Food As Plaything - Haute Cuisine, Locally Sourced, Organic, And Gluten Free, America's Dietary Obsession

 America was always a meat-and-potatoes satisfying, nutritious meal.  Farmers and their families worked hard, and there was no room for frills, eccentricities, or special needs.  Food was fuel, sustenance, and the stuff of life nothing more. 

Farm families looked forward to the evening meal because he was hungry. They woke up early to feed the pigs and the chickens, milk the cows, and untether the goats, ate a hearty breakfast of ham and eggs, walked to school and back, tilled the fields, harvested, took care of babies and young children and by dinner time were as hungry as bears. 

No one ever asked what was for dinner, for it was always the same, varied only by the season, and was a function of what animal had been slaughtered, what vegetables were in the garden, and the size of the chicken brood. No one complained, for food was functional, a necessity, filling and sustaining. 

Times have changed and food for most, while a necessity, is also a plaything, a pastime, a hobby, an obsession.  Dinner is not simply to nourish but to please.  The color palette, the architecture, the fanciful mix of ingredients that suggest exotica, open the door to unique remoteness, that give off the scent of internationalism and sophisticated taste all represent America's new, prosperous, bourgeois culture. 

Millions of dollars are spent on food processors, Japanese steel cutlery, six-burner Viking stoves, sous-vide cookers, fine oak cutting boards, track lighting, center islands, French copper cookware, tinted rose and amber-colored glasses, perfectly weighted and balanced table settings, and much more. 

Trips to the grocery store have given way to three or four vendor locales - farmers markets, specialty butchers, fish mongers, bakeries and ethnic food stalls. 

Book shelves are stacked with recipe books and food travelogues.  Cut-out recipes from the New York Times, Food & Wine, and Gourmet are sorted and filed in alphabetical folders in kitchen drawers. Cell phones all have interactive food apps and social media are filled with food sites. 

In addition to this culinary revolution, a number of special dietary restrictions have emerged - waiters at restaurants routinely ask if we have any allergies or food restrictions he should know about.  Are we gluten or lactose intolerant? Vegan dishes are starred, low sodium and low-fat offerings are noted. 

Guests with any of these dietary restrictions will inform the hostess before hand to that she can prepare dinner accordingly.  When such prior notice has not been given, guests will often carefully separate offending items, the most polite of them in a way which suggests incompleteness rather than triage. 

 Locally grown products are preferred but the reasons are flimsy and illogical at best.  We live in a globalized market which has revolutionized the market - fresh fruits and vegetables any time of year, fish from the four corners of the globe - and 'local' is nothing more than imaginative whimsy.  Why fuss with Old MacDonald when the best, most well-tended, highest quality product may come from another continent?   

 

Nothing we buy whether peanut butter, ice cream, olive oil, salt or pasta is local; so why the flapdoodle about local produce?  It is an affectation, a political statement, a sign of good intentions but no more. 

Everything the food-aware American buys must be organic, when the cost is high and the benefits marginal.  The risks of cancer from a non-organic diet compared to an organic one are so low they are barely recorded.  While no one prefers a lettuce salad soaked in Monsanto, a good washing will take care of most of the offensive bits, and lifespan is barely affected by the rest. 

Americans are locked in a closed system where food has lost its basic function  and has become a part of the haute bourgeoisie obsession with ascribed value. 

Julia Child once said that the sign of a good cook was his roast chicken.  That is a simple product done to perfection; and while many households would never serve such a common, pedestrian, cheap food to guests, they have lost sight of inherent value and have turn to appearance, novelty, and fancy. 

The Paleolithic diet is a modern nutritional plan based on the presumed diet of Paleolithic humans. It is based on the premise that human genetics have scarcely changed since the dawn of agriculture, which marked the end of the Paleolithic era, around 15,000 years ago, and that modern humans are adapted to the diet of the Paleolithic period.

The Paleolithic diet consists mainly of fish, grass-fed pasture raised meats, eggs, vegetables, fruit, fungi, roots, and nuts, and excludes grains, legumes, dairy products, potatoes, refined salt, refined sugar, and processed oils. 

One of the hottest restaurants today is NOMA in Copenhagen.  The master chef is Rene Redzepi who forages for the ingredients that go into his five-star dishes. He gathers wild grasses, seaweed, leaves, periwinkles, nuts, and berries.  Although he does not bill his fare as Paleolithic for obvious reasons, he is a chef in that tradition.  He cooks his food, which is a big improvement on early the caveman, but he still has a profound belief that whatever grows can be eaten.

In Africa 'bush meat' - field rat, snake, monkey, lizard, or wild dog, whatever is available - is no different. Both cuisines are sensible, practical, and interesting without a lot of fol-de-rol. The Bushmen of South Africa eat hard-to-find grubs, not as a delicacy but particularly rich in fat and calories. Insects are eaten throughout the Third World.  In the bars and outdoor clubs in the quartiers of Kinshasa, dried, roasted, and salted caterpillars are eaten as snacks with beer. 

Going out of the way to recreate a subsistence diet, whether Paleolithic or African veldt, strip it down to its horny, tough, inedibility, and call it modern cuisine is an example of this fanciful obsession with food as plaything. 

Of course this idle obsession with food is for those with money. Those less fortunate are still eating cornpone, fatback, and greens, the occasional Big Mac and a Dairy Queen, candy and chips and bloating to obesity. Successive American governments have tried to encourage citizens to reform and return to healthier foods, but without success.  Cheap, processed high-sugar, high-salt foods are addictive. In a penurious two-job, low-paying trailer park existence, families have only the whammy of these immediately pleasing, endorphin-producing foods to look forward to. 

The Food Pyramid - that complicated, indecipherable image of a proper diet - was revised again and again to be more user friendly, but no one paid attention to it.  The current Secretary of Health is trying his best to wean poor Americans off their heart-stopping diets to no avail. 

So, it is only the upper middle classes who fuss with food and have turned it into this high-end plaything. Something fun to do on weekends, to share with friends.  A proper bougie meal not only shows off learned cooking skills, but shouts, 'I have been there!, to Thailand, China, India, the Azores, and Bali. Food is a sign of internationalism, progressivism, and broad thinking.  

