Annals Of Underdevelopment - An African Dump With Oil, Foie Gras, And A Fulani Mistress

Fulani women are prized in Africa, for they come from Egypto-Syrian stock and share all the Caucasian traits of those ethnic groups.  As such they are far from the traditional Bantus, the predominate ethnicity of Africa.  Amina Diallo was a Fulani and one of the most beautiful women that Antoine M'bele, President-for-Life had ever seen.  He had paid thousands for her, promised her untold riches and the privileges of a queen, and established her as queen of his renowned harem. 

M'bele was president of a sub-Saharan African country with oil, emeralds, and rare earths, one whose favor was sought after by America and every important European and Asian nation.  The Chinese had promised to rebuild all of M'bele's country's infrastructure for a guaranteed, permanent below market rate for oil, and the Americans had pledged to look the other way at his famous financial siphon into which were poured millions of unaccountable dollars and flowed out into his many Aruban bank accounts. 

'Ours is a dump with oil', M'bele said with a loud, barking guffaw at a colloquy of international donor agencies gathered in the luxurious forest resort he had built with Swedish assistance.  He was proud of this epithet heard in the corridors of the World Bank and the US State Department.  

He knew that he was untouchable and in great demand.  The world's economic powers, hungry for energy and the minerals necessary for cell phones and computers, had always given him a free pass when it came to the bottom line.  As long as they could pump oil and mine Neodymium and Dysprosium, they looked the other way at his governance, off-shore bank accounts, and secret police. 

Harrison Fitch was a Loan Officer for an international development bank in charge of a multi-million dollar 'investment' in improving the country's health infrastructure.  His bank, a close ally of the administration in Washington, agreed to be the non-partisan representative of American interests in the country.  His bank loans would be the cover for the 'cash transfers' enabled by the US State Department.

In other words, the American Treasury would finance the international bank with the resources to be 'loaned' to M'bele.  M'bele was never expected to repay the loan, the bank would renegotiate and reconfigure the loan in a public gesture of international and national accountability, but the money would still exit the country into M'bele's private accounts - all for guaranteed rights to mine rare earths in his eastern provinces. 

Now, Fitch was no fool, and saw ways to benefit from his financial wizardry. He was less interested in the same kind of cash transfers enabled by his bank and the Americans, but wanted to enjoy the same perks as M'bele, or at least share in those riches. 

M'bele, who saw in Fitch a willing and important ally.  Although Fitch was merely an international civil servant, a lackey of the powers that be, he could still muddy the waters with inconvenient truths.  Similarly, with proper encouragement, he might write reports more favorable to the regime than were merited, pave the way for bi-lateral agreements and long-term accords.  

Fitch had to do no work in the country given the nature of his assignment.  He merely had to sign off on the receipt of funds by M'bele, their transfer to the Ministry of Health, and onward distribution to regional hospitals and local clinics.   This signature was only a formality, for neither one of the partners actually expected any health return on the investment; so for the three weeks he would spend in country he would be treated with the hospitality due to royalty, most importantly the company of the beautiful Amina Diallo, Fulani princess. 

As much as Amina was prized by M'bele, she was neither wife nor love interest.  She had been bought for a handsome sum from Egyptian traders and was property to be used, bartered, loaned, and traded as M'bele saw fit.  

This was not slavery nor servitude, but a consensual arrangement.  In turn for her service, her extended family in Mali would be well-taken care of and would never have to worry. Her brothers would be educated and even sent to France for university, her father was able to buy up a thousand acres of World Bank-financed irrigated lands along the river, and her mother secure and happy assisted by a bevy of servants. 

M'bele was a considerate and practiced lover.  While Amina felt nothing but duty and financial responsibility when he politely knocked on the door, she was herself a practiced actress, and the President always left very pleased indeed.  

'I want you to meet Amina', the President said to Fitch on their first meeting of his tour of the country. 'I think you will enjoy her company', and so it was that the beautiful Fulani and the banker spent many pleasurable nights in a suite at the five-star hotel M'bele had built thanks to Norwegian generosity.  

It was an idyll made in heaven, and nothing could have been more perfect.  For an acknowledging signature here and there, a desultory look at a health center or two, and a live-and-let-live complaisance when it came to any bottom line, Fitch could live in the lap of luxury. 

Now, this happy accommodation was not the exception, nor the rule, but a circumstance not overlooked by many in the business.  It was not the moral affair of those sent out to African countries to investigate, discover, and report questionable activities. Moral responsibility, if that term can even be applied anywhere in Africa, was the matter of those in bank headquarters and the President's office.  To those in charge Fitch and his colleagues were errand boys, sent to deliver groceries, and return to the store. 

The errand boys, however demeaning the assignments might sound, clambered for work.  What could be better than a sojourn in a five-star hotel with a beautiful mistress, and treated to Moet-Chandon, foie gras, and the finest food west of Suez?

 

These 'arrangements', of course, were at the very top of the development chain. The international banks were well-known for their influence, status, and first-class travel; but there were hundreds of other government-financed NGOs who sent out consultants to oversee projects in health, education, and welfare - projects which sponsors knew would have little chance of success but showed the world that rich, white nations cared about the black man. 

Money went in one door and out the other, but there was at least some actual enterprise - a teacher training workshop, a few clean syringes, a community loan operation.  These projects never amounted to much and were never expected to, but had enough visibility to ensure positive reports back to Congress and the American taxpayer who wanted their dollars to be doing good. 

These consultants never enjoyed the pleasures of beautiful Fulani women, but were not denied creature comforts - a decent per diem and hotel allowances, business class travel, all expenses paid European stopovers, etc. They were all in on the scam - for that was what international development was - and never gave it a second thought. 

