Fauci, 'The Science', And Neighborhood Gestapos - The Dismantling Of Civility By A Corrupt Man

Alicia Kent lived through the Hong Kong flu of 1968 although she was unable to get out of bed for a week, was unable to walk more than two blocks, and took a month to recover.  Others were in the same boat, laid low by a virus which disabled even the young, strong, and healthy. 

Yet nothing was closed, there were no mask mandates, no social distancing.  Children went to school, barber shops and restaurants stayed open.  People took reasonable precautions and stayed away from crowded theatres, walked rather than rode the subway when possible, and in time the epidemic slowed and disappeared. Life went on, people assumed the risk, hoped that they would be spared, and went on with their daily lives. 

Influenza was a fact of life, some cases worse than others, but in the scope of cancer and heart disease which killed vastly more people yearly than the flu did in its entirety, the only sensible response was to carry on. 

So when COVID arrived on the scene, Alicia was concerned but undisturbed.  From what information should could glean from CDC and WHO authorities, the disease mostly affected those with already compromised immune systems; and since most elderly were ipso facto immune-compromised, it would certainly be they who should receive priority attention.  In other words, COVID should be treated like any other epidemic - locate the epicenter and the vectors, and focus on them for quarantine and care. 

She was surprised when the first edicts came out from government which claimed that this was The Big One, the existential one, and only if life as we knew it was shut down, coast-to-coast Black Plague level deaths would occur. 

Yet his was nothing like polio or measles, airborne diseases which spread like wildfire and infected thousands in a day.  It was not Ebola or other unknown, virulent viruses cutting swaths through the population; and it was certainly not the Spanish flu which was indeed a worldwide, killer epidemic.  Most people who contracted COVID got a bad cough and symptoms of a bad cold, recovered quickly and went on with their lives, certainly nothing like the Hong Kong flu. 

Anthony Fauci, new COVID Czar, said that we must follow the science, and that one must be patient while the epidemiology of the disease was investigated.  In the meantime, it was only prudent to assume that it was transmitted by all means - airborne, aerosol, contact, bodily fluids, etc. - and proper protection should be taken against all of them.  

Furthermore since we did not know who was most at risk and who were the most important vectors, it was only sensible to assume that all people were equally capable of spreading the virus. As far a government's role, it would exert its full authority to protect the nation. 

Panic followed these announcements.  Every person looked at every other as a Typhoid Mary, and before long civility and good sense turned into vigilantisms and hysteria.  Homes were turned into refuges, sanitized, protected, inviolable redoubts to which no one was allowed entry, all mail and packaged deliveries were left outside and untouched until the life cycle of the virus had run its course. Kitchen counters, tables, and all surfaces were scrubbed with industrial strength lye, air purifiers were installed, No Entry signs were posted on every lawn. 

Children were interned at home, trying to adjust to home schooling, fumbling with online courses and put upon by overwhelmed, frustrated parents.  Old people were incarcerated in retirement and convalescent homes and kept from seeing outside relatives. 

All while the science came up with new, contradictory evidence daily.  It wasn't the surfaces after all, expensive new industrial air purifiers putting dentists out of business really didn't have an effect on infection rates, outdoor social distancing was unnecessary.  Yet Fauci asked Americans to 'trust the science' which is always evolving. 

Alicia was one of the few who was never overly concerned about COVID. For one thing she had worked in the most pestilential, disease-ridden, miasmic places in Africa, and had been exposed to every kind of noxious disease, had near fatal misses on chaotic roadways, and had barely missed kidnapping and carjacking. If she had survived decades of serious risk, COVID was not something to get exercised about.  That plus the life-as-normal Hong Kong flu episode of her youth gave her a practical stoicism and calm. 

As far as trusting the government, she had long given up.  It was when the government was insisting that AIDS was 'everyone's disease' when it clearly was not that her suspicion began. Because of the well-organized and influential gay lobby, the fact that the epicenter of the HIV virus was in the bathhouses of San Francisco and that the vectors were gay men was disregarded.  In order that already stigmatized gay men should receive no more censure and alienation, the disease must be portrayed as everyone's. 

As a result warnings were everywhere, school children indoctrinated, and general worry and concern spread throughout.  Although most populations never saw a case of AIDS and were legitimately skeptical of the 'everyone's disease' meme, the informational juggernaut kept on. 

So, any person with at least some worldly experience should have doubted the Fauci edicts, warnings, and closures; but panic and hysteria are resistant to logic; and the more the hysteria is fueled, the more intense the fire.  

Before long neighborhoods had become no different from mental wards with inmates crawling the walls, howling, bawling, scratching and accusing. Not only were homes sealed off, all social contact forbidden, and began smelling of the antiseptic and harsh cleansers of a hospital, but vigilantes were sent out to find, identify, accuse, and censure anyone who broke the mask and social distancing laws.

