The New Era Of Royal Democracy - Donald Trump, Darwinian Imperialism, And The American Empire

The No Kings protests recently concluded around the country - inchoate, disassembled, joyful affairs of liberal camaraderie - expressed concerns that Donald Trump was overstepping his constitutional authority, arrogating imperial power to himself, and threatening to turn the country into a monarchy. 

 

Nonsense of course.  Those protesting were simply unhappy that the President was putting the American house back in order, returning it to its foundational principles, and rejecting the fanciful, disruptive notions of gender reassignment, open borders, identity politics, and socialist economics. 

The American Left, still reeling from their electoral defeat in 2024 in which Donald Trump handily defeated Kamala Harris, a candidate who ran only on her racial identity and 'proud womanhood', is still licking its wounds. With no coherent, sensible, objective set of policies to counter the President's conservative agenda, protestors have  taken to the streets to howl, cry, and beat their breasts in frustration - as if those outcries make any difference whatsoever to a determined, willful, and self-confident president.

'What about the black man?', protesters cry, insisting that Trump's SS storm troopers are about to round up black people, pack them into cattle cars, and consign them to brutal gulags.  Gay men, lesbians, and transgenders will be sent to the gas chambers in a social purge no different than carried out by the Nazis - racial and gender purification in the extreme. The vision of a world run by women, surrounded by gay acolytes, celebrating a brave new world of diversity has disappeared in the wake of the Sturm und Drang of Donald Trump's juggernaut. 

Donald Trump has in the few short months of his presidency redefined executive power.  A man who cut his teeth on the mean streets of New York real estate, for whom legal action is child's play, and whose cutthroat, no-holds-barred victory at all costs creation of a building empire, has no intention of being civil, compromising, or accommodating.  

 

The world since the first human settlements has been violent, combative, territorial, and self-defensive - not surprising since those characteristics have been hardwired into human DNA since apes came down from the trees; but Joe Biden insisted that with love, hope, and charity a new utopian future was possible.  Through understanding, compassion and modesty the world could indeed become a better place. 

Presidents Putin of Russia and Xi of China licked their chops when they heard these nostrums, undaunted and unintimidated by America's admonitions. China made good on its promise to bring the Uighurs to heel, to secure Tibet within the Han orbit, and to make sure that Taiwan did not get too ambitious.  Russia sent its tanks into Ukraine fulfilling a millennia-old prophecy about Russian territorial sovereignty.  

Iran, happy beneficiaries of Obama's nuclear treaty which did little to slow the enrichment of weapons grade plutonium and the building of intercontinental ballistic missiles to deliver them and which did nothing to address Iran's support of terrorism and the building of an Islamic caliphate, were delighted when Biden took over the reins of government. 

Trump has joined the new world triumvirate of power, equal to Russia and China in their hegemonic principles.  All three nations are now unabashedly Machiavellian, advocates of Clausewitz, emperors and imperial regents.  

Each president is imperial in his own way given culture and history.  Xi rests on millennia of powerful Chinese dynasties which ruled the empire with authority, cultural integrity, and absolute will.  Putin recalls the storied history of Tsarist Russia, Peter the Great, Alexander the Great, Nicolas I and many more. There is nothing surprising in Putin's desire not only to recall but recreate Russia's imperial past. 

'We are entering a new era of royal democracy' wrote one political observer of American politics - 'a hybrid of imperial intentions within a traditional democracy'.

Donald Trump is neither a dictator who commands the loyalty of army and can call them out of their barracks at will; nor is he the product of Communist statism which has central authority and executive power enshrined in its canon.  

He must use the levers of power, the checks and balances of the democratic system, and stretch executive authority to the limits of the Constitution to achieve his ends. 

A foreign policy based on Darwinian confrontation, but within the sanctions of American governance, is the expression of this new royal democracy.  Trump wants Iran out of the way and Venezuela neutralized to keep their oil reserves out of the hands of Russia and China.  He wants to re-establish American hegemony in its backyard, Latin America, and has no intention of backing down on his promises to establish American control of the region.   

A crackdown on illegal immigration will restabilize America's borders and restore a modicum of cultural homogeneity - the re-establishment of an ethical and moral center so lacking in the progressive era.  The reopening of American lands to energy and rare earths exploitation will add to the country's geopolitical strength.

The waiving of wokism and a return to millennia-old principles of human normality will further contribute to America's solidarity.  And patriotism which will replace divisive multiculturalism will be the overriding, unifying ethos. 

A king in fact? Hardly, but a Darwinian imperialist in reality. What are world wars, civil conflicts, tribal rivalries, family disputes, ethnic demands, and religious aggression if not examples of Darwinism?  Human nature, that innate, hardwired, ineluctable foundation on which all action is predicated, is found in both newborns and nations.  Machiavelli anticipated Darwin, understood the basis of human activity and pronounced it indissoluble and permanent. 

Where does progressive idealism come from?  How can millennia of history be ignored.  Those who insist that the world is becoming a more peaceful, accommodating place are just whistlin' Dixie.  The Twentieth Century was one of history's bloodiest and the Twenty-First is proving to be no different. 

Conservatives accept this state of being and deal with it.  If the world is a violent, contentious place, then be prepared to counter the aggression, territorialism, and self-interest that threaten national sovereignty.  There is no point to sweet talking, compromise, or treaties.  Life has never been a bowl of cherries and never will be. 

Donald Trump understands this better than any president in history.  Yes, Roosevelt authorized the firebombing and incineration of Dresden; and yes, Truman gave the 'Bombs Away' to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki; but in both cases America was the victim of naked aggression.  

Trump intends to be ahead of the curve, to obviate any possibility of attack, to make the first strike, to obliterate the enemy.  Haven't Iran's intentions been exactly the same?

There are three years left in the Trump presidency and 'You ain't seen nothin' yet'.  The No Kings rallies are hardly blips on the radar and nothing but annoying fleas on a dog.  There is no 'there' there, no meat, nothing of substance.  Unlike the rallies to end the Vietnam War or to end segregation, the No Kings affairs are just happy jamborees, insignificant, minor episodes, weekends out. 

Meanwhile Donald Trump goes about his Machiavellian business. 

The Diary Of A Religious Seeker In The African Heart Of Darkness - An Epiphany Of Unimaginable Savagery

Angela Langford had grown up Catholic, but had fallen off the wagon in her adolescent years.  The whole story - virgin birth, resurrection, walking on water, loaves and fishes, 'I can see!' miracles seemed like one big charade, a joke, a charlatan's shell game, one great Ponzi scheme begun in the Vatican and shelved down until it became a parade of frilly hats, bonnets, and crinoline dresses. 

She had sat through one Sunday sermon after another, harangued, badgered, and warned against sin until she felt used, abused, and tinkered with by unctuous priests who retired to the sacristy and buggered each other until bleeding and sore - their only reflection of the suffering they invoked at every mass. 

'Once a Catholic, always a Catholic', goes the old adage.  The Church was so efficient in its making of Catholics out of little children that as adults they never lost the fear of a vengeful God, the heavy burden of sin, and the desperate need for salvation.  And so it was that although Angela swore off the faith, doubts kept returning, and she spent hours with the university chaplain hoping to resolve them once and for all. Fish or cut bait - believe or begone. 