When Donald Trump got rid of USAID, only these consultants were sorry, for the sinecure was now over.  However African leaders like M'bele were not put out of work.  They simply did their business directly with Exxon Mobil, Microsoft, and Apple.

'The halcyon years', said Fitch from his retirement home on Hilton Head.  'The best, the absolute best', and so they were, those idyllic nights and days, the pleasures, the indolence, the perfection of it all. 

'We were lucky', Fitch said to a brother-in-arms, a colleague from a sister bank who had enjoyed the same happy, sybaritic life as Fitch.  'Very lucky indeed.'

One Of Us, One Of Us, Or Looking For A Niche When No One Will Have You - The Sequelae Of Identity

Halsey Taylor grew up in a uniformly white, Christian, middle-class community, all of whom had respectable jobs, went to church on Sunday, played golf and bridge, marched in Fourth of July parades, had Sunday dinners, and ate simply but well. 

 

New Brighton was not exactly an idyll - Elvira Carlson hanged herself by a clothes' line in the backyard in view of the neighbors; and Frank Ardmore was a cheat and fraudster - but all in all it was a familiar, recognizable piece of the American pie that could be found anywhere. It was a time of patriotism, comity, and community. 

Halsey was a bit of a difficult child, an obstreperous adolescent, and an angry young woman champing at the bit, wanting more than New Brighton could ever offer.  What that something was, Halsey had no idea; but she knew that she was destined for more than the kinder, kirche, kuchen her hometown offered.

She went off to Smith College, one of the Seven Sisters who mimicked the Ivy League in every way - heritage, family, promise, culture - but who were exclusively female, still, despite their pedigree, second class institutions. 

It was a good, logical choice for a young woman of intelligence and ambition, but Halsey was unprepared for the randy lesbianism of the place - the horny assumptions of every upper class woman who took le droit du seigneur as written and who preyed on the young freshman ingenues who came to Northampton thinking only of Kant, Pericles, and Shakespeare. 

It was like swatting away flies, so buzzingly insistent were these women who assumed that entry into the club of the Seven Sisters meant sexual complaisance.  As time went on the insistence became more aggressive and insistent, more like a maximum security prison than a girls school - sex for favors, sex because it was available, slaves and chattel, overlords, and Simon Legrees all in this quaint Massachusetts town and ivy-halled college. 

Once out of college, finding herself adrift - the old New Brighton angst had not diminished, but virtual resentment against the received wisdom and assumed values of Smith increased - she foundered.  Where was the husband she had been promised, the Capitol Hill internship, the coattails of power?

Her classmates had all gone underground; or at least joined forces with the anti-establishmentarian Left, and become a feral mob of political dissidents. Not exactly traitors to their families and their heritage - Smith, like the other Seven Sisters and the Ivy League was still patrician to the core, aristocratic in philosophy and outlook, wealthy and privileged - but close, credulous followers of the New Age. 

She demurred, hesitant to belong to the great sweeping demographic cohort of  'The Sixties', faux liberalism, and facile, love-the-one-you're-with fellowship; but in those days, what else was there?  She had not found Mr. Right of Greenwich, Connecticut, Wall Street banker, and scion of Cabots and Lodges, had certainly not been willing to fold back in to the graces of middle-brow New Brighton, and found the caterwauling about civil rights, peace, and justice loud and irritating. 

Yet she needed a place to hang her hat, to lay her head on the pillow, to call home.  Things, however, got progressively worse as old style, Lafollette, Gompers, and Brandeis liberalism morphed into post-Sixties progressivism.  Catcalls and hysteria replaced any sensible correctional policies, bull dykes and drag queens pushed aside generational sanity, and the country had devolved into a potpourri of nasty-minded cabals. 

Where did she belong, adamantly white, upper middle class, Christian, straight, and mindful of the Founding Fathers? 

Giorgia Meloni, conservative President of Italy famously and proudly said, 'I am Giorgia.  I am a woman.  I am a mother.  I am Christian.  I am European, and I am Italian!, encapsulating in one speech the fundamental principles of European conservatism; and Halsey Taylor responded.  'I am Giorgia' she said. 

All well and done, but how to translate that particular European ethos into American civic reality?  Every principle Meloni endorsed was considered anathema by the American Left.  Womanhood? What was that when considering the fluidity of the gender spectrum?

Halsey had been an advocate of civil rights.  She had always hoped that Jefferson's search for a homeland for freed slaves had been fulfilled.  The third American president understood that the release of hundreds of thousands of uncivilized African tribal savages into the body politic would cause disruption and havoc.  That unfulfilled expectation had led to decades of racialism and division - the inner city, the ghetto, the inchoate demands of the supposedly black underserved were its legacy. 

The release of gayness and transgenderism on the American public was no resolution to sexual enslavement, but a horrific distortion of normality.  Open borders had once and for all exposed the brown and black populations as underdeveloped, unsocialized, and unwanted.  Cries for the redistribution of wealth were no more than romantic idealism and neo-Communist cant. 

Politics had destroyed the original American ethos. Ambition, opportunity, advancement as a function of talent, intelligence, and capability were suspect.  Identity, so flimsily and errantly based on race, gender, and ethnicity had destroyed comity and universal subscription to fundamental values. 

She was in effect, stripped naked.  A woman with intelligence, ability, legacy and agency standing alone in the square, spat upon, ready to be bound, tethered, and burned at the stake. 

She had few choices.  She could furl her ensign, rejoin the sailing fleet, hoist the flag of social reform, and lie, complaisantly on her comfortable unearned income; join the ultra-conservative nationalists and build a political party as successful as the AfD party in Germany or Marine LePen's ultra-nationalists in France; or show up the idiocy and faux sanctity of American progressives...But where would that leave her?