Society had broken down.  Vigilantism was everywhere, schools and public institutions closed down, small businesses shuttered, commerce interrupted and dire warnings and forecasts dominated the news. 

All because of one little man, Anthony Fauci who was given a blanket pardon by outgoing President Joe Biden who knew that his actions were liable to prosecution,.  Fauci was finally has been brought up before Congress to answer the accusations of his totalitarian, oppressive, damaging regime; but took the Fifth over a hundred times, even though he had received complete immunity from prosecution by Biden, and in so doing risked contempt of Congress. 

His absurd, ridiculous show went viral, and any semblance of respect offered him disappeared.  Comedians like Len Chappelle pilloried him in hilarious skits, and the AI-sphere had a field day. 

Finally a comeuppance for the Little Caesar, or so it seemed likely; but the damage had already been done. Years of community, productivity, education, and civility had been compromised by him.  

There is only one good to come out of this regrettable episode - that the American public had become more skeptical of government, took what it says with circumspection and a grain of salt, and was less reticent and complaisant when it came to government policies and programs. 

But have they?  The persistent and increasing popularity of 'democratic' socialism and its philosophy of government uber alles belies the fact.  Americans are even more credulous and naive than ever before, and it won't be long before another faux epidemic is unleased on the public. 

Democrats have already caused an intellectual epidemic, and have convinced millions that sex is fungible and a choice, that men can become pregnant, that mothers are dispensable, and that the gender spectrum is reality. If these outrageous ideas can be so universally believed, than the certainty of a far worse viral campaign of idiocy is in the offing 

So Fauci should be clapped into irons but will probably escape punishment, the whole smarmy truth of the COVID episode will never come out, and Americans will just have to suffer the long-term consequences of official arrogance and unlimited power. 

A Good Hand - How Mrs. Linder's Dancing School Taught A Natural Beauty The Art Of Deception

Mrs. Linder's Dancing School, a relic of the now distant past, was the place for all proper, well-brought up children of New Brighton to learn social grace. On Mrs. Linder's polished floors, boys and girls learned how to dance and the courtesies of courtship. 

Every Saturday morning Artemis went to Mrs. Linder's Victorian home on Lincoln Street, adjusted the bow in her hair and her crinoline dress, smiled at the reflection on her patent leather shoes, and walked onto the dance floor. 

Mrs. Linder - a wealthy Victorian widow with time on her hands and a love of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, decided that a dancing school for the well-to-do children of the West End would be just the thing to occupy her time and add to her already comfortable financial portfolio. 

Mrs. Linder, a tall, imposing woman with a turn-of-the-Century aplomb, had more than just the fox trot and rhumba in mind when she opened her doors.  She was a fierce conservative, a believer in survival of the fittest, competition, and the raw sexual ambition which propelled it and meant to probe its meaning.

Boys sat impatiently on one side of the dance floor, girls on the other; and at the sound of Mrs. Linder's clicker, the boys slipped and slid over the polished, waxed floor, and picked their dancing partner.  It was a free-for-all, a charge, a stampede, a pure, unadulterated show of male ambition and desire. 

To today's inclusive, compassionate eyes, the scene seems barbaric, a throwback to raw human tribalism and sexual aggression.  No one today would even contemplate such an untoward show of boys stumbling over each other to be the first to grab the most desirable girl and would never allow - as Mrs. Linder deliberately did - more girls than boys, leaving wall flowers who danced with each other.  

 

No, that would be unconscionable today, but to Mrs. Linder it was the apogee of the day.  She waited until near the end of the class to stage the happenings.  She whetted the children's appetite with waltzes, instructing girls to seductively embrace their partners and boys how to take them firmly and closely in their arms and then engaged them.

By the time the moment of the gantlet approached both boys and girls had been primed and prepared, and were not just expectant but aroused. 

Mrs. Linder reveled in the moment - the boys lined up like hurdlers in a 200 yd. race, on their toes, arms ready to pump and propel them across the floor, the girls making last-minute adjustment to bows, hair, and frills. 

Artemis was the one girl that all the boys wanted and for whom they tussled and fought over the floor to her, a tangle of them until the lead boy took her hand and the rest dispersed. 

She knew she had 'It' as her mother, a flapper of the Twenties had called it - some mysterious combination of pheromones, beauty, allure, and come-hither seductiveness that men could not resist.  Even at a very young age, she had this preternatural sense of sexuality that comes to a very few. 

Vladimir Nabokov wrote about it in Lolita where Humbert Humbert is irresistibly attracted to the 'nymphet', a pre-pubescent girl with an uncanny sense of her sexual power; and was definitely a Lolita clone. 

More than that, the stampede at Mrs. Linder's was epiphanic - a bolt of understanding not only of male sexual behavior but of their vulnerability. Men could be had, she instinctively knew, and felt a power over them that only the most beautiful, limitlessly desirable women could know. 

