Frigidity Revisited - The Saga Of A Sexually Hibernating Woman

Tally Barstow had nothing against men, although as a good feminist she thought she should.  The cant never seemed right somehow.  Men never seemed like the predatory Neanderthals portrayed by her sisters.  Her father was a good man and so was her brother who went into the priesthood, and she acknowledged men's contributions to history.  Where would France be without Louis XIV or Russia without Alexander I, Egypt without Tutankhamun? 

 

Not only that, women were not all they were cracked up to be.  There were plenty of bitches around, Leslie Banneker for example, a real harridan who made life difficult for her in middle school, always ragging her for her hair or imitating the way she climbed the school stairs.  A real cunt better disappeared down the oubliette.  What was this feminist cant all about in the first place? 

Be that as it may - and Tessa paid her dues to The Movement and hewed the party line in each and every case except this one - she had a niggling problem with men.  The whole idea of penetration was off-putting.  Just think of it, she said...or better yet, don't think about it, some grunting, groaning man on top of you.  At this moment she always thought of Mr. Barker, the wheezy, hairy math teacher pushing his way into her, salivating and drooling, eyes rolled back into his head like some epileptic. 

That was the problem.  When she tried to shake the thought of gross Mr. Barker and replace it with, say, Bobby Benson the handsome football captain, the simian Barker took over and once again she was struggling for breath as he grabbed and pulled, shifted his bulk up and down until she felt like being loaded with bags of cement or corn meal. 

What did this mean, she wondered?  She liked men well enough so why this revulsion at the thought of the act?  Why couldn't she imagine being taken by Prince Charming, reduced to tears of joy, release, and sheer happiness?  Was she frigid?  

Where she got that idea, she couldn't remember.  Female frigidity was a discredited Freudian concept - a male, patriarchal one that modern psychiatry had totally dismissed and replaced it with the gender spectrum.  If a woman felt some reluctance when it came to sex with men, it was more likely a case of lesbianism or even in the most extreme cases, gender dysphoria.  Every woman was capable of orgasm and it was only a question of finding out how and with whom. 

Tally did not want to spend her life searching for the Holy Grail - sex was not the be-all and end-all of existence despite the blandishments of her friends.  Sadie Birnbaum was insatiable when it came to sex.  In the same vein as Freudian frigidity she would have been called a nymphomaniac or at least a loose woman, but she was nothing of the kind.  'I like to be ravished', she said over cocktails at the Mayflower. 

Sadie was not exactly indiscriminate - she had the good fortune of being blessed with good looks, and her sultry Jewishness was irresistible to some men with a Cleopatra complex (again Tally found herself dredging up these old Freudian ideas). She could pick and choose at will, was often disappointed ('I must readjust my algorithm', she said), but never stopped looking or 'being taken'.  

'Doesn't it get boring?', Tally asked her one day. 

'Boring? Oh, God no. You just haven't been fucked properly', and with that she bounced off to work at Fitch, Chambers & Locke, LLB where she kept her hands off the partners, never a good idea, despite their keen interest. 

Now, when it came to modern men, there really was a variety. There was everything in the stable from Nancys to pile drivers, each encouraged to come out of whatever closet they had been locked in, but warned against excess virility; so when approached, she felt less of desirable woman that some gaudy experiment.  'Real' men, the kind that loved women, wanted to be with them, and were comfortable with them were few and far between.  

'Now if I could find Mr. Right', she said, 'maybe I wouldn't mind him on top of me'. 

But like anything else, choosing a mate was subject to advertising, promotion, and trial and error.  You had to expect a few duds along the way, but there was no way to get the gold without trying; and she was determined to do her best. 

Yet that goddamn Mr. Barker kept showing up despite everything.  It was a Jekyll & Hyde scenario she couldn't lose.  The closer a prospective lover came to real intimacy, the more he became the image of the snorting, grunting, grueling Barker.  The very idea of him on top of her bellowing like an elephant was sickening, so no matter how charming, delightful, and considerate a man might be, he devilishly turned into a pumping ogre. 

'Maybe you need a shrink', said Sadie Birnbaum. 

Finding an appropriate one was not as easy as the cavalier Sadie suggested.  There was everything from radical feminists to old Viennese-style Jews, and choosing one was just as tricky as choosing a lover. 

She decided on middle of the road - an older doctor with a family practice, a kindly man who was considerate, non-judgmental, and without prejudice.  He listened patiently while Tally told him of Mr. Barker, Sadie Birnbaum, Prince Charming and her seeming inability to rid herself of the awful thought of some pile-driving boor bullying his way inside her. 

'Have you tried women?', Dr. Pease asked; but that was no out-of-the-box thinking but a reflexive, wokism surprising for a man of his reputation.  'You mean Bernal Heights bull daggers?'

The doctor was a bit nonplussed.  He wasn't used to such spontaneous irony and dismissal of his intentions; but after one hour of his nonsensical probing into her past, she paid the bill, thanked him, and never returned. 

'Bad luck', said Sadie. 'Bad luck of the draw', so Tally went back to the drawing board but came up empty each time.  Each doctor had an agenda even though they denied it.  Either they were old unreconstructed Freudians out to probe her ego, id, and superego; feminists who assumed sexual dysfunction and liberation sexuality; or New Age 'whatever' sexual counselors who had no advice except to let nature take its course. 

'You wouldn't buy a car without test driving', Sadie said, but as hard as she tried it was simply impossible to lie down and take it. She grimaced, gritted her teeth, clenched her jaw, and snarled until the man rolled off, pulled up his trousers, and went home. 

Disgusted by the idea of fingering, sucking, and cunt-to-cunt sex, she refused the overtures of women and was left with only two choices - dildoes or forget the whole fucking thing, not worth the time or the effort.  Lady Chatterley was a tart, Tolstoy way off the mark, sex an overrated, overblown commodity, a promotional item, a troublesome irritation. 

She was a relatively young woman when she closed up shop, so she had many more years to try the sex thing out again; but as of this writing she was not unhappy with her 'spinsterhood' (again, she seemed always to fall into antiquated Freudian scenes). Still an attractive woman but uniquely attentive to her nieces, nephews, and colleagues, she lived well. 

