homo sapiens did interbreed with Neanderthals, it probably was no more common than clowns marrying circus freaks. In fact historians of pre-history conclude that the two ‘racial’ groups tried to kill each other off, and thankfully the right side won.

Why is this lesson so hard to accept? Don’t birds of a feather flock together?

Don’t they peck at the intruder until he leaves?

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No society – not even Margaret Mead’s Trobriand Islanders whose kinship and community patterns she distorted to suit her theories – exists without social, ethnic, economic, or racial divisions.  Whether India with its persistent caste system; our division by wealth, income, and race; or Iraq’s splintering divisions by Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd, we all do it.

Vicki had seen and loved West Side Story many times, both versions.  She was charmed by the lyrical beauty of the first, entranced by the simple Romeo and Juliet story, and nodded in understanding at the remake.  Finally Hollywood put its money where its mouth was and cast real ethnic characters to play ethnic roles. Yes, white people could play Puerto Ricans, but casting originals gave the movie authenticity and made it more consistent with the multicultural times of the day. 

In all her romantic fantasy she overlooked the central, inescapable lesson of the musical reprise - stick to your own kind.  Although Bernstein intended it to be an expression of the damaging, insular, and hopelessly aggressive tendency for sameness, its powerful method of watch out what you wish for is clear. 

A recent production of The Merchant of Venice was produced by the Washington (DC) Shakespeare Company, and the producers turned it into a farce.  Each of the communities of the play - Italian, Jewish, and WASP - were all caricatures.  The Venetians were tough Jersey goombas, the Jews were pure Seventh Avenue, Diamond District, shylock moneylenders, and WASPs talked with Locust Valley lockjaw and pranced around like spoiled debutantes. 

The play, taken over by 'diversity' missed the whole point.  The audience cheered, but for what?  The old Jew got his due from the WASP-in-disguise lawyer? Ethnic stereotypes in this case were not unreal, but reality.  The Joisey dumbing down of the guineas was also on target.  That's what Italian Americans are like after all, still spaghetti and meatball oafs. 

In any case Vicki was young enough and single enough to search for love 'out of the box' as she called it. An affair with an African American would lay to rest any doubts about her progressive credentials, would dispel cruel stereotypes of the well-hung machismo of the black male, and would finally break the confining mold which had held her captive since her days in high society. 

She met Pharoah Jones at a conference on racial injustice.  For too long the black man had suffered at the hands of white supremacists, locked in poverty and dysfunction, and despite the Civil Rights Act, affirmative action, and billions of dollars of investment in the inner city, he remained much as he was 100 years ago. 

Perhaps it might have been wiser for Vicki to move up the racial ladder - starting with the likes of Barack Obama, a mellow whitish black man close to standard - but she opted for a ghetto pimp who had been invited to the conference because of his street savvy, his ghetto culture, and his particularly black entrepreneurial (drug running) spirit. 

Now, Pharoah did not come to the conference all tricked out in bling, zoot suit, and patent leather.  He knew his audience - liberal white women - and so he dressed the part. As a con man Pharoah knew how to enjoin, engage, trick, and profit from the gullible, the credulous, and, the idealist. 

He was her mark, her john, her foray out of the box; and while her colleagues warned her - diversity does have its limits - she forged ahead, made overtures, and locked onto her prey. 

Of course as much as Vicki thought she was the operator in charge, it was Pharoah who thought the quick seduction of this blonde, blue-eyed white girl would be a nice finish to a tedious day.  

It turned out better than either of them expected.  Pharoah treated her well at the beginning, happy to show off his white prize to his malt liquored stoop mates in Anacostia; and she was delighted to be had by a real man (yes the hung stereotype was true); but not surprisingly, the affair went quickly bad.  The sisters in the neighborhood dunned Pharoah mercilessly, no prize there, they said, fucking a dumb white chone.  'Chocolate pussy no good no more?'