She had no compassion for the girls who were left behind, the plain, unappealing ones that no boy wanted; and felt only confidence and pleasure at her own success.  She had done nothing to attract the horde of boys who had stumbled over each other to reach her, done no act, no performance, had no conscious intent so common in every other pursuit.  If her simple being had so much power, imagine what she could do with it?

It was almost too easy, this business of sexual conquest.  No flirtation or innuendo was required, no parlor tricks or subterfuge, nothing. Men buzzed around her like bees to a fragrant flower which had done nothing to attract them, had no intent, purpose, or desire. Flowers just were, and so it was up and down the phylogenetic scale with the most attractive of the species the most successful. 

The women of Shakespeare's Comedies - Rosalind, Viola, Portia, and Beatrice - ran rings around the men who courted them, not because of anything they did, but simply because of who they were and how they used the stuff apportioned unequally at birth. 

 

So with very little effort, Artemis made her way up through the ranks - college, the law, courtroom victories as decisive and cruelly delivered as Genghis Khan's, and a Georgetown matron, arbiter of political influence and kingmaker.  Washington had never seen anything like her, and she had done little to achieve her success.  

She understood male weakness - men's fragile egos, native presumptions, dependency, and desire for youth, beauty, and sexual conquest. They were easy targets, so much so that promise alone was a leveraging tool. To be sure, she entertained men in her quarters, an interlude in the more important business of Washington politics but only with men who deserved a reward, or for whom sex exacted a promise.  

Men have always underestimated women, and been duped by them even when their guards were up but still remained hungry for their attention. Men were helpless when it came to Artemis who with a gesture, an innuendo, a nod, a posture, a pose brought them in line, kept them in tow, and pulled them along until it was time to cut them loose. 

From a more liberal, compassionate, kind and considerate perspective, Artemis was an Amazon, a vixen, a woman without principle; but that was to misunderstand the nature of women.  Gifted with this unexpected, gratuitous sexual power, specially endowed women like Artemis used it just as any other animal in the forest would - in a moral vacuum.

It all started with Mrs. Linder's Dancing School.  As she expected the boy who won the race and took her hand was the head of a Wall Street investment bank; and Janie Fisher, Mrs. Linder's wallflower, never married then married badly and was last heard of living alone in Burlington. 

Darwin was right, and so were Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Strindberg who got the picture and created women of agency.  It isn't a war between the sexes so much as it is feral competition. 

'Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, [my father] told me, 'just remember that all people in this world haven't had the advantages you've had', says Nick Carroway in the first few lines of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby - a conservative statement of inherited worth. 

There is such a thing as natural ability, superior intelligence, talent, and insight.  Nurture helps, but little improves on the hand that one has been dealt at birth. 

The lesson of Mrs. Linder's Dancing School was that, too; but rather than turn the gift into something of communal importance - the importance of giving back - Artemis took it as an unsolicited endowment; and to squander it was to deny Nietzsche ('The only validation of the individual in a meaningless world is the expression of pure will').  Artemis owed nothing to no one. 

Comeuppance? Never.  Coming a cropper? Hardly.  Anyone with such a natural endowment, such indefinable but irresistible sexual power, can never fail.  Artemis could no sooner end up like Janie Fisher than the sun never rising.  Her fate was predetermined, inevitable, unstoppable and enviable. 

For all those who thought that privilege implies noblesse oblige, thousands more took it as a desirable if unattainable right. 

The New York Times made an exception for her obituary which ran far longer than most.  Despite her ineffably conservative credentials, The Paper of Record felt bound to give her the space her eminence deserved. 

Trump, Iran, And Genghis Khan - Unleashing Hell And Total Uncompassionate Victory

Genghis Khan was a charismatic and fearsome figure.  He and his armies were known for their cruelty and barbarity, and the sight of them advancing across the battlefield in a storm of dust, the earth shaking with the thunder of 50,000 hooves, was enough to send enemies into retreat. The thought alone of this terrible, bloodthirsty, and mighty warrior was enough to rout enemy armies. Genghis Khan was a man of absolute will and power, a frightening presence of power and vengeance.  He was a horseman of the Apocalypse. 

 

There have been many successful armies in the world.  Julius Caesar, Scipio Africanus, Pompey the Great, and Marcus Agrippa were as brilliant generals as Genghis Khan, and brought Roman organization, discipline, and management to the battle.  They won because of superior ability, armaments, and military thinking; yet it was Genghis Khan who, with an almost untamed savagery, conquered the world.  At its height the Mongol Empire extended from far eastern China to the Danube, the biggest empire the world has ever seen. 

Khan had no qualms, moral reservations, or ethical hesitancy.  Wars were for winning, civilians were complicit enemies, and total annihilation of any opposition was his modus belli. Not only would defeated populations be without the wherewithal to mount a resistance or counterattack, they would never dare to incite the bloody, murderous, savage wrath of the conqueror.