The New England Slave Trade, A Going Concern Of Early America - Northern Wealth From Southern Slavery

A few years ago a Northerner was about to take a journey through the South.  'Unless you understand Southern history', he said, 'you cannot understand American history'; and of course he was right.  The Civil War was the defining moment of American history never more relevant than today.  The slums of Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Washington, and St. Louis are Reconstruction's legacy - that post-war period designed to punish and humiliate the South. 

During that period state legislatures under federal jurisdiction devolved into tribal chaos as uneducated former slaves were given electoral responsibility, former landowners were deprived of their rights and property, the Freedman's Bureau, a federal agency authorized to oversee reparations, the promotion of the black man, and the rebuilding of the South turned into a Northern carpetbaggers' advocacy agency. 

The former plantation owners, now part of a reunited Union, refused these draconian measures, and vowed to return the South to its former ways.  In short time, tenant farming replaced slavery under virtually the same conditions, Southern grandees banded together in a resolute hatred of the federal government ushering in decades of Jim Crow and segregation.  Had Lincoln lived, the story would have been quite different, but under Jackson and the radical Congress the South became hardened, angry, and resolute. 

The Northerner was roundly criticized.  Visiting the South was giving succor to the enemy.  Every dollar spent in Mississippi and Alabama was a vote for racism, separatism, and hatred.  

According to those who warned him and Northern progressives in general slavery was a Southern institution, and the South should be forever reviled and marginalized for its participation in an immoral if not inhuman activity.  The South in this view was retrograde, fundamentalist, and ignorant – all due to the legacy of slavery.  The mark of Cain had been indelibly branded on to the South’s collective forehead, and Northern idealists were determined that the South should never, ever rise again.

Abolitionists took a principled but inflexible moral position – that slavery was against the laws of God and man – and significantly set back Lincoln’s efforts at reconciliation and reunification. In league with Johnson and the Radical Republicans they did their best to destroy the South once and for all and to complete the job that Sherman’s march had begun.

Out of the War and Reconstruction to follow, Northern opinion hardened. Not only had Union armies defeated those of the Confederacy, but a superior moral system had prevailed. Free labor – the right and duty of every man to reap rewards from his own toil – won out over indentured and forced servitude.  Enlightenment principles, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and in the Bill of Rights, were never endorsed or embraced by the South, and its defeat in the Civil War was a vindication of the righteousness of the North.

The ascendency of the industrial North after the War assured the muscular application of these ideals, and despite the reestablishment of many of the traditions and policies of the Confederacy, it was for a century the backward, country cousin of the North.  Not only had the North prevailed in the War, and become a world economic power after it, the South had never learned its lesson.  It is quite understandable, then, that Northern liberals continue to disparage the South as a region, consider Southerners an inferior social and intellectual class, and keep them far more isolated and marginalized than Lincoln ever intended.

However, out of this moral certainty has come arrogance, sanctimony, and self-righteousness and a continued censure of everything Southern.  An American pop singer had chosen the Nottoway Plantation, an elegant antebellum home in Louisiana, to hold an artistic retreat organized to bring together artists and musicians to discuss creative production.  She was forced to cancel the event because of the loud hue and cry from the progressive community.  How could she even think of holding an event in the home of a Confederate slaver?

It is hardly worth mentioning that if one is to boycott Southern antebellum homes because of their link to slavery, then one should certainly boycott the Pyramids of Egypt, built with thousands of slaves who died by the hundreds in brutal conditions.  Or the Taj Mahal built by the cruel and heartless Emperor Shah Jahan.

One should avoid the Capitol Building in Washington, built in part with slave labor; and never walk on the C&O Canal, its towpath and locks built with slave and indentured labor, or visit the Smithsonian Castle. These and many other buildings and public works in the Nation’s Capital were built with slave labor.

One should certainly not visit Angola, Gambia, or Sierra Leone where African slavers provided human capital to Arab middlemen who then traded with European businessmen.  The Great Wall of China was not built by well-paid, well-treated in the First Dynasty of  Qin Shi Huang but by slaves, so visits there should be off-limits. The great cathedrals of Europe were built by serfs, another name for European slaves.

All of which brings us to the North and its role in the slave trade – a history which Northern liberals conveniently overlook.  First, while slaveholding in the North was minor compared to the South, it was common and widely accepted 

Slaves were auctioned openly in the Market House of Philadelphia; in the shadow of Congregational churches in Rhode Island; in Boston taverns and warehouses; and weekly, sometimes daily, in Merchant's Coffee House of New York. Such Northern heroes of the American Revolution as John Hancock and Benjamin Franklin bought, sold, and owned black people. William Henry Seward, Lincoln's anti-slavery Secretary of State during the Civil War, born in 1801, grew up in Orange County, New York, in a slave-owning family and amid neighbors who owned slaves if they could afford them. The family of Abraham Lincoln himself, when it lived in Pennsylvania in colonial times, owned slaves (Slavery in the North, Andrew Harper)

Second, while slaveholding in the North might have been relatively small compared to the South, huge wealth was generated by its participation in the slave trade. In 2006 a team of Hartford Courant journalists wrote a series called Complicity in which they chronicled the North’s role in slavery.

New York slowly and reluctantly abolished slavery; federal census figures showed slaves in the state until 1850. But the death of slavery in New York scarcely impeded the city’s business in the slave trade. In the peak years of 1859 and 1860, two slave ships bound for Africa left New York harbor every month. Although the trade was technically illegal, no one cared: A slave bought for $50 in Africa could be sold for $1,000 in Cuba, a profit margin so high that loss of slave life was easily absorbed. For every hundred slaves purchased in Africa, perhaps 48 survived the trip to the New World. By the end of the voyage, the ships that held the packed, shackled and naked human cargo were so filthy that it was cheaper to burn some vessels than decontaminate them (Reported in The Northern Slave Trade, Phyllis Eckhaus, In These Times)

                              New England Slave Ship ca. 1825

The slave trade in particular was dominated by the northern maritime industry. Rhode Island alone was responsible for half of all U.S. slave voyages. The DeWolfs may have been the biggest slavers in U.S. history, but there were many others involved. For example, members of the Brown family of Providence, some of whom were prominent in the slave trade, gave substantial gifts to Rhode Island College, which was later renamed Brown University (Traces of the Trade – A Story from the Deep North)

Money was certainly made by the transatlantic shipping of slaves; but the greatest Northern wealth was generated from the cotton trade.  Northern textile mills flourished in the antebellum period largely because of Southern, slave-picked cotton.  Industrialists in the booming New England and Mid-Atlantic states thrived, and the basis for a vigorous American capitalism was established.

