Two Old Maids Get Political - The Rise Of The Banger Sisters In Washington

Etta and Marfa Banger grew up in a small Midwestern town known for its parsimony, hard work, and Lutheran faith.  Their father owned a hardware store on Main Street, and their mother was a stay-at-home mom who volunteered for the Red Cross, the Junior League, and the Hospital Auxiliary. 

The girls, very close in age - Irish twins - were inseparable, a clique of two always seen together. Thanks to a school registration adjustment they were in the same grade, sat together at the lunch table, shared the same books at the library, dressed alike - although Etta favored plaids - and walked the mile or so home together.

Although teachers tried to pry them apart to give them breathing room and open them to opportunities, they were never successful.  The Banger sisters were an indissoluble duet. 

Predictably they were the object of taunts, bullying, and misbehavior.  No social group likes anomalies, especially a defiant one like the Banger sisters, but Etta and Marfa paid them no mind which of course angered the taunters even more.  The Banger girls had built an unassailable fortress, a redoubt of two and as much as their hecklers tried to storm it, they simply fell from the parapets. They regrouped again and again, but finally, defeated and dispirited, gave up and left them alone. 

Boys of course paid no attention to them.  No one wanted to be seen with either one even if they could manage to pull them apart.  The slightest nod the girls’ way would be tantamount to expulsion from their own tight, dependent clique. 

The girls were actually quite attractive, both of whom inherited their mother's English rose of summer beauty.  They were not twins so were attractive in different ways, but neither had any inclination to use their natural allure to any advantage.  A smile from either one of them would have won over classmates and teachers alike, so disingenuous and pure was it, but they without any intent maintained a moroseness that added to the universal mockery of the school.

 

While minding their own business, they rose to the top of the class and were awarded the highest academic honors.  They both were whizzes at math and science; and although they both considered a career in engineering, Etta was too much fan of organic chemistry and too much a critic of pulleys and cranes to want to build anything.  That, however, was as far as the difference in the two girls went.  They both received generous academic scholarships to MIT and graduated Summa Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa. 

'Now what?', Etta asked her sister, something neither one had considered so intent were they on their studies. 

'I don't know', Marfa replied. 'What do you think?; but after to-ing and fro-ing for a considerable time, they came up with nothing. 

'Wait', said Etta. 'I've got it.  Washington! We will become interns' 

'Interns?', replied the incredulous Marfa.  'What do we know about politics?'

'That's the whole point', said her sister. 'It doesn't matter'; and so the Banger Sisters applied for and got internships in the offices of neighboring district Congressmen, both of whom were impressed with the girls' intelligence, propriety, and recondite honesty.  

Etta had minored in economics at MIT and Marfa in political science, so their resumes were ideal - high-performing young women of serious intent and with the kind of unerring principle that was rarely found in Washington. 

They soon realized that sociability was the key to success in a town which lived on rumor, allegation, innuendo, and leaks.  As much as they hated the idea of leaving each other and their work - both had immersed themselves in drafting technical papers and editing press releases - they knew that they had to emerge from their cocoon and brave the waters of the Potomac. 

To their surprise, people listened to them.  Their brand of correctness tempered with a quickly-learned charm and simple appeal won them friends on both sides of the aisle, and in a short time they provided their Congressmen with invaluable inside information. 

'You are darlings', one Congressman said to the Banger Sisters who had joined him and his neighboring colleague for a toast to a bill they had jointly sponsored, thanks in large part to the intelligence gathered by the girls; and both were promoted to aides with impressive salaries and perks.

Outside of work the girls returned to their Dupont Circle apartment, cooked dinner, and worked on their individual projects until lights out; until one day Etta said, 'Let's go out', and the two of them went to a local watering hole for the young and up-and-coming.  To their taste it was loud and 'high spirited', and within minutes they were brought drinks and company.  'Not-a too bad-a', said Marfa, imitating a favorite Serbian tennis star who when asked by an Italian journalist with a thick accent about his recent victories at Wimbledon, Australia, and Roland Garros, nodded and said like Marfa, 'Not-a too bad-a'. 

An incidental, playful aside, but indicative of something new in the Banger Sisters - a leavening of their seriousness - but no one should take this diversion too seriously.  Neither one of them wanted anything more than professional acclaim, and God knows, no untoward attention from men. 

The sisters were as straight as arrows, not one kink in their heterosexuality, and both envisioned some kind of sexual relationship at some time, but one which would require vetting, sussing, and deliberate planning before execution.  'We're not still at MIT', said Etta when Marfa laid out her plan. 'We should just get laid and see what happens'. 

They agreed on two young prospects - blonde-haired Iowans who had come to Washington a few years earlier, worked somewhere in the Dirksen building, and who had shown the sisters clear romantic interest. 

'How was it?', Etta asked Marfa the next morning. 