'Toys 'R' Us' was the name of a popular toy store chain a few years ago.  'Foods 'R' Us' is the moniker, the meme, the essence of the American foodie, proud to show off his wares, his sophistication, his fancy, and his money. 

The Road To Wellness - Witch Doctors, Roots And Vines, Healing, And The American Dream

What one wants in America is a perfect fit - supply and demand - and Harlan Baker's operation was one of these beautifully consonant meshes.  He was a simple, uncomplicated man of limited intellectual resources but with a good social sense - an antenna for what works.  His clients were equally unencumbered by intelligence, insight, or ambition and wanted only the easy, naturally occurring safe haven of Harlan's garden.

Who wouldn't want to be treated by him, given his lite, lovely, unthreatened experience? At the very least is was an hour of happy times, at best it illuminated some of life's conundrums.  Nothing serious or mind-changing, but little helpful insights. 

'What a great country', Harlan said to his New York relatives who had come to visit; and indeed it was.  Here was a simple man who meandered here and there and then found his niche.  Along with the Zuckerbergs, Gates, Bezos, and Huangs, here are the little guys making a profit, keeping people happy and the cash register ringing.

Harlan Baker was a Wellness Counselor in Chillicothe, Ohio. He hung out his shingle after six months of training in Cleveland - a combination of bloodwort, 'psychology lite', and the art of healing. 

He had gotten into the profession in a roundabout way - a badly demented mother who had refused therapy and drugs and had gone completely 'round the bend when Harlan was a young teenager.  One day she put on lipstick and eyeliner, left the casserole in the oven, and disappeared, only to be found the next day in an Ace hardware parking lot on Route 7 as naked as a jaybird, singing the Kyrie Eleison. 

That and an obsessive-compulsive classmate who kept touching him and himself inappropriately, solving advanced quadratic equations, and dismissed for 'behavior unbecoming', a light sentence given the censorious tenor of the times. 

These two individuals clearly needed help when none was to be given.  Yes, there were psychiatrists but old-school, Freudian and Jungian throwbacks who had lost sight of wellness and dithered in dream theory and world consciousness.  They had few clients. The people of Chillicothe were hardy souls, independent minded people who had always sorted out their own problems; so Dr. Phipps got only those referred from Welfare Services and Family Assistance - people who if they didn't agree to psychiatric evaluation and counselling would appear before the court. 

Harlan was not much - an ordinary student, a diffident farmer, an impulsive teenager - but after he left Chillicothe Vocational School where he had learned something about drills and bits, he found himself, for no other reason than money, at his father's feed store as a stock and errand boy.  He set the rat traps, checked the dunnage, ran to the post office and the bank, and swept the floors - just about all that can be said from a rather slow, uninspiring boy with limited intentions. 

Yet even in the lesser among us, inspiration can come suddenly and unexpectedly.  'I will treat others', he said one day and made himself available at the Bright Beginnings Wellness Center, a 'clinic for all', a friendly, homey, unintimidating place of welcome and good faith.  Clients were treated as friends not patients, and given all the love and affection that they were missing in their personal lives.  

The Director of the Center, Barnaby Allen, thought of himself as a father or older brother.  Yes, he applied many of the precepts he had learned in training, a 'beautiful quilt' of ayurveda, the psychedelic mysteries of the Sonoran desert, the spiritual nature of Gaia and the environment, and the spiritual high of the Tantra. 

'Available' meant serving the master of the trade, an acolyte but more a sycophant in the service of a genius. However, Harlan did learn from Allen, rounded up money for the fees required at the Cleveland training college, went through his course, and found an associate position with Barnaby Allen and Bright Beginnings. 

Now, the whole affair was cockamamie nonsense - a potpourri of New Age psycho-drama, feelgood counselling, and a homemade brew of roots, tubers, vines, and leaves from the local flora.  It didn't take much to be accepted as a client, little in fees, and even less in commitment, but customers left their sessions feeling elevated and far more hopeful and positive than when they went in. 

Bright Beginnings' clientele was not a very demanding lot - idlers mostly, young adults without the brains or initiative to make anything of themselves - and so the counselling never had to probe very deeply into their psyches.  The clinic's clients were as shallow as can be, most without an original thought in their heads, and were only there because they drifted in. 

Eventually Harlan decided to go out on his own, attract a more troubled and needy clientele.  He wanted to help, to make a difference, and to make people well. After that the routine at Bright Beginnings would be just child's play. 

It took him a while to build up a following, but he became known for his patient, highly professional approach to psychological trauma.  He still prescribed his 'witches' brew' but applied for a license to dispense bloodwort, a mildly psychoactive natural substance that 'frees the spirit' and allowed the counselor to join the journey with the patient into the recesses of his past. 

This was by no means Freudian therapy - a harsh facing of facts - but a pleasant Child's Garden of Verses, mediated happiness. 

Armed with their bag of herbal cures, selections from Rumi and the Ascended Masters for reflection, and an appointment card for a return visit, clients spread the word, and before long Harlan had a going business. 

As has been noted, Harlan was no rocket scientist and 'treating people' was a pastime rather than a calling, but it now more than paid the rent and a down payment on a used Tesla. Life was good. 

Before judging Harlan too harshly, for his 'practice' was nothing more than voodoo, smoke, and mirrors and his clients only credulous, emotional wastrels, perhaps one should look at the state of America.  In such a chaotic, rootless, desperately inchoate place, who doesn't need a bit of love?

Places like Barbary Allen's Wellness Center and Harlan Baker's private practice are sprouting up everywhere.  What is needed more than Freudian psychoanalysis - fat in the fire, bringing up long forgotten, painful memories to add to the misery all around us - is a refuge, a comforting emotional home, away from bitching wives, ankle-biting children, pissy bosses, and bad pay.  Harlan loves his clients, treats them warmly, comfortingly, and kindly.  

Who cares if he cures them?  Most of them suffer from no more than living short, nasty, brutish lives like the rest of us. 

How A Very Unattractive Man Found His Political Niche - Beauty Has No Place In Doing Good

Henry Towson was ill-favored in the genetic luck of the draw.  The child of attractive parents, he came out with none of their distinguishing, notable features.  He was, for lack of a more generous and forgiving term, misshapen.  Nothing seemed to go where it belonged, so misaligned were his features and so exaggerated.  He had none of the classic facial symmetry which has characterized beautiful men and women and featured in the sculptures of Ancient Greece and Rome.  