The same spirit of total conquest inspired Harry Truman at the end of World War II when he dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, events which would bring the Japanese to surrender and would send the Soviets an unmistakable message - 'You're next'. 

Wars were for winning, civilian populations were not collateral damage but complicit in their nations' politics.  The firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo as well as the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima caused tens of thousands of civilian lives but contributed to the final, total victory of the Allies over  Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. 

Something happened to American resolve after the war, and in Korea stalemate was the result.  Despite the pleas of General MacArthur to march into China, North Korea's patron and growing Communist power, and to decisively end the Korean War in America's favor, Truman fired him and kept American troops in place.  The result was an emboldened North Korea, a rogue nuclear power and a constant threat to its neighbors, the US, and South Korea. 

Things got worse in Vietnam during America's war with Ho Chi Minh, General Giap, and the North.  President Johnson's policy of 'Win Hearts and Minds', designed to win the Viet Cong and its South Vietnamese supporters to the American cause was a complete failure.  The Viet Cong also fought to win over South Vietnamese villagers to their cause, but did so with brutality, intimidation, and horror and did so successfully. 

Much later in the Second Iraq War when after a successful invasion of Baghdad and the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein, President George Bush declared victory and withdrew his troops, leaving the door open for radical Islamic militias to assume power.  Bush was convinced that the Iraqi people would assure that the country would transition seamlessly from dictatorship to liberal democracy.  

His generals advisors counseled military rule - a severe, uncompromising period of total control and elimination of anti-American, Islamist, and anti-democratic forces - but Bush declined.  'The people are now free to decide'. 

 

Bush's war in Afghanistan against the Taliban was no different.  He held back on policies of total victory, hoped for carrot-and-stick diplomacy and measured military action, totally misjudged the will, determination and guerilla mentality of the enemy, and left the country to them. 

In the current America-Iran war, President Trump began the campaign with decisive miliary strikes which killed the Ayatollah and his inner circle of advisors and dealt a serious blow to Iran's military infrastructure; but after what looked like an easy military victory, the President - eyeing the coming mid-term elections at home and the country's hope for a peaceful end to the war - began negotiations. The Iranians, of course, more militarily able than the President thought and in possession of tens of thousands of drones and a seemingly limitless supply of missiles, took advantage of he hiatus and began to rebuild, rearm, and deploy.  

Trump signed a conditional peace treaty which the Iranians ignored, and is now threatening massive retaliation.  Given America's hearts-and-minds record, it is doubtful. 

General Curtis Lemay, Vice Presidential candidate for a third party during the 1968 American presidential election said of the North Vietnamese enemy, 'Bomb 'em back to the Stone Age' which of course neither Republican nor Democrat candidates could endorse; but in the end, Lemay was just as right as Truman was in World War II - immeasurable power and destruction will bring any war to a quick end. 

In Ridley Scott's movie Gladiator the Russell Crowe character, general of the Northern Armies, says before his forces attack the barbarians in the forests beyond, 'Unleash hell'.  A great barrage of slings of fiery oil, a rain of punishing arrows, the advance of armed phalanxes, and the attack of armed cavalry followed.  Hell was indeed unleashed, and the barbarians, the last enemy of the Roman Empire, were defeated. 

General William Tecumseh Sherman knew that his Union forces were superior and would eventually and ultimately prevail, over the Confederate South in the American Civil War, but he understood complete and total military conquest was the only victory which would assure that the South would never rise again.  

His goal was to humiliate the South – to show its people that the heralded aristocratic Cavalier was nothing compared to the tough and gritty farm boys from the North; that its leaders were inept and incapable of stopping the Union advances.  His brutal trail of destruction and devastation as he marched through Georgia to the sea and his punitive march up through the Carolinas made it abundantly clear - The days of the Confederacy were over, done with, and consigned to history. 

Sherman understood – like the Israelis in their war against Hamas – that complete military victory would not only destroy enemy military capacity but would destroy the will of the enemy and its civilian population.  

Sherman said, “War is the remedy our enemies have chosen, so let’s give them what they want.”   Sherman understood that such complete capitulation could only be achieved if he “traversed holy ground” and captured cities which were symbols of the Confederacy and what people were led to believe was Southern supremacy; and if they were easily taken or destroyed, the will of the people would be further eroded. 

Sherman was very clear about his march through the Carolinas.  He knew that the journey would be arduous and physically demanding; but he wanted to burn a trail through the very heart of the Confederacy – the place where the rebellion had started – to show the South once and for all that not only had their armies been beaten, but that their whole culture had been destroyed.

A total, annihilating war against Iran would mean thousands of civilian casualties, among whom are thousands who protested in the streets and demanded an end to the theocratic regime.  Yet just as in Nazi Germany and Japan, the complicity of the Iranian people - or at least its complaisance - has contributed to the persistence and longevity of the regime.  Total victory would send the same unequivocal lesson to the Iranian people that Israel sent to Gazans and that Truman sent to Japan - never again will you ever dare to repeat the errors of the past. 