And it didn't take much for Pharoah to revert to his pimping ways. Vicki was just one more whore in his stable, worth nothing more than the money she brought in; but before he had a chance to send her out onto the streets, she split for uptown, chastened but not bowed.  Bad luck was all. 

There was Prince, then LaFarge, then Ra-Leyden, and finally Washington Carver Lincoln, where she should have started, a Denzel Washington Roman Israel, PI respectable Negro; but in the end he was too white and not worth the effort. 

Stick to your own kind, so she spent more time than usual at the Yale Club and the Society of the Cincinnati, a place for the most high-toned, aristocratic, top-of-the-line old English American royalty; but was bored to tears by Edwardian clones and Wall Street bankers.  Now, if these investment types had been the Jeffrey Skilling, Enron variety - macho men out for a killing - she might have been interested.  They were white, OK, but they were certainly out of the box. 

But these young men were throwback to another century, old fools fifty years too early and as sexually inviting as old wool. 

She felt silly at the Adams Morgan Latino festival. These smallish leaf-blowers had none of the appeal of ghetto men, none of the swagger of Pharoah Jones and none of his African-bred sexy muscularity; but she was out to show that her progressivism was not just an academic prospect. 

She went after the tallest Jose, a 'retailer' although he did not specify what or how he sold, Salvadoran by his accent, and with some education noted in his nearly correct grammar; but he turned out to be the virtual Latino stereotype - Gaithersburg split level, four Corolla beaters in the driveway, new arrivals in the kitchen, salsa on the radio, squalling babies, and endless fighting. 

What was next? Orthodox Jews, Muslims, Arabs?

And then she pulled up.  What was she doing in the first place?  She was no different than her progressive sisters loving pho, tacos, and felafel and calling it diversity - a game, a ritual, a pastime.  She was screwing stereotypes instead of just talking about them, but that was only a difference in modality.  She was as definitively a product of her parents and her lovely environment as they- as ignorant, presumptuous, and adolescent. 

A reprise of Bernstein's West Side Story was being performed at the Kennedy Center, and she went, delighted as she was the first time, convinced of the play's deeper meaning, and vowing to return to her roots. 

Pleasant roots they were - summers on the Vineyard, winters in Palm Beach and Gstaad, Chippendale, Townsend, Revere, and Copley and boys of the same ilk, and the Muffy Cabot and Harrison Lodge wedding. 

Multicultural Diversity - Better Asian Than Black, Better Confucian Than Rap, The Evolution Of A White Liberal

Vicki Barnes lived in the city and told everyone it was 'for the diversity'.  It was comforting and satisfying, she said, to be able to eat tacos, pho, and butter chicken within ten minutes of her house. 

That, however, was as far as Vicki ever got to multiculturalism or wanted to go - ethnic food and the people who served it.  She had all the diversity she needed at her lunches at Delhi Dhaba or Thai Garden. 

When the closing bell rang, the Chinese, Koreans, and Indians who worked in the mathematics department down the hall from her, left for the suburbs . When Vicki became pregnant, a Chinese colleague said, 'Why not take your baby away from here? Chinese people are very smart', he said. 'PhD, MIT. White people in suburbs smart too'. 

It was nice to hear honesty for a change.  The university like most was a liberal, politically correct place where black people could do no wrong; and despite the lowest socio-economic indicators in the city, high rates of incarceration, and dysfunctional families, her fellow white professors sang their praises.  

The Asian professors were not held to the same politically correct standard as their white colleagues and were allowed to comment on racial disparity.  Although they were in America as highly-paid researchers, many people in their countries were disadvantaged, poor, and marginalized; so they had the right to observe racial difference in a critical way.  

And so it was that Vicki did as Hong Fat said, and shortly after her baby was born, she and her husband sold their small urban apartment and moved to Lanier, one of the metropolitan area's wealthiest and best educated suburbs.  Hong Fat was right - thanks to the influence of smart Asians the schools were among the best in the state, the town was crime free, and there was the heady atmosphere of intellectual excellence. 