She traipsed across the Old Campus three times a week to meet young Father Soto, himself a graduate of the university, schooled in the classics, history, and the strands of molecular biology.  He had never lost his faith, and in fact it had only increased over the years.  He knew about doubt and appreciated those niggling questions about the implausible myths of his religion; but was so profoundly impressed by the scholarship of Aquinas, Augustine, Athanasius, and the Alexandrian church fathers, that he based his faith on their teachings and the core beliefs of the Church - the divinity of Christ, the Trinity, and Redemption. 

 

It all went for naught, and as the semester drew to a close, Father Soto concluded the sessions, telling the young women that it all boiled down to a matter of faith. 

Given her doubts and criticism of Catholicism, she set out on a course to explore other religions which perhaps hewed closer to the essential meaning of spirituality; but she was put off by the holy-rolling, ecstatic nonsense of evangelical Protestantism.  Their claims that Jesus could be one's personal savior, come down from his heavenly throne to become a celestial friend were absurd; and where on earth did the notion that the Quran was delivered by an angel in Arabic to a poor, illiterate Arab goat herder come from?  

The Aryans on their way down to the Gangetic Plain from Mohenjo-Daro saw the universe filled with elephant gods and monkey gods, and Buddhists, rejecting all of it prayed to The One - one what, exactly, wondered Angela who had been attracted to the religion's simplicity and unpretentious devotion but got lost in its idolatry?

 

And that was just for starters.  She tested the Shakers and the Quakers,  She explored the new age religions - Scientology and its comic book electronics, The Church Universal and Triumphant and its Armageddon millennialism.  She left no stone unturned.

Joseph Conrad writing The Heart of Darkness understood the primal power of animism, a belief in the immanence of God in the natural world.  While Catholics in the sacrifice of the mass only metaphorically drank the blood and ate the body of Christ, the cannibalistic tribes of the African forest, barely evolved from the Paleolithic, understood the redemptive, salvational potency of eating real flesh and blood.

 

This was her last hope.  If she could prostrate herself before the universe, before the gods of thunder and lighting, and before a human sacrificial altar, she might find her way. 

Before she travelled to the inner reaches of the Congo, cutting herself off from the civilized world, she went to Haiti where a primitive animist, pagan religion - Voodoo - was still practiced.  Participating or at least observing these rituals would be a tutorial, a first step into the heart of darkness.

She was not disappointed, for in the hills far above Kenscoff she witnessed a bloody primitivism she had only imagined.  It was a wild, ecstatic affair with animal slaughter, the drinking of blood, demonic possession, and an experience completely removed from anything familiar or ordinary.  

'I am ready', she said; and so it was that she travelled to Africa, to the Congo, and booked her passage as far up the Congo River as she could past Kisangani, the last trading post on the river, onto a series of ever smaller tributaries which eventually led into the last virtually unexplored regions of the rainforest.  

Her guide, Emmanuel Ngoma left her at Kisangani.  'Do not go there, Madam', he said before disappearing into the dark lanes of the town.  'Do not go there'; but Angela had not come all this way to turn back.  She was not only unafraid but expectant.  This, she thought, might be the epiphany she had always sought. 

The trip was long and difficult, often impassable, choked with water hyacinths, shallow and narrow twists and turns, until finally she could go no farther.  Her boatman who had reluctantly taken her this far, fearful for his life but tempted by her generous payment, saw her off among the mangrove roots, and quickly turned back. 

Mungo Park, English explorer of the late 18th century wrote of his trips up the Niger River and how he was repeatedly captured, enslaved, sold and bartered from one tribe to another, finally able to escape captivity and somehow return to England.  His memoirs tell of the savage primitivism of the jungle, its Neolithic culture, and the fearful cannibalism of the tribes of the most interior regions of the forest. 

 

Angela had read Park, du Chaillu, Burton, and Conrad but driven by idealism, hope, adventure and a faith-or-death motivation, she pushed on into the jungle.  Along the way she kept a diary as had all these earlier explorers, and in it wrote of her expectation and spiritual coming of age.

Her remains - her macabre shrunken head and her diary, hung from it on a leather tong as a talisman - were found a year later by a Belgian missionary.  Attempts to find the young woman by Congolese, Belgian, and American authorities had failed.   Once she turned off the Ubangi and headed down the many unnamed minor tributaries and streams deeper into the jungle, she was lost to modern communications. 

The journal is hard to read, for it describes her ordeal in graphic detail. 'I am finished', she wrote, 'I have lost hope'.  The rapes, torture, disfigurement, and humiliation were unimaginable. They were done with glee, she wrote, in a kind of feral paganism that was beyond imagining.  The natives danced, sang, and howled as they encircled her, jabbing her with spears, licking her blood off the blades and driving them again into her flesh.  When she was nearly spent, bloodied, and bleeding they threw her into a hut with a joint of monkey meat, and left her to recover or die. 

Near the end managing only a barely legible scrawl, she wrote of the animist rituals outside the hut.  The entire tribe gathered in a glade open to the sky and began to chant.  The voices in unison grew louder and louder until it became a roar, and as she saw through the chinks in the mud and wattle,  a young woman was tied down on a primitive altar, raped, decapitated, sliced and served up to the priests around the altar. 

'God help me', was Angela's last entry in her journal. 

The Belgian authorities were reluctant to send the journal to Angela's parents.  It was simply too horrific, too descriptive of the inhumanity and barbarism she suffered to be read by anyone of her family. The Belgian High Commissioner in Kisangani gave the journal to the Franciscan priest who had found it and her remains.  He said he would be her caretaker, her advocate, her missionary; and alongside his Bible, he kept the journal and read its lines as if verses in a prayerbook.

Seen One Slum, Seen Them All - An Operatic Libretto, Or Annals Of African Development

Bradford Perrine was an economic development consultant with a resume filled with assignments in some of the most difficult and challenging places in the world.  These were places that no one but the international banker, oil prospector, or non-profit volunteer would go - pestilential places from arrival hall to departure lounge and everywhere in between.

Perrine had a sinecure with the World Bank - first class air travel, two-day stopovers in Europe, five star hotels at his destination and a no-limit expense account.  These were compensations for having to work in desperate, malarial, crime-ridden, corrupt places. 

The Hotel Independence was his favorite, built by Joshua N'dogo, President of a central African country with vast mineral deposits and newly discovered rare earths.  N'dogo spared no expense to make the Europeans and Americans who came courting happy, and the Independence was as fine a hotel as one would find in Paris, Rome, or London.  

Pierre Gramont, formerly of Le Lion Farouche, a Paris  restaurant which had, thanks to him earned its third Michelin star, was the chef.  N'dogo's offer was too generous to refuse - far more money in hard currency than he had ever dreamed of, a penthouse apartment at the Independence, a new Mercedes, and his choice of Fulani women.  

The luxury of the hotel was a necessity after long days of visiting Bonneville, the festering slum on the river which was the home to 100,000 residents.  It was among the nastiest of Africa, long left to rot by the President whose interests lay in beryllium not the souls of the slum. His wealth was legendary, the Presidential palace magnificent, and his harem of beautiful women from the four corners of the continent was admired by Big Men everywhere. 