 

His hair was untamed, a bit of the warlock, neither fully curly nor straight, but a nasty whorl.  His nose was long, but not aquiline, graceful, and Roman, but serrated and casting a long shadow.  His ears, while not exactly pendulous, were noticeable for their unusual size and oversized lobes. 

This was all bad enough in a world which prized beauty, but his parents were not just attractive, but Hollywood ready.  His mother in fact had modelled as a young woman, and his father chosen to represent his firm in their national brochure; so when they went out in public with their son, it was an embarrassment.  Of course they loved him and wished him well, and would give him all the social and financial advantages they had had, but still felt uncomfortable when friends and neighbors met them on the street, peered into the baby carriage, and could only manage a, 'Wow, what a baby', unable to gin up the usual fawning words. 

He soldiered his way through school, did his best to swallow the taunts and ridicule of his classmates, kept his head down and mind straight, but could not help but feel hurt and hopeless.  As he grew older, he watched his friends charm and win the most beautiful girls while they gave him little notice.  Many of these boys were as dumb and clueless as apes, but still were put in the front row, favored, privileged, and honored by teachers. 

There was something about physical beauty which prevailed and superseded any other more substantive characteristic or talent. 

The bias in favor of physically attractive people is robust, and has been proven again and again by researchers, most notably Pierce, Hendriks et al with attractive people being perceived as more sociable, happier and more successful than unattractive people   Attractiveness biases have been demonstrated in such different areas as teacher judgments of students, voter preferences for political candidates, and jury judgments in simulated trials 

Recently researchers at Harvard investigated the “beauty is goodness” stereotype in U.S. films and found that attractive characters were portrayed more favorably than unattractive characters on multiple dimensions across a random sample drawn from five decades of top grossing films.  

The authors also found that participants watching a biased film (level of beauty and gender stereotyping) subsequently showed greater favoritism toward an attractive graduate school candidate than participants watching a less biased film.  In the area of employment decision making, attractiveness also influences interviewers’ judgments of job applicants. 

Just as there are bell curves for intelligence, talent, and athletic ability; so is there one for beauty.  The marvelously beautiful and the pitifully ugly lie near the asymptotic ends of the curve, and are small percentages of the population. 

Unfortunately Henry Towson fell very close to asymptotic end of the curve.  He was definitely not grotesquely ugly or even moderately so, but no amount of finagling, fancy dress, or hours at the spa, could move him up and out from the awful penumbra of brutal unattractiveness. 

He was stuck with his his genetic legacy - attributed to Great Uncle Lawson who no matter what the pose, the lighting, his outfits, or attractive, modifying backdrops of his photographs came out as ugly as sin with the same lack of symmetry, misshapenness, and naturally glowering looks of his descendent. 

At some point, Henry decided to accept the bad hand he was dealt, and still find ways to win at life's poker table.

At his university, the protest movement was in full swing.  The progressive faction of the student body had their fingers in every social disorder.  They were at the barricades demonstrating for social justice just like their parents and grandparents had been in the Sixties.  They were outraged, angry, and full of hatred for the oppressive, racist powers that be.  The world was a viperous nest of malignity - a population which dismissed the coming climate catastrophe, which consigned the black man to perpetual dysfunction, which marginalized the gay man, lesbian and transgender, and which demanded closed borders to keep out deserving asylees. 

Curiously and surprisingly, Henry found that the most radical student organizations were represented by men and women like him - sorrowfully unattractive - and yet there was something heady and happy about the gatherings, the marches, and the protests.  Ugliness disappeared in an atmosphere of joyful purpose.  Young men and women hugged and kissed, embraced with love and unity, sang songs of protest but with love and emotional power.  

When they returned home from Washington and the National Mall, they reverted to form -  dowdy, disheveled, and brutally ugly.  The meandered through the days, an undesirable breed apart, and only when it was time to show their reformist colors were they transformed into happy couples.

They were dismissed and marginalized by the elite of the university - those attractive, desirable, privileged classmates with classically handsome and beautiful looks; the young men and women who, observed by the researchers from Harvard and Duke, would always be the first to be chosen, feted, honored, and obeyed.  To these Adonises, members of Harry's group were little more than apes in the monkey house. 

Not only were they insignificant and irrelevant, they were so ugly they were avoided, shunned, and disregarded.  As a result they banded together even more, and became a cluster of unattractiveness. 

None of this mattered to Harry who like everyone else, wanted to feel at home someplace; and this progressive cabal was just it.  So generously inclusive was it that he forgot his misfortune, and felt accepted, happy, and positive. 

He had been so convinced of the rightness of the political causes espoused at the university, that he continued on this path of social justice after graduation.  Not only would he still be a member of a particular, if peculiar social group, he would be working for social betterment. 

In the progressive movement both ideas merged.  Not only were the objectives of social reform existentially important, but that beauty was a symbol of the settled, ignorant, idle bourgeois class. Those classmates who had summered on Nantucket and wintered in Gstaad, those blond airheads of inherited wealth and privilege were the faces of the enemy.  Ugliness was a symbol of commitment, political honor, and righteous belief. 

The life of a progressive was the mirror image of the Mount Olympus of physical beauty.  Unattractiveness was the ticket to political and social success, but just the opposite of that of the rich, talented, and beautiful.  Henry's life was to be one of significance, not airy indifference. 

And so it was that he made his way with what he had - or more properly exploited his physical misfortune like a savvy miner.  He found the seam of gold in a society of black coal...Or so it was that he thought of himself. 

He made his way up through the progressive ranks, being more and more recognized as a liberal's liberal, undaunted and outspoken on every social issue, eloquent, persuasive, and insistent.  So much so that his audiences forgot his miasmic ugliness and only listened to his words. 

He had found his home.  He married a girl from the movement, and unlike his parents who had produced a physical outlier, they produced one of their kind, a 'Wow, what a baby' boy who if he was lucky would follow the same anointed trajectory of his parents. 

The Bliss Of Ignorance - Life Is So Much Easier With True Belief, The Saga Of A Credulous Woman

For Vicki Samuels there was not a scintilla of doubt that each and every item in the progressive canon was true and undeniable.  As such there was no reason to doubt or to question. It was all received wisdom - the climate, the borders, the black man, transgenders, capitalism, and racism. These were the philosophical pillars of American society, deep, strong, unimpeachable, and eternal.  It felt good every morning to know that God was in his heaven and all was right with the world. 