“King Cotton” was to antebellum America what oil is to the Middle East. Whole New England textile cities sprang up to manufacture cloth from cotton picked and processed by millions of slaves. In 1861, the United States produced more than 2 billion pounds of cotton, exporting much of it to Great Britain via New York (Eckhaus).

Those Northern traders, industrialists, and shippers invested the money realized from the slave and cotton trade back into America.  Wall Street made millions thanks to the investment of New England and New York capitalists, and lent that money out to thousands of large and small entrepreneurs throughout the rapidly growing country.  In other words, slave money infiltrated everywhere in the new United States. Looked at from the modern PC perspective of disinvestment, we should boycott everything.

The network of slavery extends throughout the world; and those who refuse to stay in an antebellum Southern home or even visit one should stay away from Portugal and the Netherlands, the countries responsible for the trading and shipping of at least 10 million African slaves.  Without them, the transatlantic slave trade would not have been possible.

The point is not to demonize the South and characterize it as the devil within, but to understand its history, to learn how and why it developed as it did, and to derive lessons from its past.  The history of the North is intimately linked with that of the South; and it is certain that without the harsh, punitive policies of the Radical (Northern) Republicans during Reconstruction, the South might not have been so determined to re-establish its old ways.  Without Northern shipping and textile mills, cotton and its slave economy would never have flourished as it did. 

History is neither good nor bad.  Every event or period has antecedents, some hundreds of years in the past. Moral principles, scientific inquiry, and political philosophy all change with the times. The great civilizations of Egypt, Rome, Persia, and China were built on the backs of slaves; but is this enough to condemn them?  Genghis Khan, Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao were responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths, but should we never set foot in Mongolia, Russia, or China?

The study of history encourages understanding.  The point is not to keep blaming the South for its past, but to address the present.  If we can forget the horrors of the Portuguese slave trade and eat well in Lisbon; forget the thousands of Nubian slaves who died at Giza building the Pyramids and enjoy Ancient History; or pretend that Mao never killed millions of his own people while we marvel at the vibrant, modern, forward-looking cities of China, then we can fast-forward our Southern movie reel to the present.

Why Government And Religion Are So Popular - Promises, Hope, And No Accountability Whatsoever

'If only Aunt Tilly had spilled the beans before she died', said her sister Margaret, hoping that the old lady might have had a glimpse of the hereafter - something, anything to suggest that there was life after death.  But nothing.  She spluttered something about peppers, sighed, and died just like that 

'She is at peace now', said Father Brophy, making the sign of the cross.  'She is with Jesus'.  Extreme Unction at least secured her place in the queue.  She had been too ga-ga to make a good act of contrition, so whether absolution was given by the Almighty or not, only Tilly would know. 

For those who knew her, ascension was doubtful.  The had been a thorough bitch her whole life, a nasty, backbiting old crone who never left well enough alone, never married, and took revenge for her spinsterhood on all men.  'Better off dead', thought Father Murphy who had known her since she had graduated from St. Aloysius of Loyola, the Catholic high school affiliated with his church, St. Maurice's, had to put with nuns complaining about the hostility and godlessness of the girl, threatening to go to the Archbishop is something were not done, and going off in a huff, rosary beads clacking away as they strode out of the sacristy and back to the convent. 

'What would a heaven with her in it be like?', thought Father Brophy in a moment of secular irony.  There certainly would be no peace unless God had a special place for the likes of Tilly Briganti. 

He shook his head, blessed himself, and asked for forgiveness.  God forbid that a man of the cloth should have such uncharitable thoughts. 

Meanwhile, Aunt Tilly's sister, Margaret, looked at the now lifeless body sharing the same diffidence as Father. Tilly had not been an easy woman, and perhaps she had indeed gone to a better place; but still Margaret had hoped for some sign of recognition of what the future held for her sister and all of us - an empty void, a smiling, welcoming Jesus, or some other unimaginable place. 

The Muslims believe that martyrs will find a paradise of vestal virgins, babbling brooks, gardens, flowering meadows, and cool breezes - enough of an incentive to kill the infidel and make way for the coming Caliphate.  Catholics were told that heaven is but the sight of God - that celestial vision more than enough for eternal happiness.  Not much to hold on to after a life of Sunday mass, confession, communion and right behavior; but at least it would not be nothingness. 

Margaret shivered at the thought of taking her dying breath and seeing nothing but a black emptiness ahead; but unless Tilly said something different, she would have to live with that possibility. 

All of which is a long preamble to the point of the story - the popularity of religion.  How is it that a belief system with no proof whatsoever, an institution built only on presumption, promise, and providence could have such staying power?  Billions and billions of dollars have been made by countless priests, pastors, ministers, and preachers over the centuries since St. Paul went on his evangelizing mission and set up churches from Palestine to Rome.  

He offered nothing but promises, repeating Jesus' own words, 'Man cannot live by bread alone' opening the door to the establishment of the Vatican, the Holy Roman Catholic Church with billions in gold bullion stored beneath St. Peter's square and countless billions more secured in offshore accounts in the Caribbean. 

 

The Church, knowing how fragile unproven faith can be, concocted both Visions and Miracles to satisfy the longing of the faithful for some sign.  The Virgin Mary was said to have appeared in Portugal and France (Fatima and Lourdes), and thousands of pilgrims go there every year in the hopes that she will appear once again, this time to them. 