She was no Stoic, no Epictetian no desultory sitter on the sidelines who could watch the hysterical cacophony of the Left without reaction; but still and all in all where was she to go?

It is ironic but understandable how a culture of inclusivity was by its nature exclusive,  Rather than assume that everyone was part of one, unified, companionable national community, one had to prove one's bona fides - black, gay, etc. 

Progressivism by its very canonical aspiration for Utopia, has fragmented, dissolved, and dismissed any sense of unity, of pulling together rowing the same boat; and so it was that Halsey ended up adrift, a supernumerary to political advocacy, a fifth wheel. 

Yet, she started off as a rugged, uncowed, determined individualist - a pissy little kid who knew what was what - and managed quite well.  The world is 99.9 percent accommodated, fitted nicely into prescriptive groups, but Halsey part of the tiny fraction not only survived but prospered. At least she knew that she was of the elite. 

When Diversity Goes Rogue, Stick To Your Own Kind - The Demise Of A Central, Universal Ethical Core

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

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

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

Of course Bernstein was just whistlin' Dixie.  Ever since the first Paleolithic settlements, human beings have formed likeminded groups and have been suspicious of 'the other'.  Human and animal societies have always prized centrality, core identity, universal belonging and have fought fiercely to defend polity, consensus, security, and identity.  Bee and ant colonies are built on complex social systems designed to propagate, protect, and defend the colony.  No outsiders, no intruders, no external intent is tolerated. 

In human society there has always been a tendency to form larger groups of associated, similar interests.  There is clearly strength in numbers, but only if those numbers add up to the same sum.  Groups become larger groups, extend their each, become more and more inclusive.  Religion became a central camping ground as did politics. 

Social groupings - the natural colloquies of the similar and likeminded - have always described human aggregations and always will. 

For large social groups comity is essential.  Fragmentation into self-interested groups is antithetical and destructive.  This is why China has always been a powerful nation and is now increasingly so.  It has refused ethnic separatism and insisted that all distinct groups abandon cultural distinction and join the universal, national polity of the nation at large. 

At the heart of this cultural polity is a strong ethical, Confucian core.  Separate ethnic identity means nothing compared to universal comity - subscription to a social, ethical, and moral core that guides every action and anneals divisions of self-interest. 

Japan is no different, hewing to the same idea of a central ethical core, in their case derived from Shintoism and Buddhism, but with a strong, undeniable cultural and historical legacy. 

Russia and Turkey, both with storied empires, understand the importance of cultural unanimity.  The Ottoman Empire - like the Roman, Mongol, Mauryan, or Persian - could never have existed without a strong, ineradicable cultural center and a universal embrace of it. 

Understanding the natural human tendency to form identity groups, but equally realizing the corrosive nature of such separatism has been the key to national strength and geopolitical supremacy. 

The United States once understood this - Thomas Jefferson and his Founding Fathers colleagues formed the new republic based on philosophical and religious principles.  The nation, although refusing the dictatorial imposition of European religion, would nonetheless be 'One Nation Under God' and would be guided by the principles of the Enlightenment. Logic and reason were only means to the end of better understanding God and his Creation. 

Now, however, the nation is ruled by identity politics - the division of the country into racial, ethnic, and gender groups, all legitimized by narrow self-interest.  National ethos, polity, comity, subscription to universal norms of right behavior have been rejected in favor of cultural separatism.  Blacks and whites have nothing in common, nor do gays and straights.  There is no attempt to find common ground because a priori, ipso facto there is none. 

Europe, after decades of the liberal, inclusivist policies which have let in millions of Middle Eastern and African Muslims, has realized the mistake it made.  These immigrants, always harshly critical of and militantly aggressive against all other religions, have made it clear that they will create a sub-state within national borders.  They have refused European secularism, and have insisted that God's law - their Islamic social code - will always have the ultimate say. 

Conservative leaders in France, the UK, and Germany will most certainly be elected in the next round of voting, and they have vowed not only to close the borders but to deport all who are in the country illegally and to insist on overt and universal subscription to European cultural laws and traditions.  Cultural diversity will be respected as long as it does interfere with, counter, or reject the universal norms of the nation. 

Poland and Hungary have made cultural integrity the cornerstone of their political agenda.  Poland has been publicly proud of its tight immigration policy, and Giorgia Meloni, President of Italy has said loudly and proudly, 'I am Giorgia.  I am a woman.  I am a mother. I am Christian. I am European, and I am Italian!' the litany of foundational values. 

Japan under its new conservative leadership has vowed to close down mosques, deport anyone who has not become fully Japanese, and has vowed to preserve Japanese culture. 

Of course the European Left has cried fascism, neo-Nazism, and right-wing extremism, and have begun a hate-mongering campaign to cast all conservatives as retrograde, bullying Hitlerian National Socialists. 

Conservative adherents have been very outspoken in their frustration and anger at having for so long been forced to bow to the claims of the Left that white, Christian Europe has been nothing but a predatory, warmongering, colonialist, oppressor, and good riddance to it. 

American conservatives have raised the same angry cries.  For years Americans have been told that white, Christian America is evil, the perpetuator of slavery, Jim Crow, persistent systemic racism, and the oppression of minorities and the poor.  The creation of identity groups has been an important way to counter white, straight, Christian supremacy. 

Conservatives are having no more of it.  White, Christian, Europe has given the world modern civilization - art, literature, science, philosophy, architecture, laws, and civil governance - and its inheritors in America should not only be proud of that legacy but do everything to restore it. 

To create a culture of identity is to foist a superficial, discrediting, demeaning philosophy on the citizenry.  A focus on race, gender, and ethnicity diminishes and detracts from the attention which should be paid to intelligence, talent, creativity, insight, and social courage.  There will always be differences among people. 