'I miss the ethnic food', Vicki mused to her neighbor, a Chinese bio-tech scientist.  The neighbor of course thought that the American obsession with diversity was nonsense.  'Americans eat noodles and think they're holy'. Diversity for Asians did not exist.  They had no interest in anything but their own cultural communities. American style diversity would dilute its high-value intellectual universality. If a Chinese scientist crossed ethnic lines, it was to confer with his Indian colleague about bosons or semi-conductors and nothing more. 

Bloomingdale, a formerly all-black neighborhood of Washington, DC, was noted for his high-quality housing stock, tree-lined streets, and uncluttered feel.  The old Victorian brownstones, the architectural hallmark of the city and saved from urban renewal because Bloomingdale was too far from the city center to worry about, were a marvel, and it wasn't long before urban pioneers - white families looking for racial diversity and inexpensive fix-up housing - moved in.

Racial diversity being what it is, Bloomingdale when the first white families moved in, was still the ghetto; and so these pioneers installed iron grates on the doors and windows, floodlights and police cameras over the entrance way and on the roof, kept Doberman Pinchers, mace in the drawer, and industrial sirens.  The black men smoking spliffs and drinking Colt45 malt liquor were not their neighbors but suspicious interlopers, for 9th Street and Independence was now their neighborhood. 

'When more of us move in', said one new white resident, 'the streets will be clean and the schools better', and true enough within ten years Bloomingdale became upscale, expensive, and the place to live. 

'The medium is the message', said philosopher Marshall McLuhan about the new electronic media culture in America.  Everything was about how form did not only follow function, but that 'functionality', the mediazation of culture would change everything from family order to principles of social interaction. 

Cultural environment is the new message; and it didn't take long before Vicki had jettisoned her wokeness and adopted a very Chinese, disciplined, centered, and ambitious ethos.  The sound of children practicing piano scales or the greetings of mothers welcoming sons and daughters home from after-school Russian math programs, or the squeak of violins and lights on after midnight were parts of the influencing environment which changed Vicki from a passionate social reformer, to an academic disciplinarian, an Asian philosopher, and a purposeful parent. 

Playmates for her children were selected for seriousness and an intellectual intensity inherited from their parents - children who could solve Rubik cubes in minutes, who mastered multi-thousand piece Legos, for whom chess was a pastime not an obligation.  At the same time Vicki and her husband became perfect fits for the rarified atmosphere of PhD, tech savvy Lanier residents. 

'Now this is diversity', Vicki said to her husband, referring to the Chinese, Indian, and Korean families in Lanier, and not a pho place or Chinese take-out in sight. 

The old adage - 'Give a progressive enough time and he will become conservative'  - is amplified and intensified by cultural environment. Living in the intellectually rich, academically ambitious, and socially demanding Asian environment accelerated her political transformation.  Identity meant nothing.  Excellence meant everything.  In time because of the shared cultural environment of academic pursuit, creativity, and disciplined work - hallmarks of Chinese Confucian culture - the racial distinctions between her and her Asian friends and neighbors disappeared. 

Lanier is one of the wealthiest suburbs in the state, and the old Vicki would have thought twice about moving there.  The three and four million dollar homes would have been a symbol of capitalist greed, unnecessary bourgeois excess, and a clarion call for the redistribution of wealth.  They were now simply a part or the landscape - affordable for the two high-income earning families, reasonable for four, practical, and convenient. Her neighbors were highly productive, contributing far more than their share to American productivity and competitiveness.  Their wealth was not misspent and squirreled away - it was a means to an end. 

Vicki had indeed become a suburban mom, but not just anyone.  Rather than the caricature of the American suburb - settled, predictable, uninspiring, and insular - Lanier was the new American model. Diversity exchanged for universal excellence. Intellectual homogeneity, cultural unity, a common place. 

Her son could have been Chinese if mentality, ambition, cultural respect, Confucian principles, and respect were the criteria; but perhaps more importantly he - and his Asian classmates - were the new Americans. 

