The Saga Of Portia Hamilton–What Glass Ceiling? A Tale Of Beauty, Charm, And Allure

Portia Hamilton had been a beautiful child – dark, curly hair; peaches-and-cream complexion; perfect symmetry,  and Elizabeth Taylor violet eyes.  She was cuddled, pampered, shown off and adored.  A little princess whose mother never discouraged the crinoline dresses, tiaras, and wands she wore at her ‘performances’.  Portia was never nervous or hesitant before an audience.  On the contrary, she wanted to perform before everyone, dancing prettily, showing off her costumes, her choreography (she never just twirled and jumped like other girls, but followed a script), and her music (her songs, like her dance steps were hers and hers alone).  She loved moving, smiling, dancing on tip toes, twirling so her dresses lifted and showed off their sparkles, gold thread, and pinks and purples.  She had her own dressing room – her mother’s walk-in closet which her father had set up with a mirror, good lighting, and a downstairs table; and she spent fifteen minutes fixing her hair just right with a red ribbon and ringlets, a dot of rouge and a touch of lipstick.

Her Aunt Mary – a single woman of late middle age who had forgone marriage for a successful legal career, a former trial lawyer who had won, according to family lore, all her cases, whose clerkship for Judge Harlow of the DC Circuit Court had paid off with a partnership at a K Street law firm and a final appointment to the bench – was unhappy with the way her sister was raising her daughter, Portia.  How, in this modern, feminist age, could she be raising a girl whose attitude and aspirations were – if she had to be honest – retrograde.  A little girl in crinoline, frills, and ribbons, never behind a book, and always primping and being pretty not only could never make it in the world of today, but was an insult to her family’s intellectual integrity.  The Hamiltons were indeed related to Alexander and were a respected Boston family which had lived and ruled following their great ancestor’s principles of freedom, justice, and personal enterprise.  There was seldom in over two hundred years, a breach of family principle or etiquette, and the Hamiltons had always been known as a family of superior rectitude, purpose, and honor. 

What had happened, Portia’s aunt wondered, to her sister who had shown as much promise as any of her four siblings, who had been destined for an equally distinguished career in the law, married well, and settled well in the right suburb of Philadelphia? And how could any daughter of hers be brought up in such a silly, common way?  All girls of her niece’s age, it seemed, bought princess outfits, and primped and pranced around the living room; but they were not of Portia’s caliber, carried none of her genes, and had no family histories of any note.  Portia, now that feminism had cleared the decks and made women’s professional and business success as probable as men’s, should by now be well on her way rather than wasting the all-important early childhood years on trifles and frivolity.

“But she loves it so”, replied Portia’s mother to her sister’s insistent objections.  “How can I refuse….and I shouldn’t refuse”.

“Why?”, demanded Aunt Mary.

“Because she has talent”.

Talent, schmalent, thought Mary.  A few pretty dresses, childish ditties, and prancing on stage don’t mean a thing  They mean diversion and distraction.  By the time that Mary was Portia’s age she was reading The Odyssey, computing, and excelling at math.  This girl had to be turned around before it was too late.

Nothing of the sort.  Portia was not to be turned and kept dressing up, making up, fixing her hair, and collecting a closet full of pretty dresses and shoes.  By the time she was in fifth grade, she was the social center of the class, precociously dispensing advice  about boys, girls, and love ‘infecting’ her classmates, according to her aunt, with outdated notions of feminine wiles, allure, and attractiveness.  By junior high, she was prom queen, dating the football captain, and a cheerleader.  Her photo and doings were reported monthly in the school paper, and she charmed her way through her classes.  She was sure to be the first Hamilton to be a disgrace.

Of course she would be nothing of the sort.  Feminism, the broken glass ceiling, clerkships, and professional marriage might be well and good for some; but Portia understood that beneath it all women were women – no different now than they were in Shakespeare’s day.  Beautiful, seductive, appealing, and above all able, thanks to their sex, best them at every turn.  It wasn’t so much that obvious, acquired intellect and cognitive intelligence didn’t matter; it was just that everyone had some measure of those, and few had her particularly sensitive awareness of femaleness and the indisputable – despite current, woke, and diversionary claims to sexual spectra – dynamics of heterosexual sex.  Lady Chatterley, Rosalind, Beatrice, and her namesake Portia were her ancestors; not the flinty, beastly ladies of Wall Street and corporate America.

These women had their place, and no one could take away their pluck and determination; and without their tunnel vision of success her road would be more difficult; but no one had schooled Eleanor of Aquitaine, the wives of Richard II and Henry VI, the heroines of Shakespeare’s Comedies, Emma Bovary, Hedda Gabler, or any other of the fictional and historical women who had used their native intelligence, sexual awareness, and will to get exactly what they wanted.  The difference between Portia and these characters was her enjoyment of herself, her sexual politics, and her absolutely enormous appeal to men.