'Not quite what I expected', her sister replied; but then again given the Banger sisters' incredibly high standards only an Errol Flynn or Casanova himself would do.  So they both decided to use sex the way it was used in Washington - common currency, a means to an end, and a not totally unpleasant way of getting information and influence. 

 

'Did he come quickly?', Etta asked her sister.

'Define quickly', Marfa answered, to which both girls had a great laugh at the expense of the young man who had provided useful information but little satisfaction and was left on the curb. 

As time went on, both sisters rose to prominence in Congress.  Only a few years after coming to Washington, they were chief aides to some of the House's most important committees, and their reputation for intelligence, objectivity, and political neutrality won them plaudits and further offers. 

Their personal lives had not changed despite their socio-political allure and classically beautiful maturity.  Yes, they had been courted, proposed to, and offered unthought of wealth and luxury; but they had never been tempted.  Marriage was like an equation with an elusive proof - everyone used it, but no one could prove its value.  Divorces and affairs were other currencies of the realm and led to bankruptcy.  Why even bother to go there?  Not to mention men who who uniformly disappointed on all scores. 

 

They were both approached for consideration of elected office, but both demurred.  Given what they now knew about politics, they wanted no part of that merry-go-round.  'Imagine doing that bullshit every day', said Etta in a surprisingly crude comment, 'begging, cadging, wheedling, and sucking off for money.  No thanks'; and so the Banger Sisters created their own glass ceiling, never looked up, filled their bank accounts with honest money and returned to the Midwest where they bought an old farm with horses and sheep, and never looked back.  

The Rise To Power Of A Thoroughly Unlikeable Woman - Reprising Darwin In The Free Market

Lucretia Evans had been brought up in style - Park Avenue penthouse, summer home in Southampton, skiing in Gstaad, and a Paris pied a terre - she was a child of privilege, purpose, and position. She was raised by an English nanny and attended to by a phalanx of liveried servants. 

 

She went to the best private schools in New York, and when old enough boarded at Andover, then at seventeen entered Harvard where her record was impeccable - Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and captain of the squash team. 

All was in order for a storied career, especially now that the glass ceiling had finally been broken and women had acceded to top positions in politics, business, law, and medicine. Her career choices were limitless, all doors open for this talented, well-educated woman from one of America's finest families. 

The only problem was that she was one of the most unlikeable women ever - a bitch, a harassing, intemperate succubus who laid waste to classmates, colleagues, family and friends.  

How she got this way was a mystery.  Her father was an old-school gentleman of impeccable manners, and her mother was the gem of Fifth Avenue society. She had not been spoiled no more than any child of wealth would have been.  Despite servants, summers, and Cartier most girls of her social class emerged with charm and a particularly attractive worldliness.  They were confident, determined, ambitious in their own way but never bullying or untoward. 

Lucretia had been born with a nasty streak - a 'bad seed', bits of DNA from the more disreputable side of the family, the robber baron side, the merciless capitalist side.  Her great-grandfather was more ruthless than J.D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie combined and made a fortune through canny predation, exploitation, and downright meanness.  He was feared and avoided.  Accommodation and compromise were not words in his vocabulary.  He was the Genghis Khan of early Twentieth Century America, took no prisoners and impaled the heads of his enemies on stakes that lined Wall Street. 

Of course genetic assignment being what it is, no one in the Evans family could pin down the association.  It could simply have been faulty wiring or some random, stray bit of DNA that came in with the genetic tide; but whatever it was, the woman was insufferable.  Yet one investment bank after another sought her services, for she was made for the Street.  America was not made by sissies, and what was a bit of nastiness on the floor compared to the bodies of financial enemies littering lower Manhattan?

 

Yet despite the millions she made - she was a wizard at ingenious credit swaps and innovative financial instruments - she poisoned the atmosphere of any office where she worked.  She was a snarling, barely restrained attack dog.  She seethed anger and impatience.  Associates moved out of her way when they saw her coming, avoided her in the halls, and patched her in to virtual meetings rather than have to be in the same room with her. 

It was all worth it, said the admiring Chief Executive of her firm.  She was an example of pure Darwinian evolution - she swallowed up the weak and the uncertain, castrated the comers, and neutered the bitches who thought they could take her on.  She was at the very top of the food chain; and while she would never have a management or executive position - jobs that take ambition but a modicum of collegial leadership - she would eat everyone alive and profit from it. 

Genghis Khan was a brilliant strategist, canny politician who through tact, intimidation, and offers of great spoils, enticed the warlike Turkic tribes to join his armies, nearly doubling their strength.  However, it was not only the might of his imposing armies, nor his ability to manage, discipline, and control such a large and diverse military force; nor even his tactical acumen and understanding of calculated risk which assured victory.  It was his indomitable, absolute, unalloyed will.  