Yet everything was wrong with the world - the black man continues to be oppressed in a world of white supremacy, the climate shows no signs of healthy reversal, the gay man, the lesbian, and the transgender are still marginalized and hated, needy refugees are turned back at the border or rounded up and deported once here, and Wall Street keeps up its predatory, acquisitive behavior favoring the rich and well-to-do; but everything is on the right path for renewal, transformation, and return. 

Vicki used to be a voracious reader, but the more she read now, the less she learned or discovered.  The world was exactly as forecast, on a downward spiral of hate, incineration, and misery.  There was no need to read about sea level rise and the barrage of Atlantic hurricanes because global warming was a fait accompli, an undeniable, unquestioned phenomenon.  Whatever the vicissitudes of weather, the trajectory was the same - a disastrous, violent, destructive climate Armageddon. 

Every day white, privileged men exerted undue power over the vulnerable, fomented hatred of all other races, genders, and ethnicities. Gestapo SS storm troopers were rounding up legitimate asylees, loading them on cattle cars and shipping them back to the concentration camps of origin.   Gay clubs and the lesbian beer halls of Bernal Heights were raided, and men and women were sent to far northern reservations far worse than Soviet gulags. Black men were hanged from sycamore limbs as often as during the days of Jim Crow and segregation. 

Vicki knew this absolutely and needed no confirmation for her beliefs.  The time for inquiry and investigation were over. 

Now, of course none of these assumptions were true, vetted, parsed, and studied. Vicki took them all on face value, matters of principle, divine injunction, and an almost Biblical faith.  

How did this viral possession of an ordinary, reasonably intelligent, uninspiring but good woman happen.  As a child she believed in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy; but as she got older forgot them, relegated them like old dolls she played with as a toddler, kept them in a favorite, soft part of her memory but never once looked at them as anything more than enduring myth. 

She was tricked by older children - stones collected from a giant's lair, a space alien's tooth, and the magical potion of wild berries and pine root - but those too were dismissed in normal childhood evolution.  

She believed boys were actually interested in her although she had none of the charm, beauty, and sexual allure of her classmates.  She primped in the mirror seeing only Helen of Troy, not the rather unattractive offspring of unattractive parents.  She believed it when class activists told her that she had a mission to reform others, and that the world needed young women like her. 

There was no indication that she would necessarily fall off the rails or into the deep end.  For a long time she retained her equilibrium, chose and acted sensibly; but as she grew older, it was as though all intellectual reserve had crumbled.  She had become a credulous, naive, and totally vulnerable woman. 

It wasn't that the progressive canon was so new, revolutionary, or existential. Far from it.  It was as fantastical as any other utopian movement, filled with aspirations, dreams, happy hopes for an impossible paradise of harmony, universal justice, and love but with no foundation, no historical precedent or relevance.  Vicki's immediate, whole-hearted, absolute embrace of the liberal canon was not based on logic, objectivity, analysis, or exegesis.  Something else was the matter. 

Professor Howard Rubenstein of Harvard, noted social scientist and bio-ethics researcher, had this to say about the nature of true belief:

True Belief, the passionate embrace of a utopian future, the jettisoning of rational doubt and in its place installing an altar to hopefulness is a common phenomenon, rooted somewhere in the dimly remembered events of childhood, maturing in the fiercely hostile world of adolescence, and growing inalienable in the heady atmosphere of political righteousness.  True Believers, unlike the normally skeptical and patient, wait for the illogical epiphany which will finally release them from the confines of the real world and let them gambol in fantasy. 

 

Vicki lives in a leafy neighborhood of Washington, DC, a politically uniform, universally liberal enclave of the city.  Each and every resident is of the same political absolutism.  No one needs look any farther than the mirror to confirm their hatred of Donald Trump and his MAGA followers.  There are things in the world that need no inquiry.  There is no need to deconstruct to discover political cadence, meter, or tone.  To a man and in complete lockstep Vicki's neighbors march to the same drummer. 

This unquestioning neighborhood of foundational belief was the perfect home for Vicki who by this time had rid herself of any niggling, residual doubts of progressive righteousness.  It was time to rest from debate and animus and lie back in the knowledge that history had come to an end. 

A few years ago the political philosopher Francis Fukuyama had concluded that with the fall of the Soviet Union, the world had come to 'the end of history', that is that it was now united in democratic principle, and would never more be subjected to tyranny and political evil. 

Where he got his news has always been a mystery, but for a few years after the demise of Communist Russia, the world believed him in a wave of idle hopefulness.  It wasn't long before the idyll ended and the world fell apart in a miasma of territorialism, religious fanaticism, and political hatred. 

So the residents of University Park should have known better.  History will never end, human nature will continue to drive territorial ambition, self-interest, and aggressiveness.  If there is such a thing as received wisdom it is the absolute ineluctability of human nature. 

Ignorance is indeed bliss for the True Believer who has chosen to escape the hurly-burly world of political difference and to reside in a world which needs no confirmation.  And who can blame them? Who would not want to live in an unencumbered, uncontested world? The happiness principle, the new ethos of political absolutism. 

Meritocracy - The China State Dinner Guest List, Not A Black Face In The Crowd

There they were surrounding the Presidents of the United States and China - Musk, Bezos, Brin, Huang, Ellison, Page, and Zuckerberg, America's genius cluster, neo-industrialists like Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan of a hundred years ago, the men whose intelligence, creativity, ambition, will and insight have confirmed the country's premier position in high-tech, media, and business. 

China is the second biggest economy in the world, America's most formidable adversary, a country of remarkable achievement, in only a few decades rising from the poverty of the Maoist years to one of the world's wealthiest, most ambitious and best militarily prepared. 

Xi has made China's intentions clear. With its Machiavellian world view, its Confucian ethic, its imperial history, and a Communist system which insists on cultural integrity, patriotism and national pride, a deliberate, single-minded drive for international superiority, and a program to elevate millions out of poverty to wealth, it will preside over all nations. 

