One Of Us, One Of Us, Or Looking For A Niche When No One Will Have You - The Sequelae Of Identity

Halsey Taylor grew up in a uniformly white, Christian, middle-class community, all of whom had respectable jobs, went to church on Sunday, played golf and bridge, marched in Fourth of July parades, had Sunday dinners, and ate simply but well. 

 

New Brighton was not exactly an idyll - Elvira Carlson hanged herself by a clothes' line in the backyard in view of the neighbors; and Frank Ardmore was a cheat and fraudster - but all in all it was a familiar, recognizable piece of the American pie that could be found anywhere. It was a time of patriotism, comity, and community. 

Halsey was a bit of a difficult child, an obstreperous adolescent, and an angry young woman champing at the bit, wanting more than New Brighton could ever offer.  What that something was, Halsey had no idea; but she knew that she was destined for more than the kinder, kirche, kuchen her hometown offered.

She went off to Smith College, one of the Seven Sisters who mimicked the Ivy League in every way - heritage, family, promise, culture - but who were exclusively female, still, despite their pedigree, second class institutions. 

It was a good, logical choice for a young woman of intelligence and ambition, but Halsey was unprepared for the randy lesbianism of the place - the horny assumptions of every upper class woman who took le droit du seigneur as written and who preyed on the young freshman ingenues who came to Northampton thinking only of Kant, Pericles, and Shakespeare. 

It was like swatting away flies, so buzzingly insistent were these women who assumed that entry into the club of the Seven Sisters meant sexual complaisance.  As time went on the insistence became more aggressive and insistent, more like a maximum security prison than a girls school - sex for favors, sex because it was available, slaves and chattel, overlords, and Simon Legrees all in this quaint Massachusetts town and ivy-halled college. 

Once out of college, finding herself adrift - the old New Brighton angst had not diminished, but virtual resentment against the received wisdom and assumed values of Smith increased - she foundered.  Where was the husband she had been promised, the Capitol Hill internship, the coattails of power?

Her classmates had all gone underground; or at least joined forces with the anti-establishmentarian Left, and become a feral mob of political dissidents. Not exactly traitors to their families and their heritage - Smith, like the other Seven Sisters and the Ivy League was still patrician to the core, aristocratic in philosophy and outlook, wealthy and privileged - but close, credulous followers of the New Age. 

She demurred, hesitant to belong to the great sweeping demographic cohort of  'The Sixties', faux liberalism, and facile, love-the-one-you're-with fellowship; but in those days, what else was there?  She had not found Mr. Right of Greenwich, Connecticut, Wall Street banker, and scion of Cabots and Lodges, had certainly not been willing to fold back in to the graces of middle-brow New Brighton, and found the caterwauling about civil rights, peace, and justice loud and irritating. 

Yet she needed a place to hang her hat, to lay her head on the pillow, to call home.  Things, however, got progressively worse as old style, Lafollette, Gompers, and Brandeis liberalism morphed into post-Sixties progressivism.  Catcalls and hysteria replaced any sensible correctional policies, bull dykes and drag queens pushed aside generational sanity, and the country had devolved into a potpourri of nasty-minded cabals. 

Where did she belong, adamantly white, upper middle class, Christian, straight, and mindful of the Founding Fathers? 

Giorgia Meloni, conservative President of Italy famously and proudly said, 'I am Giorgia.  I am a woman.  I am a mother.  I am Christian.  I am European, and I am Italian!, encapsulating in one speech the fundamental principles of European conservatism; and Halsey Taylor responded.  'I am Giorgia' she said. 

All well and done, but how to translate that particular European ethos into American civic reality?  Every principle Meloni endorsed was considered anathema by the American Left.  Womanhood? What was that when considering the fluidity of the gender spectrum?

Halsey had been an advocate of civil rights.  She had always hoped that Jefferson's search for a homeland for freed slaves had been fulfilled.  The third American president understood that the release of hundreds of thousands of uncivilized African tribal savages into the body politic would cause disruption and havoc.  That unfulfilled expectation had led to decades of racialism and division - the inner city, the ghetto, the inchoate demands of the supposedly black underserved were its legacy. 

