Trump And Putin Talk About The Health Of The Planet - This And Other Geopolitical Jokes

Bob Muzelle was ecstatic at the rumors circulating in Washington - the President and Putin of Russia were to hold a mini-telephone summit on the state of the planet, its health and well-being, the preservation of forest land, biodiversity, and clean air. 

 

Bob had been an environmentalist for decades and a climate change activist for many years.  He was on the board of directors of the Environmental Defense Fund, the Sierra Club, and the Wilderness Society.  He had been an associate of Partners in Parks, the movement to save the snail darter and the woodland feather-tailed grouse, and in the phalanx against the expansion of AI data centers. 

He had been encouraged by the policies and programs of the Biden Administration, but was angered at Donald Trump's rollback of most of the former president's reforms.  Under Trump it was an energy free-for-all - oil pipelines now back in operation, new refineries being built, oil shale and gas fracking well underway, coal fired power plants reopened, and more. 

It was a catastrophe, bemoaned Bob, commiserating with his colleagues in a small conference room in his non-profit organization, Americans For Social Responsibility, a catch-all place for climate activism, gender equality, and civil rights; but he had gathered his associates to discuss what would be a historic meeting between two adversaries who agreed on almost nothing.  Ever since the Cold War days America and Russia had never seen eye to eye, but here in the offing was a meeting of the minds of historical significance. 

Repeated calls to the White House press office, direct lines to the Press Secretary, and attempts to reach high-placed officials in the Administration proved futile.  No one was available to take Bob's calls, and confirmation of the historic mini-summit would have to wait. 

Just think of it, Bob mused.  First Russia, then China without whose support hope for climate sanity would always be a chimera.  Was it time to let the foot of the gas and pause Trump hatred? To give the President space to formulate his agenda and prepare for the conversation with the Russian?

This, however, would mean dismantling the entire machinery of the Left where Trump hatred was an industry. The inertia of anger, spite, and poisonous attacks was such that slowing it would be like trying to turn the full speed ahead Titanic away from the iceberg; and to claim that the President was actually doing something right would be tantamount to political treason and reason for expulsion from the party. 

Now, of course the last thing this president who had closed down EPA, opened the country to energy exploration, granted generous easements to logging companies to operate on federal land, and dismissed climate concerns out of hand, would ever do was to put environmental concerns on the geopolitical agenda let alone to discuss them with the enemy. 

Calls to the Russian Embassy were summarily dismissed.  'America is one crazy place', said Anatoly Karpov, Kremlin Deputy Assistant Secretary in Washington, amazed that amidst the initiative for tsarist revival, the patriotic war in Ukraine, and the progressive modernization of the country's nuclear arsenal, the idea of an 'environmental summit' as the caller had called it could even have been suggested. 

'Like mosquitos in Novosibirsk', Karpov added. 'Nobody pays attention'. 

Hope springs eternal, the old adage too Christian to be put in an embroidered sampler on Bob's office wall, was exactly the right notion for Americans for Social Justice.  Yes, such a bi-presidential discussion was indeed far-fetched, but if only the rumors were true, all Bob's hopes and dreams would be realized. 

The fact that Bob actually gave credence to the idea - as impossibly fanciful as it was to anyone living outside the hermetic progressive world in which Bob lived - was no surprise to many on the inside, for Bob had been on the front lines of environmentalism forever, and his willingness to believe in supposition was part of his advocacy.  

Al Gore, former Vice President in his book An Inconvenient Truth predicted the end of the world because of human indifference to climate change.  Sea levels would rise and swamp New York and Miami, soy bean crops would sizzle and die in Iowa, choking heat would kill millions of the poor trapped in non-airconditioned tenements and tarpaper shacks.  In short Armageddon. 

Bob took every word as gospel truth and renewed and energized his environmental advocacy.  He became a man possessed, a whirling dervish, an Old Testament prophet, a streetcorner preacher, a televangelist, a political firebrand all rolled up into one.  He was on fire. 

Every suggestion that the climate was not behaving as Al Gore said - that the geological record was more suggestive of natural cyclical changes in temperature than any human intervention - was tantamount to heresy and would not be tolerated.  Bob became not only an advocate for climate sensibility, he became a j'accuse vigilante.  

Any and all discrediting remarks were to be called out and the speakers cancelled.  'There can be no opposition to the truth', Bob said, 'when the truth is existential', a line that came back to haunt him once reliable data showed an increase in polar ice, not a decrease; that sea levels were remaining steady, and that catastrophic storms predicted had not materialized. 

