Epidemics, Climate Change, The Black Man, And Corporate Greed - Calamity Jane's Post-Menopausal Hysteria

Janie Thomas was a Nervous Nellie, always was and always would be, or so thought her ambitious parents anxious that she should succeed where they had not.  He, a bank teller and she a milliner's assistant wanted their daughter to rise above the herd, to be somebody of worth; and so it was with dismay that they saw their young daughter afraid of her own shadow. 

No matter how they tried to get her to straighten out and take the bull by the horns, the little girl stayed in her room played with her princess dolls and plodded her way to school, to church, and the corner store. More than just shy, Janie was timid, afraid to walk under overhanging limbs with the certainty they would come down as she passed, worried that the cumulus clouds gathering in the west meant tornadoes, that the rattles and shake in her father's old Ford meant disastrous engine failure on the busiest highway in the state, that hearing her mother's cough meant that she would die, leaving her motherless and an orphan. 

No one knew where this unusual fearfulness came from.  Her older brother ran up emergency room bills thanks to his wild, untamed rides in up and down Southington mountain, got pulled in  by the police for grotesque graffiti on the pillars of the Skyway bridge, failed every course at P.T. Ballard High School and rode the rails to seek his fortune in Chillicothe. 

Janie's parents didn't want her to turn out like her brother, a social renegade and shame to the family, but wished she had just a bit of his derring-do, gumption, get-up-and-go, risk-taking.  Instead as every year passed she became even more of a Nervous Nellie.  The more she understood the world, the more she saw lurking dangers, intolerable risks, assault, abuse, and poverty. 

Now, there were really only two options for a girl like Janie Thomas - keep on bumbling through life, afraid to look around corners, never going into closets at night in the dark, worried that the sky would fall; or harness her worries and do something about them.  She had never intended to be a social reformer, a woman engaged in the existential fight for a better world, but the fit was perfect.  After years of moral, physical, and emotional fear, she finally found her place. 

Yes, the world was in danger of extinction, her climate change colleagues warned.  Unless Americans were aware of the existential threat of rising global temperatures, the loss of polar ice, and the disastrous heating of the atmosphere, the earth's atmosphere would overheat and every living thing within it would incinerate.

Because of her childhood fears and innate conclusions that disaster was around the corner, she took such screeds and wild hyperbole as fact and vowed to march in the front lines and take on the capitalists, scientific naysayers, and backwater ignoramuses and teach them a lesson. 

Given her peripatetic nature, and the bevy of worries and concerns that had plagued her all her life, climate change activism wasn't enough to bank the fires that burned within, that still gave her tremors and night sweats.  The progressive canon was filled with to-do items, lists of horrible outcomes unless and until concerted communal action were taken. 

The ghetto was rising as nastily as it had back in the day of Watts, Detroit, and Newark.  Racism, black hatred, white oppression, and elitism were keeping the black man in chains worse than during slavery, Jim Crows, and segregation.  He could not fight the good fight alone, and it was up to committed, empathetic, and determined women like her to join in the battle. 

She fought on two fronts, and was as often seen in the teeming slums of Anacostia as she was on the picket line in front of the White House demanding climate sanity. 

And then COVID hit, and every fiber of her timorous, frightened, quavering fear that she had thought tamed and submerged, resonated at a fever pitch.  This indeed was The Big One, the Annihilator, the Last Judgment, the End of Days.  As we know now the whole COVID affair was a big cock-up, the scam of century, a power grab by a little marionette who in the name of epidemiology shut the country down but whose real agenda was to extend the power and reach of government and create Big Brother. 

However there were Janie Thomases everywhere, and general panic set in.  People were scrubbing their fingers to the bone, sanitizing every kitchen surface, triple-masking, never venturing out, isolating thre mail and waiting three days to bring it in.  J'accuse vigilantism spread throughout otherwise accommodating, tolerant neighborhoods; and once again, Janie thought she had found her calling.  She had been right after all to worry about an extinction-level virus that would emerge from a Chinese poultry market, mutate, infiltrate, sicken, and kill by the millions. 

She was first on the streets of University Park calling out neighbors who did not respect social distancing or mask mandates.  She was ferocious, wild, and threatening, a whirling dervish of anger, resentment, and purpose. She became known as The Madwoman of University Park, modelled after her counterpart of Chaillot.  

The history of hysteria can be traced to ancient times. In ancient Greece it was described in the gynecological treatises of the Hippocratic Corpus, which dates back to the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Plato's dialogue Timaeus compares a woman's uterus to a living creature that wanders throughout a woman's body, "blocking passages, obstructing breathing, and causing disease". The concept of a pathological wandering womb was later viewed as the source of the term hysteria,which stems from the Greek cognate of uterus, ὑστέρα (hystera) 

In the 19th century physicians thought that the stress associated with the typical female life at the time caused civilized women to be both more susceptible to nervous disorders and to develop faulty reproductive tracts.

Up until the 20th century doctors treated hysteria by masturbating female patients to orgasm (termed "hysterical paroxysm"), and that the inconvenience of this may have driven the early development of and the market for the vibrator.

All those medical claims have been rescinded by what is considered a more modern, female-sensitive, New Age psychiatry, but hysteria remains, both as an individual pathology and national, collective one. Does the following sound familiar?

The hysteric personality is characterized by mental instability, superficial and excitable emotionality, capriciously changeable tendencies, and the capacity for completely contradictory behavior. Hysterics combine inferiority feelings with the need to attract attention, role-playing, and showing-off; they take the imaginary for the real and subordinate reason and will to emotional impulse. Their attitude to the environment swings wildly and they change from sympathy to antipathy instantaneously.