It owns much of the United States' debt, is on a path to control the natural resources necessary for modern, high-tech technology, to command the attention of Third World nations as it continues to make mutually favorable deals for mineral wealth and energy.  There are none of America's conditionalities applied to African nations, insisting on judicial and electoral reform as conditions of foreign aid.  The Chinese have negotiated an agreement with Angola - guarantee oil at a fixed, below-market rate, and we will rebuild your failing infrastructure.  

Morality and exceptionalism have no place in the Chinese geopolitical worldview  Every country is bound to further its national interest first, foremost, and exclusively.  It is up to recipient countries to reform if they see fit. As such, and guided by such a simple ethos, the Chinese have managed to assume political and economic hegemony over Africa and much of the rest of the developing world while the United States has dithered, mired in self-referential moralism. 

At the core of Chinese dominance is a socio-philosophical culture which values hard work, discipline, single-minded attention to excellence, and an indefatigable practicality.  One has to look no farther than the Chinese diaspora in America to see this ethos at work.  Chinese students are the majority at specialized high schools like New York City's Stuyvesant which takes students based on a highly competitive exam.  They predominate to such a degree at America's top tier schools that a Supreme Court case had to be fought to ensure that programs of diversity did not discriminate against them. 

So it is no surprise that Donald Trump brought out the big guns of modern industry at his state dinner.  America has been and will always be a world leader in economic influence.  China may be a worthy competitor, but these men sitting around the formal dinner table are not to be taken lightly.  They will engineer America's supremacy in AI, robotics, and the introduction of ultra-high technology throughout the economy. 

'Racist', said Bob Muzelle when the read the guest list in the Washington Post. 'Not a black face among them', but no comment could be more irrelevant.  Presidents Xi and Putin of Russia have had a good laugh at the circus of diversity, equity, inclusivity, and identity politics dividing America, focusing on irrelevant, historically ignorant, and febrile fantasies.  The more the United States is consumed by such idiocy and turns its vision away from the far more important if not existential geopolitical issues of the day, the better it is for the Machiavellian, determined regimes of the world. 

There was no politically driven, enforced mandate of diversity promoting the men of the genius cluster.  They rose to the top of the industrial pyramid and to untold wealth thanks to brains, ambition, will, and ingenuity.  There is no room for the less qualified in their intellectual aerie; no room for hopeful but intellectually laggard hopefuls. 

All formal White House events under the Biden administration were examples of diversity run rampant.  Guests were chosen to show off a 'rainbow coalition', an assortment of races and ethnicities with little regard for excellence, ability, or promise.  It was enough to show the world and assembled dignitaries that America was a cultural haven, a humane, considerate, compassionate place. 

There were no black faces around the formal dinner tables at the Trump dinner because the black community still lags far behind in educational performance, professional success, scientific achievement, intellectual brilliance, and uncommon character. This all may be in the cards, but not now.  

The head table at one of Biden's last state diners was a circus act, a side show, a collection of every possible variety of race, gender, and ethnicity - and not just tame, Armani-suited, examples of business demeanor, but the most exaggerated versions of each.  Not just gay men who looked like every other American man, but the swishiest, most outlandishly cabaret-ready ones.  Such diversity was far more powerful, telling, and indicative of geopolitical superiority than any collection of Silicon Valley and Wall Street so-called geniuses. 

To Bob Muzelle and his progressive colleagues, the guest list at the Chinese state dinner was a travesty, an expression of America's deeply-rooted sense of elitism, aristocracy, cultural separatism, and raw Darwinian competition. They howled when they saw the limousines pull up to the White House gate - billionaires and their white trophy wives - tall, elegantly dressed, stunningly beautiful consorts to the world's most powerful. 

And yet, all Bob could do when he made up his own diverse guest list was to come up with old, hackneyed retreads - Al Sharpton, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cornel West, and Henry Louis Gates - men known more for their social media sites and public showiness than any real substance.  Of course there were hundreds of black athletes who dominate American professional sports, but all these men can do is throw or kick a ball, and would add nothing to the high octane fuel of state dinners. 

Progressives like Muzelle were stuck within the  confines of 'diversity' a political agenda which stopped at the surface and had no interest in the real high qualities of a nation.  He was hobbled by an irrelevant algorithm.  Given his political party's insistence on the superficial, insisting that race, gender, and ethnicity alone gave agency, respect, and title, he was forced to come up dry. 

Of course there were plenty of Asian Americans at the Trump dinner.  What would Silicon Valley be without them? But they don't count and don't belong in the racial pantheon of the liberal Left.  They are not victims, and that is what filters them out of the equation.  Diversity is not static, but a first step to raising the disadvantaged out of social poverty. No Asians, by and large successful, intellectually driven, professionally outstanding, and wealthy, fall into that category. 

'Your time is up', said a Yale classmate of Bob as kindly as he could, 'and about time', he added to himself; but to Bob the fight was now enjoined at the highest level.  Donald Trump was a maleficent, dangerous, opportunistic interloper who must be defeated, replaced, decommissioned and sent packing before he did any more damage. 

Yet, in his quieter moments, Bob, now a man of advanced years reflected on his life and saw only his shabby office, his split-level in the low-end suburbs, his penurious income, the failing public schools his children had attended, his exclusion from all the perks and advantages a Yale education should have afforded him.  The classmate who called him out for his penitential politics was about to head off to Nantucket for the summer in time to sail in the Yale-Harvard Alumni regatta.  He was to be joined there by other members of Bob's class of 19__, patrician, wealthy, influential men and their families of beautiful wives and children. 

He quickly shook off the awful vision and returned to the social activism which had sustained him for so many years; but there was that guest list, in indelible ink before his eyes.  America's best and brightest shown off to the world while his ragtag, motley diverse assemblage of racial, gender, and ethnic caricatures was nowhere to be seen. 

The Three Faces Of Eve - The Usefulness Of Falsehood In Love And War

Eve Harden never let on what she was thinking or feeling. She had learned that to keep secrets - whispered gossip - was easy, but to keep one's real intentions hidden was mastery. This sense of personal secrecy had worked since she was a child with her doting and credulous parents. Whatever she told them, they had a penchant to believe, and if later found out to be less than the truth, they gave her the benefit of the doubt.  Her sincerity, love, and desire to please overcame any censure or discipline. 