The bell curve will always and inevitably define human society - there will always be the smarter and the less able, those with will and ambition and those without, those with talent and insight, and those who remain ignorant and credulous. 

The bell curve describes performance, actual or potential - and that has always been part and parcel of the American ethos.  A land of infinite opportunity which some will take advantage of and others won't.  Racial differences might be factors in the character of the bell curve, but are irrelevant in and of themselves. 

Europe will soon close its borders, expunge anti-cultural elements, and return to a central cultural ethos. The smell of ragu, kielbasa, couscous, and thieboudienne will still fill alleys and byways, but that's where cultural diversity will stop.  

An Insane Asylum Opens Its Doors, And An Inmate Runs For Office - From Loony Bin To Washington, What A Great Country

Janet Putnam did not consider herself mentally ill.  She was convinced that she had been cured before St. Elizabeth's suddenly opened its doors and freed the inmates.  Not so the others.  Regina Phipps was still as loony as a red-eyed cockatoo when she walked out onto the city streets, still talking to herself, babbling about abduction, sexual adversity, and plum pudding, no different than she did when she kept the whole ward awake with her cackling and demented rambling. 

Angela Crawford danced like a whirling dervish from morning till night until the attendants strapped her in her bed where she twisted, shook, and writhed until morning, as cadaverous looking as a refugee from the grave, as crazy as anyone on the ward, a nutcase, an unrecoverable, hopeless woman. 

In any case, out they went, lock, stock, and barrel by federal order.  The Congress of the United States under its all-encompassing act to protect the disabled, concluded that internment in mental facilities was cruel and unjust punishment, and that the mentally ill were no different from anyone else, just temporarily dislocated. 

Now Janet Putnam was just kidding herself about her sanity.  She was as batty as the rest of them; it was just that she didn't show it.  Her insanity was deeply buried, cloaked in an eager normality; but when it emerged as a demonically twisted specter that belonged only in a straightjacket, it was fearsome to see. She became transformed, mutated, and unrecognizable. And that was just for starters - her panoply of apparitions was another thing altogether. 

Luckily for her the demonic side stayed put except for rare occasions.  Psychiatry had not cured her of her illness, just shoved it far below ground, deep enough, the doctors thought, that it would have trouble emerging. 

The problem was that Janet missed the demonic self, for as in certain cases of epilepsy, patients have vivid hallucinations, often see God, and report the most ecstatic feelings of joy.  To those witnessing her 'fits', she was a scary creature, but on the inside, she was seeing the most beautiful, beatific scenes of the Garden of Eden. 

 

However, she had no control over the demon, and like epileptic fits, it could emerge at any time and unexpectedly.  Over her last year in the asylum before they opened the doors, she had had only one 'emergence', at supper when it appeared and as she stood up, spilling the soup and the condiments all over the table, she shouted, 'He has risen!'.  

The emergence was over as quickly as it had come.  She settled down, asked for another bowl of soup, and continued her conversation with her friends. 

The attendants of St. Elizabeth's were surprised at the Congressional order.  There was no way that these wackos should be let out onto the street, but there it was in black and white, posted on the office door as plain as day, and within weeks of the declaration, the hospital was empty. 

The state did provide some transitional care - halfway houses, temporary lodging to give former inmates time to adjust to their new surroundings - but most patients didn't know the difference and thought that they were still in K Ward of S Block. 

Janet was different.  She refused - as she had a legal right to do under the new law - to enter one of these halfway establishments, for she considered herself well enough and able enough to negotiate her way through civilian life.  She had a sizeable bank account and considerable investments which had been untouched during her stay at St. Elizabeth's and had grown considerably thanks to a favorable market. 

With those earnings she rented a spacious and well-appointed apartment in the Dresden, on Connecticut Avenue.  The owner, an old matron of considerable wealth, died, and her children who didn't want to be bothered with disposing of that part of the estate, rented it out furnished. It was perfect - classic Victorian, well-kept with views up and down Connecticut Avenue. 

Now, it must be said that Janet's demon might have been well-buried deep in her subconscious but her illness had other, less troublesome, but nagging expressions.  In other words, she was not an entirely well woman, given, particularly at night to seeing things crawling, staring, and flagellating around the apartment.  Having been convinced that these apparitions were not real, she dismissed them, let them carry on until they decided to leave. 

What was she going to do with her time? Her Georgetown acquaintances who had fallen completely for the idea of full integration and accommodation of 'the other' into society's mainstream, and still with great respect for the Putnam family legacy - a First Family of colonial America - and their storied history through the years, took her in like a prodigal child. 

 

She was by no means insane, she knew, and her beauty had been little affected by her time 'away from home'.  She was as much a lively, attractive woman as she ever had been; and her friends would do everything they could to reintroduce her to society. 

Her re-entrance happened during the Biden Administration, an age as most remember, one extremely accommodating to the previously marginalized - the black, the gay, the Hispanic, the poor, and the disabled who were now to be considered no different than anyone else in the white, proper majority.  

Representatives of each identity group, chosen for their charisma and general appeal were enlisted to speak for this community; and so it was that Janet came to be noticed by a Congressman from Ohio who had been a champion of the disabled, he himself having been crippled by a strange childhood palsy and confined to a wheelchair.  

He loved Janet as soon as he met her, for who could not love those cornflower blue eyes, flaxen hair, sumptuous figure, and delightful charm which she had not lost during her internment? In fact, every morning when she looked in the mirror she saw not herself but some princess of the past, one who changed every morning.  

On one morning she might be Nefertiti, another the Czarina of Alexander II of Russia, another the first wife of Sultan Suleiman's harem. It was not that she imagined these women, she was them, and as she walked out the door and saw the admiring looks of every man she passed, she returned the gaze, right and proper for a royal highness to acknowledge her subjects. 