Khan had no qualms, moral reservations, or ethical hesitancy.  Wars were for winning, civilians were complicit enemies, and total annihilation of any opposition was his modus belli. Not only would defeated populations be without the wherewithal to mount a resistance or counterattack, they would never dare to incite the bloody, murderous, savage wrath of the conqueror.

In all human history violence, brutality, conquest, and bloody empire have been the rule; and the acquisition, maintenance, and extension of power at all levels of human society is still our modus operandi.  It is only vanity, historical ignorance, and incredible idealism which closes the blinds on the Twentieth Century.  

'On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life' was Charles Darwin's seminal work in which he expounded his theory of evolution - the progressive emergence of dominance in all living species.  The subtext of the work was that the stronger, more evolved organisms would destroy the weaker, thus ensuring the survival and preeminence of 'The Favored Races'. 

 

While Darwin based his theories on observations from the animal kingdom (especially those made during the voyage of the Beagle in the South Atlantic), the conclusion that man was no different from the animals he studied was inescapable, and that the social implications of his work were clear,  Every parcel of human society, from families to nations, was based on competition to achieve dominance; and only the strongest and most able would survive and prosper. 

History has repeatedly and eminently shown the correctness of this assumption; so why has moralism and its rejection of competition in favor of cooperation and collaboration had any currency whatsoever? What in history has ever disproved Darwin?  The Pax Romana was short-lived in historical time, bookended by thousands of years of violent territorialism.  

Margaret Mead who claimed she had found true cooperative living among the Trobriand Islanders was recently criticized and her theories debunked.  Faulty reasoning, a priori judgements, and an error-ridden methodology led to her happy, but fictionally hopeful conclusion that peace and harmony are possible. 

Lucretia Evans' Chief Executive hung a portrait of her on the wall of his office after she left, not because of the millions in profits she had brought to the firm, but the most pure, unalloyed, unmitigated example of Darwinism that he could imagine.  The nastiness, arrogance, and obvious misanthropy went with the territory.  Nietzsche's Superman - the epitome of Darwinian principle, who rode above the herd was not a nice guy. 

'Wasn't she great?', said the Chief Executive. 

How A Progressive Found Jesus And Was Tarred And Feathered For It

 Billy Bob Jarvis was born and raised in Tupelo, Mississippi – yes that Tupelo, birthplace of Elvis, but still home to poor whites, crackers, like him whose father worked at the sawmill and whose mother took in laundry.  They shopped on Fridays, sale days at Piggly Wiggly, ten percent off 50 lb. sacks of corn meal, and fat back only 49 cents a pound, streaky, nasty stuff but all the family could afford.

Billy Bob’s grandfather had been born in the Delta near Indianola, tenant farmed a small patch of land until he packed up his wife and five children and moved across the state in search of something other than dirt farming until he landed in Tupelo, met a distant uncle related to Elvis who owned a dry goods store who let him sweep floors, scrape the mud from the front porch, and drive the mule across the line to Alabama for lumber, nails, and buckets.

Billy Bob’s father managed to make a living cadging and hustling, taking odd jobs, errand boy, gofer, paper route, and finally an apprentice at the mill working his way up to planer and then supervisor.  The pay never matched the long hours and hard work, but enough to keep his children from the state.

Billy Bob was always a smart boy, jumped two grades, did well in high school and got a scholarship to Ole Miss where thanks to his charm, easy manner, and eagerness to please, he was accepted to one of the university’s best fraternities – not the best of course, reserved for the wealthy Delta elite, sons of the owners of thousands of acres of rich bottom land still farmed for cotton, but a good, respectable one, and one which turned out to be a base for his political ambitions.

In Senior Year he was elected President of his class and Phi Beta Kappa.  He caught the eye of his Congressman, Eldridge Parker, Sr. and was offered an internship. 

Parker was one of the few liberal politicians sent to Washington, and he repeatedly won election thanks to his popular and populist appeal.  He was a man of solidly conservative social values, but always championed the cause of his poor white and black constituents. Billy Bob – now William, given his new, important status – had no particular political leanings and would have just as readily joined a conservative in Congress had the time and opportunity been right; but with Parker he learned the progressive’s trade and in time was a partisan, a follower, and eventually a believer.

Through perseverance, loyalty, and hard work Billy Bob was offered a sinecure – a safe seat vacated by a long-serving Democrat from Meridian – which thanks to the support of his patron, he won handily.  From there, his political road was paved with gold.

Something clicked during his first term, something that went beyond simply Democratic politics, something eager and important.  The lot of the poor was not just an incidental plank on a political platform, but an issue; and given the zeitgeist of the times, this concern was conflated with the lot of the black woman and the gay man.  He became a progressive, and although he had to walk fine line in Meridian as he became more and more liberal, he was able to convince his constituents of the rightness of compassionate action and was granted another term.