When she grew older this simple disingenuousness became charm.  A pretty girl and then quite a beautiful young women, she quickly understood how a smile, a favoring look, a delightful, light touch on the arm could resolve any issue, achieve difficult ends with little effort, and make her way in the world with ease and impunity. 

Ordinarily a girl who charms boys is hated by other girls.  Jealousy in adolescence is a rite of passage, and the natural instinct of Eve's classmates was to turn on her, claw, scratch, bitch and bite until she was cowed and their way forward was clear. 

In Eve's case, her classmates had no animus, no resentment, no hatred, for Eve's remarkable charm - now called public relations - was so unintimidating, so tame and unthreatening - that she always had her way. Each girl thought that Eve was her best friend, and as a group, they were as docile and following as a flock of sheep, 

Eve knew when to share a bit of gossip or innuendo, at such a right time and place that it gained in intimacy and credibility.  When she started the rumor about Mr. Finchley - entirely unfounded and untrue but cannily crafted and built around his eccentricities - it not only was believed by the girls and not only did it bring the poor math teacher up before an administrative committee, but it gave Eve a reputation for insight, sharing, and friendship. 

She always wondered at the ironic instance of her naming after the first woman, a deceitful, sexually manipulative character.  This Eve - Eve Harden - never thought of herself in such negative terms. She was only using her God-given talents to make her way in life.  

If God had created woman as a seductive, alluring, and irresistible being, then using that endowment was not negative but positive.  And if God created men as credulous beings, longing for adulation, and obsessed with sexual conquest, then they were there to be used as an accessory to profit. 

Now, the Hebrew authors of the Old Testament hedged a bit.  They knew what women were capable of, and how men needed to be on their guard from the get-go, but could not damn God's human creation, so they invented the snake, the Devil in disguise.  

They said he was responsible for Eve's canny seduction of Adam; but they knew that the snake/devil was just an artifact.  They knew that Eve was responsible for Adam's foolish bite of an apple from the Tree of Knowledge and the couple's expulsion from the Garden of Eden. 

Our Eve knew that her way in the world have its pitfalls - that she learned from Genesis.  Eve might have been acting according to her God-given nature, but she still should have known what might happen. Eve Harden would be much more careful. 

God's Eve was to be a model for all women, for she used all her canniness, her observant insights into the nature of men, her natural feminine allure, and her superior intelligence to deceive Adam, the first man.

God's Eve had only Adam to work with.  Our Eve had unlimited possibilities, unlimited sources of wealth, influence, and authority.  It was not enough to have seduced the girls of St. Anthony's High School into believing in her sainthood, to have tempted the boys into treating her like a queen, and to have gotten far better grades than she deserved from each and every teacher.  She would move on to greater successes, greater heights. 

Her success at college was legendary. President of this, chairwoman of that; social and academic honors, etc.; but it should not be assumed that she made her way only through this sexual nativism.  No, Eve was smart enough to lay the foundation for more personal add-ons. Brains plus charm is a heady mix. 

Eve's ambitions were many, and realizing her abilities, she would achieve them all.  She was a voracious lover and picked only the most sexually accomplished men. The same instincts that enabled her to find, see, understand, and use human gullibility gave her a finely-tuned animal ability to sort the most able and potent men from the weak and unreliable.  When she found the right partner, she became an irresistible sexual object and an indefatigable lover. 

When she turned her attention to the long term - a mate, a husband - she was equally calculating.  She vetted, sorted, sussed, triaged with a sense of demography, social dynamics, and a good sense for responsibility, duty, and fidelity. 

'This can't be', one was tempted to say.  How could one woman have all these incredibly useful traits, this inimitable drawing power, this multivariate talent? 

Yet these doubters never looked past the pedestrian and the ordinary. Although all women were God's Eve's descendants and like her had a native, undeniable sexual power, few realized it like our Eve.  They acted by fits and starts, influenced by social norms, feminist advocacy, Sunday School and Christian teaching, patriarchy and pregnancy and did not tap into their roots, realizing their full potential.  Our Eve did and then some. 

Life is not a bowl full of cherries, nor is it quite as bad as Hobbes thought (solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short).  It is to be lived, to be taken advantage of, to be exploited, a fertile field but one full of pitfalls, dangers, mine fields. 

On and on went the homilies, adages, and sane prophecies but the smartest among us, the Eves, disregarded both the warnings and the overblown optimism. Success requires understanding, plotting, determination, will, and guiltless action only. The rest is for true believers and pessimists. 

Eve's record is clear - notable notes in the Alumni Magazine, mentions in the Congressional Daily, New York Times references to her successes, blurbs in her home town newspaper.  A casual Google search will turn up hundreds of sites recording or reflecting her life, thoughts, and accomplishments. 

At one point however, she dropped out of sight, leaving everything behind - her two husbands, her lovers, her career.  All traces of her disappeared; but those few who knew her - really knew her for the complex woman she was - were not surprised. 

She was Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen's character in his play of the same name.  Hedda, like Nietzsche believed that the only validation of the individual in a meaningless world was the expression of pure will.  Her devilish manipulation of Lovborg, encouraging him, driving him to suicide was the apotheosis of this willful, amoral determination. 

So once it was all over, once Eve had left behind a thousand Lovborgs, won innumerable battles in love and war, had fulfilled every ambition, revered as a Colossus but smiling at adulators' credulousness and gullibility, she retired. 

'A remarkable woman', said a former lover. 

Modern Barbary Pirates - How Government Dragoons The People

'Government is not the solution', said Ronald Reagan, 'it is the problem', thus ushering in an era of privatization and reduction of the size and influence of government.  Of course neither he nor any other president has been able to do so, and the bureaucracy - despite the considered efforts of Donald Trump and Elon Musk - is still the behemoth it always has been. 

 

The Founding Fathers never envisaged the new republic this way. Government was to be only facilitator, caretaker, and defender.  It was the enterprise, ambition, and hard work of the individual which would enable his family, his community, and his country to prosper. 

'Rugged individualism' was the meme and ethos of the day.  It was through this determination, this sense of individual enterprise that Westward expansion was enabled, and the dream of Manifest Destiny, an America from coast to coast, was realized. 

It was private enterprise that built railroads, ports, and roads, that built towns and their granaries, banks, saloons, and stores.  Government was there to facilitate this enterprise, to survey and plat the land.  Land ownership was capital on which money could be borrowed, and fair and just settlement of disputes over property rights was the responsibility of the courts. 