The World Bank, the executing agency for a United Nations project to improve environmental sanitation, had provided a multi-million dollar soft loan to N'dogo to invest in providing waste disposal in Bonneville - low cost sanitary latrines in particular.  Bank engineers assured beneficiaries that the latrines were the latest in structural design and would revolutionize slum development. 

Of course the President had no use for toilets or slums, siphoned off most of the Bank money, dug a few desultory pits and sent bulldozers on a one-time visit to move the trash from choked gutters to large, rat-infested mounds, took photos and videos of the operation and signed on for an extension to the loan. 

Perrine had found every reason to avoid visiting Bonneville, for as callous and unfeeling as it might sound, 'seen one slum, seen them all' was the meme. The factors producing abject poverty and miserable living conditions were universal; and in the case of Africa, they influenced countries as a whole. 

Rural populations tempted by the promise of big city opportunities but still tribal in outlook had neither the will, the education, nor the cultural ethos to make anything of the city except one vast, pestilential slum. 

Every city was more slum than residence. Tribal mentality, government indifference, the venal opportunism of post-colonial regimes, and some kind of animist loyalty turned one urban area after another into a stinking pit. 

N'dogo of course knew which side of his bread was buttered, and he made sure that at least one part of every major city looked modern, enclaves of faux prosperity more theatrical staging than anything, and development bankers chose to see these areas as signs of hopefulness not the charade they were. 

Bonneville was disgusting, but no more than any slum Perrine had visited in Kinshasa, Lagos, Luanda, or Maputo. Open air defecation, rutted, potholed roads, wooden huts on stilts perched over stinking, human waste-carrying, trash-clogged canals, naked children, cheap whores, indolence, and grime. 

Which was why Perrine had deferred his visit. What was the point?  He could write his report without having to set foot in the place.  He knew where the Bank money went - to offshore accounts and not to Bonneville - and N'dogo knew that he knew but the rare earth contract was all that mattered. 

A drive-through perhaps with a Bank photographer in tow - Perrine With Native Children...Perrine Observing Excavation...Perrine Beside Local Authorities - was the least he could do, so in the Presidential limousine, dark tinted windows rolled up, chilling air-conditioning on full blast, and single-malt whisky in the teak cabinet before him, Perrine did an 'on-site' visit. 

Finally back at the Independence, sitting by the pool with Emriye al-Maghrebi, Fulani princess and his Presidentially approved consort, sipping a sundowner, he lay back watched the evening swallows do their aerobatics, and smiled.  Life in Africa wasn't all that bad. 

The next morning he was invited to the Presidential palace for an audience with the President.  The entrance hall was magnificent - Carrera marble floors, Venetian sconces, Baccarat chandeliers, and caparisoned Republican Guards - and the long walk through equally well-appointed corridors only confirmed the majesty of presidential power. 

'How was the trip over?', asked the President.  Were Perrine's accommodations comfortable?  Had he tried Pierre Gramont’s pheasant-under-glass? 

The meeting was a formality of course.  The President had not an iota of interest in the project in Bonneville and was only interested in the Bank's upcoming geological mission - an evaluation of the rare earth deposits in Bolo Province, the first step to opening the area to private investment. 'Soon, Mr. President, soon'; and with that, Perrine was ushered to his waiting limousine to complete his mission. 

The First Class cabin of Emirates was offering a tasting of the best California and Bordeaux wines - a friendly competition for those Americana and European patrons of the airline.  The wine flowed, the mood was jovial, and time passed quickly. 

 

Perrine's department chief, a Dutch engineer with a commitment to low cost sanitation and a lifelong dedication to alleviating African suffering, wanted details.  Perrine, used to his boss's ardency was well- prepared, and shared with him the engineering report prepared by N'dogo's Minister of Public Works, a man known to Rietveld thanks to his many trips to Washington.  

The report was fiction, of course, but prepared in the most meticulous engineering language complete with dimensions, static head calculations, temperatures, and plumb lines. 

'Good', said Rietveld, 'very good indeed', and with that Perrine returned to his office to begin the paperwork on the new, extended loan. 

Perrine saw no irony in all this, no moral crossroads, no ethical dilemmas.  This was the way the world worked - a mutual back-scratching, quid pro quo arrangement that had taken place ever since African independence when Cold War powers did everything to win the allegiance of the new continental governments.  

Money had poured down the sluice without a second thought in those days.  Nothing had changed. It was no longer a matter of political rivalry but economic competition.  Chinese and American interests were anxious to secure African natural resources, and would look the other way when it came to accountability.

Given this larger geopolitical context, issues of moral probity or ethical posture were irrelevant. Generous loans would be given, eyes turned the other way when money showed up in Aruba or Bimini, fictious reports of 'development' taken as gospel and used as the basis for more soft loans, and the dance of consultants like Perrine perfectly choreographed in time with the music. 

So Perrine slept well and looked forward to his next trip to Africa. By now even the pro forma trips to the beneficiary slums were unnecessary, so unerringly similar they all were, and so predictable were the projects designed for them.  A sojourn at the Independence or the Internationale or the Majestic, good food and wine, a friendly camaraderie with the President's men, and lovely, languorous nights with dark-eyed lovers was all one needed to know about Africa. 

A Love Affair In The Heart Of Darkness - Without Savagery, Passion Is Pedestrian

Barton Ames, World Bank loan officer, old Africa hand, and world traveler, had had his share of affairs on the Dark Continent, some incidental, some circumstantial, and others temporary but telling. There was nothing like loosing the tethers that bind, heading off for the deepest, most remote and unexplored regions of Africa and, like Kurtz in Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, coming to grips with human savagery and engaging it. 

Of course Ames had a romantic streak, and his job as an international civil servant working at the behest of bank investors and canny loan beneficiaries offered little in the way of Mungo Park, Conrad, Rene du Chaillu, or Richard Burton; but he at least understood the nature of adventure and how it provided the context for more simple engagements.

He first experienced the strange complementarity between danger and sexual energy the last time he was in Haiti - a country disturbed, politically uncertain and calm before he arrived, but chaotic and violent a few days afterwards.  He and his lover, a Palestinian woman in Port-au-Prince for the United Nations Refugee Relief Agency, were on the balcony of their room at the Splendid, a Victorian gingerbread hotel, all mahogany, teak, and polished brass, when the shooting started.  They could hear the mortar fire by the port, and hear the rumble of tanks making their way in convoy from their barracks in Petionville to Duvalierville. 

Soon the hotel was surrounded by army troops, the first of which broke into the bar and carried out cases of Johnnie Walker, passing bottles around to their comrades in the half-tracks and armored personnel carriers stopped in the parking lot in front of the hotel.  

When  they received orders to proceed ahead and engage the rebel forces coming up from Avenue Toussaint de l'Ouverture, they were drunk and fired their old, Soviet-era single shot, bolt action rifles into the air, hollered and bellowed patriotic songs, and made their way south. 

Tires were burning everywhere, 'necklaces of fire' they were called.  Traitors were handcuffed and blindfolded while tires were put over their heads and set ablaze while irregulars hooted and hollered at the charring bodies. 

The night spent by Barton Ames and Emriye al-Mehmet was all the more uninhibited because of the intimidating, encircling violence.  Far from frightening it gave emotional cover and shared protection.  In bed, under the covers, holding each other for comfort and fear, their intimacy turned to sexual interest and then to irresolute passion. 