For terrorist regimes like Iran and its clients - ISIS, Hamas, and Hezbollah, the death of civilians, has no relevance since the ends of battle are religious and spiritual.  The ends justify the means far more than any secular struggle. What Americans consider heinous crimes – blowing up school buses, crowded markets, and residential neighborhoods – have no moral implication per se.  They are only necessary measures to assure the final and ultimate moral end.

In this war with Iran, the United States' ally is Israel, the  only country that has understood the dangerous, aggressive militancy of Islam, and they fight with the same moral rectitude and purpose as their radical Islamic opponents.  They will brook absolutely no threat to the Jewish homeland, and civilian Palestinian and Iranian deaths are the price the enemy must pay for its aggression and permanent hostility.  The Israelis know that they are fighting an enemy who uses a territorial imperative – a Palestinian state and the creation of an Islamic caliphate – only as pretext for the annihilation of Israel, the ridding of Arab lands of the infidel, and in preparation for universal Islamic rule.

Under these circumstances, total, uncompassionate war is completely justified. 

'The Bitch Set Me Up' - Politics And Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle In A Delightfully Faux World

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle  asserts that certain pairs of physical properties cannot be measured precisely at the same time. If the position of a particle is measured very accurately, its momentum becomes highly uncertain, and vice versa.  

This principle at the heart of quantum mechanics describes the basic organization of matter.  In layman's terms, you can never know what's going on.  In the world of sub-atomic particles, there is no truth, fact, or absolutes.  It all depends on who's looking and what one chooses to see. 

Heisenberg of course was only describing an esoteric world of bosons and muons, particles which not only cannot be fixed in time and place but which exist for only fractions of milliseconds - evanescent bits of matter that sometimes are and sometimes aren't.  This theory paired with Einstein's Theory of Relativity - another now you see it, now you don't world of surprising uncertainty - describe the universe as unknowable, or knowable as long as you can put up with probability. 

These scientific theories, like Darwin's theory of evolution have necessarily been applied to life above ground, the normal, pedestrian life of solid matter, solid observable things beneath which the particles of the quantum world go whirling. 

As much as we might like to claim the absolute truth about an idea, a premise, an observation, or a conviction, we quickly find that it all depends on who's looking and through which lens. Five eye-witnesses will see the same event in five different ways. You may be convinced that what you see is undeniable, but it is a function only of perception. 

Philosophers like Hume have pondered the metaphysical nature of the question  'If a tree falls in the woods and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?'  Is errancy or consistency the rule of being? 

This conundrum should lead us to confusion and a terrible state of indecision or quandary, but of course it doesn't.  We observe, conclude, and pass on the information as the truth.  The information makes the rounds, changing character and veracity each time it changes hands, and by the time it has come to a dead end it no longer resembles its first telling. 

No one seems to care about this maybe, perhaps state of affairs.  As long as we believe what we see, read, or hear, the story ends there.  What happens to the information when it leaves our intellectual property is someone else's business. 

Ivan's Devil in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov admits that he is a vaudevillian, and without his antics life would be a bloody bore, three hundred and sixty five days of Sunday Mass, a predictable, dull, and sodden state of affairs.  And so he makes things up, lies, distorts, discombobulates until there is nothing left but fiction, fantasy, and likes and dislikes. 

What would life be like without rumor, gossip, and innuendo?  Getting at the truth, the principle of our judicial system, is nothing more that getting at the most plausible fiction.  The dead body might be lying there ashen and cold, but how it got there, under what circumstances, and why is another question altogether. 

Murderers plot their killings in intricate ways, and one only has to watch a few episodes of Miss Marple or Poirot to see how the intricacies of the crime are discovered, sewn together to form a conclusion. 'He couldn't have...Of course he could...Why wouldn't he...' are all part of the marvelously wicked pursuit of the truth. 

Former Mayor Marion Barry of Washington, DC was caught in a sting where he was found smoking crack with a prostitute.  'The bitch set me up', shouted Barry as federal officers handcuffed him and took him away.  He was smoking crack and the girl was a hooker, but beyond that guilt and innocence were figments of perception. 

A bank of television monitors at the gym, tuned to Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC when covering the same incident, portray it in different ways, configured according to their political philosophy and the profile of the audience.  'US War Planes launch destructive strikes on Iranian regime infrastructure' is the headline on one channel while 'Trump's destruction of civilian infrastructure causes civilian deaths'.  Viewers assume that their preferred source is correct, when any less biased observer can only conclude that an attack happened. 

History has a way of moderating events. Does the fact that slavery has existed since Ancient Greece and Rome; that the capture, purchase, sale, and barter of conquered, captured enemies was a way of life in sub-Saharan Africa; that 19th century ethnography placed Africans lower on the phylogenetic scale than white Europeans; and that the unusual co-existence of labor and capital in each slave ensuring his protection and care obviate the moral opprobrium so common in America? and give a chance for practical assessment, integration, and social evolution to happen?