Beauty is destiny is the way one philosopher put it.  Portia would always be looked at as a model, a symbol, and an ideal.  Fame, currency, and wealth were hers for the asking from the high-end of American culture.  Given her preferences she could be a model in Milan, the wife of European royalty, or a Park Avenue socialite.  She had the physical credentials to write her own ticket in those circles who prized her type of beauty and the carriage, confidence, and presentation which always seemed to go along with it.

Marilyn Monroe was not only physically alluring, there was something about her personality which fit her body.  It was an indefinable, impossibly subtle, and completely irresistible quality of femaleness.  Men do not want to admire women.  They want them as sexual partners; and men for generations have wanted nothing more than to go to bed with Marilyn Monroe - not Ava Gardner, Hedy Lamarr, or Vivien Leigh.

Progressive social critics complain about America’s false sense of values, placing Hollywood beauty above all else and in so doing setting impossible standards for young girls.  How can a plain, simple girl possibly compete with the fantasy images of Hollywood, Elle, Seventeen, and Glamour?  She can’t.  Beauty, feminine allure, grace, charm, and winsomeness have been admired, imitated, and honored since the first human settlements.

 

 

Portia Hamilton was one of the lucky few, given unusual beauty as a surprising, unexpected gift.  From a very early age she understood who she was and what she would be and  soon realized her good fortune. She had a very successful career as a fashion model, wearing the best designer clothes on the most prestigious runways of Milan, Paris, and New York; and since beauty is indeed destiny it was no surprise that after her career she married a scion of Wall Street, lived in a Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking the Park, wintered in St. Bart’s, and skied at Gstaad.  She had led a good, charmed life.

Keeping The Wolves At Bay–Civility, Rectitude, Principle, And The Quiet Resistance Of A Small Town

The Blanton Clarion’s first publisher, Harrison Nichols, had come to the prairie in 1920 after making his fortune in New England in lumber and shipping.  In a story out of Main Street, he had followed his love to Western Minnesota, invested his money in land, and soon was the town’s most prosperous citizen; and he, like Sinclair Lewis was taken with the town’s decency, patriotism, faith, and optimism.  Although it was, not unlike most small towns in America, somewhat insular and resistant to change – not the place for idealists or entrepreneurs – Blanton was still very American.  Its fundamental values, morality, and ethical probity were what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they formed the Republic. While the residents of Blanton looked at news from the great cities of the new America with curiosity and interest, most had no desire to leave the town in which they were born and grew up. 

Two generations later when Harrison Nichols’ grandson took over the paper, the community had changed little.  It had survived the Depression, the commercialization of prairie farmland which had left many small prairie towns empty and farmhouses abandoned, and perhaps most importantly the waves of social change which had radically restructured American society and reoriented the principled values that had been at the center of its life.  Resistance or opposition to these progressive waves was not difficult for Blanton because few of those with ‘alternative lifestyles’ felt any desire to go there; nor were there any minorities to speak of.  The black exodus after the Civil War bypassed them.  The Illinois Central travelled far to the east, and few freed slaves, even had there been a whistle stop in Blanton between Mississippi and Chicago, would never have chosen life on a cold, bleak prairie. 

So in many ways, Blanton was indeed ‘the town that time forgot’.  Time had shown itself to be disruptive, uncivil, divisive, and contrary; and if the town’s social perimeter had become tighter and less permeable over the years, no one was complaining.  The America its residents saw on the news was definitely not the country they recognized.  While unfailingly patriotic – Blanton boys had died in all America’s wars -  the town never wanted to join a mainstream which had become muddied and lifeless.  Residents knew that the other America was encroaching, and that soon their livelihood and way of life would be swallowed by the social waves sweeping from the coasts; but they remained in place.  There was something to the idea of place itself that held them.  Blanton was more than just a town that had lasted for over a hundred years, essentially unchanged and intact.  It was a town of generations; houses lived in by successive Hammonds, Parkers, Carpenters, and Joneses; park benches sat in by grandmothers, climbed on by grandchildren, and repaired and restored by their relatives. 

Act I of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town begins with a description of a small town in New Hampshire:

The sky is beginning to show some streaks of light over in the East there, behind our mountain.  Well, I'd better show you how our town lies. Up here is Main Street. Way back there is the railway station. Polish Town's across the tracks. Over there is the Congregational Church; across the street's the Presbyterian. Methodist and Unitarian are over there. Baptist is down in the holla' by the river. Catholic Church is over beyond the tracks. Here's the Town Hall and Post Office combined; jail's in the basement. Here's the grocery store and here's Mr. Morgan's drugstore. Most everybody in town manages to look into those two stores once a day.