The coup was aborted, the President was still alive and well in the palace, and the rebels were executed by firing squad in the public square.  Barton left the next morning for Washington, and Emriye for Istanbul on the first flights available. 

One might think that such an adventure would bring them indivisibly together, but foreign affairs have a way of dissimulating. Lovers can never recreate the heady atmosphere of a dangerous tropical sexual rendezvous in their own, calm, quiet, and sedately peaceful home countries. Trysts in godawful places are things of fancy.  

At the same time Barton couldn't help but wanting to revisit the uncommon passion of that night at the Splendid.  It was unique, something out of D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller; but undaunted and a sexual partisan, he knew that if the circumstances were right, it would happen again. 

Africa is a penitential miasma on every point on the compass - venality, autocracy, civil violence and unrest, corruption, and chaos.  Somalia is but the most current example of Africa's descent into tribal, religious, and ethnic hell.  It is a country defined by international boundaries only, an unruly and unrulable place unfit for human habitation; and the Congo is no different,  Kinshasa is a sinkhole of poverty, incivility, and misrule.  

Nigeria is perhaps the worst. International development consultants have No Nigeria clauses in their contracts, Americans have lost millions to Nigerian online fraud, and the fertile delta, area of vast oil resources is a gangland shooting gallery.  South Africa, once the bright light of the continent, destined to build on Afrikaner enterprise and wealth, now is only a desperate shithole of tribal rivalry and government corruption. 

Barton was drawn to Africa not because of Conrad but not despite him either.  The continent held a special place in the adventurer's heart -  a place still so primitive, uncivilized, intemperate, violent, and untamed that it had to be experienced.  He signed up for a sojourn in a Sahelian country recently in the news for its successful fight against ISIS and the rebellious Tuaregs in the North.  It would provide just the right blend of colonial French culture, Islamic Sufism, and African tribal warfare to be the right place at the right time. 

The trip started off well.  He chose a small hotel run by ex-colonial women from la France profonde, somewhere in the Dordogne, women who still recorded guests' accounts by hand, and where old Africa hands came in from the desert for their Pernod and canapes at the bar. 

As occasion would have it, he met a young German woman ready to embark on a solo journey far to the north, beyond Mopti and Timbuktu, toward al-Alamein and the Algerian oases serving the salt trade caravans. She, like many expatriates and European travelers were drawn by Africa's mystery.  

It was indeed a mystery why after over sixty years of independence the continent was far worse off than under its colonial rulers.  In the same space of time that South Korea went from a rural peasant society to a world economic power, Africa regressed.  While China went from Maoism to America's rival if not superior in a few short decades, Africa became basket case.  

It was this desire to explore a seemingly defiant primitivism that drew both Heidi and Barton Ames to the Sahel. Like attracts like, and after pastis and capitaine, they became lovers.  Anyone but expatriate drifters might question the ease and quickness of their affair, but those who have been about and around such Sahelian places would not question it. Temporary, fortunate sexual elisions are common and expected in otherwise uninhabitable, uncivilized places. 

The night was hot, long, and stifling. The hotel lost power by 6pm and never recovered, but with the windows to the street wide open, and secure under a canopied mosquito net, the two lovers were at ease. Both would never do with cooling, insulation, and  the security of Europe a l'étranger. It had to be this way, and the disturbing gunfire from the nearby desert rebel redoubts only added to the sexual tension.  

Baron and the German girl said their goodbyes the next morning.  He back to Washington and she to the interior.  His trip was subject to delays, hers was liable to Tuareg or ISIS raids, which is why both hoped that they would meet again under similar circumstances but knew that they would not.  Such love affairs do not survive light and air, 

Infidelity, fantasy, adventurism?  All the above and more.  Barton was near retirement.  Although he looked forward to a new, less complicated, and simpler life, he wondered how he would adjust to his new celibacy, his confinement, and his ordinary ways. Thomas Wolfe:

You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing's sake, back home to aestheticism, to one's youthful idea of 'the artist' and the all-sufficiency of 'art' and 'beauty' and 'love,' back home to the ivory tower, back home to places in the country, to the cottage in Bermuda away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time--back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.

 

Back home - Barton wouldn't want to go there if he could.  He was more than satisfied with an untethering of the ties that bind, a sojourn in a nasty place, love in the palms. 

Who Do You Trust More, Men Or Women? - New Studies Reveal Startling Results

'Of course men cannot be trusted.  Just look who's in the White House...If Bill Clinton cheated on his wife, then how can we trust him with our country...Richard Nixon lied through his teeth about Watergate...Ronald Reagan deceived us about Iran-Contra...Martin Luther King cheated on his wife Coretta every chance he got...Kennedy bedded Marilyn Monroe and Russian spies...'

  

While it is unfair to pick on world leaders - Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor to President Nixon, famously said that power was the greatest aphrodisiac, so it is quite natural for powerful men to have the pick of the litter - do all men share this penchant for lying, deception, and cheating?

In a new, controversial study published by the Utrecht (Louisiana) University Press (March 2025), Professor Emeritus Lionel P Smathers confirmed this universal, popular conclusion: 

In a double-blind study of over 2000 subjects across a wide range of socio-economic, racial, and cultural categories, the inescapable conclusion is that men, for reasons of birth, genetics, and cultural influence, can be trusted far less than women.  While this was the unanimous conclusion when it came to sexual vagary, it included the crimes of Bernie Madoff, Skilling, Kurniawan, and other infamous frauds. 

There is something in the male makeup, exhibited on the pre-historic African veldt, on Wall Street, and in Washington and Silicon Valley which have given men a predatory, amoral drive for survival while women have been content to sit by the home fires tending to the family. 

'See, what did I tell you', said Vicki Chalmers to her close friend, Bernadette. 'I knew it all the time.  Men are rutting pigs'. 

Her friend demurred, wife to a faithful, loving husband and wonderful father.  'Well, surely not all men, Vicki', she said knowingly. 

'Just you watch out', Vicki replied angrily. 'What goes around, comes around', confirming the suspicions that Wilbur Hanson was not the choirboy Bernadette thought.  Vicki had seen him at the Town & Country bar of the Mayflower hotel on a hot midsummer afternoon, hidden away in the shadows with someone definitely not Bernadette.  'She will have her comeuppance', thought Vicki, angry at her supercilious friend. 

Yes, Vicki  had also been deceived by a wandering husband - in Anchorage with Miss Fairbanks, 'business trips' to Port-au-Prince, weeks of 'staying late at the office'.  She hated to conflate all men based on her own unfortunate experience, but when face-to-face with a smiling, assured, deceived woman like Bernadette Hanson, she had to speak up. 

Not every academic agreed with Prof. Smathers.  In fact his article, reprinted in the New York Review of Literature was the subject of an academic tit-for-tat that went on for weeks.  In a particularly dismissive retort, Prof. Arnold Vibberts of Medford (Oregon) University had the following to say in the familiar sardonic, catty, and unctuous style characteristic of the Review:

With all due respect to my esteemed colleague from Louisiana, research from other quarters, far more disciplined, rigorous, and methodologically sound has shown just the opposite.  It is not just men who are the deceivers, the sexual truants, and untrustworthy public servants, but women who trump their misdemeanors at every turn. 