The desire for immortality - or at least the certainty that a spiritual afterlife exists - is viral.  Everyone has it, no one wants his short, nasty, and brutish life to end with only an eternity of nothingness thereafter.  Schizophrenics, natural visionaries and seers, so unhinged are they from the here and now, are often looked to for spiritual guidance.  Forensic psychologists have long contended that religious prophets saw nothing but the twisted, fantastical djinns of their own minds, and that religion has been confected from nothing but febrile dreams. 

 

Every Sunday at the Ebenezer Baptist Church of Aberdeen, a congregation near the Alabama border of Mississippi, someone finds Jesus, stands up, points to the rafters, raises her arms and shouts, 'He has come'. 

'Hallelujah', respond the hundred or more souls in the church all with their eyes skyward hoping to see Him. 

This episode is repeated every Sunday morning throughout the South and in store-front churches in Northern inner cities.  Belief in the impossible has become standard issue.  He must be real, congregants say, otherwise there is no hope. 

'But hope is what there is, Brother', said Pastor Isaiah Jones from the pulpit of his own church, filled to the gills with families who have come from far-away cotton fields to hear him preach.  'There is no cause for despair', and the families go back to their tarpaper shacks feeling anointed and blessed.  Maybe next Sunday He will be revealed. 

 

Not one scintilla of evidence.  Not one proof, not one vetted, peer-reviewed incident of divine intervention in the world; and yet billions of people get down on their knees every Sunday or Friday and shed tears for the mystery and magic of God. 

Brilliant, ingenious, a fabulous idea!  To build a multi-trillion dollar industry on nothing but promise? Credit must be given. Religion is the most successful scam the world has ever seen.  Every Sunday the basket is passed, every year checks are written to the Annual Fund, every one of the millions of viewers tuning in to tearful, beseeching televangelists give from their little widow's mite to support God's work and make their elision to heaven easier. 

Thomas Sowell, conservative economist and political observer has noted that religion and government are the only two institutions built on nothing but promise.  Accountability is unnecessary and non-existent.  When a government announces the allocation of billions of dollars for the poor, that, ipso facto, is enough.  The idea is so resonant, so unmistakably right and good, so reflective of Christian, moral principles, it has to be right - checking up to see if it is, is irrelevant, supernumerary. Of course it is right, good, and proper. 

Trillions have gone out the door for welfare programs which have been miserable failures, entitlement programs which do little more than train people for dependence.  Treasuries have been emptied for pre-school programs which teach how to color within the lines but which have no lasting impact on future academic performance. Countless more programs designed to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion have managed just the opposite and created division, suspicion, accusation, and false promises across the board. 

  

The government interventionist agenda is based on faith and presumed authority. If something sounds good - compassion, inclusion, sharing, confidence - it must be good.  There is no need to set objectifiable indicators of success, quantifiable measures which indicate cost-benefit.  Only government, says economist Sowell, has no accountability, no bottom-line, no feet held to the fire.  If private sector investments turn no profit, they are cancelled.  If a new design, new logo, new operating procedures does not increase sales, they are scrapped. 

In the unlikely event that a government program is called out for non-performance, all that is necessary is to say, 'We have learned from our mistakes', followed up by a new tranche of money just as airily conceived and and unlikely of impact as its predecessor. 

The World Bank under the leadership of former Vietnam War-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, a man desperate to make amends to the world's poor after the murderous debacle under his watch, instituted a program of Poverty Reduction and thanks to it billions of dollars in soft loans and grants went out the door with nothing more than assumption.  The idea was moral, right, and good, so success would follow. 

 

When it didn't, McNamara and his minions said, 'We have learned our lesson', and millions more of airy unaccountable millions went down the rathole. 

Government whether directly or indirectly, whether nationally or internationally has been the most marvelous, most creative, most impressively vaporous invention since the first human settlements.  It follows in the footsteps of religion, step by step. 

'A sucker is born every minute', said circus impresario P.T. Barnum, or it takes two to tango; and religion and government would not be so influential and universal if it weren't for credulous patrons. 

So, sign up for the Greatest Shows On Earth and make millions. 

Europe Wakes Up While America Dithers - The Nastiness Of The Unwanted Comes Home To Roost

Ellie Frampton was not only happy that President Biden opened the southern border to let in thousands of desperate asylees, she even voted for a property tax increase to cover the cost of sheltering them while they became accustomed to life in their adopted country. 

Her city, thanks to a progressive mayor and city council, became a sanctuary city.  The old Roosevelt Hotel, once the watering hole of the glitterati of the 20's, and the Biltmore, a hotel made famous by both Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis, the gathering place of the well-placed and their aspirants now housed immigrants from El Salvador and Nicaragua. 

How could a compassionate, integrationist society like hers ever turn away the poor, the alienated, the disadvantaged, and the hungry?  It was only right and just that America should open its arms in welcome of the needy just as it did at the turn of the Twentieth Century when European immigrants flooded our shores. 

As important as offering a home to the disenfranchised and despondent, an open door policy signaled the end to white supremacy and  privilege.  The wave of new immigrants from the south would change the demographics of America forever, and would hasten the diversity of the country. 

Now, the city in which Ellie lived had been for its long and storied history, one of the most adherent to American values - a working class, socially ambitious, but patriotic place of traditional principles. Europe might be far distant in terms of parentage and national origin, but was still respectful of the motherlode of religion, culture, and society.  Now, however, firmly in progressive, secular administration, the city had done its best to dismiss and demean this storied heritage.  Any devotee of the old colonial, racist, exploitative Europe was a traitor to modern, inclusive, diversity. 

The city had become a morass, and despite every attempt to gloss over its soaring crime rate, Fentanyl abuse, homelessness, and garbage-strewn neighborhoods, the municipality declared victory.  'We are the future', proclaimed the Mayor, standing proudly with a panoply of racial, gender, and ethnic diversity. The white, middle- and upper-class residents who remembered what the city was and how disreputable and sickening it had become, disagreed; but their votes were in the minority, and the municipality became proudly Democratic Socialist. 