Another now discredited psychological assumption is the ancillary to generalized hysteria - post-menopausal hysteria, a condition in women caused by a reversal of fortune.  What most defines a woman - her ability to become pregnant and bear children - is around the age of fifty over and done with.  Most women take it in stride, a matter of course, irremediable and final; but many others are shaken to the  roots.  Their lives are over, done with.  They are biological rejects, left on the evolutionary curb without their say-so. 

 

This is what happened to Janie Thomas, a perfect storm of natural fearfulness and timidity, female hysteria, menopause and the validation of her most upsetting fears.  She was a wreck and could barely function.  She was worthless as a wife and mother, a supernumerary in the progressive struggle for social justice (women in The Movement were afraid of her and how her unhinged screeds and St. Vitus' dancing would sully good causes), and an increasing candidate for St. Elizabeth's, Washington's Hospital for the Mentally Ill, an old-fashioned insane asylum fashioned after Bedlam and Broadmoor.  

How many women like Janie Thomas are in The Movement today?  Judging by the frenzy, the maniacal demonstrations, the inchoate and mad expressions of outrage, and the totally consuming, corrosive, and destructive social behavior, they must be in the hundreds of thousands.  The coming of the conservative wave has helped calm the waters.  These women are being called out for 'Febrile Political Hysteria (FPH) but if Janie Thomas's experience is any indication, their hysteria is more systemic, harder to quiet, and a continuing nuisance. 

Janie has disappeared, perhaps folded into the schizophrenic homeless on the streets of San Francisco, or secure in an institution more caring and understanding than the asylums of the past.  Hysteria need not be permanent, the professional literature suggests; and with proper medication and counselling it can be controlled. Or she might simply be spent. All those wild, feral energies played out, leaving her empty but at least no longer a shrewish, unpleasant woman. 

Selective Memory - The Past Is But A Fictitious Drama, A Confabulation, And We Still Demand The Truth?

Thanksgiving dinners at Aunt Tally's were always fun for us kids. Lots of ice cream and sarsaparilla and the usual fights between Tally's cousins and the Grillo brothers.  The two could never seem to agree on anything, argued over every detail, and seemed to be from different planets.  It wasn't a Ford but a Chevy.  It didn't happen on Route 15 but 72.  It wasn't Margaret Filcher driving but her retarded sister; and the poor fool died at Grace New Haven not New Britain General...and so on. 

It got so bad that Tally had to separate them, 'Now, now Harry', she said cutting him another piece of ham pie and refilling his Lambrusco, settling him down, returning the table to incidental talk about Angie's lasagna and the outrageous peonies in Mabel Schwartz's garden ('Most be hybrids' said Joey Panto. 'She could never grow them that big'). 

The point is not about the wreck that sent Margaret Filcher - or her sister - to the hospital, but the total inability of anyone to agree on anything. Was it just obstreperousness? Why would anyone dig their heels in and have a go over such an inconsequential event that may not have even happened? Harry Grillo told the same story every Easter an no version jibed. It was as though he had reworked the score, adding more trumpets and relegating the strings and revising the libretto until it soared with drama. 

Emil Panto had heard Harry's performances every Thanksgiving and had the same contentious objections.  Not this but that, not here but there, not her but him until the dinner was once again as messy as a doctrinal dispute. He should have known that when Harry saw or heard something, it got processed in his overheated brain, got modified, convoluted and produced according to his imagination; that facts never seemed to matter, the telling is what counted, and the more engaging, entertaining, and compelling the story was, the better. 

Besides, the old folks around the table had their own way with facts, and no one could agree on when the elms had come down, Zackin's Pharmacy closed, or when Mayor Gambino got ousted.  The confusion got worse when it came to family history.  It was as though Gibbon invented The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or that Plutarch's Lives was pure invention.  Each and everyone of the guests around Tally's Easter table had their own version of the past, the true version, the one and only version; and they were as unmovable as the Rock of Gibraltar when it came to defending it. 

There was a recent case of a drive-by shooting in the New Haven Register that left two people dead on Whalley Avenue.  The paper declined to give details because the eyewitnesses interviewed different substantially on what happened.  In fact the lawyers in the case were forced to rely on tire marks, shell casings, trajectories, and firing angles in their prosecution and defense because the three bystanders who supposedly witnessed the shooting could not agree.  It was a Ford not a Chevy.  The shooter was black not white.  It was a handgun not a rifle. There were two men in the back seat or none, only shadows. A volley was fired not just two well-placed rounds. 

Perception is a very tricky business; and much has been made recently about the inability of eyewitnesses to agree on what they see.  There have been a number of scholarly articles recently on memory and how selective it is.  It is well known that eyewitness accounts are usually wrong or conflicting.  Despite the absolute conviction of witnesses that they saw a white male, large ears, and goatee point a gun out the window of a Buick LeSabre and shoot Robert Leggings, they saw no such thing.

Scott Fraser, a forensic psychologist, provided surprising evidence in a recent interview on NPR’s Ted Talks.

Fraser researches what's real and what's selective when it comes to human memory and crime. He focuses on the fallibility of human memory and encourages a more scientific approach to trial evidence. He has testified in criminal and civil cases throughout the U.S. in state and federal courts.

In 2011 Fraser was involved in the retrial of a 1992 murder case in which Francisco Carrillo was found guilty and sentenced to two life sentences in prison. Fraser and the team that hired him staged a re-enactment of the night in question, and they showed the testimonies that had put Carrillo in jail were unreliable. After 20 years in jail for a crime he didn't commit, Carrillo was free.