What my learned colleague conveniently overlooks is pregnancy and the fact that only women know who the father is. Women have used this proprietary information to feather their nests.  Playing on men's natural evolutionary mistrust of women (see Freud, On the Determinants of Male Jealousy, 1904), women have dismissed male patriarchy and chosen their own path to sexual freedom.  

Laura, the main character in Strindberg's seminal play, The Father drives her husband mad with doubts about his paternity, has him committed to an insane asylum, and takes over full responsibility for the considerable family finances and the sole care of their daughter.  Fiction? Hardly.  Research by Figgins et. al in 2022 in which 1500 women were queried about their 'gender potency' results were unequivocal.  Most women were aware of their innate biological and reproductive power and would use it if and when necessary. 

French Deconstructionist Lacan ventured into the argument a number of years before in an influential article on historicism and the ineluctable influences of social imperatives. 'It is not that women are inherently duplicitous', he wrote, 'only complicit, made so by their perennially inferior, subjugated status.  Using whatever power they have over men they are co-equals in sexual terms if not legal or social ones'. 

Women, because of this history and natural proclivity, can be trusted far less than men. This genetic, reproductive investment has given them 'a nuclear weapon in the armory'. 

'Men have not needed to be duplicitous or unfaithful', Prof. Vibberts went on.  Ask Suleiman the Great of Ottoman Turkey, a man whose harem numbered in the hundreds and whose many wives were cloaked, veiled, and immured in granite redoubts.  The Saudis have been on to something for generations.'

Not only academics are in this cat fight on the back pages of the New York Review. Leakage into the popular press when the subject is of such topical interest is guaranteed; and when Women Today opened the discussion to its female readers, the outcry was deafening. The reference to the legitimacy of the repressive Saudi regime in its incarceration of women alone was grounds for the beheading of the so-called academics who champion men's predatory, abusive rights. 

Vicki Chalmers, far too old for Women Today but a closet reader of girly-girl articles in it about how to get a man, read the angry retort in the magazine which opened the discussion up to its readers; and from there the debate became a cause celebre. 

Insults, vicious ad hominem attacks, vile and scurrilous contentions poured forth from both sides.  If anyone ever doubted there was a war between the sexes, this nasty exchange dispelled all doubts. Men from the deepest holler in Appalachia to Wall Street traders both reviled women for their trickery and roughshod feminism and reiterated their natural right to roam. 

Women were equally outraged, and from all quarters were heard the familiar accusations of patriarchy, misogyny, and male supremacy.  'We may not be saints', one reader wrote, 'but we are not sinners'. 

Professor Vibberts who argued  that female 'reproductive supremacy' gave women a potent weapon in their contest with men, and deployed often, was unrepentant. 'The facts speak for themselves', he said in an interview with the BBC. 

'Feminists argue that women need protection from men', Vibberts went on.  'Nothing could be further from the truth, and by ignoring their innate, inviolable reproductive power, they demean all women'. 

This irony has not been lost on social conservatives.  How can you champion women on the one hand, claiming that they are superior to men in all regards, and then demand bastions of protection for them on the other?  'Nonsense'. said Vibberts. 

Vibberts was summarily dismissed from Medford despite his tenure, for 'behavior unbefitting of the University'.  He knew it was coming, for few if any of his colleagues were speaking out against the cant and pseudo-intellectual monopoly of the Left; but he easily won his case on free speech grounds, stating that a cloture of the debate on gender differences was tantamount to gulag repression. 

'How's your marriage, Professor?', one gotcha reporter had the temerity to ask. 

'Of my five current wives', he replied, 'one of them may be telling the truth.'

The Invented Woman - The Recreation Of A Glorious Past That Never Existed

Vicki Chalmers knew that her memory was failing from 'Now, where did I put my keys?' to 'Who’s coming to dinner?' but she put those minor inconsistencies aside and said, 'But I can remember the important things'. 

Vicki had always preferred selective, creative memory.  There was no more idyllic time, she said, than those years in Greenwich Village smoking endless unfiltered cigarettes, drinking tequila, and loving the one she was with. 

There was Emil the conceptual artist. 'We made love underneath his The Human Odyssey, looking up at Homer standing astride the whitecapped waves of the Mediterranean', none of which was even vaguely true, but when told in such dreamy-eyed romantic verse to an eager group of ladies at tea, the truth did not matter. 

 

It all could have happened.  She did live in New York at the time, although on Staten Island as an au pair, released one night a week when she took the ferry to Manhattan and wandered up from the Battery to SoHo and the East Village.  As she walked past the dive bars, smoke-filled cafes, and coffee shops, she imagined herself there, cigarette dangling from her lip, eyes squinting against the smoke, a volume of Proust's Chez Swann opened in front of her, the pages dogeared from use, stained with tears and drops of expresso, next to an artist or a poet, longhaired, distant, and mythic. 

But for a few slips of fate she might have been a student at Columbia, or halfway through a doctorate on Deconstruction at NYU and living the postmodern moment at the Cafe Nero, or...the possibilities were endless, but the closest she got to her dream was  'the forgotten borough', an afterthought of the Dutch who settled Manhattan and the legions of entrepreneurs who later made the City what it was. 

Fate was fate, she believed, and there was nothing you could do about the cards you were dealt except to make the best of them; and soon in her young life 'extension' became the operative principle. With enough imagination and empathy it was enough to be in the occasion of cool, commit to memory the confected reality, and rely on it as a foundation for future recall.

Vladimir Nabokov, a self-described memorist, said that the past and only the past defined human existence.  The present, Nabokov went on to observe is nothing more than a millisecond of existence before becoming the past. The Higgs boson once produced has a lifetime of less than one sextillionth of a second; and this is slow compared to the passage of the present to the past. The  future is only a speculative time of possibilities and impossible dreams. 

The more one remembers the past, said Nabokov, lives it through constant recollection, and curates it as a personal, existential treasure, the more one’s life has substance and meaning.  Nabokov developed techniques to fix events in his memory and devised ways to recall them from his mental archives and replay them like a movie.  The more he could remember, he said, the more complete he was as a human being.

However one chooses to define the present, it quickly becomes the past, archived in our memory, and without attention can disappear.  If we cannot remember the beach at Deauville -  the umbrellas, the silhouette of the cliffs of Dover on the English side of the Channel, the seagulls, the chill, and the dresses of young girls – then it never happened.  Even if the events of that day had subliminal effects – our preference for colored dresses or our dislike of the chill – if we cannot remember them, they have lost their meaning, integrity, and substance.

Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is an autobiography which was written not as a historical record of the author’s life, but as a pastiche of those memories which define him.  There was no reason to order them chronologically, to link them to future events citing cause and effect, only to celebrate them for what they were – integral and indispensable parts of him.

Vicki was a creative memorist.  She saw no distinction between her imaginings, their confection into valid memory, and the actual events of her life.  Why should one be forever harnessed to a mule endlessly plowing the same furrow? No, the human spirit was made of much finer stuff than just plodding through a solitary, brutish, short, and nasty Hobbesian existence.  

Of course she did not set out to construct this alternate reality, but fell into it naturally.  As a little girl, the world around her seemed too flat and grey until she invested it with brightness and color of her own. Birds were not just birds but messengers of God.  Clouds were the meadows of angels. 