A Casanova In A Sea Of Angry Women - A Reset Of the Heterosexual Compass

The times are changing in America - old cant replaced by new, statues once removed, replaced, one zeitgeist exchanged for another; but perhaps the most striking change is gender re-establishment....Not the gender reassignment so promoted by the progressive Left, Freedom to Choose sex and sexuality, but the old fashioned male-female dynamics of the past - the affairs of Lawrence, sons and lovers, Ursula and Gudrun, and Lady Chatterley. 

For years men were shunned for their patriarchy, sexual adventurism, and misogyny.  Women were the future of a kinder, more compassionate, elite humanity.  Men were the has-beens of history, necessary but unwelcome contributors to fertility, annoying, insensitive mates. 

Until recently, now that the tide has turned.  The emperor is naked after all, the gender spectrum is the folly that most expected but few called out, transgenderism seen as the inverted, invention of a sexually bereft minority, and the whole idea of gender choice ridiculed for a Barnum & Bailey freak show that it is.

John Wilberforce had never been bothered by any of this.  Women had not changed since the first human settlements - yes, of course they had gained the right to vote and to break through the glass ceiling, but they had not fundamentally changed when it came to mating.  They still fell for bad boys, confident, sexually assured, men; for executives, power lawyers, Wall Street investors, and simply those men that looked at them in a certain way and made good on the promise. 

While many men fell in line, joined the choir singing hymns to virgins and queens and made way for women at every step, Wilberforce never gave an inch.  He was as intently, heterosexually desirous of women as his father and grandfather before him - as all men were before the feminist uprising and their demotion and decommissioning. 

Ibsen and Strindberg, proto-feminists for their creation of strong, indomitable, willful women - Hedda Gabler, Hilda Wangel, Rebekka West, Laura and Miss Julie - had it right in one, tapping into an ur-femaleness first exploited by Shakespeare who invented the strong woman.  Who better than Goneril and Regan, Dionyza, Volumnia, Tamora, Margaret of Tours, and Joan of Arc to set the tone for latter day women with gall and incentive?

Wilberforce paid no mind to these women, fictional or otherwise.  His sense of male inevitability was not to be dismissed.  Women came to him without invitation.  Despite their feminist upbringing and socio-cultural reform, they were ineluctably drawn to the strong, determined, confident male. 

These women said they wanted a man who opened the doors to their inner rooms, explored, found, and cherished what had been hidden there for so long within; but they fell for the pursuer. They never admitted such apostasy but when it came to choose between the dutiful, respectful, and honorable male and his sexually derelict but virile counterpart the choice was clear and foreordained. 

John never married, for why should he? While many men lamented the disappearance of available women - too engaged in climbing the social ladder, too busy flexing their newfound muscles and showing off their unparalleled ability, or too intent on dominance and superiority, Wilberforce never blinked.  A woman was a woman whether in Armani suit, shirtwaist, or apron. 

He was never a bully - that would have gotten him nowhere and there was no place for that in his seductive repertoire.  Women want to be listened to, to be taken seriously, to be respected; and whether what a woman said went in one ear and out the other, he looked for all intents and purposes that not only was he paying attention, but what she was saying was actually worth listening to.  Women fell for his attention and admiration even more than for that indefinable maleness behind every word. 

'I've pushed all the right buttons', Bob Muzelle said to a colleague, 'been dutiful, respectful, considerate, and willing but women never look my way'.  Sold a bill of goods, out front and vocal as a speaker at women's conferences, champion of women rising to the top, first responder for women subjected to male chauvinism and misogyny, but left on the curb while the John Wilberforces of the world did absolutely nothing for women yet had them eating out of their hands. 'I have done everything right.  What have I done wrong?'

The recalibration, the resetting of the heterosexual compass is nearly complete.  Most gender warriors of years past realized their folly, their misguided attempts to remake themselves in a feminized image to be more successful with the modern woman, gave it up quickly when they saw the tide turning. However, since these men had lost their sexual footing, they foundered and bumbled trying to find their way back to the gladiatorial days of their youth and lost ground to the John Wilberforces for whom no recalibration was necessary. 