Public School's over yonder. High School's still farther over. Quarter of nine mornings, noontimes, and three o'clock afternoons, the hull town can hear the yelling and screaming from those schoolyards. This is our doctor's house, Doc Gibbs'. This is the back door. This is Mrs. Gibbs' garden. Corn…peas...beans...hollyhocks…heliotrope… and a lot of burdock. And this is Mrs. Webb's garden. Just like Mrs. Gibbs'. Only it's got a lot of sunflowers, too.

Nice town, y'know what I mean?

Eudora Welty writes of a similar town in Delta Wedding. Although there are some strains within the Fairchild family – the marriage of outsiders Troy and Robbie are potential disruptions to the perfectly-ordered running of the plantation – none of them ever amount to anything.  The folds of the family are too welcoming and absorptive.  It is too big, too old, to established in its traditional ways, propriety, good taste, and humanity not to tame the most rebellious.

Delta Wedding is not only the story of a multi-generational, closely-knit family but its simplicity extends beyond the plantation.  Welty chooses not to write about the Civil War or Reconstruction, both of which were only decades before her story of the wedding.  The plantation is a physical and historical enclave.  The only past that has any importance for the Fairchilds is the one of their ancestors.

Sinclair Lewis, perhaps best-known for his criticism of the insular, ignorant, and self-satisfied burghers of the Midwest (Babbitt) in Main Street he is far less critical, and although he first depicts the small Midwestern town of his birth in an unfavorable and predictable light, he later expresses admiration for its energy, optimism, faith in progress, and solid values.  Any society, he observes, has inwardness – a self-protective instinct to keep disruptive ideas out – but there is a distinct value to a culture which has an undeniably moral and ethical core.

When Carol Milford arrives in Gopher Prairie she feels lost and depressed.  The town is small, simple, and unattractive.  There are no arts, no beauty, and no poetry.  It exists only because of the rich prairie land around it, the money to be made, and the services to support it.  It is a miserable place without culture.  She resists and makes repeated attempts to introduce ‘culture’ to the town without success.  It is not only insular, simple, and conservative; but obstinately resistance to change.  However, over the years, she realizes that the town’s cultural indifference is nothing of the sort.  In her desire to remake the town in her ambitious cultural image, she ignored the unique, fundamental culture of its own. A community which valued place, permanence, family, and civility most definitely had culture, perhaps not ‘high’ culture, but a a level of ethical and moral consistency which in many ways surpassed it.

Hawthorne in The House of the Seven Gables also wrote of place, permanence, and history; and although critical of the corrosive inbred nature of socially hermetic places, he could not help but see their importance.

The street in which it up-reared its venerable peaks has long ceased to be a fashionable quarter of the town; so that, though the old edifice was surrounded by habitations of modern date, they were mostly small, built entirely of wood, and typical of the most plodding uniformity of common life. Doubtless, however, the whole story of human existence may be latent in each of them, but with no picturesqueness, externally, that can attract the imagination or sympathy to seek it there.

But as for the old structure of our story, its white-oak frame, and its boards, shingles, and crumbling plaster, and even the huge, clustered chimney in the midst, seemed to constitute only the least and meanest part of its reality. So much of mankind's varied experience had passed there,—so much had been suffered, and something, too, enjoyed,—that the very timbers were oozy, as with the moisture of a heart. It was itself like a great human heart, with a life of its own, and full of rich and somber reminiscences.

‘The town that time should forget’ was the headline of an editorial in a well-known Eastern newspaper whose journalist did a feature on Blanton – a small town whose residents boasted of its principles and fundamental values but whose lily-white, conservative values were in fact racist and indicative of the white supremacy which resided throughout the country under the cover of probity and traditionalism.  The journalist, like the fictional Carol Milford, overlooked and ignored the internal culture of the town and how a community uniform in race, ethnicity, and social and religious values, need not be prejudiced. Cultural homogeneity does not imply injustice.

He was not alone, for many of his colleagues made the same wrongful assumption and worse, conflated individual towns’ experience with a national one.  All small towns are socially ignorant.  Cultural uniformity ipso facto is defiant racism. They are obstacles to progress, social justice, and progressive reform. 

The opposite is true.  The values of homogeneous societies such as Blanton or the fictional towns of Lewis, Wilder, and Hawthorne, are more representative of high culture than any more diverse.  The values of Blanton – rectitude, honor, respect, discipline, compassion, courage, and honor – have been the attributes of advanced civilizations since Greece and Rome.  The educational principles of Cato the Elder incorporated into his diptychs for future Roman leaders included this moral code as even more essential than military strategy, civil governance, or law.