Ellie watched where she walked.  Thanks to her own advocacy to defund the police and to create non-    ICE zones of 'cultural relevance', the streets of her city were unsafe; but this was part of the calculus of equality.  The black people of the city, so long oppressed and put upon by their white Simon Legrees, needed room to grow, to multiply, and to express their native culture. 

The city soon ran out of funds and imposed supplementary taxation on every resident - their fiscal duty to right the ship, to provide a welcoming, accommodating haven for new refugees and for the emerging black population. 

Yet Ellie persisted.  She resisted call from cousins in Florida and Texas to relocate and enjoy an atmosphere of civil liberty, opportunity, and freedom.  No, she was in for a penny, in for a pound. Black people and asylees from Latin American needed her love, attention, and support. 

Ellie's town was not unique - the pandemic was universal throughout metropolitan America.  Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, and Washington were no different.  They were not only sanctuary cities, giving shelter and welcome to undocumented immigrants, but were avowedly and passionately determined to usher in the new multicultural majority of black and brown peoples.  Whiteness and European civilization from which the grandees had come, was history. 

Now Europe was having none of this integrationist nonsense. Conservative politicians in Italy, France, the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, and Hungary were demanding the repatriation of unwanted Muslim socio-political invaders and a return to Christian, European, nationalistic values.  Giorgia Meloni, President of Italy famously announced before a chanting crowd of supporters: 'I am a woman, I am a mother, I am a Christian, I am a European and an Italian, and God willing so will I remain'. 

Le Pen in France, Weidel in Germany, Farage in the UK, and Wilders in the Netherlands have been as outspoken about the existential importance of ridding the continent of hateful, divisive, medieval Islam.  The borders are closed to intolerance, exclusivity, and barbarity. 

Ellie read these pronouncements and declaimed and disparaged them.  What else to conclude from a white supremacist cabal of right wing bigots?  The world was changing in favor of universal cultural diversity, and these women (most of the European leaders were women) represented the worst of recidivist racism. 

Surprising that the world could be so convincingly divided, but divided it is. It was not at all surprising that the continent that fought against Muslim (Saracen) invasion in 778 and saved Europe from Islamic barbarism honored Roncesvalles, Charlemagne and Roland. France has always proudly proclaimed that it is 'La fille Ainee de l'Eglise, the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church, and rightly so. 

The new battle between Christianity and Islam has already begun; and Europe is just realizing it has let the fox into the henhouse. Marine LePen, Giorgia Meloni, Alice Weidel, and Geert Wilders are the avant garde against Islamization and far more importantly the progressive-socialist agenda which has facilitated its rise. 

Emmanuel de Miramon-Fargues was a French aristocrat who anticipated the flagrant permissiveness of French governments.  He said that the aristocracy and the royalty were not supernumeraries in European history but its heroes.  'We are the guardians of the legacy of kings, courtiers, and theologians', he said, 'the only remaining link to our glorious past.'

A bit inbred and self-serving to be sure, but not far from the truth. The peasantry might have tilled the soil and tended the sheep, but it was the well-born, the titled, the legatees of history, culture, and tradition who made the world what it is. 

Ellie of course wanted nothing of these self-serving aristocratic apologia.  The aristocrats of Europe were nothing more than colonialist oppressors, despicable tyrants and international thieves. 

Nonsense of course. European kings instigated and oversaw the civilization of Europe, Africa, and beyond.  European colonies brought culture, learning, and jurisprudence to societies still breaking rocks.  Africa was nothing but a continent unmoved and undeveloped since its Paleolithic origins and had it not been for European colonization, it would still be living in caves. 

Who wants Africans in Europe other than Africans? And who want Islamized Africans, devout and determined to extend a Third World Muslim caliphate? Mosques, Sharia law, head scarves and burqas, female circumcision, and absolute patriarchy?

'Diversity', said Ellie, angered at the European rightist uprising, fascism in the cloak of conservative politics, and determined to assure that American borders be uncrossed by anti-democratic, racist Europeans. 

Ellie's city, once known for its New Age accommodation, its tolerance, and sweet Pacific inclusiveness, had become a Lagos slum - blocks of nodding Fentanyl addicts, back alleys of heroine junkies, lanes of schizophrenic homeless - a derivative inner circle of Hell, a mess, a socially fetid corner of a once respectable urban environment. 

'What's different here?', asks the tourist promotional ad for Poland.  No black people, no inchoate street protests, no rapes, assaults, and robberies.  A peaceful place, a Christian place, a white place. 

Racist? Hardly. The inconvenient truth - the megalomaniacal diversity and the radical progressivism of open borders and socialist idealism - has been destructive, damaging, and unwanted - is now for everyone to see.  Poland is the European future, not France. 

 The cultural tide usually swings from west to east; but nowadays the counterrevolution in Europe will soon claim American lowlands.  There is no way that American progressives, heirs to the early 20th century socialism of Brandeis, Gompers, and Lafollette but adrift in racial and identity politics, can survive.  Americans are not that stupid; but perhaps they are. 

America has always looked to Europe for culture, history, social organization and structure and  la dolce vita ; but now it is grasping an existential lifeline. Go back to Roncesvalles and the defeat of the Muslim invaders, reclaim the legitimacy of 'The eldest daughter of the Church', and return to the aristocratic, courtly fold. 

Youth Springs Eternal - It's Not Wanting To Be Young Again, But To Be With Someone Young Again

 Herman, Abe, and Art were lamenting their lost youth – not the days of their youth gone by but the fact that the young women who had loved them in their later years had long gone.

“She was wonderful”, said Abe, “a real gem.  An early Christmas present.  An unforgettable charm”. 

Laura had been thirty-two when they met, Abe sixty-four, stretching the May-December relationship to its outer limits.  Abe was reaching the end of his sexual shelf life, and she was in full bloom.  He had been surprised that such a woman had any interest in him at all.  Yes, he still had much of his hair, was in good health and good physical condition, but as his doctor had advised him, ‘Numbers don’t lie’.  In other words it was about time that he began to look more seriously at his end-of-life priorities.  Even the best actuarial estimates gave him only relatively few more years, so he had better turn his attention to more important matters.