The release of gayness and transgenderism on the American public was no resolution to sexual enslavement, but a horrific distortion of normality.  Open borders had once and for all exposed the brown and black populations as underdeveloped, unsocialized, and unwanted.  Cries for the redistribution of wealth were no more than romantic idealism and neo-Communist cant. 

Politics had destroyed the original American ethos. Ambition, opportunity, advancement as a function of talent, intelligence, and capability were suspect.  Identity, so flimsily and errantly based on race, gender, and ethnicity had destroyed comity and universal subscription to fundamental values. 

She was in effect, stripped naked.  A woman with intelligence, ability, legacy and agency standing alone in the square, spat upon, ready to be bound, tethered, and burned at the stake. 

She had few choices.  She could furl her ensign, rejoin the sailing fleet, hoist the flag of social reform, and lie, complaisantly on her comfortable unearned income; join the ultra-conservative nationalists and build a political party as successful as the AfD party in Germany or Marine LePen's ultra-nationalists in France; or show up the idiocy and faux sanctity of American progressives...But where would that leave her?

She was no Stoic, no Epictetian no desultory sitter on the sidelines who could watch the hysterical cacophony of the Left without reaction; but still and all in all where was she to go?

It is ironic but understandable how a culture of inclusivity was by its nature exclusive,  Rather than assume that everyone was part of one, unified, companionable national community, one had to prove one's bona fides - black, gay, etc. 

Progressivism by its very canonical aspiration for Utopia, has fragmented, dissolved, and dismissed any sense of unity, of pulling together rowing the same boat; and so it was that Halsey ended up adrift, a supernumerary to political advocacy, a fifth wheel. 

Yet, she started off as a rugged, uncowed, determined individualist - a pissy little kid who knew what was what - and managed quite well.  The world is 99.9 percent accommodated, fitted nicely into prescriptive groups, but Halsey part of the tiny fraction not only survived but prospered. At least she knew that she was of the elite. 

When Diversity Goes Rogue, Stick To Your Own Kind - The Demise Of A Central, Universal Ethical Core

In Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, the Broadway 50s musical based on Romeo and Juliet, a boy and girl from two opposing gangs, one white and the other Puerto Rican, fall in love. Anita, a friend of Maria, warns her against getting involved with someone from a different community.  She sings:

A boy like that
Who'd kill your brother
Forget that boy
And find another
One of your own kind
Stick to your own kind
A boy like that
Will give you sorrow
You'll meet another boy tomorrow
One of your own kind
Stick to your own kind

“Stick to your own kind” is her refrain. If you don’t, you’re asking for trouble.  Of course Maria does not listen, bad turns to worse, and the final scene is a melodramatic replay of the end of the star-crossed lovers.

Of course Bernstein was just whistlin' Dixie.  Ever since the first Paleolithic settlements, human beings have formed likeminded groups and have been suspicious of 'the other'.  Human and animal societies have always prized centrality, core identity, universal belonging and have fought fiercely to defend polity, consensus, security, and identity.  Bee and ant colonies are built on complex social systems designed to propagate, protect, and defend the colony.  No outsiders, no intruders, no external intent is tolerated. 

In human society there has always been a tendency to form larger groups of associated, similar interests.  There is clearly strength in numbers, but only if those numbers add up to the same sum.  Groups become larger groups, extend their each, become more and more inclusive.  Religion became a central camping ground as did politics. 

Social groupings - the natural colloquies of the similar and likeminded - have always described human aggregations and always will. 

For large social groups comity is essential.  Fragmentation into self-interested groups is antithetical and destructive.  This is why China has always been a powerful nation and is now increasingly so.  It has refused ethnic separatism and insisted that all distinct groups abandon cultural distinction and join the universal, national polity of the nation at large. 

At the heart of this cultural polity is a strong ethical, Confucian core.  Separate ethnic identity means nothing compared to universal comity - subscription to a social, ethical, and moral core that guides every action and anneals divisions of self-interest. 