The American Left states with certainty and absolute judgment that European colonization was inherently bad - a manipulative, exploitive, arrogant, and inhuman oppression - and that as a result any of the laws, traditions, principles, and practices derived from empire must be erased, expunged, and discarded.  Yet, the advances in the governance of civil society, the flowering of arts, science, and literature thanks to the right and power of kings cannot be dismissed. They happened just as surely as labor, resources, and wealth were taken as rights of the colonists. 

If this one principle - the Uncertainty Principle - were understood and adopted as a prevailing social ethos, the world would be far less of a contentious, contested, and disruptive place.  A measure of Heisenberg, one of Epictetus and the Stoics, one of Sartre and the Existentialists, and one of Dostoevsky's Devil would make for a much more civilized place. 

Ah, yes, say those Darwinians who contend that human nature is and always will be aggressive, self-defensive, territorial, and self-interested and that metaphysics and phenomenology have little bearing on desire and ambition. 

Yet the result is the same.  If one believes that human nature is as described and hardwired, then there is no point in getting exercised about true belief.  True belief is the heart and soul of politics, and if one accepts that the hysterical claims of the Left are Darwinian in nature - an expression of selfish identity, absolutism, and violent defensiveness - one can easily dismiss them. 

Which is why politics is such a circus, a marvelous freak show, a three-ring event, a vaudevillian act, an impossibly hilarious Borscht Belt comedy routine.  With the notion that such inarticulate hysteria is par for the course, as silly and preposterous as that of previous administrations and those to come, life can be worth the price of admission. 

From Teepee To Casino - Faux Genocide, Honor, And Money To Burn, A Comanche Chief's Tale

Chief Grey Wolf took a sip of his single malt and said to his longtime friend, Ed Swallowtail, 'Long knives, bad shots but generous to a fault', this said in reference to his great grandfather, Comanche hero, White Wolf who slaughtered incompetent Union soldiers and white settlers in equal numbers in defense of his homeland, and citing the legal easement give to his descendants to open a casino on former Indian land. 

 

Grey Wolf, 'Wolfie' to his friends had been a silent partner in the development of the Mohegan Sun Pequot casino in Connecticut, investing just enough to stay below the radar of the state's overseers but enough to give him influence and a high rate of return on his financial backing of what had become the most profitable gaming operation on the East Coast after the slow demise of Atlantic City. 

'Genocide? Fuck no', said Wolfie after his second Lagavulin.  His great grandfather had been one of the most feared Indian chieftains in American history, but was not alone.  Running Bear, Rising Cougar, and Blue Lion, heroes of the Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole tribes, each with a thousand white men's scalps and the virginity of ten thousand daughters.  

The Indians were beaten fair and square, not an idler among them, all tarted up in feathers and warpaint, spears and arrows at the ready, waiting for their opportunity to kill anyone who intruded upon their native land. 

'Redskins?, Sure enough', Wolfie sent on, and imagine five hundred of them thundering over the prairie like Genghis Khan and his Mongol armies of the steppes instilling fear and panic in all in their path. 

And so it was of particular pleasure that Wolfie took the white man's money hand over fist at the casino.  He loved the stack of tour busses lined up in the parking lot, waiting for their riders to return empty-handed but happy to have been fleeced by Native Americans.  So what if the odds seemed more stacked against them than usual.  It was a day away from scratchy wives and union jobs, so who cared who won or lost, it was the thrill of the chase that mattered. 

This too gave Wolfie a chuckle, remembering the tales of his grandfather about the buffalo hunts when Comanche braves riding bareback on their palominos and paints culling the herd, whooping and hollering with the sheer joy of the kill.  It was a pleasure to take money from white men who had nothing in their quivers or their rifle chambers than the desire to hit the jackpot - a jackpot which Wolfie and his partners parceled out in very limited numbers. 

This was not to say that the Indians had not been deceived by the white man.  The credulous Choctaw and Chickasaw had taken Andrew Jackson at his word of sharing in the spoils after victory over the British in New Orleans in 1813 and for their courage and loyalty they were marched across the Mississippi and told to never again cross back. 

Montezuma was promised that they would reign supreme, wealthy beyond their wildest dreams, and with undisputed power if only he would tell the conquistadores where to find El Cerro de Oro for which information he was imprisoned by Cortes and died a miserable death. 

The Wampanoags met the Pilgrims, treated them well, and gave them the provisions to survive the harsh Massachusetts winter and were sent packing in the Spring.  Although Chief Massasoit rallied his tribesmen to overrun the new colony of English, he was convinced by his Council of Elders that these newcomers could arm them and give them tools and wartime implements they had only dreamed of. 