John squired women like a prince and was always a good, consistent lover - his love of women...perhaps not exactly love, but fascination with them...knew no bounds.  He was at home with all women, intrigued by their persistent similarity and little aberrations of form.  They all loved him without a doubt and without hesitation. 

Would he ever marry, his colleagues wondered, and like the poet in Shakespeare's Sonnets hoped that he would.  He had to pass on his beauty, his masculinity, and his canny understanding of women to the next generation.  He owed it to men, they said, to propagate the world with men like him. 

Women who still clung to the tattered sheets of feminism hated him for his easy way with their sisters; and hated those women for their willingness to be taken in by such a cad.  They hoped he would end up badly. 

Of course he did not. Eventually he married and married well.  His Casanova days over, he was a good, faithful husband and father - not that he valued fidelity in any sense of the term, but that the faithless, diffident, marvelously presumptuous years were simply over and done with.  He was ready for a change. 

And so it was that the days of feminism, sexual diversity, inclusivity, and uxoriousness ended not with a bang but a whimper. They faded into the background, then into history, then forgotten forever.  Wilberforce never considered himself unusual, neither pioneer nor counter-revolutionary, just a man who loved women. 

A White Man Wants To Be Black And Father A Hundred Children - The Irresistible Allure Of Black Machismo

Harvey Stillson was an ordinary man living an ordinary life.  In it there was no drama, no outbursts, no recriminations.  It was a patiently constructed life, one of habit, order, and simple expectations. Yet Harvey was a profoundly unhappy man.  As he was approaching an age where more years were behind him than ahead, he had become restive, nervous, and jittery. 

'What on earth is wrong with you?, his wife asked, less out of concern for her husband than for upsetting the settled nature of the marriage - one which brooked no disruption, let alone random questioning of purpose, affection, or concern.  Besides, it was women who were supposed to keep their feelings to themselves, rarely confessional and hectored by badgering husbands not the reverse.  In short, this mopey, unresponsive man had become a problem. 

Harvey came by this resolved character naturally.  The son of a pharmacist and a homemaker in a socially respectable, complaisant family happy enough, economically secure enough, and healthy enough to steady the course, make no waves, keep to the shipping lanes, and always have a hold full of cargo. 

'A good boy', said Father Brophy, 'a very good boy', suggesting a vocation, the priesthood or a monastic life.  The Catholic Church always needed boys like Harvey, serious boys of sincere calling. 

His teachers were equally fond of the Stillson boy.  Such a patient, responsible student, a boy always to color between the lines, write neatly, and to come to school prepared.  'A promising future', they all agreed. 

And so it was that Harvey even before he left elementary school, had been fully formed.  Somehow and quite remarkably his moral compass already pointed to true north, his principles as foundational of those in the American Constitution, and his mind, body, and spirit in perfect alignment.

Not surprisingly his adult life followed the straight and narrow.  He was built for duty, responsibility, and patriotism and little could sway or deter him.  He chose a modest profession, a modestly attractive and intelligent wife, and a life of security.  Whether in his personal life, his financial investments, his job, or his leisure he was firmly located.  No one, especially he, ever wondered about Harvey Stillson. 

Which was why this unsettled, scratchy period was a surprise to his wife who had gotten used to his regularity and reassuring sameness.  Harvey himself didn't know exactly what was wrong except that nothing seemed right. There was nothing that teased him away, the tickled him, that even vaguely tempted him.  He felt like a silhouette, a stick figure, an imaginary number.  

The polite after-work highball turned into double martinis and Wild Turkey.  His work became addled and imprecise and his attentiveness to his wife, the garden, and his children's wellbeing went missing. He shambled. 

Now at the time American popular culture had gone black.  Thanks to diversity, equity, and inclusion, black faces were everywhere, selling dentifrice, Doritos, Toyotas, and Schwab.  They were a race apart on the hardwood floor and the gridiron.  They were in every television serial, every major Hollywood movie.  

