Eva Marshall–A Shakespearean Feminist

Eva Marshall was a definitive woman comfortable in her shoes whether professional or flighty.  She was a tough manager, a coquette, and a skilled navigator of sexual waters.  She never ran aground, never luffed in a bad tack, always reached port safely, and left her male competitors in life’s regatta winded, discouraged, and well in her wake.

She was born savvy and understood how to ease her way to victory and success using her beauty, charm, and appeal.   There wasn’t a man alive who was not enticed by this combination, and from the age of 12 Eva always had a posse of boys and men trailing her.   She used her feminine charms as a sweetly-baited lure, and her intelligence and will to keep them in line.

“Eva is a Shakespearean woman”, said Harold Fein, professor of English literature at Yale and a Scott Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge – a particular honor for any academic, but an especial one for an American.  Fein had earned his wings on the female dramatic personae of the Comedies, the Tragedies, and the Romances – strong women who understood men, were never intimidated by them, who knew that struggling against patriarchy and male authority would be senseless, but trumped men nine times out of ten.

Cleopatra was Fein’s favorite female character.  Antony was besotted by her beauty, seductive charm, flamboyance, and Eastern mystery, lost the naval battle of Actium because of her, and died ignominiously because of his misguided love.  Why misguided? Because he was so smitten by this Ptolemaic beauty, so entranced by her sexual prowess, and so taken in like everyone else in Octavius’ court except the young emperor, that he couldn’t resist.


                  www.fanpop.com

Rosalind, Cressida, Gertrude, Portia, Goneril, Regan, Dionyza, and Volumnia were no different.  Cressida played Troilus for a naïve fool, changed allegiances and lovers to suit her fancy and fortune.  Rosalind and Beatrice ran rings around their suitors, settled for them in the end because feminism went only so far in the 16th century.  Volumnia ruled her powerful son Coriolanus and dictated his personal and political life.  Goneril and Regan had no patience for men and used their husbands Albany and Cornwall to destroy Lear and his court. 

Eva had been a student of Fein’s at Yale, and he immediately took a shine to her.  He had a reputation for seducing his female students.  Few of them were able to resist his European manners, Jewish intellect, and Errol Flynn good looks; but he knew from the beginning that Eva would never be one his sexual groupies.  On the contrary, he followed her around like a lost puppy, this incarnation of Cleopatra and Queen Gertrude, and felt fortunate to see one of the Bard’s characters incarnate.

He watched the male posses form, disband, and regroup throughout her years.  He watched his male students cluster around her at the end of class, excited more by her diffidence and cool than her occasional coquetry.   “The Antony syndrome”, he said.  “Males besotted by strong, beautiful women.”

Not surprisingly the feminists on campus in the early Seventies were completely nonplussed by Eva Marshall.  Here was a woman of natural, innate authority, gifted with will and intelligence and completely able to fend for herself, act successfully on her own, and get exactly what she wanted.   How was it that she escaped the patriarchy of the Fifties?  Was she never a Daddy’s little girl who dressed in frilly dresses and Easter hats? How did she escape from the male gulag and a thousand years of female servitude?

They missed the point because they were women.  Professor Fein understood Eva because he fell under her spell, as happy as Antony ever was to be bewitched by such a creature.  Her female colleagues could never appreciate what men saw in her because they were competitors.  The took her refusal to join women’s groups, march for women’s rights, or protest the university’s persistent old boy ethos as repudiation not just of their movement but as them.  Put bluntly, they were jealous of the popular, confident, unintimidated and independent Eva Marshall.

At a time when young women at Yale were dressing dykey in a rejection of  bourgeois concepts of femininity, Eva kept to her wardrobe – collegiate, casual, upper class, but unerringly feminine and appealing.  She knew that men wanted her and wanted her all the more because of her quietly seductive manner and dress.  She felt validated by their attention; and because she understood men so well – their strengths but above all their fragile egos and outrageous self-importance – she never felt threatened.

Many years later she shared her surprise at modern young women in their twenties and thirties.  They dressed just as provocatively as any women ever did,  but insisted that inevitable male attention was always unwanted, undesirable, and invasive.  They wanted to be desired and loved on their own terms, they said, but their terms were illogical and counter-productive.  Why on earth dress like Blaze Starr set up medieval barricades against male intrusion?

Eva who after earning an advanced degree from Harvard quickly rose through the corporate ranks, remarkable because her ascendance was many years before the glass ceiling had even been tested.  She knew that her sex would always keep her from the highest ranks of business, but for her – like Shakespeare’s women –success with authority and power even within a circumscribed social and political context could be very rewarding indeed.

She was always regarded as fair, thoughtful, and respectful manager, and few men ever blamed their ‘education’ at her disciplined, firm hand on her sex.  She knew that she was smarter than most of the women in her departments and certainly leagues above the men; but understood that cajoling and stroking of tender egos went a lot farther with men than the whipping post.