The western Indians, used to a free, wild, and untamed life on the plains were no such dupes, and resisted the Union soldiers to the last man.  The battles were fiercely fought, and the valor of the Indians unparalleled.   Their bows and arrows were no match for the Remington rifles of the soldiers and they were gunned down by the thousands as they tried to take army encampments. 

To call it genocide was an insult to native Americans, a heresy, a complete distortion of history and a demeaning travesty.  The Indians were never rounded up and shipped off to concentration camps in cattle cars like the Jews.  They were heroically defiant, determined, and indomitable. 

The whole guilt-ridden, woke, ignorant program to remove all traces of Indian heritage to eliminate any possibility of racist discrimination was laughable.  'Imagine', said Grey Wolf, 'a football team sporting a logo out of racism and hate'. Relatives of the man John Two Guns White Calf, whose profile served as the face of the Washington, D.C., football team for 48 years, wants his likeness returned to the franchise. The image signified courage, valor, strength, and honor, White Calf said, and to remove it and all traces of native American heritage is a disgrace. 

Early Indian tribal representatives who went to Washington to seek amnesty and recourse, and referred to themselves as 'redskins' and thought nothing of it, White Calf added.  The name was not an insult, only an observation.  On the contrary, Indians had always been respected and feared. 

'How'd we do?', Yellow Feather asked Grey Wolf about the casino take over the Fourth of July weekend.  'Marvelously', said Grey Wolf and made a show of pouring a bucket full of silver dollars all over the counting room of Mohegan Sun. 

Grey Wolf hated to go back to northwestern Texas, his old stomping grounds. He hated to see old men selling turquoise trinkets on the roadside, billboards featuring teepees and beautiful squaws. He had a number of Frederick Remington paintings of Indians in his home.  For a white man, Remington had captured the spirit of the plains Indians and painted them out of respect and admiration.  The paintings were reminders of his storied past, and not a day went by without him stopping to look at them and remember. 

The Biden Administration had invited Grey Wolf to represent the Native American community and complete the circle of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.  He would join black men, gays, Mexican farm workers, Bernal Heights lesbians in a rainbow coalition, and would express the pride of identity that the group represented. 

Needless to say he refused and felt the old tribal instincts rising up.  He wanted to take scalps, not smoke a peace pipe with these fools and be folded into their absurd cant like egg whites into a meringue - to be used, shown off like a bearded lady in a freak show, wearing a feathered headdress and warpaint, his shirt off to show his red skin. 

He quickly calmed down - he expected no less of a freak show from these idiots and should have known better than to let it all get to him even for a moment.  Yet, he was only human, and years of looking at the Remington braves only consolidated his pride and defiance.  Scalps it had to be. 

Grey Wolf retired to St. Tropez.  The French fawned over him and saw him as The Noble Savage, and he could always be found at the Cafe du Port surrounded by the glitterati of the Cote d'Azur telling stories of the Great Plains. 

Yale, The Demise Of Excellence, And The Race To The Bottom - A National Metaphor

Athena Phillips was a graduate of Wellesley College, one of the Seven Sisters, a group of women's colleges on an academic par with the Ivy League when Yale and Harvard were not yet co-ed.  She took her education and her privilege seriously, marrying well (Harper Davenport was a descendant of John Davenport who, in search of a more disciplined, rigorous, and faithful Calvinist environment than that of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded New Haven), establishing herself in New York and Palm Beach society but never losing her patrician noblesse oblige spirit. 

She was known for her elegant dinners, her equally well-bred circle of friends, and her collection of Greek bronzes. She had wealth, taste, and privilege but never retreated into that insular, hermetic community of the rich, remained active in civic and community affairs, and felt a duty to serve. 

She was not unlike George H.W. Bush, who before becoming President of the United States was a loyal two-term Vice President to Ronald Reagan, head of the CIA, Ambassador to China, and former Navy combat pilot in WWII.  Wealth hath its privilege, said Bush, but also its duty; and Athena Phillips was cut from the same cloth. 

Her husband, equally well-placed in New England society, Yale graduate, member of the prestigious Skull and Bones society, captain of the baseball team, and Rhodes scholar was not unlike the elder Bush. He entered J.P. Morgan, Wall Street's premier investment bank immediately after college and had made a small fortune before he was thirty. At the same time he set up a trust which, managed with vision and discipline, encouraged the best and the brightest - entrepreneurs, artists, and innovators. 

So it was with some concern that Harper Davenport saw the changes taking place at Yale and the Ivy League itself and the disturbing erosion of the of early American foundational values espoused by Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams and his own Davenport family.  This heritage did not begin with the founding of the American republic.  Honor, courage, honesty, compassion, intelligence, and duty were enshrined in Ancient Greece and were the core values taught by Cato the Elder to the future leaders of Rome, and now they were not only dismissed but disparaged. 