Japan is no different, hewing to the same idea of a central ethical core, in their case derived from Shintoism and Buddhism, but with a strong, undeniable cultural and historical legacy. 

Russia and Turkey, both with storied empires, understand the importance of cultural unanimity.  The Ottoman Empire - like the Roman, Mongol, Mauryan, or Persian - could never have existed without a strong, ineradicable cultural center and a universal embrace of it. 

Understanding the natural human tendency to form identity groups, but equally realizing the corrosive nature of such separatism has been the key to national strength and geopolitical supremacy. 

The United States once understood this - Thomas Jefferson and his Founding Fathers colleagues formed the new republic based on philosophical and religious principles.  The nation, although refusing the dictatorial imposition of European religion, would nonetheless be 'One Nation Under God' and would be guided by the principles of the Enlightenment. Logic and reason were only means to the end of better understanding God and his Creation. 

Now, however, the nation is ruled by identity politics - the division of the country into racial, ethnic, and gender groups, all legitimized by narrow self-interest.  National ethos, polity, comity, subscription to universal norms of right behavior have been rejected in favor of cultural separatism.  Blacks and whites have nothing in common, nor do gays and straights.  There is no attempt to find common ground because a priori, ipso facto there is none. 

Europe, after decades of the liberal, inclusivist policies which have let in millions of Middle Eastern and African Muslims, has realized the mistake it made.  These immigrants, always harshly critical of and militantly aggressive against all other religions, have made it clear that they will create a sub-state within national borders.  They have refused European secularism, and have insisted that God's law - their Islamic social code - will always have the ultimate say. 

Conservative leaders in France, the UK, and Germany will most certainly be elected in the next round of voting, and they have vowed not only to close the borders but to deport all who are in the country illegally and to insist on overt and universal subscription to European cultural laws and traditions.  Cultural diversity will be respected as long as it does interfere with, counter, or reject the universal norms of the nation. 

Poland and Hungary have made cultural integrity the cornerstone of their political agenda.  Poland has been publicly proud of its tight immigration policy, and Giorgia Meloni, President of Italy has said loudly and proudly, 'I am Giorgia.  I am a woman.  I am a mother. I am Christian. I am European, and I am Italian!' the litany of foundational values. 

Japan under its new conservative leadership has vowed to close down mosques, deport anyone who has not become fully Japanese, and has vowed to preserve Japanese culture. 

Of course the European Left has cried fascism, neo-Nazism, and right-wing extremism, and have begun a hate-mongering campaign to cast all conservatives as retrograde, bullying Hitlerian National Socialists. 

Conservative adherents have been very outspoken in their frustration and anger at having for so long been forced to bow to the claims of the Left that white, Christian Europe has been nothing but a predatory, warmongering, colonialist, oppressor, and good riddance to it. 

American conservatives have raised the same angry cries.  For years Americans have been told that white, Christian America is evil, the perpetuator of slavery, Jim Crow, persistent systemic racism, and the oppression of minorities and the poor.  The creation of identity groups has been an important way to counter white, straight, Christian supremacy. 

Conservatives are having no more of it.  White, Christian, Europe has given the world modern civilization - art, literature, science, philosophy, architecture, laws, and civil governance - and its inheritors in America should not only be proud of that legacy but do everything to restore it. 

To create a culture of identity is to foist a superficial, discrediting, demeaning philosophy on the citizenry.  A focus on race, gender, and ethnicity diminishes and detracts from the attention which should be paid to intelligence, talent, creativity, insight, and social courage.  There will always be differences among people. 

The bell curve will always and inevitably define human society - there will always be the smarter and the less able, those with will and ambition and those without, those with talent and insight, and those who remain ignorant and credulous. 

The bell curve describes performance, actual or potential - and that has always been part and parcel of the American ethos.  A land of infinite opportunity which some will take advantage of and others won't.  Racial differences might be factors in the character of the bell curve, but are irrelevant in and of themselves. 