Vicki came into her own later in life when she reined in her fanciful ambitions, finished college, and moved to Washington where she found an internship at an environmentalist non-profit agency.  Although she had no particular commitment to reversing climate change or to saving the snail darter or spotted owl, the idea of saving the earth had congeniality. 

It wasn't long before she conflated her own fancy with the affairs of environmental action.  She became  a preservationist, a poet of the forest, a Rousseau and a Walt Whitman. She wove these stories and accumulating 'memories' so convincingly that her actual deskwork, endless editing of policy papers and screeds disappeared, in fact for all intents and purposes never existed.

The progressive tent is a big one with room enough to accommodate all manner of activists - climate change activists were joined by civil rights workers, transgender advocates, socialists and communists, and former farm workers.  In the heady atmosphere of social reform, all issues were conflated or subsumed within a universal anti-capitalist ethos. 

Slowly but surely, she created memories of abortion camaraderie on the National Mall, marches down the avenues of Washington with Black Lives Matter, standing tall and defiantly against the storm troopers of ICE. 

None of it was true, but it could have been, so close was she to the action in its preparatory phases in her office on U Street; and years later she spoke with confidence about those good, purposeful, righteous times. 

She didn't stop there, and as an older woman revived 'memories' of marching with Martin and Ralph across the Pettis Bridge, Woodstock, and Montgomery sit-ins. 

The remarkable thing of it was she never once considered herself an imposter, a fraud, a balmy dreamer.  Her invented memories were so real, so intimate, and so peopled with friends, lovers, and colleagues that she became a totally invented person. 

She always kept one step ahead of the truth - her stories of her halcyon years were so rooted in chronology, fact, and record that few questioned her; and her passionate retelling of them complete with love, hate, deception, dishonesty, and courage deflected any suspicion. 

Her marvelous confection was so convincing that she herself had no idea what was real and what wasn't. In a land already filled with striving, desirous, upward-reaching, credulous people whose grasp on reality or real possibility was fragile at best, Vicki fit right in.  No one really cared about the truth, veracity, or fact.  It could have been was enough for them. 

Artists like Browning, Durrell, and Kurosawa let alone trial lawyers knew that truth was evasive. Eye witness accounts of the same scene differ greatly.  Stories told around Aunt Leona's Easter dinner table about Uncle Harry and his third wife never jibed. The Ring and the Book was all about mnemonic artifact. 

So for Vicki Chalmers the niggling doubts about memory loss were insignificant.  If one memory faded, she could replace it with another, and till the end of her life she was so adept at confabulating her past that she was revered - a freedom fighter, a reformist, a progressive.  Yet, not only was she none of those things, she cared little about them.  They had been convenient, accessible realities, no more no less. 

A marvelous human invention was Vicki Chalmers, a marvel, talented creator of reality, an eye-painter, a dreamer brought to life, a unique creation.  Those who suspected that much of what she told was reverie, never called her out for dishonesty.  They, like everyone else, loved the stories, the passion, the engagement, and the vitality.  Who needed the truth?

The Faithful Husband - Leftovers In The Survival Of The Fittest

New Brighton is a small Connecticut city once known for its industry.  Its factories produced arms and materiel for the Union Army in the Civil War, the United States Army in WWI and WWI, and hardware for the domestic market. Its factories eventually shut their doors in the face of foreign competition, but small tool-and-dye shops remained. 

New Brighton in the modern era was like many in New England, recovering from the end of their industrial heyday, losing population to the wealthier suburban towns serving New York, Hartford, and Boston, but managing.  For those who remained - a healthy cadre of doctors, lawyers, teachers, and accountants - like was good.  Crime was rising due to Puerto Rican and Dominican immigrants; the Polish neighborhoods, always anchors of civility, were now far smaller than they were fifty years ago, but there was the Frederick Law Olmstead park, an important regional hospital, and a small university. 

The older residents remember the town in its halcyon years - a bustling downtown, festooned with lights and window displays at Christmas, Holy Week processions, and a post-war optimism shared by many in the country.  Things changed, of course.  Religion was no longer the common thread of the community, children are driven to school rather than walk, the finer stores have moved to the suburbs, and marriages are more open, women more free to come and go as they please, and men involved with other women.  It isn't exactly the free-for-all found in big cities, but the old life of fidelity and Kinder Kirche Kuchen is no longer. 

From an evolutionary point of view, this is a good thing.  Darwin would have been cautionary at best had he seen the sedate homeliness of the Fifties, men settling for one woman, women happy as homemakers and mothers, and children brought up in an atmosphere of propriety, faithfulness, and patriotism. 

The real world was held in abeyance during those years of happy marriages and a welcoming but censorious society.  The Sixties changed all that.  Love the one you're with replaced the old tired nostrums of sexual ordinariness.  Sex was offered, accepted, negotiated in a free marketplace, the fetters, tethers, and halters were off.  Mr. Right went packing.  Men were free to roam. 

Something happened, however, in later years.  Somehow sex was again being put back in carefully-wrapped boxes, opened carefully to save the ribbons. Women were once again nicely trimmed, honorable, and as untouchable as the Virgin Mary...unless they let their knickers down, set the rules of engagement, warned against untoward advances, and in the interest of personal integrity replaced ravishment with dutiful respect.

 

Arnold Perkins was a man who accepted this new ethos.  He washed the dishes, kept hair meticulously out of the sink, encouraged and congratulated his wife at every turn, never questioned her intentions or movements, and saw only the emergence of the New Woman - independent, confident, ready and able to take the place of men everywhere. 

Needless to say, his wife quickly tired of his toadying complaisance. She was a woman, after all, programmed for bad boys, genetically primed for male confidence, pursuit, and sexual desire.  Before her inclusion within the new paradigm of female supremacy turning the tables on formerly predatory, abusive men and giving them a taste of their own medicine, she was a girly girl who fell for the football captain, the dreamboat, the man of a thousand women. 

Subject to the insistence of her political sisters she came to realize the error of her ways - this macho thing was what had incarcerated women for millennia.  Forget the hunters of the plains, the warriors, the shamans and bed the farmers who will finally and at long last treat you right. 

Now that she had roped the calf, she wanted only the bull.  She wanted to feel the glory of being taken, being used, being ravished.   She was initially ashamed of these feelings, a traitor to the cause, but nature overruled nurture, and before you know it she was in bed with a billionaire she met at the Town & Country bar at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, an after conference hours affair she had always dreamed of. 

In fact she could have written the script herself - handsome, well-dressed man treated like royalty as he came into the bar, kissed by a hundred women as he walked to his place, ordering a dry Stoli martini straight up, three olives. 

This was the very man she was told to avoid - the predatory male indifferent to women except as vessels of pleasure, the epitome of self-interest and arrogant self-assurance - and yet she could not resist, succumbed without a whimper, and wanted to come back for more. 

'Another time' he said, and of course she never saw him again. 

Meanwhile Arnold waited patiently for his wife's return from her business trip.  Dinner was in the oven, the table was set, the bathrooms had been given an extra swish, and her favorite music was playing.  When her heard her familiar step on the walk, he smiled, delighted that she was back. 

'I'm tired...sorry, see you in the morning' she said to a disappointed but understanding Arnold as she went up the stairs. 

'Of course, dear. These trips take a lot out of you', and with that he replaced the china and silver, carefully put away the roast, the parsley potatoes, and the legumes almondine, turned off the music, and sat in his recliner. 