Not only were the testimonies of the eyewitnesses in question, what they said they saw had no bearing whatsoever on reality.

Literature is filled with stories of subjective eyewitness memory.  Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book is a recreation of an actual event:

The Ring and the Book tells the story of a murder trial in Rome in 1698, whereby an impoverished nobleman, Count Guido Franceschini, is found guilty of the murders of his young wife Pompilia Comparini and her parents, having suspected his wife was having an affair with a young cleric, Giuseppe Caponsacchi…. The poem comprises twelve books, nine of which are dramatic monologues spoken by a different narrator involved in the case… usually giving a different account of the same events, and two books (the first and the last) spoken by the author.

The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell is the story of an event told by four different people, all with different recollections of what actually happened; and of course Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all recounted the same the story of Jesus Christ quite differently.  

We all ‘fill in’ memories after the fact.  We may have stored some essential facts or impressions of a long-ago event, and we tend to fill in the blanks based on recollections of family and friends.  It may be that it wasn’t Uncle Fred who threw up on the Persian carpet, but Uncle Pasqual.  We had the scene right, just not the actors.

So Harry Grillo 'filled in' his recollections with both his own confabulations and the asides of others, and before long, the original story had become something entirely different. 

A famous psychological experiment had young children seated in a circle.  One child was given a simply, easy to remember story - 'Mrs. Harris's dog chased the neighbor's cat up the oak tree and the fire department had to be called' -  and told to repeat it to the classmate next to him, on and on until the circle was complete. 

By the time each child had been told the story and repeated it, the version told by the last student to the experimenter bore no relationship to the original version. 

So, the combination of personalized, selective memory, plus filling in and hearing what we want to hear assures that recollection of the past is a very tenuous, shaky proposition at best. 

Much is made of 'the truth' and 'fake news' these days - as though there were actual, universally agreed upon, objective reality.  Watching reportage of the same event on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC illustrates the issue.  Although all can agree that ICE personnel have been deployed to Detroit, the way such deployment is presented differs significantly. It is either a legitimate response to crime and illegality or it is an untoward use of federal authority to usurp the power of local government.  It is either a reasonable, trained, and disciplined force, or a racist phalanx of thugs with a brutal agenda. 

Why all the fuss and bother?  Of course there is no such thing as the truth and all news is fake; and for all the Sturm und Drang over morality, there is not nor never has has been a universal, absolute, unquestioned right rule of conduct. Relativity did not start with Einstein. Muslims and Christians radically disagree on the Crucifixion.  Allah would never have sacrificed one of his prophets and allowed him to be subjected to hideous torture.  There was no Resurrection, and Jesus was taken up into heaven with no imaginative, totally false assumptions. 

Progressives not only want their version of history - their particular selective memory - to be current. They want to expunge and remove all traces of alternate versions. Confederate statues must come down, army posts and streets must be renamed.  The antebellum South can no longer exist. Progressive history allows for no intrusion into their confected reality - their version of the past. 

Husbands tell their own versions of infidelity, admitting when forced their adultery, but easily shift the blame onto their hectoring, vixenish, shrewish wives. Sexual dalliance forced upon a husband is not a sin, a dereliction of duty, or an amoral act.  Uncle Joe was simply seeking love when his marriage provided nothing but dismalness and rancor.  His wandering was not only justified, it was right and proper. Did he commit adultery? It all depends. 

The truth? Fuhgeddaboudit...

The Search For Real Love - Confounded By The Hopelessly Fabulist Romanticism Of A Medieval Dreamer

The poet Petrarch (1304-1374) is credited with the creation or at least discovery of romantic love.  Petrarch was an Italian scholar and poet in Renaissance Italy, and one of the earliest humanists. Until he was smitten by ‘Laura’, the woman of his 366 sonnets, he contented himself with academic treatises on political philosophy, moral theory, and social order. After spotting her in the Church of Sainte-Claire d’Avignon, however, he was never the same.

There is little definite information in Petrarch's work concerning Laura, except that she is lovely to look at, fair-haired, with a modest, dignified bearing. Laura and Petrarch had little or no personal contact. According to his "Secretum", she refused him for the very proper reason that she was already married to another man. 

Petrarch wrote: "In my younger days I struggled constantly with an overwhelming but pure love affair – my only one, and I would have struggled with it longer had not premature death… extinguished the cooling flames.

 

Petrarch was consumed by love for ‘Laura’ but guilt and the ponderous weight of his former priesthood and the mores of the times – not to mention that ‘Laura’ was married – prevented consummation. He wanted her and at the same time was repulsed by his immoral desires. “He channeled his feelings into love poems… and wrote prose that showed his contempt for men who pursue women”.

Petrarch’s sonnets all idealize ‘Laura’.  In his verse she became a perfect but untouchable woman – a saint, the perfection of female beauty, and a goddess.  In the following sonnet, Petrarch expresses his ineffable, unattainable love for her and the permanent grief caused by her death.  His was idealistic, unrequited love; and his poems expressed the persistent romantic notion of compulsive, but often unattainable desire.

Henrietta Parsons knew all about Petrarch, his love poems, his late adolescence, and his codifying the love ballads of 11th century troubadours into a genre. Petrarch didn't exactly invent romantic love - the conditions in the early Renaissance, knights, fair maidens, courtship, and the emergence of the sybaritic court, were right; and the songs of the iterant musicians limning the beauty of sexual intimacy were just the thing to set the poet dreaming. 

Romantic love needed a beginning.  Before the idea emerged, marriages were arranged, brides and grooms were chosen for their reproductive and economic potential, for their social status, and their well-being.  Marriage was a contract to assure viability in hard times and not something vulnerable to the vicissitudes of subjective choice.