He was increasingly being seen as a wild-eyed Cassandra, a bitch with an agenda, a crazed weirdo, and an intellectual degenerate.  Of course not by his inner circle or those close to the epicenter of the climate change movement; but still his solid reputation was being questioned.  All of which only fired up his boiler to high heat, and gave him a St. Vitus' dance persona - a man jumping and bouncing with demented energy - or a Tourette's Syndrome sufferer barking out obscenities at random. 

This cockamamie rumor about the presidential environmental summit pushed him over the edge.  For a while he stood firm, hopeful that that the international high-profile conversation would take place; but once he realized that belief in such specious, unbelievable rumor was tantamount to dementia, over he went. 

And so it is in Washington, climate activists toppling over the cliff left and right  along with Bob. Journal after journal called out the climate hype for what it was, and if the so-called 'crisis' got any ink, it was to laugh at it and its true believers. 

Bob was no longer fit to work after the rumor was outed and dispelled.  The wind had been taken out of his sails, the fire in his heart dampened and doused, and his moral compass sent spinning.  He was a shell of a man, an empty suit, and a deranged soul simply trying to regain his balance. 

He couldn't of course. There was return from such depths.  'A fool and his money are soon parted' said English poet Thomas Tusser, and so it was with a fool and his beliefs.  Without the foundational belief of an imminent climate Armageddon, this particular fool was left with nothing. 

The Return Of The Shah - 'Please Don't Bomb My Palace' - Reza Pahlavi And The Restoration Of Empire

Reza Pahlavi, son of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, former Shah of Iran, exiled to and harbored by the United States after the 1979 Islamic revolution, had lived in royal splendor.  He embodied the greatness of the Persian Empire, its opulence, its reach, and its magnificence.  His display of wealth which disturbed many as an indication of his insularity and complete ignorance of the needs of the common man, was in his words, nothing less than the rightful splendor of Persian culture, a sign of imperial power and cultural influence. 

   

His celebration of 2500 years of the Persian Empire was a billion dollar extravaganza, a world event of awesome pomp and circumstance, a display of the greatness and permanence of the rule of shahs. 

It was indeed something to celebrate, for the Persian Empire was all that Pahlavi claimed, covering vast territory and extending arts, science, literature, language and high culture over a vast region of the globe. It was indeed something to celebrate. 

 

Of course the shah, like Czar Alexander of Russia or Henry XVI and Marie Antoinette of France had no idea what was brewing.  The Russian and French revolutionary movements were growing in importance, significance, and strength under their noses, but they were too self-assured, so confident of the permanent nature of empire to notice.  The 2500 year anniversary of the birth of the Persian Empire was the Iranian 'Let them eat cake' moment. 

Shortly after the celebrations Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile and oversaw the Iranian revolution which installed a theocratic government which has now lasted nearly fifty years.  The shah and his empire were history, but faithful Iranian monarchists and common admirers have never given up hope that the rule of the shahs will return. 

Shortly after the first wave of American and Israeli attacks on Tehran the shah-in-waiting, Prince Reza Pahlavi, said he was ready to serve; and it indeed looked to all like he would soon be returned to the throne. 

It was not meant to be.  The Iranians proved to be more than a paper tiger and a legitimate military power.  While they could not match American and Israeli air power and high-tech ordnance, they had tens of thousands of missiles and drones deployed throughout the country in underground silos ready to attack. Air power was not enough to eliminate this unexpectedly successful weaponry. 

The war which many thought would be over in weeks - a reprise of the Israeli Six Day War of recent years - has dragged on for well over a month, and Donald Trump has modified his objectives.  Regime change and the restoration of the country's rightful leader was longer the issue - it was simply to get Tehran to agree to abandon all nuclear weapons, fissionable material, and the infrastructure and machinery to make bombs.   

Prince Reza Pahlavi would have to wait and maybe never sit on the throne which was his by birthright.  

He has lived quietly in a wealthy suburb of Washington, DC.  His father had of course secreted out hundreds of millions of dollars when he sought asylum in the US, so the Prince has never had to worry.  Reports are that he hs gotten quite used to the suburban life of the Capital.  He wasn't exactly barbecuing on Saturday afternoons, but he was still quite at home in the reserved, quiet life of McClean, Virginia. 

He like many of his neighbors keeps a stable, entertains lavishly but in good taste, is a frequenter of the best Georgetown parties, and an aficionado of early American art for which he has become an important patron. 