Government was small, supportive, and useful; but over time this narrowly conceived role expanded to its present size, and government today is present, like never before, in the affairs of its private citizens.  It is a multi-trillion dollar business, taking money from individuals and with arrogated authority, spending it willy-nilly in their interest and legislating to itself vast, uninhibited powers and the freedom to upset ordinary lives. 

The Constitution envisioned only one role for government - the defense of the homeland - but allowed a certain measure of jurisprudence.  The framers of the Constitution agreed on the principle of private enterprise to be aided, facilitated, and encouraged by a minimalist government. 

According to the Left, the Democrat Party and especially its progressive wing has been responsible for legislative actions on climate change, gender equality, redistribution of wealth, and a policy of 'pursuant peace', and legislators in Congress have long been advocates for a strong, interventionist public sector. 

How could radical social reform be effected without the presence of federal authority and the allocation of funds from the treasury?  It was the arrogance, manipulation, and total dereliction of moral responsibility of the private sector which held back the country's utopian promise; and only if this maleficent being could be flayed, neutered, and disassembled, could the nation truly and equitably prosper. 

Social activists had no qualms about the size of the federal budget and the increased taxes that made necessary spending possible.  It was the duty of every man and woman to contribute his or her fair share to the reformist, universalist, and profoundly moral purpose of government; and to support the role of government to help the poor, the disadvantaged, and the marginalized with such honestly generated revenues. 

Now, not everyone was happy with this turn of the screw, the complete abandonment of the originalist principles of Hamilton and Franklin, and growing, seemingly unstoppable power and influence of government.  There were those like Harlan Putnam, descendant of the colonial Putnams members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in the evangelizing mission of John Davenport, and later scions of shipbuilding and the transatlantic trade. 

Putnams had made inestimable wealth from these enterprises, and went on to found more than one Wall Street investment bank. The Putnams were confidants, supporters, and advisers to the great industrialists of the early Twentieth Century - Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan.  They not only provided valuable financial and economic counsel, but were the heart and soul of private enterprise.  Harlan's ancestor, Isaiah Putnam had warned Rockefeller and his associates of 'the restive lion in his lair', the sleeping giant of government, and now Harlan saw how right his forbear was. 

'Dragooned', he said speaking of the American taxpayer who was at the mercy of predatory, manipulative, seditious legislators and their progressive shills, and who gave up thousands to the beast in Washington with little say. 

Yes, of course they had some say in principle - their votes counted - but the entire system was rigged against them.  Government was the only American institution without accountability.  Billions could be poured down the sluice of the Treasury with nary a nod to performance.  Progressive governance was one based on utopian optimism and neo-socialist promise. No private enterprise would ever get away with such financial irresponsibility. 

The private sector elite of the country - the new Rockefellers and Carnegies, Bezos, Huang, Musk, Brin, and Zuckerberg - do their best to keep the beast at bay, but viral progressivism still epidemic despite the decommission of Joe Biden and the election of Donald Trump, maintains its pressure.  The private sector, made up of greedy, oppressive, arrogant capitalists cannot be trusted, progressives insist.  Their inventions, discoveries, and innovations only benefit the rich, and if they are allowed to exist their predatory, acquisitive nature must be held in check.

It is not just the Harlan Putnams who are exercised over the unwanted jamboree of public spending, but the American working class who unwillingly fuel with their hard-earned money the follies of big government.  Seeing paychecks winnowed away by government taxation with nothing to show for it, these Americans are as exercised as the wealthy Putnams.  They are taxed at tax time, every time they buy a burger or shop at Walmart, every time they fill up the tank, for every move they make; and the rates keep rising. 

'For the public good', insist progressives who have bigger things in mind than the unpatriotic worries of those who, despite their favored status as members of the marginalized, protected class, are dismissed as irrelevant to national priorities.  These people cannot see the big picture, so focused are they on insignificant concerns. 

'Barbary Pirates', said Harlan to a group of investors considering an infusion of cash in a promising new private enterprise but hesitating while Congress debated new, punitive legislation designed to limit such private investment in favor of increased, 'morally dispensed' public expenditure. 

The Barbary pirates were privateers who operated from the North African 'Barbary (Berber) Coast', modern day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, from the 16th fo the 19th centuries. They captured European and American merchant vessels in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean to steal cargo. They enslaved an estimated 800,000 to 1.25 million Europeans over three centuries or held them for expensive ransoms. They raided coastal towns and villages across Europe—not just in the Mediterranean, but as far north as Great Britain, Ireland, and Iceland.

'The Somalis are petty thieves compared to them', said Harlan, quite impressed.  'Imagine! over three centuries of uninhibited piracy'; and that was exactly the point, he went on, citing the American history of tax piracy. 

Hayreddin Barbarossa was the most famous of all Barbary corsairs. He and his brother captured Algiers for the Ottoman Empire, and Hayreddin later became the Grand Admiral of the Ottoman fleet after major naval victories.  'There was no one like him before or since...unless you look on our shores'. 

Harlan's colleagues laughed at the simile - Harlan knew his history - but to him it was no laughing matter.  Federal taxation was piracy, no bones about it. 'Taking money from someone who earned it and giving it to someone who didn't'.  A corruption of moral justice. 

There were those who lived off the grid, deep in the woods of Humboldt County or the Idaho panhandle.  No Social Security card, no drivers' license, existing without a trace, living off the land and their wits, originalist Americans, but too fringy, deliberately disenfranchised, and wayward to make a difference, but at least they stood on principle. 

Harlan's hero was White Wolf, a Comanche chief who raped, disemboweled, hanged from trees, and burned men, women, and children in defiance of white intruders to Comanche land and a bloody lesson to them.  He was a true American - proud, native, defiant, and indomitable, a symbol of honor, strength, and courage. 

'I'm sure he paid no taxes', Harlan said to his colleagues, and so ended a toast to him. 

The Political Saga Of Fanny Farmer - How Victimhood Became Drollery, Alexander Hamilton, And The Unwashed

'I am so sick and tired of these Podunks', Fanny said to Claude, her partner for the night and fellow activist in town for a meeting of Scientists for Social Justice, the progressive lobby group to which they both belonged. 