He joined all the progressive caucuses in the House, and soon became known as a progressive’s progressive, a tireless advocate for the environment, the transgender community, Black Lives Matter, and Occupy Wall Street. He, thanks to his generous personality and increasingly eloquent speeches, was sought after by his most influential progressive colleagues.  The fact that he was from Mississippi enhanced his reputation.  If a cracker white boy from the South could so enthusiastically embrace the progressive agenda, anything was possible.

Yet just as his star was shining most brightly and his political way clear, he found Jesus, a natural happening many said given his Southern upbringing, but still unusual and rather shocking for a committed progressive.  The secular journey was supposed to be without the unpleasant complications of religion – Biblical fundamentalists simply got in the way of liberal visions of a Promised Land here and now.  Yet here was one of progressivism’s leading young lights gone to the buggering nuisance of the Jesus Right.

In fact Billy Bob came by his religious conversion quite naturally.  No one could grow up in the rural South without preaching, covered dinners, and the Lord.  His father, no born-again zealot, was a Sunday church goer.  Somehow the sermons must have registered somewhere in his unconscious; or more likely it was the moment Anna Mae Borders in a moment of mad ecstasy tore open her blouse and stood before God, Pastor Phillips, and the congregation naked as jay bird shouting, 'Take me, Jesus, take me'. 

The young Billy Bob had longed to see the breasts all his older friends talked about - milky white, as round as ripe melons, as soft and downy as silk - and there they were for all to see and they were more marvelous than he could ever have imagined.  He watched as she shook and danced, smiling and laughing and shouting 'Jesus, Jesus', until she collapsed on the floor and was helped out of the church by four young men. 

In any case there Jesus was, all dressed in white raiment, arms extended and a broad smile on his face. Billy Bob was in the garden of his modest suburban home in Bethesda when he saw the Lord and sat with him on the porch furniture he had just bought from Walmart.  It was like an image out of a catechism or a child's hymn book all soft lighting and pastels, a floral backdrop, but it was real. 

He wore a beatific smile all that day and the next as he walked through the corridors of the Dirksen building to his office, greeted his staff, his intern, and his chief aide. 'God bless you', he said to them all, 'and have a blessed day'. 

'You're chipper this morning, boss', said the aide, to which Billy Bob replied, 'I am chipper and blessed by the Lord'.  The aide smiled quizzically gave him his briefing papers for the day. 

'I won't be needing those', Billy Bob said.  'I am in the Lord's hands now', so the prepared speech 'The Rise of the Black Man' and the treatise on the melting ice caps were handed back but the notes accompanying a poster section entitled 'The Greatness of Woman - A Secular Triumph' caught his eye. 

'No, no, no', he admonished the aide.  'Women are God's creation, vessels of his divine procreation and mothers in his service.  Where did this apostasy come from?'. 

The aide, perplexed and confused since the paper had been written by Billy Bob himself, reminded him of the upcoming session, the Gay Women's caucus which had sponsored it, and his role in it; but Billy Bob wanted no part of it.  'Tell them to stop barking up the wrong tree, and to come to Jesus'. 

And on it went until he was considered around the bend, as nutty as a fruitcake and no longer acceptable or even viable as a progressive spokesman.  He had become as batty as the rest of the bass boat crackers in Mississippi.  They had known if from the beginning and suspected that his espousal of the progressive agenda was just a ruse, a ploy, some kind of chicanery to get him bipartisan support for higher office. 

Undeterred in every public utterance until he was hooked from stage left like a bad vaudeville act, he started and finished with Jesus Christ.  It was only a matter of time that the powers that be stripped him of all his Congressional duties, committees, caucuses, and activist groups.  No Christer, no Biblical babbler could continue in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. 

So he switched parties, won reelection easily in one of the most lopsided elections in Mississippi electoral history and was poised for the Senate with universal Republican support.  Finally he had both a spiritual and political home.  There were no longer suspicious, inquisitive looks as he walked to his office prominently carrying a worn, leather-bound Bible and greeting people with a 'Jesus loves you'.

Progressives, nonplussed and irritated that he was still in the well of the House and in the Dirksen building but on the other side, sneered at his supposed born again conversion; but then again he was where he belonged - with the party of dopes, holy rollers, and ignoramuses.  God has no place in the Congress of the United States they said, but there was Bible-thumping Billy Bob, turncoat, quisling, and very symbol of the intellectual rot seeping up from the swamps of the South. 

'Quisling?', he said to a reporter who was questioning him on his volte face and return to his Southern roots, 'They are the quislings, the Judases, the heretics and apostates, and they will be cast out'.  Whether by prophecy, coincidence or the final lap of godless progressivism, all his hecklers were gone after the next election cycle. 'Either Jesus or the American people had enough of their smarmy nonsense', he said, 'and good riddance to bad rubbish.'