Like the demon episodes, these fugues into the past passed quickly and she recovered her grip on the world without a hitch. 

In any case, it was during one of these episodes - actually an unusual confederation of many princesses and queens of the past - that she met with the Congressman in his Capitol Hill offices.  She was perfectly capable of being a princess and holding the most pedestrian conversations at the same time, such was the peculiarity of her illness. 

And so it was that the besotted Congressman, always left in the lurch by women who were put off by his crippledom and now in the thrall of this exceedingly attractive girl, invited her to join his office and his campaign. 

The mentally ill were always thought of to be a twisted, deformed, drooling, and twitchy lot; and here was just the opposite, a recovering madwoman who could make the case for inclusion. 

It took no practice and no rehearsals for her to be a compelling speaker, for all the various incarnations which were part of her deeply schizophrenic mind joined forces to spread the good news.  Mental illness was not the offensive, horror of Bedlam, Broadmoor, or the maximum security hospitals of Norwich and Battersea.  'I am the mentally ill', she proudly said - or perhaps it was the Duchesse de Nantes who said it. 

 

Not only did she speak for the mentally disabled, she was welcomed into the bigger tent of the progressive movement and before long her beauty, charm, and eloquence led her into climate change, gender reform, the black man, immigration, and the redistribution of wealth.  

Soon she was coopted by the leaders of these many factions and sub-causes and did fewer and fewer mental shows and more and more wider issue appearances.  Before long she was recognized as one of the most articulate spokespersons for the Left.  Yes, she was white, upper class, and straight, but even the arch-liberals of The Movement knew that they had to broaden their reach. 

So successful was she, that she was considered for public office, and it was then that the whole kit-and-kaboodle of demons, princesses, consorts, empresses, and queens came loose from their moorings and appeared all at once.  She began to speak in tongues, imagined ancient Egyptian, Farsi, Russian, and Ottoman Turkish, a nonsensical caterwauling that her audience - this time in the Great Hall of the Kennedy Center to a congregation of a thousand - and was hooked off stage like a bad act in the high days of vaudeville. 

The cat was out of the bag and Janet never felt better.  It was like those first few months at St. Elizabeth before they force-fed her drugs, jammed needles in her arms, and shocked her silly.  Insanity felt good, she said, and now as she was being pulled off the stage, she felt good again. 

Now, of course, there was nowhere to put her.  She was jettisoned as quickly as damaged cargo by her progressive colleagues who wanted mental disability in small doses, not this hysterical mania, but there were no public hospitals open anymore and she had no family that was willing to place her in one of the privately run, exclusive hospitals in Connecticut, so she ended up on the streets, one of a thousand batshit crazy schizophrenics sleeping in culverts; but by this time she didn't know the difference between shit and Shinola and ran out her days completely happily. 

Electric Cars And Hybrid Sex - Life In Our Precious, Fairyland Age

Jan Bossey was well into his sexual transition, feeling a bit dodgy and off his feed at time, but the hormones had kicked in nicely and that springtime, feminine feel that he had long been waiting for had finally arrived.  He put on his Easter bonnet - yes, he knew it was too early, but he simply felt like it, and his new self gave in far more easily to whim and fancy than his old self had. 

When he was a Senior Vice President at a major consulting firm on the Route 128 tech corridor, he had been decisive in his attitude, peremptory and unforgiving in his management, and absolutely determined and goal-oriented in his life.  He was a feared supervisor not because of the harsh punishment meted out to laggards, but because of his stature.  There was no one in the firm with more intelligence and resolve than Jan Bossey.

It was a complete surprise when it was learned that he was unhappy in this premier macho role and had opted to transition.  During initial psychological counselling his feelings about femininity were probed, and while he was not exactly asked to pick from a Chinese menu of options, it amounted to that.  Like everything else in modern genderism, there was a spectrum, ranging from tough Bernal Heights flannel and jackboots tough girls to sweet, frilly, pretty things and everything in between.  Of course, the counselor noted, gender transition was not yet an exact science, no bulls eyes, only approximations.

Jan, feeling if one was in this thing, then one had to be all in, he opted for the frilly end of the gamut.   His mother, like him a romantic and vaudevillian at heart, looked like Toulouse Lautrec’s Jane Avril, all feather boas, black stockings, petticoats, and dancing shoes. 

 “I feel pretty, no matter what anyone says, especially your father”, she said to young Jan who was always her most attentive audience, sitting on the plush dressing room divan waiting for his mother to emerge.  All that anticipation and delight when she finally threw open the door and danced before him had taken hold at a very early age; and despite the many years of suppressing it and becoming an ur-macho Simon Legree, it never went away.  So the choice of the girly-girl persona was easy enough.

Yet, as he proceeded in his transition, he felt that there was something wrong – a niggling sense of incompleteness and dissatisfaction.  He was stuck between second and third gears, he thought on his last trip up and down the Strip in his hemi Dodge Charger.  This too will pass, advised his transition counselor.  One does not simply pull out all that nasty male stuff in one go.  Soon enough he would see the changes he was expecting, and today, the day she donned his Easter bonnet and headed for St. Maurice’s church to flirt with the men talking golf with Father Brophy, the change was secure.

Or almost.  As much as the counselor told him to dismiss his persistent, recurrent dreams of pursuit and penetration, he was always a man in them.  What was this all about?  Despite his current demission and removal from the psychiatric pantheon, Freud’s insights could not be totally dismissed.  Psychiatry was not all behaviorism and drugs, but the psychological potpourri of genes, hormones, childhood, and their weird dynamics.  