Europe will soon close its borders, expunge anti-cultural elements, and return to a central cultural ethos. The smell of ragu, kielbasa, couscous, and thieboudienne will still fill alleys and byways, but that's where cultural diversity will stop.  

An Insane Asylum Opens Its Doors, And An Inmate Runs For Office - From Loony Bin To Washington, What A Great Country

Janet Putnam did not consider herself mentally ill.  She was convinced that she had been cured before St. Elizabeth's suddenly opened its doors and freed the inmates.  Not so the others.  Regina Phipps was still as loony as a red-eyed cockatoo when she walked out onto the city streets, still talking to herself, babbling about abduction, sexual adversity, and plum pudding, no different than she did when she kept the whole ward awake with her cackling and demented rambling. 

Angela Crawford danced like a whirling dervish from morning till night until the attendants strapped her in her bed where she twisted, shook, and writhed until morning, as cadaverous looking as a refugee from the grave, as crazy as anyone on the ward, a nutcase, an unrecoverable, hopeless woman. 

In any case, out they went, lock, stock, and barrel by federal order.  The Congress of the United States under its all-encompassing act to protect the disabled, concluded that internment in mental facilities was cruel and unjust punishment, and that the mentally ill were no different from anyone else, just temporarily dislocated. 

Now Janet Putnam was just kidding herself about her sanity.  She was as batty as the rest of them; it was just that she didn't show it.  Her insanity was deeply buried, cloaked in an eager normality; but when it emerged as a demonically twisted specter that belonged only in a straightjacket, it was fearsome to see. She became transformed, mutated, and unrecognizable. And that was just for starters - her panoply of apparitions was another thing altogether. 

Luckily for her the demonic side stayed put except for rare occasions.  Psychiatry had not cured her of her illness, just shoved it far below ground, deep enough, the doctors thought, that it would have trouble emerging. 

The problem was that Janet missed the demonic self, for as in certain cases of epilepsy, patients have vivid hallucinations, often see God, and report the most ecstatic feelings of joy.  To those witnessing her 'fits', she was a scary creature, but on the inside, she was seeing the most beautiful, beatific scenes of the Garden of Eden. 

 

However, she had no control over the demon, and like epileptic fits, it could emerge at any time and unexpectedly.  Over her last year in the asylum before they opened the doors, she had had only one 'emergence', at supper when it appeared and as she stood up, spilling the soup and the condiments all over the table, she shouted, 'He has risen!'.  

The emergence was over as quickly as it had come.  She settled down, asked for another bowl of soup, and continued her conversation with her friends. 

The attendants of St. Elizabeth's were surprised at the Congressional order.  There was no way that these wackos should be let out onto the street, but there it was in black and white, posted on the office door as plain as day, and within weeks of the declaration, the hospital was empty. 

The state did provide some transitional care - halfway houses, temporary lodging to give former inmates time to adjust to their new surroundings - but most patients didn't know the difference and thought that they were still in K Ward of S Block. 

Janet was different.  She refused - as she had a legal right to do under the new law - to enter one of these halfway establishments, for she considered herself well enough and able enough to negotiate her way through civilian life.  She had a sizeable bank account and considerable investments which had been untouched during her stay at St. Elizabeth's and had grown considerably thanks to a favorable market. 

With those earnings she rented a spacious and well-appointed apartment in the Dresden, on Connecticut Avenue.  The owner, an old matron of considerable wealth, died, and her children who didn't want to be bothered with disposing of that part of the estate, rented it out furnished. It was perfect - classic Victorian, well-kept with views up and down Connecticut Avenue. 

Now, it must be said that Janet's demon might have been well-buried deep in her subconscious but her illness had other, less troublesome, but nagging expressions.  In other words, she was not an entirely well woman, given, particularly at night to seeing things crawling, staring, and flagellating around the apartment.  Having been convinced that these apparitions were not real, she dismissed them, let them carry on until they decided to leave. 

What was she going to do with her time? Her Georgetown acquaintances who had fallen completely for the idea of full integration and accommodation of 'the other' into society's mainstream, and still with great respect for the Putnam family legacy - a First Family of colonial America - and their storied history through the years, took her in like a prodigal child. 