Kings were no different.  Henry VIII was not interested in love and romance but a woman who would give him a male heir. Other kings, courtiers, and varied royalty were no different.  Marriage was an official affair with invariable parameters set long ago.  Emperors, sultans, shahs, and shoguns were governed by the same rules of practicality.  No one, high- or low-born could afford the vagaries and uncertainties of romantic love. 

Be that as it may, Henrietta was lonely, unloved, and forgotten.  Well past the days of her youth and entering an age of dubious sexual interest and decreasing fertility, she despaired.  She had dressed too often in the sequins, ribbons, and frills of a princess to dismiss the idea of a Prince Charming.  She had read too much romantic fiction to see love in the most unexpected places in the most unsuspecting circumstances.

The battlefield, however, was littered with bad marriages and contentious divorces.  Over half the marriages in the United States ended in dissolution - and those were first marriages.  The rate for successive ones was almost as high. Women and men who thought they had learned from the first debacle had not.  The configuration of sexual desire - to whom we are attracted - is set early on, some calculus of father-love, mother-jealousy, natural sensitivity, reserve, or hostility.  So it is not surprising that women fall into the same disastrous marriage pit again and again. 

Yet Henrietta, despite her romantic fantasies, was a very disciplined and determined woman. The had been imbued with the concept of romantic love - that is, that it does exist far beyond the poetic dreams of a Renaissance journeyman.  There is something almost spiritual in the union of two perfectly matched people.  

D.H. Lawrence came close to expressing the idea of this iconic union, but stopped at the physical.  Coming together, mutual orgasm between one who dominated and one who willingly submitted opened psychic doors and allowed the release of untapped energies and passions. 

Love was absent in this calculus as it was in Tantrism, the precursor of Lawrentian spiritual epiphany; or the philosophy of ying and yang and the necessary complementarity of the sexes.  Henrietta wanted both Tantric expression and Petrarchan romance to complete her puzzle. 

Whistlin' Dixie, of course.  Such perfection occurred only on drugstore shelves - magazines and dime-store novels filled with promise, romance, and emotional completion. Everywhere else in real life, such intimacy, romantic desire, and blissful fulfillment was absent. 

The Andersons, the Parsons' next door neighbor fought like banshees.  They 'flayed each other to the marrow' as George says to Martha in Edward Albee's play about drunken sexual brutality, the insistent, cruelly present desire to resolve disputes and return to camaraderie if not love. Was this a condition of love, Henrietta wondered? Having to go through a gantlet of abuse, bloody antipathy, and hurtful spite?

William Eakins, the Parsons' neighbor on the other side of the house, was a serial adulterer, and when the Eakins' bedroom windows were open in the summer, Henrietta could hear Martha sobbing inconsolably, waiting for her aberrant husband to return. 

Irma Carlson committed suicide by asphyxiation in a closed garage because her husband tortured her.  He never resorted to physical violence, but he disassembled the poor woman emotionally piece by piece for years until the torment was intolerable. 

Heidi Ballard loved her husband dearly, but he was a vaporous, infinitely passionless man who married because it was what one did, a kind of social anchor to a regular, predictable life.  Why she fell for such an empty vessel was another story altogether, but the misery of unrequited love was first on the list. 

There is always romance at the beginning, something befuddled by sexual desire, notions of beauty, innocence, and charm; but after a few years of sharing the same bed, the same dinner table and the same television channels, the blush came quickly off the bloom of the rose. 

So, what's a woman like Henrietta to do?  A woman with not inconsiderable intelligence, sensibility, and emotion; a woman who desperately wants a life companion but is discouraged by the detritus around her; but a woman who still believes that some modicum of happiness can be found with another. 

Women will try anything to increase their chances.  What is the gender spectrum but an opening of many doors.  The combinations and permutations are limitless, and a woman should be able to find a partner among them.  Yet the whole idea of some randomly ascribed sexuality, some invented, self-serving psycho-social category defeated the whole purpose of romantic love. 

Lesbianism offered a convenient outlet; but in all recorded history, in all ancient and modern fiction, and in all potent sexual affairs, it was only the fireworks between men and women which lit the sky.  That was what Tantrism, Lawrence, and ying and yang were all about. Something preternatural and predetermined. 

It would be a fitting ending to the story of Henrietta Parsons if Mr. Right walked into her life, they fell in love, married, and lived happily ever after; but of course that only happens in romantic fiction.  These days you've got work at marriage to make a go of it, such are the competing demands of profession, individuality, and married life; and work does not a Garden of Eden make.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was perhaps the only writer who really understood the Henrietta Parsons of the world.  Jay Gatsby was a dreamer, perhaps the only man that Nick Carroway, the narrator and Gatsby's friend knew who had an undiminished idealism and romantic hopefulness. 

The Gatsby story ends tragically but the lesson is not lost.  There is hope for the romantically driven, motivated by something more profound than anything Petrarch could have imagined, something that one should hold on to and never give up. 

Perhaps Henrietta was a Jay Gatsby, at least one hopes so, although at the same time wishing that her end is more satisfying and satisfactory.  It probably will be, because for all her heady romanticism and almost impossible idealism, she was imperturbably wise. 

Genealogy, Who Cares? - Let Sleeping Dogs Lie And The Sorry, Pedestrian Truth Of The Past

Henry Louis Gates, academic clone of the Reverend Al Sharpton, black ambulance-chaser on the scene wherever blackness needs publicity, has made fame and fortune by digging into the genetic pasts of famous black people and revealing them on national television.   