If he was chasing women in his dreams, it had to mean something.  Perhaps ‘that nasty male stuff’ his counselor referred to was not just a flimsy thing easy to extract, but something more permanent and resistant to the daily doses of progesterone injected every day.

This middle state, this inconclusive, changeable period of neither here nor there was not unpleasant at all, for what man or woman could feel both male and female?  The very pleasant calm before the storm, the final explosive burst of pure sexuality at the end of the transition process.

Jan had always liked cars, and the Dodge hemi was but the last in a line of muscle cars he had had ever since he turned eighteen.  There was that reconditioned 65 Corvette; the 64 GTO, 389, Hurst three-on-the-floor transmission, racing tuned double carb beast; the chopped and channeled Camaro which tipped out at 150 without so much as a groan or a shimmy.  

He went to car shows and admired the cars he could never afford – Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Maseratis.  He liked to hang around body shops, garages, and racetracks.  He bought a TR-3 for $500 dollars back in the day, took it to Lime Rock and raced in the short track at the foothills of the Berkshires, did his own tune ups, lubes, and brake jobs.  Cars and men were one.

On that very Sunday when he went out in his Easter finery, he noticed a number of hybrid cars in the church parking lot.  Now what were they? he asked permitting himself a moment of doubt.  Of course he knew what they were – little underpowered four-wheelers designed to save energy, to turn on and off, gas and electricity, and designed to get you there without much fanfare.  It was the idea of a hybrid that piqued his now highly sensitive metaphysical interest – something, like him in his current transitionary stage, that was neither this nor that, neither here nor there.

He had never had much patience for Teslas until Elon Musk’s designers made one that would go 0-60 in under two seconds and was one of the fastest production cars on the market.  Musk never got on this neither fish nor foul hybrid bandwagon.  He went all in for electric, and he would make Tesla the peer of the fastest Ferrari on the road.  A macho car despite its batteries and plug-ins.

The hybrids were delicate little nothings that flipped on an off, never made a fuss, and were nothing but shows of environmental purpose for the leafy neighborhoods of Northwest Washington.

So wasn’t he a hybrid? A neither here nor there male/female?  There was no technique for scraping all the XY chromosomes from his DNA and replacing them with double X’s.  Not like sparkplugs or alternators.   He would be an XY male for the rest of his life, like it or not, Easter bonnets notwithstanding. 

But doesn't nature trump nurture in these behavioral days?  It was what you believed you were not what you actually were that counted, that made a difference.  If you truly believed that you were a woman, and that the belief could be augmented by a shot or two of female hormones, then you were a woman, no questions asked.

Yet the hybrid image stayed with Jan and he couldn’t shake it.  He was becoming what he never intended to be – a she-man, he-woman, a sexual hybrid.

The hybrid cars and Freudian dreams put the brakes, so to speak, on Jan’s transition.  He could wear an Easter bonnet whenever he wanted with all his equipment intact, or revert to Dodge Charger hemis; retake the fifth floor of his old firm and rule the roost like he once did, or join the secretarial pool.  

The transgender, gender fluidity advocates had a point.  Sexual expression was a matter of preference, so go with your personal flow. Where Jan got off the bus was denying genetic determinism.  As many frilly dresses as he might wear, no matter how many high heels, handbags, perfume, and eyeliner were his, he would always be Jan Bossey, tough guy.

He went overboard on the return – full beard, heavy drinking, Harley Hog in the garage – but soon settled back into his own particular maleness.  A few friends asked where he had been for the past year or so, but he demurred – family business, personal affairs and that sort of answer – but soon enough that hiatus had been completely, absolutely forgotten.

Suffrage, Feminism, Female Agency - Fertility Gives Way To Secular Obsession, Lessons From The Lindsay Clancy Trial

The women shouting for Lindsay Clancy's acquittal, absolving her from the responsibility of murdering her three children because of 'mitigating circumstances' displayed cracks in the feminine ideal.  Somehow the movement for equal rights, shattering the glass ceiling, full and free access to all that modern America had to offer had gone off the rails. The murder trial - Clancy had readily admitted to killing the little ones - had turned into a sad caricature.

There was no way said liberal women, that this woman, beleaguered and besieged by a patriarchal, abusive husband, chained to motherhood and deprived of even the basics of a liberated life, should be convicted.  If anything, she was understandably disturbed, upset, and indeed mentally ill because of the punitive treatment meted out by her typically misogynist man. 

One juror - a man - refused to buckle to this progressive hysteria, held his ground, and insisted that she was guilty of first degree murder.  She had researched strangling on the web, found a suitable errand for her husband that would take him out of the house until she had done the deed, and had planned the whole thing.  

The children had to be rid of, exterminated, eliminated from life.  To rule anything but premeditated murder would itself be a crime, a capitulation to febrile politically correct nonsense, a travesty of justice, and an unholy, immoral act. 

Marcia Griffin was on the fence when it came to the trial.  She had been married twice to fools and ignoramuses and to this day she damned herself for being so credulous and naive.  How could she not have known?  How had she been so shamed and cowed by an abusive father, watched him demean and dismantle very shred of dignity of her mother, that she jumped at the opportunity of loving a good man? Hah! How stupid and hopelessly romantic.  

Yes, Harper Fleming was dashing and virile, charitable and attentive and seemingly kind and caring; but it didn't take long for him to sidle up to the women in his office, the tarts on K Street, and the dames in his corporate boardroom. Marcia thought she was marrying the anti-father when in fact, Skinner, Maslow, and Freud being directly on target, she instead took wedding vows with her father,  Harrison P Griffin himself. 

The second time around should be a charm, but husband number two turned out to be a wheezy wheedler, a randy follower who claimed he knew women but that was just part of his treacly liberalism.  He gave her more space than No. 1, but was so objectionable and totally, completely clueless about femaleness, femininity, and womanhood that she couldn't stand one more painful, numbing hour with him. 