“Why bother”, Dr. Kaplan had said when he first heard the news. “What will she give you that God won’t?”

It was obvious that Kaplan had never strayed from his marriage of forty years, let alone with a younger woman.  Those who had been more adventurous or fortunate knew that they had been extremely lucky.  No one wanted to relive their youth – who would want to repeat the adolescent bumbling, the adult mistakes, missed opportunities, and downright shameful episodes of the past? Better done, gone, and forgotten than sifting through the discards to see if there was anything worth retrieving, anything worth  a second look.

In Abe’s case, his life had been satisfactory enough – a successful career on K Street, a good marriage, well-placed and respectful children.  He never saw cause to wish the genetic cards his son and daughter had been dealt had come from a different deck, or to have chosen a more beautiful wife; or even to have had more affairs.  At 70 he was sitting pretty, atop a considerable retirement fund and investment properties, a home in Boca Raton, and good friends. 

Yet everything in his life seemed predictable, tired, and worn.  A life of no regrets did not mean a life with a happy ending.  Encroaching old age was ugly, dispiriting, and frightening.  He did not envy the young people around him.  He had had his day and it was their time.  Nor did he wish that there were some wormhole through which he could be sucked into the past.  Youth was overrated, especially when one saw the depressing consequences of disappointments, un-achieved success, illness, bad choices, and bad luck.  The years took their toll, and since one could neither go back and fix them, what was the inherent, innate value of youth anyway?  Little more than a stop along the way. 

Konstantin Levin, a major character in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina saw great irony in God’s having created man - an intelligent, creative, insightful, intuitive, and enterprising being – allowed him to live for a scant few decades, then consign him for all eternity in the cold hard ground of the steppes.  If there was no point to life, reasoned Abe, then there was certainly no point to youth.  Other than reproduction and carrying capacity of course.  On an existential plane, youth was wasted on everyone.



Laura Peterson came into Abe’s life unexpectedly, a work meeting, drinks, a conference in Cairo; dinners, and finally sex.  The scenario was not new to Abe.  He had always had affairs, but because of circumstances, they were all ‘commensurate’.  The women were like him all professionals, travelers, within a few years of age, happily loosed from the fetters of marriage or partnership.  There was nothing remarkable or particularly interesting in these short-term relationships.  They were almost de rigueur, part of the business traveler’s benefit package, a no-strings-attached rider to one’s contract.

Abe’s love affair with Laura, however, defied the actuarial odds and the lottery.  An old man was not supposed win big.  He was designed to lie down and take it easy or die in his traces, not get back in the saddle.  He knew that eventually she would give up on him for a more expected life; and more importantly would no longer be able to overlook his stoop, his ailing hip, his older children, and his futurelessness.  Since Abe had as little enthusiasm for the future as the past, and since consequently the present was the only tasty morsel in the buffet, he gorged himself.  His affair with Laura Petersen was right out of a ladies’ library romantic novel.

"Shh," he said, pulling her up so they were face-to-face again. He slid his hands between her legs, positioning fingers and thumb the way she'd taught him. Except that wasn't right. She hadn't taught him. They'd figured it out together, how to make her come. He nuzzled against her, his lips on her neck, nibbling and kissing his way up to her earlobe, where she'd always been ticklish. "Ooh," she whispered. "Ooh! Oh, oh, oh," she sighed, as he worked his fingers against the slick seam . . . and then she forgot to pose, forgot about trying to look good, and lost herself inside her own pleasure. Andy watched her squeeze her eyes shut as she clamped her thighs against his wrist and snapped her hips up, once, twice, three times before she froze, all the muscles in her thighs and belly and bottom tense and quivering, and he felt her contract against his fingers (Jennifer Weiner, Who Do You Love?)

He wished he could have felt instead like Cormac McCarthy:

Lying under such a myriad of stars. The sea’s black horizon. He rose and walked out and stood barefoot in the sand and watched the pale surf appear all down the shore and roll and crash and darken again. When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different (The Road)

The problem is that with Abe, like all older men in an affair with a younger woman, it was the pulp fiction that said it all.   There were no existential thoughts, no God, no kindness and compassion, just adolescent wet dreams.  The rotten prose captured the pure physical responsiveness of the sex act; and that was all that mattered.  It was the only reliving of the past that made any sense.  It wasn’t reliving a particular event or recreating a circumstance – staying in a familiar hotel, eating in our restaurant – it was playing the part of a youth as an old man, and voila la difference.

Phillip Roth’s character, Coleman Silk, says in The Human Stain, describing his affair with a woman half his age,  “Granted, she's not my first love. Granted, she's not my great love. But she is sure as hell my last love. Doesn't that count for something?” Abe was Coleman Silk.  “It’s all about the sex, isn’t it?”, asks Silk’s friend; but although Silk denies it and criticizes his much younger friend of his own romantic notions and unfilled sexual demands, it is indeed about the sex.  The book has a happy ending only in that Coleman Silk dies without ever having to give up his woman.  His last memories are of her body.



“Too soon old, too late schmart”, said Herman after hearing Abe’s story.  “You’ll never learn.  The putz is not the way to figure things out.”

Cheating - It's In Our Genes, Everyone Does It, So Sit Back And Enjoy The Ride

You have to hand it to the Somalis. They went from pirating cargo ships in the Gulf of Aden - a tricky, dangerous affair, attacking huge Maersk container ships on an outboard over choppy seas - to pirating the public treasury of Minnesota.  It took savvy, opportunity, smarts, and the credulousness of a government in love with asylees; but the sheer chutzpah of it was marvelous. 

When reporter Nick Shirley decided to visit the now infamous Learing Centers, supposed pre-schools funded though generous grants by the state, he found them empty - not a child to be seen, doors locked, a few men hanging around chewing kat, but nothing even resembling a pre-school. 

The Somalis didn't even try to cover up their fraud - create some semblance of a working school, a few coloring books and toys on the floor, perhaps even one or two children whose parents were paid for their appearance.  Nothing, nada.  