Blanton should be looked to for guidance not with opprobrium and mistrust.

Some critics have suggested that the sense of place was really what gave Welty’s later works distinction; and that novels like Delta Wedding were examples of how the ‘place’ of the Delta and the Fairchild plantation was a metaphor for place and family:

Place is vitally important to Welty. She believed that place is what makes fiction seem real, because with place come customs, feelings, and associations. Place answers the questions, "What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?" Place is a prompt to memory; thus the human mind is what makes place significant.

There was indeed human mind in Blanton, and far too little outside city limits.

“Go Back Where You Came From”–Trump’s Fighting Words, And An Angry Dismissal of Bite-The-Hand-That-Feeds-You Political Grandstanding

Much has been made recently of Donald Trump’s harsh dismissal of the claims of three progressive Congresswomen that America is a racist, white supremacist country governed by a bigot and supported by a mass of unwoke, backwoods, cracker ignoramuses.  “Return to your countries of origin”, he said in so many words, “and fix the endemic problems which make them perennially dysfunctional” rather than bite the generous hand that feeds you, the country that took in your parents, gave them protection, economic opportunity, and safe haven from the assaults and depredation of the corrupt regimes they fled.

Of course Trump’s language was far less temperate and chosen. “Go back where you came from” were his fighting words, a retort to what he saw as the thankless, unpatriotic, and politically self-serving statements of the Congresswomen; and of course they were taken as the latest and most condemning proof of his racism; and worse his desire to return America to an all-white, male elitist, autocracy.

Now, anyone following Donald Trump pays no attention to the words he says but the meaning behind them.

The progressive Left is nonplussed at the continued mania of Donald Trump.  To them he is a misogynist, xenophobic, sexist homophobe - has always been and will always be.  He is an inveterate, congenital liar, a braggart, a capitalist who built his fortune on the backs of the poor, and an unreconstructed egotist.



f course he is none of the above.  As a son of Hollywood and Las Vegas; a performer, vaudevillian, and big tent revivalist in the old American tradition, he doesn’t mean what he says.  He says what he means.  His is a political circus act with a semiotic foundation.  Crazy as a fox and as smart as a whip, The Donald speaks a firestorm but is as rational – more rational in fact – than his opponents who speak in platitudes, shopworn nostrums, and old-fashioned appeals to ‘experience’.
 
No one but unreconstructed liberal elite take him at face value.  Everyone knows that his call for expatriating all illegal immigrants is purposeful hyperbole, circus act exaggeration, and vaudeville at its very best.  Everyone but older Eastern progressives and young idealists understand that there can never be an impenetrable wall on our southern border.  Everyone but academics who have insulated themselves from the world outside Cambridge, the Upper West Side, San Francisco, or Chicago knows that there will be no mass deportations, no electrified wire fences at Dulles Airport, no Gestapo on the Canadian border to keep immigrants out. Hyperbole to make a point.  Illegal immigration is a serious problem which must be addressed no longer with the tentative, hesitant gestures of the past, but forcefully.

Deconstructionism has had its day, although because of tenure there are many academics who will preach this secular animism until the day they die.  All texts are equivalent, they say.  There is no such thing as artistic genius, and the works of Shakespeare, Aeschylus, and Dostoevsky should be read only within the narrow context of  race, gender, and ethnicity.  Hamlet and Macbeth are nothing more than plays about political power, the corrupt nature of elites, and the alienation of the many to serve the powerful.
 
If one reads the text carefully, deconstructionists say, one will discover the true meaning behind the words which are mere and artificial constructs of individuals who can but express political zeitgeist and the particular configurations of social, economic, and cultural conflict.

So where are these deconstructionists when it comes to parsing the stump performances of Donald Trump? Why are they so literal in their interpretation of his words?  How could they assume that his hot button rhetoric is anything more than getting sinners to walk up the aisle and accept Jesus as their personal savior?



This myopia is not surprising, for despite progressives’ claims to objectivity, rationality, and on-the-one-hand-on-the-other tolerance and consideration of differing opinions, they intend no such thing.  Their canon of diversity, race-gender-ethnicity, and social liberalism is as enshrined as any.

Such political and philosophical absolutism ipso facto requires blinders.  In an a priori world where right and wrong are pre-determined and absolute there is no room for due consideration or rational debate. Put more simply, the progressive Left has made up its mind about Donald Trump and nothing can change it.