“A Shakespearean feminist”, Harold Fein was fond of calling her in their later years.  They had become friends and stayed in touch after Yale.  Fein grew to epic stature within the world of English literature.  His book, “The Making of a Marvel – Shakespeare’s Strong Women” had become an instant academic classic.  At the same time, he became a popular icon.  His political and social conservatism was never as contentious and irritable as that of Allan Bloom; and his own charm, intellect, and humor always won the day.  He was made for television, and he had millions of fans.

Feminism was not all it was cracked up to be, he said in so many carefully chosen words embedded in literary context. “Boys will be boys, and girls will be girls”, he said on Charlie Rose and championed strong women of all ages.

Now approaching ninety, Fein admitted he had absolutely no idea what to make about the fuss over transgenderism.  “Unless I’m missing something”, he said, “function follows form”, an ironic allusion to the Bauhaus and their architectural manifesto.  Men and women have different sexual equipment, he said, installed far up the human assembly line, designed for a particular purpose, impossible to wear out, simple, functional (although somewhat impractical), and basically unchanged for millennia.

His comments were more about the hysterical brouhaha of the times than about alternate sexual behavior per se.  “I could care less what men do to each other”, Fein said.  “There are too few gay men to make a difference.  Sexual deviance from the norm is not exactly earth-shattering”   Accommodation was his rule.  Let gays and straights find some way and manner of accommodating each other’s principles and behavior.  “No more demonstrations.”

Every word of the above was quoted, misquoted, and sent down viral pathways where they got even more twisted and distorted, until at the hands of the liberal press, this old man was a threat to progressivism, civil rights, and the modern age.

Eva spoke at Fein’s funeral.  Fewer people than ordinarily should have been were in attendance.  Because of his many outspoken television appearances, he was rapidly marginalized, an unlikely feminist and gay antichrist.  Every one at the ceremony, however was a believer, so Eva preached to the choir; but she did it with feeling and a respect that went far beyond his academic brilliance and literary insights.  He not only understood women, he understood women like her – strong, independent, willful, and in full control of their mind, body, and spirit.

“Like Cleopatra”, she said, ending her eulogy.

The Corrosive Effect of ‘I Want Mine’ Factionalism And The Decline Of National Integrity

Americans are dealing with diversity very badly indeed.  The nasty, argumentative, bilious screeds on Facebook are only an expression of how far we have strayed from our founding principles.  Jefferson and his colleagues never intended for the nation to become a free-for-all where the commonweal was secondary to the satisfaction of individual and factional demands.  ‘The pursuit of happiness’ never meant the freedom to pursue selfish ends.  Individual liberty came with conditions, first and foremost of which was to respect the integrity of the Republic and the smaller societies on which it was built.


             www.commons.wikimedia.org

While it is true that neither Jefferson nor Madison could ever have envisioned the America of today, a nation more populous, wealthy, and variegated than that of the early 19th century; philosophy, like mathematics, has its grounding in principle, rules, and internal logic.   Voltaire, Rousseau, and Locke had shown how democracy was based on sound rational and moral principles.  There was a higher good, they argued, in the will of the people and the rule of the few. 

Yet all of them understood the complementarity of individual free expression and respect for that of others.  While most democrats in France and the United States were appalled at The Reign of Terror in France after the Revolution and how sound principles so quickly gave way to retribution and murder, they still were convinced that popular democracy would prevail.  France returned to autocracy under Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbons, but has managed to sort out culture and society to accommodate both aristocracy and popular sovereignty.


                             www.glogster.com

Hamilton and Jefferson disagreed on how America should be governed; and the horrific history of ‘93 and the Jacobins was in their minds.  The mob cannot be trusted, said Hamilton.  Populism would result in the same violence and disregard for order that occurred in France.  The people alone are not capable of being governed; and only if government is structured with this debility in mind can the Republic grow and prosper.

Jefferson disagreed and had an almost religious regard for the rights of man and the expression of the will of the people.  In the end, he argued, they would always be right, whereas continuing even the vestiges of authoritarian rule would lead to ruin.

Hamilton, it appears, was right.  The current electoral system, ‘democratized’ through the dismantling of the smoke-filled room nomination process and the institution of the primary system, is a good example.  Narrow, factional, sectarian interests have dominated the 2016 campaign as never before.  No candidate has or even pretends to have an all-encompassing vision of leadership, nor an understanding of nationhood and the importance of social integrity.  There are no Churchills running . No men or women of unshakeable vision and principle.  No one of honor, courage, and respect.


                   www.pbs.org

This is not the fault of Trump, Cruz, or Hillary Clinton alone.  We the voters; we Americans have made them possible.  We are the ones who in our distorted vision of representative democracy have redefined the process.  Gender, race, and ethnicity and the corrosive nature of liberal ‘diversity’ have eroded the integrity of the nation.  It is one thing to argue for equal rights, equal opportunity, and equal protection under the law; but it is divisive and self-serving to pursue these ends through exaggerated and intemperate demands.