The latest was when he confronted Angela Davis, Sixties radical, black supremacist, and Communist with the fact that one of her ancestors came over on the Mayflower. 

'It can't be', said Davis. 'It simply can't be'.  Heresy, apostasy, fake news, a scurrilous attempt to distract, demean, and disparage her blackness and her untiring labors for the black man. 

But of course it was true.  First of all thirty million people are descendants of the Mayflower colonists, not surprising as genetic inheritance becomes geometric. The 102 passengers on the ship quickly became 200 and then 2000 and before long in the tens of thousands.  

Death from infection, disease, and Indian scalping did nothing to stop the demographic tsunami. That number even beggars that of Genghis Khan who conquered the whole world and whose descendants are estimated to be only sixteen million.  Human beings are not exactly fruit flies, a generation of which is ten days, but our reproductive potential is still impressive. 

Second, Angela Davis is not as black as the ace of spades and even a casual look in the mirror would tell her that she had more than a drop of white blood.  Miscegenation was common in the days of slavery, most plantation owners had their way with chattel and it wasn't long before the pure Mandinka stock of the first African slaves had been mixed with white blood. 

Third, the preference in the black community for lighter-skinned mates is well-known - the more white blood the better. 

Yet Angela, playing for the camera, looked nonplussed and shocked.  Gates, delighted in his gotcha moment, smiled.  'There, there, my dear', he said. 'We're all in the same boat'. 

The Gates show is serial soap opera, with each black participant on tenterhooks to find out how black he really is, only to find out that he has been mongrelized long ago.  It was not enough to want to be white, to bed white, to envy white.  Once the onion had been peeled back and white was found at the core, whiteness was complete. 

Ordinary black people have not followed suit.  For two hundred years in America they were segregated and whether pure black, quadroon, octoroon, or just a bit off-white, they were mishandled, misused, and mistreated by the white man.  The last thing they needed to know was their white ancestry - who had done what with their mommas in the woodshed - and even before that which African tribe they had come from. 

Those tribes were complicit in the slave trade.  It was Mandinka slavers who sold their stable to the Portuguese, the Spanish, and the English.  Where was the value in confirming that?

White people, however, are spitting into cups at record rates and sending it off to be genetically tested.  The curiosity of 'who am I?' has become epidemic. 

The reasons for researching ancestry are many.  Take Bob Muzelle, a civil rights activist who made his reputation on the Freedom Rides to Selma and Montgomery and who marched across the Pettus bridge with Martin and Ralph.  Bob had so identified with black people his whole life - rode with them, ate with them, partied with them, and went to their weddings and funerals, that he considered himself one of them.  

Perhaps given this instinctive, almost preternatural preference for black folk, he thought he might have black blood in his veins.  He might be a descendant of Sally Hemmings, Thomas Jefferson's black mistress, or any one of the offspring of Southern grandees and their slaves.  His family was originally from Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, and the opportunities for mixed race affairs were many.

If he found out that he did indeed have at least some black blood, his reputation in the black community and in the white progressive one in which he was a notable member, would be further burnished. 

Of course Bob, so one-sided and deliberate was he in his search for black membership, that he never considered the alternative - that he was descended from slave owners, a far more likely possibility. He waited patiently for the DNA results, confident that what he had long assumed would be confirmed. 

Things don't always turn out the way we hope, and when Bob's genetic results came in, they confirmed the worst of all scenarios.  On both sides of the family he was descended not just from slaveowners, but the largest, most vilified, cruel, and most dastardly of any in the South.

DNA testing can only show general associations, but with only a very little research into public and family records, ancestry can be made far more precise.  There was no doubt that he was white and in a direct genetic line to two prominent Southern plantation-owning families.

Not only was he white, but pure, unalloyed white. The properties owned by the families were the largest in the county, and thanks to their thousands of slaves, they moved comfortably to the Mississippi Delta to grow cotton once the tobacco lands of the Virginias had been depleted. There they ruled the roost just like they had in Virginia. 

To tell or not to tell was Bob's dilemma.  Revealing his tainted, slave-owning ancestry would be tantamount to expulsion from the black community; but concealing it would be dishonest and a secret hard to keep. 

On the other hand, being a close relative of one of the most notorious slavers in the South and freely admitting it and stating his renewed commitment to the black cause might be just the thing to give him a particular and unique cachet. 

'Let it be, Bob', said his wife, Cara, a far more down-to-earth, practical woman who to be honest had only put up with her husband's racial fol-de-rol for decades and at best hoped that his grandee past might put an end to his black wannabe-ism.  She, also descended from well-to-do Southern families, had always assumed both family slave holding and sexual liaisons and took it all as a matter of course.  History was what it is, unchangeable, irremediable, and inalienable.  Besides, who cares?

Bob however went into a funk, a dark depression, a miserable period in which he questioned his very worth.  What had all the stinking bus rides, the nasty hotel rooms, and the gross Southern food meant?

Betty Putnam had hoped to find a direct ancestral link to the Duke of Northumberland, English royalty not too far removed from the throne of England.  She had watched every episode of Upstairs, Downstairs, and Downton Abbey, rooted for the aristocrats, her likely ancestors, masters of the realm, at the top of the social pyramid, and la creme de la creme of Anglo-American society. 

The Putnams already were known for their storied history - early American colonists in the Massachusetts Bay colony, associates of John Davenport who in search of a more disciplined Puritanism founded New Haven, and who were later successful shipbuilders and traders; but a touch of royalty would be the jewel in the crown. 