That was Part I of her Lindsay Clancy dilemma. Part II was her hidden desire to have children, many of them, to fulfill the only real reason women were created in the first place, fertility and reproduction.  Of course in today's progressive political environment in which she made her home, she could never even hint at what would be considered treasonous notions, but there there they were, niggling, insistent, thoughts that wouldn't retreat.  

So as much as she agreed with the millions of set-upon women who felt that Lindsay was simply acting out a justified reaction to male subjugation and the prison of motherhood, she could not deny that the woman had snuffed out the life that she had given - that only she, a woman, could give. Murder was one thing, unacceptable, heinous, criminal, and immoral; but when committed against the very flesh and blood that a woman created, carried, and delivered was in a hell reserved for only the most evil. 

The trial which had become a viral, social media caricature of modern politics - liberal vs conservative philosophy - for Marcia it was far more than that. It forced the hidden conundrum - fertility or agency - out into the open, forced her to wonder why she had resisted motherhood so adamantly and ferociously, why she had reviled God's creation. 

 

At the same time Marcia thought of Freud who was quite generous to the mature, intelligent women of his day who simply and austerely chose either single womanhood or a life unencumbered by children. 

He wrote about Aimee Herzog, wife of Austrian financier Henrik Herzog.  Mrs. Herzog was the center of Viennese society, had charmed Freud with her wit, intelligence, and social grace.  She led a life which suggested a new age of female agency, a pre-feminist who admired mothers, children, and childbirth, but who abjured the idea for herself. 

There was room enough in the universe for both kinds of women, surely, so why was it that she was so upset by the subterranean urgings of motherhood?  A lifelong progressive, espouser of every cause in the liberal canon, she froze at the idea of abortion.  

Her colleagues had become cavalier about it.  The fetus was no more than a clot of unwanted phlegm, an irritation, and intrusion to be rid of. And yet the fetus had a beating heart and could feel pain.  Even if one did not grant identity to the unborn child, it was a potential soul and scraping it summarily out of the womb was depriving a life of being. 

So how were these howling hyenas calling for the head of the male juror who resisted their hectoring, bullying, and abuse representative of the modern woman?  Something had gone wrong between suffrage and today.  Something had gotten twisted beyond recognition when women defended the likes of Lindsay Clancy and her heinously conceived and executed execution of her children?

These same progressive colleagues laughed at the stay-at-home moms of the country, the homemakers, caretakers, wives, women content with their calling - the only calling which distinguished them from men.  

Worse, progressive women were questioning the very nature of womanhood.  Wasn't gender self-identified and one could choose from any one of a hundred choices up and down the fluid gender spectrum? How were men, castrated, injected, twisted and deformed into horrible caricatures of women, ever considered women?

When the suffragettes of the early Twentieth Century demanded the right to vote, they only wanted electoral equality and with it the ancillary rights of property, ownership, and wealth. They were vilified, abhorred and rejected, but they were right.  Fertility and agency could exist simultaneously.  No one said that electoral power eliminated the nature of a woman to reproduce. 

In today's culture of identity there is no such thing as a national ethos, a universal moral code to which everyone subscribes.  Race, gender, and ethnicity trump obedience to and respect for commandments of right behavior.  A woman is simply one of many identities, and within that one fungible category, she can subdivide, reconfigure, and reform.  In so doing she has lost both fertility and agency. 

As much as Marcia listened to the blandishments of her colleagues, their pleas for understanding the female condition that Lindsay Clancy represented, their demands for lockstep solidarity in the matter of rejecting male patriarchy and privilege, and their insistence on the irrelevance of motherhood, she remained unconvinced.  The woman had murdered three innocent children, killed them one by one as each watched. 

For Marcia it was too late for husband No. 3, too late for fertility, for children and for motherhood.  She would have to stand on the sidelines and watch, regret her own ignorance, lack of will, and submission to the outrageously deformed canon of the Left.  

There was nowhere for her to turn.  She could no longer abide progressivism and the sanctimony of her liberal friends - the Clancy case slammed the door shut on them - and she had been far too public about her endorsement of the canon she now despised to be looked at as only an operative, a spy, a mole in the conservative camp.

It didn't have to end this way, but she did not have the willpower of the one male juror who stood his ground at the Clancy trial to resist the cant and doctrinaire bullying of her colleagues.

Hers is a sad story.  Now old, without children, with no comforting political camaraderie, no future, no man, and only regrets for a past unrealized she passed out of sight, lamentably out of mind, and eventually away. 

The Vanity Of Leaving Something Behind - The Jolly 'I Did That' Yale Reunion

Augustus Spillane stood on the podium before the Class of 19__, now old men giving their last hurrah, and intoned, 'Climate change...Existential threat or the nonsense of fools'.  Here he paused for effect, for everyone in the audience knew that he had been the head of one of the most influential environmental organizations and the United States' special envoy to the Conference on Global Environmental Rights. 

Gusty Spillane was a true blue social justice warrior on an international scale, a man of agency. 

Spillane was also a prick, and had been every since his Yale days.  He and his Opus Dei classmates considered themselves the intellectual center of the class, far more impressive in intellect, intelligence, ironic wit, and social stature than even Skull and Bones, Yale's most prestigious secret society of which both Presidents Bush were members.  

Gusty had curried favor with those assumed to be members - Peter Cabot of the Boston Cabots, Arthur Davenport of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and founder of New Haven, and Fitch Longworth of Salem and Newport, colonial entrepreneur, trader, and owner of a fleet of ships plying the Three Cornered Trade. 

