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.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.