However things in Merry Old England were just as tricky as they were in America, and there were far more servants, peasants, and grooms than the intermarried royals, so it shouldn't have been a surprise when she found no direct link to the Duke of Northumberland or any royalty.  

She was unmistakably and irrevocably from peasant stock. The Putnams might have been ambitious international entrepreneurs, clerics, and adventurers, but they weren't royalty by any means.  Betty had to be content with recorded history and to forget the inconvenient truth of her genetic past.

 

The rest of the millions of Americans who want a glimpse into the distant past are happy enough confirming their Irishness or Italian ancestry. Some wanted to be sure they had no Jewish blood, although given the forced insularity of the Jews, ghettoes, shtetls, and the like - that was pretty much of a certainty.  

'I've got a drop of Scottish blood', said one patron at McSorley's bar, who bought a round of single malt for everyone; and that was about as far as most DNA searches went. A complete waste of time and money, a pastime, an incidental use of new technology, but meaning little or nothing. 

Yet Gates has made millions, far more than he made as a Princeton professor teaching Black Studies to black students, or later at diversity minded Harvard which hired him to do the same thing; and the DNA tracking companies are now on the stock exchange. An American success story among many, or looked at another way, a sucker born every minute. 

'If The Rule You Followed Led You To This, Of What Use Was The Rule?' - The Short, Unhappy Life Of Frances Macomber

The Anton Chigurh character in the film version of Cormac McCarthy's novel, No Country for Old Men, asks a private detective he is about to kill, 'If the rule you followed led you to this, of what use was the rule?'. The detective shakes his head and asks Chigurh if he knows how crazy he is. 

'You mean now?' replies Chigurh. 

'No' says Carson Wells, 'I mean the way you are'. 

Chigurh smiles, looks for a long minute at Wells, and then pulls the trigger. 

Forensic psychiatrists who watched the movie have observed that the Chigurh character was the most accurate depiction of a psychopath they had ever seen on screen or even in their practices. Chigurh, demented beyond description, without a shred of moral composure, a calm, determined, calculating indifferent killer is 'a frightening example of human nature gone completely awry'. 

The now famous line has gained popular currency, applied to lives far more mundane than that of Anton Chigurh.  It is the existential question asked by many older people nearing the end of their lives without particular regret but with a nostalgia for the road not taken.  What if? is the refrain often heard in game rooms of retirement communities. 

Frances Macomber, widowed for many years, childless, but with the professional freedom that barrenness afforded, had recently and reluctantly retired from her position at a Washington area university and accepted an emeritus position, was given a pleasant although not corner office and all the logistics support she required.  She was at work on her memoir - Diary Of A Reluctant Mind - a book which would chronicle her long career and offer insights about womanhood, feminism, the glass ceiling, and the compromises of marriage and professional responsibility. 

To be honest it was make-work - a project to keep the now elderly woman off the streets.  The subject had been beaten to death by legions of women who thought their lives particularly illuminating and whose university presses gave them a by and printed a limited number of copies at their own expense. 

Frances, however, took the work seriously, pounding out page after page of prose narrative.  She had, despite many years as Chair of the English Department never lost her prolixity and tendency to overwrite, and now, since there were no editors looking over her shoulder, the memoir became a kind of A Child's Garden of Verses with all the romanticism of lost youth but without Stevenson's poetic grace.

As she labored away at the book, she became increasingly disconsolate as she heard the happy chatter of young Assistant Professors in the hallways, knowing that she would never again be one of them; and slowly but surely doubts began creeping into her head.  Perhaps she really had nothing to say, nothing 'illuminating' or interesting. She had led a predictably comfortable life in academia, publishing now and again, teaching a desultory course or two, keeping office hours which had become little more than whining sessions for unprepared students.

Not surprisingly her long tenure in academia strengthened the early liberalism of her youth.  She had grown up in a modestly successful Ohio family whose members were solidly Democratic, swimming against the tide of rock-ribbed Republicanism of the state, and who suffered the opprobrium of colleagues, friends, and neighbors. 

They were old-line progressives, weaned on the heady laborism of LaFollette, Gompers, and Brandeis who argued for workers rights at a time when socialism still had a chance to prosper in America, and dinner table conversations were always about the dignity of the working man and the failure of the country to give him his due. 

 

She had tired of these mealtime commiserations, and had vowed that as soon as she could, she would leave the farm, liberalism, and reformist policy.  She went east to college, one of the famed Seven Sisters schools where she became friendly with the daughters of the rich and well-to-do.  If she had been immured within walls of liberalism back in Ohio, she had more than she could take of aristocratic indifference. 

She returned to the progressive fold and joined a movement which had changed since the days of labor, factories, and the depredations of robber barons, and had become the party of civil rights, diversity, and peace, all of which suited her.  While her relatives' holier-than-thou sanctimony had bored her to tears to the point that she completely empathized with Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan, she now found this new cant, dogma, and canon particularly relevant. 

 

She added social activism to her already significant workload at the university where she was making her way up the ranks, and became what she increasingly thought of as 'a modern woman'. 

Yet now bent over her manuscript and checking the clock as it approached time for 'Community Talks', the informal women's political discussion group she had organized and arranged, she felt a wave of anomie, a feeling of hopelessness and despair.  Of what earthly use was a hen party of disaffected old women banging on about Donald Trump and the ignoramuses in his thrall?  

And who on earth would want to read the reminiscences of a woman who had never been one of the best and the brightest, an academic who published regularly but whose readership was insignificant at best, and whose students, admitted under affirmative action and its post-Supreme Court shady covers, were as clueless and unprepared as Tibetan monkeys. 