Nothing doing.  Skull and Bones never once considered Gusty's interest, thought him far from the patrician, old Anglo-Saxon family history required for membership.  Gusty was an arriviste, a pompous comer who thought that just because he had read Summa Theologica, he was somehow Skull and Bones material. 

Gusty took offence.  Who were these privileged toffs who had never had an original thought in their heads, vacuous, airy nothings?  

But the sting of rejection hurt and lasted throughout Yale.  He and his Catholic buddies, Chuck Moakley and Dean Farmer, huddled conspiratorially in a corner of the Trumbull College dining room and debated Aquinas and Augustine. 

They were 'douche bags', public school bursary boys who if not seen hunched together at a dining room table were behind the steam trays paying off their debt to Yale.  This double whammy - public school and need-based scholarship - was bad enough, but there they were in plain sight to all, white aprons and gloves, dishing out Salisbury steak to the private school, old monied idiots admitted to Yale on the basis of family legacy. 

Now as in the case of many poor boys who have made it to the first rung of success - Presidents Nixon and Clinton were motivated by their straitened circumstances and fought all the harder to work their way up the ladder - Gusty took the dismissiveness, sniffy scorn, and outright rejection at Yale and made it work for him.  He would show those assholes. 

It didn't take Gusty long out of Yale and the University of Michigan graduate school to join in the civil rights movement of the day.  He was a frontliner, an advocate for the black man par excellence, and an inveterate hatred for the white, privileged grandees of the South who cannily and easily restored slavery by calling it something else.  The tenant farming system instituted during the arch-punitive period of Reconstruction was nothing but slavery plus a few pennies spent at the company store.  

Gusty's hatred was visceral, a playing out of all the resentment and spite he felt for the Northern grandees who had made his life so miserable. This virulent animus gave him energy and a kind of ignorant courage, first to get beaten by Bull Connor's axe handles, bitten by his dogs, and set upon by his cracker mob.  He cared less about the fate of the Negro and more about venting his anger against white powers that be. 

 

From there, like most of his brothers-in-arms, he drifted from one progressive cause to another and somehow landed in the midst of the embryonic environmental movement.  This was a movement which relied on objectivity - historical data from sailing ships, temperature readings from the Humboldt current and Gulf Stream, and measurements of polar ice - and had a missionary zeal that other causes did not.  Climate change - then known as global warming - was an afterthought, a fanciful notion cooked up by zealots. 

Americans jacked up their air conditioners in the summer and their heat in the winter without a thought to the extra carbon emissions they were causing.  Global warming was simply a rousting issue for social activists, and when Gusty tried to convince others of the importance of immediate action, he was dismissed as convincingly as he was at Yale. 

More coal for the boiler. Gusty worked up a head of steam thanks to this mindless indifference, and was unstoppable, a whirling dervish of righteous fervor.  As he gained recognition within the movement, he was heard more and more at conferences, seminars, and protests challenging his supporters to do more, to join the army of the Left, soldiers in the crusade against human ignorance and darkness. 

So by the time Gusty stood before his classmates at their reunion, he was well-known as the world's environmentalist, the man to see, the person who more than anyone brought the reality of climate change before the people.  

Of course by this time the issue of global warming had faded from view in light of the wars in Ukraine and Iran, the resurgence of Russia and the preeminence of China; and especially considering new data from the polar ice caps and coastal areas of both the Pacific and Atlantic which showed, if anything, global cooling.  

Evidence from bio-geographers at Harvard who studied climate data from fossil records of the Pleistocene and after was particularly damning to the cause.  Cyclical climate change was the norm, not the exception, and the world was simply in one of these warming cycles which no amount of man-made influence could affect significantly. 

Nevertheless, despite the increasing evidence that the whole climate change thing was a fanciful invention, a mystical illusion fueled by Armageddon-like secular primitivism, and a total hoax, Gusty stood before his class and hammered on about incinerating croplands, the return of tropical disease, the inundating waters of the world's oceans, and the miasmic doom of an overheated world. 

Gusty, tired and spent - after all a man of his age could not be expected to gin up the energy of a young man - sat down to polite applause while the next speaker mounted the podium.  It could have been any issue - race, gender, ethnicity, corporate greed, immigration, or internationalism - for Gusty was not paying attention.  He had been the keynote speaker for a reason.  Global warming was an ineradicable threat!

The thing of it all was that each speaker was as addled by his cause and his achievements as Gusty.  One after another they intoned the obvious - old scores never settled - and went on to tick off line items on their resumes.  'When I was President of...when I visited Ndjamena last...As the Prime Minister said to me...', on and on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. 

Now, one would think that these men, perhaps in the last decade or even last few years of their lives, would be thinking of the vast unknown, and preoccupied with it.  What was coming surely should be more important than what was or what had been; but no, they banged on as though there were no tomorrow.  The record of the past had to be recalled, consolidated, properly archived, and revered. 'I did that' each man said over and over again.

Tolstoy wrote about death and dying in his novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a story about a man who realizes almost too late that his marvelously confected life, his brilliant architecture of living means absolutely nothing as he faces his end, eternity. 

It was easy for Ivan to content in his secure, well-ordered world while he was healthy, for then there was nothing but endless tomorrows before him, pleasant days and nights of respect, admiration, and camaraderie.  When the death sentence was passed and as he went through the various stages of denial, accommodation, and reluctant acceptance, he still clung on to the accomplishments of the past; and only at the very last did he come to his senses.  'Ah, death' he says, finally resolved and accepting. 

I wonder if Gusty Spillane will have an Ivan Ilyich moment.  It certainly didn't look like it would come any time soon as the old man banged on about the Albanian delegation and the new axis of environmental reform.

 'I did that'. Gusty said and believed that that would be enough.