 

She was by no means insane, she knew, and her beauty had been little affected by her time 'away from home'.  She was as much a lively, attractive woman as she ever had been; and her friends would do everything they could to reintroduce her to society. 

Her re-entrance happened during the Biden Administration, an age as most remember, one extremely accommodating to the previously marginalized - the black, the gay, the Hispanic, the poor, and the disabled who were now to be considered no different than anyone else in the white, proper majority.  

Representatives of each identity group, chosen for their charisma and general appeal were enlisted to speak for this community; and so it was that Janet came to be noticed by a Congressman from Ohio who had been a champion of the disabled, he himself having been crippled by a strange childhood palsy and confined to a wheelchair.  

He loved Janet as soon as he met her, for who could not love those cornflower blue eyes, flaxen hair, sumptuous figure, and delightful charm which she had not lost during her internment? In fact, every morning when she looked in the mirror she saw not herself but some princess of the past, one who changed every morning.  

On one morning she might be Nefertiti, another the Czarina of Alexander II of Russia, another the first wife of Sultan Suleiman's harem. It was not that she imagined these women, she was them, and as she walked out the door and saw the admiring looks of every man she passed, she returned the gaze, right and proper for a royal highness to acknowledge her subjects. 

Like the demon episodes, these fugues into the past passed quickly and she recovered her grip on the world without a hitch. 

In any case, it was during one of these episodes - actually an unusual confederation of many princesses and queens of the past - that she met with the Congressman in his Capitol Hill offices.  She was perfectly capable of being a princess and holding the most pedestrian conversations at the same time, such was the peculiarity of her illness. 

And so it was that the besotted Congressman, always left in the lurch by women who were put off by his crippledom and now in the thrall of this exceedingly attractive girl, invited her to join his office and his campaign. 

The mentally ill were always thought of to be a twisted, deformed, drooling, and twitchy lot; and here was just the opposite, a recovering madwoman who could make the case for inclusion. 

It took no practice and no rehearsals for her to be a compelling speaker, for all the various incarnations which were part of her deeply schizophrenic mind joined forces to spread the good news.  Mental illness was not the offensive, horror of Bedlam, Broadmoor, or the maximum security hospitals of Norwich and Battersea.  'I am the mentally ill', she proudly said - or perhaps it was the Duchesse de Nantes who said it. 

 

Not only did she speak for the mentally disabled, she was welcomed into the bigger tent of the progressive movement and before long her beauty, charm, and eloquence led her into climate change, gender reform, the black man, immigration, and the redistribution of wealth.  

Soon she was coopted by the leaders of these many factions and sub-causes and did fewer and fewer mental shows and more and more wider issue appearances.  Before long she was recognized as one of the most articulate spokespersons for the Left.  Yes, she was white, upper class, and straight, but even the arch-liberals of The Movement knew that they had to broaden their reach. 

So successful was she, that she was considered for public office, and it was then that the whole kit-and-kaboodle of demons, princesses, consorts, empresses, and queens came loose from their moorings and appeared all at once.  She began to speak in tongues, imagined ancient Egyptian, Farsi, Russian, and Ottoman Turkish, a nonsensical caterwauling that her audience - this time in the Great Hall of the Kennedy Center to a congregation of a thousand - and was hooked off stage like a bad act in the high days of vaudeville. 

The cat was out of the bag and Janet never felt better.  It was like those first few months at St. Elizabeth before they force-fed her drugs, jammed needles in her arms, and shocked her silly.  Insanity felt good, she said, and now as she was being pulled off the stage, she felt good again. 

Now, of course, there was nowhere to put her.  She was jettisoned as quickly as damaged cargo by her progressive colleagues who wanted mental disability in small doses, not this hysterical mania, but there were no public hospitals open anymore and she had no family that was willing to place her in one of the privately run, exclusive hospitals in Connecticut, so she ended up on the streets, one of a thousand batshit crazy schizophrenics sleeping in culverts; but by this time she didn't know the difference between shit and Shinola and ran out her days completely happily.