 

Davenport and Athena wrote to the Presidents of Yale and Wellesley expressing their dismay at the rapid decline of academic excellence in the name of 'diversity'.  It was one thing to admit students of color who met the highest standards intellectual achievement and who would be valued members of the university community, another thing altogether to disregard ability in the name of 'equity'. 

The response Harper received from the President of Yale who replied in person out of respect for the Davenport family and their storied history, was courteous, respectful, but little more than polemic.  'The black man', he wrote, 'has for too long suffered under the yoke of white privilege and exclusivity, and it is time for Yale to acknowledge its role in imposing this entitlement and to open its doors to the underserved and marginalized'.  

 

To accommodate these newcomers, Yale revised its curriculum to both include a series of remedial classes and to provide courses that would 'meet the cultural needs and expectations of black students'.  The courses Harper had taken at Yale - 'Aeschylus, Sophocles, And the Greek Dramatic Episode' and King Lear, English Prehistory, and The Invention of the Human (this taught by the young Shakespearean eminence Harold Bloom) were gone, replaced by 'Slavery, Feminism, And The Heroic Journals of Enslaved Women', 'Incantation of Blackness - The Supremacy Of Tribal Consciousness'. 

Courses in philosophy, sociology, psychology and seemingly all the liberal arts reflected this same cultural bias.  The historic achievements of European civilization reflected in the arts, science, and literature were being erased and replaced by dogmatic recanting of received wisdom - European civilization was little more than a 'regional cabal of white supremacy'. 

With little investigation, Athena found that the situation was repeated at Wellesley, the other Seven Sisters, and throughout the Ivy League.  Administrators tripped over themselves to justify this race to the academic bottom, this 'closing of the American mind'. as scholar Allan Bloom wrote, and this racial idolatry.  The Dean of Students at Princeton wrote in a letter to all alumni that the university had finally shed its patrician, Southern cavalier image, and was now home to 'the real America'. 

'We have eliminated all traces of patriarchy and discredited notions of excellence', he wrote.  'SATs will no longer be required, high school transcripts and grade performance will be optional, and emphasis will be placed on 'social performance', essays recounting personal struggles and triumph'. 

Everything is subject to the Bell Curve, the normal distribution of people and events. Einstein, Kant, and Shakespeare are at one asymptote representing those with intelligence so rare that it is shared with very few. Severely mentally retarded adults are at the other end of the scale, doomed by crossed and defective genes to never advance beyond the age of a child; and the rest of us are in the middle, under arc of the curve, sharing modest intelligence with millions.

Artistic talent, practical genius, and religious insight all are subject to normal distribution.  There are just as brilliant Jivaro Indians in the Amazon as there are Descartes or Picasso. One only has to know where to look. They are the best hunters, the most accurate prophesiers, and the most charismatic priests.  They have been gifted with native abilities and the particular energy and ambition to use them. 

The Harvard Red Book, a journal written by Harvard graduates five years after they graduate and every five years thereafter was a good example of the pre-affirmative action ethos of excellence at the university. The initial five- and ten-year editions display the intellectual energy and drive of former students.  They may have started off as lawyers, doctors, or architects; but when they found that their chosen career paths were less rewarding than they had expected, they changed them; and went on to perform well and succeed in them.

The racist epithet, 'white supremacy' stuck in Harper's craw.  It was insulting, ignorant, absurdly reductionist thinking - an intellectual corruption thought only to have been experienced in the worst of Stalinist Russia, the Eastern bloc, and the brutal dictatorships of Africa.  A profoundly self-serving, facile, and unimaginable irrationality. 

Athena was no less livid.  To see her storied family history - one of English nobility, American talent and enterprise expressing the best of European descendancy and New World energy and individualism - derogated and dismissed as if thousands of years of cultural excellence meant nothing; and to see the tribal, Paleolithic culture of Africa lionized and instituted as a cultural ideal - was sickening at best. 

How did this philosophy - one that ascribes the same socio-economic and cultural value to the former slave, the migrant farm worker, and the assembly line worker as to the investment banker, the CEO, the cyber-startup genius, and the Frank Lloyd Wright - ever gain traction and currency?  And most importantly where did this profoundly revisionist view of history ever come from? 

It is not a matter of principle, but a matter of fact - privilege and elitism had been an essential, ineluctable, permanent aspect of human society since its first settlements. Human communities from the most remote Amazon tribe to Imperial Europe have been divided by ability and the power and influence which that confers. 

American public schools focus their investment and their attention on 'the disadvantaged, the underserved, the socially needy' at the expense of the gifted and talented.  Public education should be focusing its attention instead on the best and the brightest, those who will contribute most to their communities and America at large. Taxpayer money should be spent within this perspective of promised accomplishment, not invested in the unpromising. 

Harper and Athena continued to do their part, and gave millions to their private foundations to promote excellence, achievement, talent, and innovation.  The both stopped supporting Yale and Wellesley.