They were all bling, machismo, randy sexuality, and in-and-out fatherhood - all of which was lionized by white people who saw this culture as particularly expressive and human, far more than white culture which had always been prim and prissy, all Chippendale, Townsend, and Revere or bass boat and gunrack. There was no soul to white culture, no exuberance, no....joy. 

The black man had come from the primal forests of Africa to America attuned to nature and the primitive callings of physicality, sexuality, and male dominance.  Yes, he had come to America as a slave, but that did nothing to suppress his native masculinity - something the white man had never had. 

Wilt Chamberlain, the former professional basketball player said that he had had sex with over a thousand women, at which confession he winked.  Of course it was more than that, and there were far too many children borne of those relationships that he could count.  He was exuberantly male, unapologetic, in his sexual prime and a model for all men. 

Of course he was reviled by the white community.  The cult of blackness had not yet come to the fore, and such sexuality had yet to become the expression of black identity that it was in Harvey's day. In fact such sexuality was considered a threat.  Why should black men confine their sexual ambitions to the ghetto, and wasn't the white woman the prize of all prizes? 

This sexual deviance was borne of tribal primitivism and encouraged by slave owners who were happy to see their stable of slaves increase. Sexual abandon was good for business, so it was no wonder than in a ghettoized society, insular, ingrown, and still rooted in African soil, Wilt Chamberlains abounded. 

Time passed, white opprobrium became adulation.  The black man was now recognized as the natural successor to the white man.  African tribalism and its profound link to the environment, the Earth, and humanity itself was to be realized for the determining factor in human society.  

While there were some who said that fatherless families were signs of social dysfunction, that single motherhood was not a social paradigm like any other, and that catch-as-catch-can civility was antithetical to a national ethos of responsibility, most white people embraced the idea of diversity in all its forms. 

Perhaps Harvey Stillson took the black thing too far when he said that he wanted to sleep with a thousand women and father hundreds of children; but he couldn't help himself.  Every cossetted nun, every admonishing priest, every hectoring, badgering teacher was his enemy.  They were the ones that put him into this sexual straightjacket, whittled his soul down to nothing, left him an emotional beggar, a shadow of a man. 

Of course opening up to a black sexuality is not as easy as it sounds.  White feminism had put a lid on sexual adventurism.  No Means No had become the ethos, intercourse became a reading of road signs, license and registration checked at stops along the way.  Serial partners or worse multiple contemporaneous partners was ipso facto condemning.  Men who had such primitive desires, ignoring women for who they were not just as sexual objects, should be tarred, feathered, and castrated. 

Only black men got away with this awful opprobrium.  The long knives stayed away from the ghetto, residents there were living their own, respected cultural identity.  White censure, rule, and slavery were things of the past. 

It is a tough thing to wake up in the morning realizing that you have been a eunuch all your life, whipped and collared by women, forced into sexual sedation, and now exile.  

Despite everything - the violence, rapes, murders, incivility, and dysfunction of the ghetto, Harvey still wanted to be black, to be left to his own sexual devices, to love as and when he wished, trapped and warned by no woman.  He wanted to strut, pimp walk, macho it up like a ghetto prince. 

Bad luck of the draw.  He was white, as white as white bread, milk, and flour.  He could be nothing but a clerk in a minor accounting firm, doing people's taxes, correcting balance sheets, straightening out accounts and deposits, BLTs for lunch, a ride on the N6 home, feet up on the ottoman, an early dinner. 

And all the while black men in the inner city were having a grand old time, smoking a spliff, drinking malt liquor on the stoop, and having sex with women in a different block of the projects every night of the week. 

'Shape up', said his wife now more than irritated at her slovenly husband who had come loose from his moorings, and God only knew what he would do next. 

Nothing of course.  The die had been cast decades ago when he was a boy growing up in New Brighton, set in stone from an early age, given no chance whatsoever to be black, stuck in perennial whiteness and fidelity.  He couldn't even get up the gumption to invite Amanda from HR for a drink.