Her old friend Margaret Tippet, like her a graduate of the women's Ivy League but who had labored thanklessly in the vineyards of second rate schools, said, 'Bake a cake', her own typical, ironic rejoinder to older women's depression. 

'Bake a cake indeed', replied Frances, glad to have a sympathetic ear but not ready for her friend's catty remarks.  After all, what had she done?  Nothing to speak of, hanging on to an even more questionable position at a third-rate school and a frequent speaker and smarmy gender-reveal political advocacy groups.  Neither woman had lived up to their promise or potential but neither was willing to accept it and move on to life's final phase. 

A phase which was frightening to say the very least, a vacuous void, an eternal emptiness, a horrifying nothingness.  Again the light switch along the emotional wall of old women flipped on.  Why had she so abruptly left the church, avowed atheism, and turned away from anything spiritual except hippy worship? If she only had had God in the wings, an unquestioning hand of mercy, she would not feel so lost and alone.  But deathbed conversions let alone while she was still alive and kicking were not her style.  She would have to go struggling into that long dark night like Ivan Ilyich without anyone with her. 

 

Frances had seen the No Country movie and like thousands of other viewers and was taken by the Chigurh line about rules and unexpected ends. And here she was, facing the barrel of his shotgun without a clue or answer in the world, and welcoming the annihilating blast. 

Suicide is the only unforgiveable sin, Scobie, the character in Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter tells Mrs. Rolt, his lover; but he rejects his profound, obedient Catholicism and does just that. He is tired of pity, self-recrimination, and responsibility, and he must do the right thing. 

Frances was in no mood for self-abnegation.  Suicide was too final a solution for the ills of an ordinary woman, so suffer she must.

She soldiered on despite her dispiritedness - her memoir, her political chat group, Commentary, The New Yorker, the New York Times, and NPR. 

Nietzsche had said that the only validation of the individual in a meaningless world was the expression of pure will, but here she sat with little will, no meaning, and no hope - a sorry, pathetic old woman who should have followed a different rule. 

 

But then again as philosopher psychopath Chigurh would have certainly said, 'The rule itself doesn't matter.  Any rule will do'. 

Getting Away With Murder - Apologies, Faux Contrition, Sob Stories, And A Sucker Born Every Minute

The Robert Redford movie Quiz Show is based on the scandal and downfall of a noted professor at Columbia, son of a scion of world literature, and legatee of a storied intellectual family history. Charles Van Doren cannot resist the temptation of fame and fortune and agrees to get the answers from the producers of Twenty-One. 

 

A Washington attorney working for a Congressional subcommittee overseeing television, suspects something fishy and pursues Van Doren.  In one scene in which Richard Goodwin is at a poker table with Van Doren and his friends, Goodwin calls Van Doren and says, 'I know you're lying'. 

Van Doren replies, 'Bluffing, Dick.  It's called bluffing'; but Goodwin knows that he has struck a nerve and the usually suave, confident, and charming Van Doren knows he's been found out. 

As the producers of Twenty-One say during the Congressional hearing into the corruption of television quiz shows, 'It's just entertainment, Senator.  We give the public what they want...just like you do'. 

The public doesn't care about erudition, it cares only for the drama - the anxiousness of the contestants, their agonizing over difficult questions, their hesitation, perspiration, and the final right or wrong answer.  Van Doren, from an old New England family of rectitude, strict discipline, honor, and honesty convinces himself that he is not deceiving the public but both entertaining and performing a public service.  Millions of young people who tune in will be encouraged to read and to study. What harm have I done?

Lying of course is as common as sunrise.  Everyone does it, hopes to get away with it, gets caught, apologizes and goes back to deceitful ways.  Lying is endemic among the well-born, the educated, the farm worker, the lap dancer, the lawyer, and every run-of-the-mill married couple. So common is lying that there should be no fuss or bother when the liar is found out.  

Yes, he has deceived his wife, his constituents, his investors, and his congregation, but there is nothing new in that.  America has produced snake oil salesmen, shysters, con men, shell game tricksters, and Ponzi scheme financiers since the founding of the Republic and for years before. 

A few years ago a NBC News Anchor admitted to making up a story about taking enemy fire while in Iraq; but when recently exposed, he said that he had ‘conflated’ his helicopter which did not take fire and the helicopter in front of him which did.  An unfortunate error in judgment for which he apologized. 

Investigation into his reporting on Hurricane Katrina from New Orleans suggested that he made up stories there, too. His reports of suicides that didn’t happen, bodies falling from the top of buildings which never flew, and other distortions, misrepresentations, and flat-out inventions had to be scrutinized for ‘veracity’.

The ‘conflation’ issue is inexcusable, said critics for not only does it damage the cause of investigative reporting and honest journalism, it makes a joke of the men and women who do come under enemy fire.   It is scandalous.  That well may be, but 'conflation', outright distortion as it should be known, is very familiar.  The whoppers told at Aunt Tally's Easter dinner table are just as wildly entertaining as the confabulation of public figures. 

The melodrama of John Edwards who had betrayed his dying wife, fathered a child whom he denied, and asked a subordinate to take the fall for him and lied through it all was to some a disgusting spectacle but par for the course for politics. 'Let the buyer beware' is as relevant for the high-and-mighty as it is for used cars. 

Mark Sanford, Senator from North Carolina lied through his teeth about his Argentine lover and to cover up a tryst with her in Buenos Aires told his constituents that he had been hiking on the Appalachian Trail.  Who could not revel in the pure chutzpah, the marvelous inventiveness, and the total absurdity of the claim?