His office was in quite a flurry as American bombs blasted government infrastructure in Tehran and eliminated the ruling shah and his most important political advisors.  The regime would soon fall and Pahlavi would be on a plane within weeks. 

'Tell them not to bomb my palace', he told his aide-de-camp and senior adjutant, a man who had the ear of the White House and the Pentagon; and as a second thought, 'especially the garden', the magnificent Versailles-style expansive acreage of the most beautiful flowers ever assembled, and over which his father looked from the window of the palace.  Reza remembered playing in the garden to 'look but do not touch'; and now within a short time he would be walking amidst the roses and chrysanthemums. 

'I must assemble a cabinet', the Prince said to his advisors, using the American term unheard of by his father.  A shah does not have a team of advisors, professionals on which he can count on for professional counselling but a loyal inner circle to do his bidding.  His father, Mohammed, was known for his sudden purges where supposed loyalists were imprisoned, gutted, and hanged.  Imperial rule is not a matter of consensus or discussion. 

High-ranking members of the Iranian diaspora were well known to the Prince, but they were old men now, and far too Americanized to resume royal duties.  Pahlavi would need young men, sons of the diaspora and from the legions of supporters in Iran. 

Of course, Pahlavi was still a shah who had never forgotten his roots, the imperial grandeur of Persia, and the mighty regime of his father.  Yes, Mohammed had perhaps overstepped his bounds, angered an already restive population, and ignored the reality of popular uprising; but that did not detract from his vision of a renascent, resurgent Iran. 

Reza Pahlavi was not surprisingly an admirer of Erdogan of Turkey and Putin of Russia, men who made clear their intention to revive and restore their countries' imperial past.  The Ottoman Empire was as far-reaching as the Persian Empire in its day; and the imperial rule of the Russian Czars extended from Europe to the far east.  Both were beacons of light, culture, and learning. 

Democracy was a nice enough American surrogate for imperial rule, Pahlavi said, but it would not last.  The Persian Empire lasted two thousand and five hundred years! The Roman, Mongol, Gupta, and British empires were also extensive and historically significant. 

Of course in meetings with Donald Trump, Pahlavi assured the President that he would preside over a democratic republic, and would make it a model for participatory government in a region notoriously without it; but he had no intentions of ruling a country as divided, divisive, without historical grounding and without a moral ethos as America. Americans has forgotten Jefferson, Adams, and Hamilton long ago and were marching to a different drummer and an ear-splitting band. 

Once installed back in the palace in Tehran, Pahlavi would begin slowly but progressively to restore the mechanisms of power created by his father.  He would of course do them under the mantel of popular engagement and the rule of law - it was not hard to please the democratic West as his father well knew - but soon enough imperial rule would be restored. 

The Prince waited impatiently for the final blow to be delivered to the Tehran regime, but the American president unexpectedly shilly-shallied. Netanyahu had told Trump that unless he obliterated the regime, it would be back in power, supporting its anti-Israeli terrorist groups throughout the Middle East, and rebuilding its nuclear capacity.  The mullahs do not want peace for its own sake, they only want time to maneuver. 

Yet Trump told the Israeli President to be patient.  Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.  'Not enough', said Netanyahu. 'They don't care about the bomb. That is only a diversion, a bargaining chip to get America off its back'.  

Pahlavi knew his people and knew that Netanyahu was right.  If Trump prevailed, not only would he, Pahlavi, not be able to return to Iran but it would in time become the disruptive, hateful force that it has been since 1979. 

'Don't order the drapes', said a dissident who hated the Islamic regime but did not trust Pahlavi.  While dreams of the restoration of empire in the guise of a democratic republic sounded good, the shah had no intention of turning his back on the past. 

So, the Prince is back to his McClean dinners, soirees, and musical events waiting it out in style. 'Be patient, Reza', said a close advisor.  Remember Cyrus the Great'; but the advisor's Persian history was off-kilter.  Cyrus was never patient and crushed the opposition on his way to power in the early Achaemenid Empire. 

'We shall return', said Pahlavi using the royal we. 'It's only a matter of time'; but Trump has badly underestimated the regime, even worse than his predecessor Barack Obama who gave Iran the store in hopes of encouraging  moderate, tolerant, and inclusive regime. 

'I'll wait', said the Prince, sampling the Caspian Sea beluga caviar which made its way through the American sanctions to his table.  'I'll wait'. 

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.