Claude was not her love nor anything close, but she was old enough to remember the 'love the one you're with' posters on her mother's bedroom wall, and having inherited enough of her Sixties love thing to be unconcerned about incidental affairs, she rolled over.  Besides, Claude was a good worker, a good colleague, and a good traveling companion.  They had gone to Cleveland together to protest ICE storm troopers; to Lewisburg for a No Kings rally; and to Atlanta for an abortion rights demonstration. 

'I'm too old for all this travel'.  It was not time to hang 'em up, but ready for a more suitable desk job in Washington.  'I know that sounds bad', she said to Claude, taking the bogarted joint from him, kicking him to attention, 'but I haven't enough steam'. 

'There are no desk jobs in our business', said Claude.  'Its barricades or nothing'. 

What about Bob, she said, referring to Robert Muzelle, Managing Director of the organization, as happy and satisfied as could be, resting on his laurels, sit-ins, freedom rides, Bull Connor and the Pettus Bridge 'with Ralph and Martin', fat windbag, full of himself, never once getting out of his chair except for a a tribute to himself, an honorary title for his meritorious and tireless commitment to progressivism.  'He has a desk job'. 

'I'm getting on in years', Fanny said.  True enough but certainly not over the hill.  Just enough years to give her second thoughts.  Not whether it all had been worth it - activism was what had always counted - but was that all there was?  Was there no Act II?

It was the ten-dollar bill that did it, or at least that was the epiphanic moment of truth.  Alexander Hamilton, reviled patrician lord of the Old White Guy Constitutionalists who argued with Thomas Jefferson about the fickleness and cow shed ignorance of the majority, and insisted on an intermediary legislative body to protect the commonwealth from the tribalism and venal interests of the mob, suddenly made sense. 

All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born; the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second.

God forbid such a conversion, she said, blessing herself, making the sign of the cross, a reflexive gesture learned as a child and never gotten rid of despite her adopted secularism and radical progressivism.  Even granting Hamilton the benefit of the doubt - Shakespeare was neither the first nor the last to pillory the mob for its gullibility and capriciousness - was apostasy, a heretical venture away from the moral plumb line of her political faith. 

Yet, there he was - a handsome, chisel-jawed man of wealth, status, and influence expressing his anti-democratic sentiments to proto-liberal Jefferson, the man who understood not only the tenets of democracy but its ethos, its moral center, and its enduring legacy, and winning the argument. 

Fanny had spent months in fetid homeless shelters, on squirrely food lines, in nasty public housing gulags, beside in clinics with new transgender women, at the barricades with fierce lesbians, and it was beginning to show.  These were not America's best  and brightest, the Musks, Brins, Huangs, Bezos, and Zuckerbergs, at the top of the phylogenetic pyramid, a genius cluster never before seen, but on the lowest rung. 

And the masses she and her fellow activists were promoting so aggressively?  The foul, crime-ridden, endemically dysfunctional 'inner city'?  Pimps, ho's, Fentanyl dopers, crack-smoking losers? What was she thinking?

Again she blessed herself and again said, 'God forbid'; and yet these niggling, insidious, traitorous thoughts kept piling on, all because of one, fleeting, desultory, accidental glance at the ten dollar bill and the engraving of Alexander Hamilton. 

'Who's going to Anacostia tomorrow?', asked one of the assembled group.  Fanny groaned at the thought.  Another trip across the river in a caravan of three armored Chevrolet Suburbans bought second hand at a Defense Department auction, to meet with 'the community', local women demanding reparations for the city's indifference to the squalor and violence of the streets.  Anacostia, Brentwood, and any number of other communities in the blighted black wards of the city had done nothing but accept walkin' around money, entitlements, and a free pass and sit in their sinkholes waiting for more. 

Now, Fanny would never have thought that way before her epiphany - that startling revelation produced by one incidental look at the first Secretary of the Treasury. Before that, she would have gone across the river willingly and happily to join with the community in condemning racism and white privilege, marching with them to demand equal rights and justice.  Pharoah Jones, the self-anointed King of Anacostia, would have been her hero, the Black Odysseus of the ghetto; but now he was little more than a caricature, all fitted out with bling, grilled teeth, ermine coat, and snakeskin boots. 

Was all of this hatred, meanness, and vile assumptions always there, brewing and festering inside her, tamped down by her own idealism, her sunken costs, her Skinner-esque behavioral training?  Had she been a hypocrite all along?  Or like all epiphanies, did the truth simply sing out and she heard its chords?

'The latter, I hope', she said to herself as she demurred, claiming a conflict.  Anacostia would have to wait. 

Hamilton, as Secretary of the Treasury would never have agreed to or even considered such entitlement cash poured out in unaccountable sums on the basis of victimhood alone - a financial travesty, a consummate waste of valuable taxpayer monies, money that could be used to facilitate individual opportunity, create the infrastructure for wealth creation, and pave the way for private enterprise. 

Her advocacy group Scientists for Social Responsibility shamelessly took money from donors and earmarked federal funds and gave it away without a second thought given to accountability, performance, or positive outcomes. A virtual open sluice gate of dollars which would never be seen again in cash or in kind, misused, diverted, lost. 

When her masters shouted 'redistribution of wealth...Occupy Wall Street...from the haves to the have nots...to each according to his needs...' she had always raised her arms in solidarity.  The American economy was built on the backs of the poor and only the one percent benefited.  Now, thanks to that Augenblick of Alexander Hamilton on the ten dollar bill she had been about to use for a tuna sandwich and a diet Coke, she could only shake her head at her mindless credulousness.  How could she have?

An apocryphal tale, baldly untrue, said those in her former camaraderie who couldn't believe that a social justice warrior of Fanny's reputation, credential, and red badges of courage could be such a turncoat, a traitor.  But they were the blindered ones who had never had Fanny's revitalizing vision.  They were the ones still stuck in the mud, floundering but thinking it was only exuberance.  

Fanny had made her bones and her public image as a progressive, a liberal activist, and a professional harbinger.  Now that she was out of that particularly limelight, it was hard for the camera to pick her up.  By now in any case she is probably retired someplace warm with both her early life and her conservative reincarnation long recessed.  When sitting on a balcony in South Beach overlooking the Atlantic on a bright January day, nothing really matters anyway.