'Man up!' was the cry he should have listened to.  He had become his wife's doormat, her convenient househusband, her steady-as-she-goes plowman, her faithful, dependable mate and had gotten nothing but a peck on the cheek in return. 

He ignored the signs - sexual demurral, increasingly frequent trips to New York, a new dismissive indifference - and assumed the best, that his wife was coming into her own, a proud, defiantly positive woman. 

Meanwhile his wife cavorted in her newfound return to the old days, danced until midnight, squired by devilishly attractive men and was left in series on the curb.  She had been used, but she loved it. 

These men all had wives, lovers, and children by all of them.  They were Darwinian darlings, at the top of the phylogenetic chain, the progenitors of the best and the brightest, the fittest; while the Arnolds of the world died out, overmatched, ignorant, and useless. Blips on the evolutionary radar. 

Feminist accusations of predatory, toxic masculinity, misogyny and swamp-and-cracker machismo were brushed off like pesky flies by these men who went on their merry way finding hundreds of women failed by the cant of femaleness and wanting only the hard, rough reality of sexual pleasure. 

The marriage ended, no surprises there.  Arnold quickly remarried to a simple, sexually complaisant, deferent woman from New Brighton with whom he shared common interests.  

He never blamed his first wife.  She had every right to choose her own path, her own destiny; and it was he who could not provide the support and consistency that she needed. 

Only once did he have his doubts about his life choices.  His Yale reunion was dominated by the wealthy, successful, sexually adventurous men of his class.  They talked only of conquests - a Wall Street merger, the billion dollar startup, offshore investments, homes in St. Bart's and third wives.  His lot - sharing misery stories in the shabby non-profit corner - was a sorry one; and he wondered if he had taken a different turn, he might be one of the big men at the bar. 

Unfortunately evolution is not a matter of choice, and he had gotten the short end of the stick. 

As to his wife? No one had heard much about her after she left Arnold and New Brighton.  His friends hoped that she was a sexual retread in Spokane, which was possible the way she started off; but no one cared that much except for the apocryphal lesson of her marriage to Arnold.  Man up! Throw the bitch out! but of course those angry howls had no resonance in a society still beholden to women. 

When Bob Porter Poisoned The Parsons' Dog - The Myth Of Neighborliness

University Park is a leafy, well-to-do neighborhood of Washington DC, home to lawyers, professors, non-profit executives, and mid-level government officials.  It is uniformly progressive - American flags are a no-no, rainbow flags and Hate Has No Home Here Signs are on every other lawn - and during COVID it mobilized a vigilante committee to call out and report mask and distance offenders. 

Children were enlisted in a Stasi-like secret service, taught by their parents to shout j'accuse at anyone not wearing a mask and then to spread the alarm that so-and-so was a Typhoid Mary.

There was really no cause for alarm, however, since the community was in lockstep - to a man they believed that COVID was The Big One. They stayed at home at the first sign of a sniffle, scrubbed their counters with industrial strength cleansers, installed air purifiers, had food delivered, and isolated mail for three days before bringing it indoors. 

The neighborhood was shocked when Donald Trump won the 2024 election.  They were sure Kamala Harris and her message of diversity would win the day, so when the returns came it, they were disconsolate, despondent, and fearful.  From that moment on Trump hatred went viral, neighbors consoled neighbors, busses were organized to take them to the National Mall to protest, and the entire community was as unified as never before in political solidarity. 

So it was with some surprise that the Parsons’ dog dropped dead on their doorstep. Fluffy had always been a healthy, hearty animal with boundless energy and enthusiasm, so his premature end was a surprise and cause for suspicion.  Of course, given the closeness of the neighborhood no foul play was initially suspected but rumors have a way of taking over reason, and the Parsons were convinced that the people across the street had done the unthinkable. 

Now, the dog was a royal pain in the ass, barking at every passing car, howling at night, snapping and yapping at squirrels.  He barked from the moment the lights went on in the Parsons' kitchen till the last nightlight was turned off.  He was a barking machine, an unstoppable, loud, annoying nuisance. 

When the across-the-street neighbors came over to ask the Parsons if something might be done about their dog, Marfa Parsons politely explained that Fluffy was simply experiencing readjustment pains.  He really was a lovely dog, quite friendly especially with children, and there was really nothing they could to.  Once he became more accustomed to his new home and the residents around it, he would quiet down. 

The dog, however, was a barker - a fouled up cross breed Schnauzer, Terrier, and Shepherd.  The bloody animal had barking hardwired into its genes and could no sooner 'quiet down' than sit at the table.  For weeks, months the dog barked until its vocal chords were frayed and by evening it could only utter muted, raspy sounds; but by the next morning it was on the front porch barking at every moving thing in sight. 

Again the across-the-street neighbor paid Marfa a visit, but this time was more insistent.  There were rules of civility and neighborliness she said as well as local ordinances; and the Parsons would do well to heed both. 

'Well, if that doesn't take the cake', said Marfa Parsons in a huff, and reported the episode to her husband, a lawyer whose brain began to sift and filter cases of nuisance suits.

The barking went on for another two or three months at which time the dog died. ‘It was them', said Marfa. 'It has to be.  Who else would do such a thing?' 

Of course the accused neighbors denied it, taking great offence at being accused of breaking the unspoken civil code of the neighborhood. 'Do an autopsy', Bob Porter shouted, knowing full well that the Parsons would never agree to have Fluffy cut open and give their children nightmares for years; for of course he poisoned the dog and did the neighborhood a favor by doing it. 

'What happened to that Parsons dog'? everyone within earshot said, thankful that they had been given a reprieve; but the Parsons were not going quietly and so what is commonplace even in well-ordered, considerate neighborhoods, began. 

A tit for tat, increasingly vandalizing affair - petunias trampled, tires deflated, car windows soaped, trash strewn in the gutter, and so on. It actually almost came to blows when Bob Porter and Frank Parsons squared off in the middle of the street but both thought better of it.  A tussle in lawyer-heavy University Park would be not just male bravado but assault and battery. 

So the Parsons decided on rumor and innuendo.  'Did you know that the Porters poisoned Fluffy?' Marfa told all her friends, the mothers of her children's schoolmates, the postman, the garbage men, and passersby. It worked and before long the Porters were pariahs, dunned out of the babysitting coop, the PTA, and the ANC3 council. 

This spawned counter rumors - also true - that Frank Parsons spent his Thursday evenings not at the bowling alley but in Adams Morgan with Betty from Accounting and that Marfa Parsons was no shrinking violet herself. 

Luckily for everyone the storm blew itself out, the Parsons got a new non-barking dog, a Basenji-Shih Tzu mix, two canine breeds that cannot bark. The cross breeding did something to the torso and legs, so this miserable animal waddled and rocked and couldn't fetch or chase. 

Up and down Blanding Place there were incidents.  Herb Archer told his neighbors to move their car back of their property line 'for their own protection'.  An old tree in the front yard might lose a limb in a storm and fall on their car.  The tree however was as solid as the Charter Oak, so for the windy neighbor the car had become an obsession which caused no end of bumper-car antics. 

The people next to the Parsons objected to them parking in front of their house.  'It's a public street', said the already suspicious and on-alert Marfa to which the neighbor slammed out the door and backed her car into the Parsons's Porsche. 