The cheating - at this multi-million dollar level it is called fraud - but cheating is what it is, taking something from someone on false pretenses.  It was the gall of it, the sheer scale and scope of the affair that was impressive. 

Sven Carlson, born and raised on the Minnesota prairie, Sinclair Lewis country with some originalist American Midwestern values but still a windy, cultureless, ramshackle place surrounded by emptiness, had moved to St. Paul after business school and hung out his shingle, S.P. Carlson, Accountancy and Tax Preparation.  

He did well despite the incursions of the big Eastern accounting firms.  He knew Minnesota and federal law and how to avoid and in some instances evade it. He had been cheating the government for years, and so when he learned of the Somali escapade right in his backyard, he was delighted.  Not only would the government be occupied with the Learing Center debacle, but it showed how easy it was to take from the public trough. 

Not everyone was on the take in Minnesota, of course, but there was enough cheating going on everywhere to make one think that the state had a monopoly on it. Looked at another way, Minnesota was the land of opportunity - for what else to expect of a people who had survived the harsh winters of the prairie and made a home and a living there?  

Cheating was just the questionable edge of doing business.  Donald Trump, after all, made millions by inflating the value of his properties and counting on the credulousness of buyers looking for a good deal to fall for his his sleight of hand.  He did nothing wrong in a buyer beware New York real estate market.  No one took a number at face value in that heady environment. 

And what else would Sven’s father's friend Halve Swanson have done other than woo the wife of Henrik Olson, take her on the corncobs in the far shed in the dead of winter?  Halve's wife had frozen up on him years ago citing all manner of discomfort, desuetude, and disinterest, and any red-blooded man would naturally seek solace and sexual comfort elsewhere.  Yes, he cheated on his wife, but who wouldn't? Married to that woman was penance in and of itself. 

The Devil in Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov tells Ivan that he is not such a bad guy, certainly not worthy of the calumny heaped on him since the Fall.  I am a vaudevillian, the Devil says, and without me life would be a bloody bore, three hundred and sixty five days of Sunday mass, penitence, good works, and vain hopes for an unattainable better life. At least with me around life can be fun. 

 

He is a trickster, a con artist, a carny barker, a snake oil salesman - anything to spice things up in what Hobbes would describe as a short, nasty, and brutish life.  'You should be thankful for me', the Devil tells Ivan. 

Talking about chutzpah, what about the two best con artists of recent years?  Bernie Madoff bilked his Jewish friends out of millions in a Ponzi scheme which when uncovered by the FBI had not one red cent of assets left.

Madoff was brilliant - suave, convincing, playing on his Jewishness, his natural financial wizardry, and his charm - and convinced hundreds of investors that his fund was the best way to double and triple their profits.  

 

Rudy Kurniawan was a young Indonesian who made millions selling dreck as high-quality vintage wine to investors who would never drink it but buy and sell it at enormous profit.  

Rudy bought up leftover French barrel wine, became a master at 'aging' bottles, corks, and labels, and claimed he had a wine cellar unmatched for sophistication and unrivaled quality.  On occasion he would buy an actual high-end wine (he was gifted with a remarkable palate), share it with investors, and con them into thinking this would be the wine they would be buying. 

'That's what I'm talking about!', Ivan's Devil would certainly have said had he known of Bernie and Rudy, 'my kind of guys’

Who in America could not have marveled at former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford who went on fugue, a long absence from the statehouse to be with his Argentine lover in Buenos Aires, and when questioned insisted that he had been hiking the Appalachian trail.  'I needed headspace', he said. 

Or John Edwards, another American politician who bribed a minion to take the fall for him and announce that Edwards' illegitimate child was his; or former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich who gave his dying wife a bouquet of flowers, an 'I love you', and then went off to the Bahamas with his lover.

 

Politics of course is an easy target.  'They all cheat', said a Washington Post Watergate era reporter; but religion is the motherlode.  Bible hucksters since the days of Billy Sunday and Amy Semple McPherson have been making millions off the spiritually bereft.  Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Tammy and Jim Bakker were brilliant at filling their personal treasuries with only the promise of prayer. 

Mackintosh Peters was a snake oil salesmen in the Arizona Territory in the 1870s, and made a good living selling worthless gum Arabic and corn syrup mixtures to the Piute and Navajo.  'Works like a charm', Mack told the Indians, 'take a swig in the morning and one in the evening, and it'll cure what ails you'. 

Which was arthritis, impotence, scabies, catarrh, and suppuration and anything else he could conjure up.  He was long gone before the Indians knew they had been had, but the placebo effect has been around for centuries, so many of his customers told their friends and families how good they felt after only a day's dosage.  If for some reason he found himself back in the same village and was accosted by the Indians he had duped, he had a ready reply. 'Ahh, of course', he would say. ‘I said two swigs in the morning and two at night, not one.'

'What's a swig?' asked an elder of the tribe. 

'Why, like this', Mack said, swilling a half-bottle down in one gulp. 'Ya see, ya wasn't takin' nearly half as much', and with that, he lit out of town, his racks of phials and bottles clinking and rattling in the back seat of the wagon as he drove. 

Nigerians are the kings of cyber trickery.  Snake oil salesmen on a grand scale.  Tens, hundreds of thousands of appeals go out at the click of a mouse and if only a fraction of one percent bears fruit, the Nigerian scammer is set up for life.  

After the genie was out of the bottle and the whole scamming landscape quickly evolved into a barely recognizable, untraceable universe, there was no limit to the money that could be made. Brilliant. 

Husbands cheat on their wives every day of the week, cheating on your taxes has become patriotic, keeping a thumb on the scale was the way Katz's Delicatessen turned a profit.  Cutting corners and reshaping them to look full is an American talent.  

Advertisers cheat with every seductive, persuasive ad, always keeping one step ahead of the FCC.  Politicians tell bald-faced lies, are found out, apologize, and are re-elected.  Televangelists who have an unaccountable product keep on praying and passing the basket.  

Looked at through the prim, censorious lens of the social and moral reformer, all this cheating is corrosive, destructive, and hurtful; but looked at through a more forgiving one, it is the only thing that keeps us awake. 