Of course he is pissed at the venal, intemperate, and self-serving remarks of the newly-entitled progressive comers; and so are the tens of millions of Americans who voted for him.  Americans who while appreciating the plight of the marginalized and underserved, refuse to champion their causes at all costs.  Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the National Anthem, the virulent hostility and self-aggrandizing words of the Women’s Soccer Team co-captain, the uncompromising  pursuit of the LGBTQ agenda and its rejection of traditional Judeo-Christian Biblical interpretations of sexual and reproductive normality, the universal call for the dismantling of liberal economies in favor of socialist dirigisme, and the primacy of ‘diversity’ over ability not only rankle, but anger.

No one who has read the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers; or who has reread Locke, Thoreau, and the thinkers of the Enlightenment can tolerate let alone accept this pseudo-revolutionary cant and preposterous ignorance of the principles that have characterized democracy since the ancient Greeks.

To listen to modern-day American progressives, there is an absolute, inherent value in racial, gender, and ethnic diversity.  Somehow a radically polyglot society benefits all, raises all ships and sets their sails for Utopia.  But how, exactly, does diversity per se benefit the commonwealth of America?  In the early days of the Republic all comers were welcome because the nation needed building – roads, railroads, ports, and cities.  There was no lionizing of Italians, Chinese, Jews or Poles.  Once they were here on American soil, they were Americans, and Americans only, here to work, to benefit, to contribute, and to belong. 

How does being gay, Mexican, black, female, or Indonesian per se help the commonwealth to prosper? What benefit does anyone have rubbing shoulders with diversity?  We all live in narrow, insular, self-protective sub-groups and are quite happy that way.  Our individualism and individual non-diversity driven enterprise benefits all.

It is natural and normal, then, for an American president to be insulted by the claims of entitled newcomers who insist that the country that welcomed them is hostile, predatory, and exclusive – just as it is for an ordinary American, working three jobs, accepting no welfare, proud and determined to succeed, and happy for the opportunity to do so are angry at these self-anointed saviors.

In short, to progressives Donald Trump is not ‘presidential’; but in leveling this latest charge, they betray their social and political myopia.   Trump is not presidential because he does not act presidential – a textbook example of begging the question. 

Of course we know what they mean.  They want Mr. Trump to act like Lincoln, FDR, Woodrow Wilson, and Thomas Jefferson all rolled into one – modest, well-spoken, respectful, careful, and dutiful.  They want erudition, oratory, and stature.



Democrats may have applauded LBJ for his principled stance on civil rights and poverty, but he never shook his country bumpkin image.  To those who loved Kennedy, his successor was not only a happenstance stand-in but a rube – a pushy, manipulative, cracker-talking Texan dirt farmer.  In their eyes he was marginally presidential but presidential nonetheless.  He at least met the minimum requirements of the office.

Ronald Reagan was a B-movie actor, television huckster, and hail-fellow-well-met politicians; but he never embarrassed himself, never went overboard.  If he was not as eloquent as Kennedy or FDR, he embodied the American presidency – stalwart, principled, and socially conservative.

No one or nothing prepared the liberal and conservative establishments for Donald Trump.  Not only is he considered retrograde and beyond the pale of political opportunity; he is a cultural outlier, a social maverick who redefined the term, and a true take-no-prisoners individualist.

Of course he still calls Elizabeth Warren ‘Pocahontas’; and of course he still ridicules liberal media presenters.  Only the deadly serious, righteous Left finds no humor in the Twitter exchange between Trump and MSNBC anchors Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough.  All three know they are playing for ratings and enjoying it to no end.  If these two media-savvy personalities don’t know what’s what, no one does.

The howls that ‘Trump is not being presidential’ grow only louder the more his critics are befuddled by the man and dig in their heels to defend what they insist must be the ‘propriety, dignity, and honor’ of the office.

But Trump is being presidential.  He, like all Presidents before him hew to a particular set of personal values.  The problem is that no one knows what to make of a president who did not come up through the ranks, governor, senator, congressman, or mayor.  Trump is from the mean streets of NY, the image-making tinsel of Hollywood and the rough-and-ready frontier.   His stances on immigration, social justice, equality, and ‘diversity’ are different from his predecessors in tone, attitude and demeanor only. The Left is paying no attention, distracted as they are by their insistence on fictitious notions of ‘truth’; while the Right gets it, endorses Trump’s policies while ignoring his braggadocio and bombast.

Trump is right to call out the invidious claims of political newcomers out to make political hay out of the tempestuous zeitgeist; right to demand a certain respect for foundational values, to acknowledge the importance, relevance, and salience of traditional religion-based morality and ethnics; and right to ask those who here only to complain despite the welcome offered them, to leave.