The list is endless. Everyone in power – or so it seems – lies to cover up indiscretions whether financial, marital, or sexual.  The confessional apologies are worse than the escapades, and it is painful to watch dutiful wives and children stand up on the stage with the sinner quietly forgiving and forgetting. 

Lance Armstrong, professional cyclist and winner of seven Tour de France titles - an almost inhuman feat - was accused of doping. There was no way that any man could win two competitions let alone seven.  Armstrong who was doping and had figured out ingenious ways to escape notice, was unshakeable and implacable in his lies.  He was a master at deception who turned legitimate questions into unfair and reasonable accusations. Given the public adulation, the praise of world personalities, and the absolute silence of all his UPS team members, he went on doping and winning for nearly a decade.  

The more he lied, deceived, and distorted the truth, the more he was lionized - how could the press be so arrogantly destructive of a true hero?  The public, as always in need of heroes, simply turned a blind eye, preferring to bask in the glory of a fellow American, refused to look beyond the spotlight. 

Of course, Armstrong was a genius at equivocation. One observer remarked on Armstrong’s ability to tell bare-faced lies without a trace of nervousness, shifty eyes, or uncomfortable rambling.  Each and every time he was asked about doping, he looked his accuser in the eyes and replied with an unequivocal, unhesitating, and viciously stern, “No”.

Bernie Madoff, the shyster, convinced hundreds of Jews, most of him his friends, to invest in his Ponzi scheme, a house of cards of no value whatsoever.  He bilked millions and never looked back.  Once again, it takes two to tango.  There seems to be a credulousness inbred in all of us, especially and unfortunately in Americans. 

Rudy Kurniawan, another master trickster, bilked friends, associates, and wine wannabees out of millions in his fake wine scheme.  P.T. Barnum, circus impresario, said 'A sucker is born every minute' and nothing has ever been more true. 

Of course not only the rich and powerful lie - we all do.  Men cheat on their wives and invent the most outrageously implausible, cockamamie fables. Children rarely tell the truth unless called on the carpet.  Lying is endemic, hardwired, persistent, and permanent. 

Yale Medical School professor Dr. Diane Komp in her book Anatomy of a Lie raises an interesting explanation to the now common phenomenon of lying in America.  Perhaps it is not the lying star figures who influence us, but we who influence them:

I began to wonder about the possibility that my own seemingly harmless white lies had an impact on the world, that maybe, instead of there being a trickle-down effect when people in exalted positions or in public life lie, there is a trickle-up effect," Komp explained in a recent interview. "In other words, maybe the cultural trend in lying begins with those of us who are not in positions of power, rather than the other way around. Maybe the 'trivial' lies that most of us tell without any real pricks on our conscience do matter.

It takes two to tango and liars would not be so bald-faced about their indiscretions if their partners, whether spouses or constituents, were not complicit.  There is something naturally credulous in all of us, some desire to believe that trumps the truth every time.  Working late at the office, that old chestnut of the adulterer, is so obvious, transparent, and ridiculous that no wife should ever believe it;  but believe it they do, give their husbands a free pass, value longevity and sunken costs more than the inconvenient truth, and welcome their men home for a late dinner. 

Everybody does it.  Children fib, doctors hedge the truth, beauticians crow over the genius of their makeovers of ugly women, old friends overlook sags, hollows, bulges, and lines and tell us how great we look.  What is the point of the truth, we reason, when it can hurt others? 

Nothing beats Bill Clinton’s defense of his affair with Monica Lewinsky before Congress. Bill Clinton’s parsing of language to deflect the accusation that he had sex with Monica Lewinsky seems to have happened in a far more innocent age.  The President obviously knew that what he did was wrong; and he had moral compunctions about the act itself, the deception of his wife, and the betrayal of the trust of the American people.  So in his testimony before the Grand Jury, he said:

It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the--if he--if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not--that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement....Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true.

 

Of course this endemic lying is viral.  Once it gains universal acceptance, it it hard to stop and it becomes the new norm.  And in this day of Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality hasn't reality undergone an existential change?  Who can possibly distinguish between a real photo and an engineered one? And isn't that the point of virtuality, undermining the concept of reality and replacing it with one of imagination? Why live in a bricks and mortar environment when the fabulous, imagined, virtual world beckons?

Donald Trump, master showman, has made a fuss over 'fake news', but he knows that all news reporting is fake, i.e. filtered through a very subjective editorial sieve.  Two channels on a gym's bank of televisions report the same news differently. MSNBC, notorious liberal, says 'Trump defies judicial precedent and...', while Fox News reports, 'Donald Trump's corrective judicial reform...'.  Somewhere in between lies not the truth but some semblance of fact. 

The New York Times, The Grey Lady the newspaper or record with All The News That's Fit To Print now goes overboard with a liberal editorial twist to every otherwise non-political item.  'Climate change causes flood disaster in Nepal' the headlines shout while other news outlets cite historical records of periodic avalanches and still others cite China's overbuilding of dams and civil infrastructure high in the Himalayas. 

Ivan's Devil in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov says that without him life would be a bloody bore, three-hundred-sixty-five days of Sunday Mass, rectitude, formality, and right behavior.  'I am a vaudevillian', the Devil says, 'and thank God for me'. 

 

We live in a moralistic, censorious age, so the fol-d-rol over lying should not surprise anyone.  However, given the fact that lying has been part of human history - no, human nature - since the beginning of recorded time, such umbrage seems silly, vain, and self-serving. 

Most Americans enjoy the Donald Trump show because he is the very incarnation of Ivan's Devil - a vaudevillian, a teller of tall tales, a mountebank, and a carny barker all rolled up into one.  How boring life will be once he is gone.