Without it there would be no television serials, no gossip, no kibbitzing by the water cooler, no locker room stories, no lawyers, no politicians, empty shelves in the supermarket.  Cheating, and its handmaidens lying and confabulation, are what make the world go round. 

War, A Love Affair - The Allure Of Fiery Destruction

Imagine Genghis Khan with an army of ten thousand men thundering out of the Steppes, slaying all in his wake, laying waste to village after village, and nothing but carnage and death in his wake from the Far East to Europe.  It must have been a grand and heroic  spectacle.

Khan was charismatic and fearsome; and 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 feel of the earth shaking with the thunder of 50,000 hooves were enough to send enemies into retreat; but the thought alone of this terrible, bloodthirsty, and mighty warrior would have been enough. 

Genghis Khan was a man of absolute will and power, a frightening figure of power and vengeance.  He was a horseman of the Apocalypse.

 

The Crusades were Christian but just as barbaric.  Pope Urban’s armies were sent out to destroy and annihilate the Muslim occupiers of Jerusalem, to rid the world of them and their godless, heathen, insidious religion.  The mayhem and slaughter wreaked by the crusading armies was little different from that of Genghis Khan.

The battles of wars past were exalting in their ferocity –  banners flying, swords flashing, and thickets of arrows flying them through the dust of battle.  Armed horsemen – mammoth, incredible figures to most enemies who had never seen horses – charged through the enemy lines, slashing all from their mounts until the battlefield was littered with dead.

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 while Genghis Khan added an almost untamed savagery to his victories.

The battles of the Aztecs were more like those of Genghis Khan, for in addition to classic military strategy, organization, and a half-civilized barbarism, they added a powerful spiritual element.  Soldiers dressed in the skins of animals whose spirits they possessed.  When they attacked the enemy, they killed like a panther would; or ripped and tore flesh like an eagle.

The army of Montezuma which pursued the enemy across the Mexican highlands was not just comprised of men, it was made up of powerful animal spirits. It was the panther which killed, the eagle which ripped enemy flesh, and the jaguar which tore at enemy throats. There could be no greater spectacle of battle than that of the great Aztec armies and the wild soldiers dressed in animal skins, talons, and feathers charging across the plains.

The armies of the European Crusades fought for their Christian God, and felt his spirit within as they attacked the Infidel.  Theirs was a military engagement with strategy, operations, and tactics; but it was also a holy war, inspired by a holy cause, and guided by God himself.

Early modern warfare was tame by comparison.  World War I was a war of mud, trenches, barbed wire perimeters, mortar fire and infantry charges.  It was a war without spectacle, fought without clear cause or purpose, and was responsible for the deaths of millions.

World War II was the first fully modern war, for it combined classic military tactics with a full complement of armaments – planes, tanks, artillery, riflery, rockets, mortars, and bombs. Soldiers had a cause – Hitler had invaded their countries and they were determined to drive him out – but they were part of a military machine, cogs in its wheels.  Battles were hard-fought, territory often gained by feet, not miles, and battle lines shifting by the week.  It was an ordinary war.

It was not until Vietnam when the spectacle of war again appeared.  F-16 jet fighters were once again Apocalyptic as they rained terror down from the skies.  The destruction was Biblical and epic.

Despite Hinduism’s image as one of shanti, Om, and peace, its mythology is based on endless cycles of destruction and rebirth.  The goddess Kali is the Destroyer and the god Siva dances for its rebirth.

Despite our intentions to end war and to progress towards a peaceful, accommodating, compassionate, and respectful Utopia, brutal, bloody, insensate conflicts will – as always – exist.   How can millennia of violent, aggressive, brutal, human history not be of relevance? Genghis Khan is more expressive of human nature than Jesus Christ ever was.

The Old Testament, of course, reads in parts like the chronicles of Genghis Khan.  Yahweh having seen how badly the Garden of Eden turned out, destroyed the world in the Flood.   When the world repopulated and returned to its evil ways, God sent a message to the sinful.  He destroyed the entire populations of Sodom and Gomorrah – men, women, children, and babies – in a vengeful, murderous purge.  That too did not work, and he sent Jesus to deal with a seemingly irremediable world.  His message of love, compassion, and brotherhood went unheeded, and the world now is no different than it ever was.  God anticipated this, of course, and vowed to destroy the entire universe in a fiery inferno.

So Genghis Khan, the Crusades, Sodom and Gomorrah, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the firebombing of Dresden, the napalming of Vietnam, and the nuclear intentions of rogue states are all part of the same, predictable scenario.  The comic books of the Fifties were not aberrations but prophetic.  It would not be aliens who would destroy the world, but ourselves.  The same inevitability, the same destiny.

A few years back American boys played with He-man figures and created out of imagination and popular lore their own existential battles.

Hindu philosophy teaches cycles of destruction and regeneration as the natural order, but the destruction is much more human than the regeneration.  Nietzsche believed that an expression of pure Will – one beyond morality, beyond good and evil – is the only thing that validates our humanity.  The F-16 fighter pilot raining terror from the skies, the panther man ripping the throat out of his enemy, or Genghis Khan, Nietzsche’s perfect Superman rampaging his way through the civilized world, are all very much like us all.

Although we may live in a quiet, orderly, predictable world, there is something violently primitive still in us all; and as much as we talk about peace, community, and diversity, we cannot ignore it.

Our religions have become tame and tepid compared to the animistic and supremely powerful religions of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, where the Zapotecs worshiped thunder, lightning, earthquakes, and violent storms and sacrificed their own to appease their gods. Our wars have become tame, remote, and surgical. Acts of human will and expressions of pure power are – for the time being – things of the past. 

This period of temperance, judicious political restraint cannot last,  Our lust for violence, our blood lust, sanctioned by acts of war must be satisfied and it soon will be. The New Age has tried to tame such lust, and boys are encouraged not to destroy things but to build them – trucks, cranes, and bulldozers are sought-after toys by concerned parents – but little boys find ways to engage the trucks in battle, to crash them, overturn them, and destroy them.  It’s in our genes.