Spite fences gave Long Fence a boost in corporate revenues.  Lagging for years in University Park which was uninterested in boundary lines, the company, after the various spats in the neighborhood, began to put up fences left and right - not simple white picket fences, but stockade fences, ten feet tall, wooden barricades up and down both sides of the house. 

Before long, University Park, formerly a congenial politically uniform, neighborly place had turned into a snipped and bitten one.  Children walking to school were told to keep to themselves and speak to no one.  No cups of sugar were exchanged, no kind words were spoken to the elderly, and worst of all, all but armed guards were put around dug-out parking spaces. 

In the space of a few years not a scintilla of the old neighborliness remained.  Cynics said that it just reverted to normal - territorialism and self-interest was the human rule, not the exception - while die-hard optimists thought that once the bad apples had left for other stomping grounds, the neighborhood would once again become Washington's model community. 

Human nature being what it is - as the man said, territorial and self-interested - and hardwired into the human genome, the new crop of University Park residents were likely to ne no different than those they replaced. 

Marfa Parsons moved to a condo in a Bethesda high-rise - that way she would have no territorial disputes with neighbors and would rarely see the people in 327 or 325 - but of course no building is completely soundproof and the smell of garlic never stays put, so she had to put up with nuisance and assholes. 

Manifest Destiny Redux - Thomas Jefferson And Donald Trump's International Expansionism

Manifest destiny was the expansionist belief in 19th-century America that American settlers were destined to expand westward across the continent and that this belief was both obvious ("manifest") and certain ("destiny"). The belief is rooted in American exceptionalism, romantic nationalism, implying the inevitable spread of republicanism and the American Way.  According to historian William Earl Weeks, there were three basic tenets behind the concept:

• The assumption of the unique moral virtue of the United States.
• The assertion of its mission to redeem the world by the spread of republican government and more generally the "American way of life".
• The faith in the nation's divinely ordained destiny to succeed in this mission.

Thomas Jefferson played a crucial role in the early stages of Manifest Destiny through the Louisiana Purchase and his vision of westward expansion which laid the groundwork for the United States territorial expansion. 

Jefferson sponsored and promoted the famous Lewis and Clark expedition on a maiden voyage to map out, plat, and claim the vast lands recently bought from France in the Louisiana Purchase. The enterprise was central to the development of the new American lands, for it provided the framework for the titling and private ownership of land, on the basis of which new landowners could borrow money to improve it. 

The United States has never veered far from this founding principle.  Throughout its history it has claimed territorial rights over sovereign lands and used military force to secure it.  The Mexican wars were meant to push Spain back from its own territorial designs on the Southwest, the American War against Spanish Main Philippines was a conflict that arose after the Spanish-American War.  The United States which had defeated Spain in the war, sought to assume control of the Philippines, a colony which had been under Spanish rule for over 300 years. 

The American invasion of Cuba in the Bay of Pigs operation, the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, the compacts made with the Pinochet regime in Argentina and the colonels in Brazil were outright attempts to exert American hegemonic influence in the hemisphere. 

Under George W. Bush and the Neocons, American exceptionalism was the policy meme, and US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were expression of it. American-style democracy was, in Francis Fukuyama's words, the end of history, and spreading it among the newly liberated Soviet states and elsewhere was America's calling and duty. 

'I am Manifest Destiny', said Donald Trump in a speech before the American Foreign Policy Institute in February of this year (2026) and he made it quite clear that he was invoking the spirit of Jefferson in his bold nationalism.  

There is no way that the Americas, long continents in America's orbit, ambit and geopolitical interest can be allowed retreat into socialism, a political philosophy antithetical to American values and one on which corrupt governments have pillaged, raped, tortured, and deceived the people they were to serve.

America will not stand by idly and let Cuba continue to deprive its citizens of their natural rights, consign them to more years of destitution and poverty; nor did it remain on the sidelines while the venal, corrupt, and vile regime of the dictator Nicolas Maduro ran Venezuela into the ground. 

We will stand with Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, El Salvador and other countries whose leaders are visionary men, determined to return the country to free elections, free markets and free enterprise. 

America will not stop in its own backyard, said the President.  China will not be allowed to range free to exploit African countries, control the mining of rare earths, oil, and gas.  Africa, while not in America's direct geographical orbit is within its geopolitical one. 

Progressives have cried foul.  The President is turning America into a neocolonialist power no different from those European empires which exploited black and brown people, ransacked Africa and Asia of its natural resources and turned them into subservient lackeys.  Donald Trump may say he is promoting the cause of freedom, but his only interest is dominant control. 

'I am indeed', replied the President in a speech to the Hoover Institute.  'I make no bones about my intentions.  Why should billions of people suffer under communism, socialism, and brutal dictatorships when America is there to help? 

'And yes', he went on, 'in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson and Manifest Destiny, I want American access to the world's resources without restriction.  Just as settlers from Ohio and Pennsylvania moved westward in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark and laid claim to the fertile lands of the prairies and beyond,  Americans have the right to the world's oil, minerals, and rare earths.  There are no limits or boundaries to international commerce.'

 

As part of this renewed doctrine of American geopolitical expansionism, the President has isolated what he has called 'the nexus of possibility' a triumvirate of geopolitical power, all in competition for power, territory, and resources but honest brokers in their Machiavellian intentions. 

Russia, China, and the United States - finally and at long last - have understood the nature of political adversity, and in so doing have made the battle lines unequivocally clear.  Of course Russia and China will try to expand their spheres of geopolitical influence and now so will the United States.  All will be above board, a clear, defiant contest of wills. 

There will be no negotiations, no Neville Chamberlain 'Peace in Our Time' capitulations, no Biden era Utopian, One World idealism.  Each of the three powers of the triumvirate will be acting on willful purpose to extend and expand its power and influence and in so doing control the world's resources. 

American progressives, steeped in this Chamberlain-esque compromise and craven idealism, march in protest - the Hamas, Venezuela, and Iran wars are nothing but bald neo-colonial adventurism and display Donald Trump's arrogance, dismissiveness, and autocracy.  America's F-16s over Tehran, Gaza, and Caracas are there only to bully, intimidate, and destroy. 

The President did not answer these charges, too pitifully naive and self-serving to deserve a reply, but said in a speech to the DAR in Washington:

We are patriots all, defenders of freedom, liberators, and pioneers of Manifest Destiny.  The world has changed, reverted to history's old ways of survival, conquest and spoils.  I invoke Genghis Khan when I convene my Cabinet to discuss our foreign policy, a man of iron will, unshakeable purpose, and vast geopolitical vision.  Thanks to him and his Mongol-Turkic armies, the Mongol Empire spread from Europe to the Far East. 

Again the Left raised its voice in protest.  'We are on the cusp of a new, verdant, harmonious, peaceful world order', said Bob Muzelle, a leader in the peace movement since the days of the Cold War, 'on the verge of diversity, inclusivity, and equity on an international scale, and we shall not be denied.'

His voice trailed off in the March wind, down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the White House, and in ever more faint echoes down the National Mall.  It was a feeble, desperate plea to return to an age of idealism which never existed.  The United States has always been a nation of Wild West justice, Robber Baron enterprise, and Harry S Truman brass balls, and the new Manifest Destiny is right in line.