Even granting the imprecision of the term ‘transgender’, the number of ‘alternately gendered’ men and women in infinitesimal.  If the LGBT population is estimated at 3 percent of the population, the transgender portion of that is statistically insignificant.  Why, then, has there not been a proportionate accommodation to transgender needs rather than raise the issue to the level of Supreme Court jurisprudence; and by so doing inflaming the entire country?

The issue is not about sexual legitimacy, nor even about tolerance.  It is about subsuming narrow, parochial interests within the socio-cultural context of the larger society.

The issue of race is no different.  The current racial discord in America has been exacerbated by the same kind of narrow, factional interests.  There is no room for an open discussion on race.  Daniel Moynihan was prescient in his concern about the growing dysfunction of the black community and argued that only structural change from within – an acceptance of responsibility, a refusal of entitlement, and a recommitment of black leaders to economic progress based on social reform – could solve the problem.   White progressives in their refusal to heed Moynihan’s warnings aid and abet the continuation of neo-slavery – the consignment of inner city populations to a life of poverty, violence, and despair.


         www.participle.org
In other words, the  Black Lives Matter movement is still dominated by old-school thinking – divisively racial politics at its worst; confrontational attitudes that teeter on demagoguery; and a reluctance to face indisputable socio-economic facts and factors.

Such factional intensity only hardens the views of the opposition – not only bigots and retrograde whites who, like blacks, prefer an ideological argument rather than a rational one; but more moderate whites as well who feel assaulted, put-upon, and marginalized.

Economic inequality has been a fact of human society since cowrie beads, barter, and tribal organization.  There have always been haves and have nots; and while societies in the past have taken this fact of human life for granted, American exceptionalism prevents any acceptance of the sort.  In our democracy such inequality is not only unacceptable but morally reprehensible. 

Instead of facing facts and dismissing the idea that everyone is equal (Jefferson never said that everyone was equal, but only that everyone deserved equal opportunity), we try level the playing field.  As a result of this impossible task, we have pitted rich against poor – or rather the idea of wealth against the reality of poverty.  Such antipodal arguments in a country whose citizens still value enterprise and believe in opportunity can only add to the corrosive environment of today.

Inequality exists; but will dismantling the institutions and redoubts of the rich automatically benefit the poor?  Has radically engineered wealth redistribution ever succeeded?  Under what conditions can opportunities be opened for the working poor without sacrificing the enterprise and investment of the wealthy?

America was founded on religious principles.  On the one hand our independence was predicated on freedom of religion and non-interference by the State in religious matters; but on the other it was founded on Enlightenment ideas which never strayed from God.  Rational inquiry, said intellectuals of the period, was the best way to ponder and discover the wonders of God’s Creation.  No nation, even the marginal Christians among the Founding Fathers said, can exist without foundational faith.
So how have we become so abusively intolerant of religion? 

The separation of Church and State does not mean that religion must never be discussed in the classroom.  How can one teach American, let alone world history without talking about religion.  It is not enough to cast religious conflict in solely political terms.  The Crusades might well have been Christian and European expansionism, but the motive was religious.  ISIS may be a dominant political force in the Middle East, but it is based on Islam.   Religious faith has been behind the greatest Western and Eastern art.  The principles are universal.


                       www.thegospelcoalition.org

The current debates about ‘religious liberty’ have convoluted the original intent of Jefferson and his colleagues.  They would have done anything to assure the rights of anyone to practice, defend, promote, and apply his faith.  The State should have no business in religious affairs.  Is it so hard to accept that some secular interests might conflict with religious principle? Or so hard to reflect on Jefferson’s vision of the primacy of religion and the relegation of the State?

The clock cannot be turned back to the simpler, more homogeneous, and more temperately ambitious age of Jefferson; but we can reflect on his promises, consider the importance and permanence of principle, move even beyond tolerance, and return to more coherent respect for others.  Accommodation in the interest of social integrity is not a bad thing.  It is a good one.

Progressives' Persistent Fantasy - High Taxes And Big Government

In an article in the New York Times (3.19.13) David Brooks wrote about Democratic ‘progressives’ persistent fantasy – that government is always the answer; that government spending is the be-all and end-all to all social and economic ills; and that punitive taxes on the rich are always the way to get a free lunch.  They cannot seem to forget FDR and his Depression-era public spending; they ignore the realities of today,and call for discredited policies of the distant past.

There is a statue outside the Department of Labor of a powerful, rambunctious horse being reined in by an extremely muscular man. This used to be a metaphor for liberalism. The horse was capitalism. The man was government, which was needed sometimes to restrain capitalism’s excesses.

Today, liberalism seems to have changed. Today, many progressives seem to believe that government is the horse, the source of growth, job creation and prosperity. Capitalism is just a feeding trough that government can use to fuel its expansion.

This is the best metaphor ever to describe ‘progressives’ideologically-driven agenda.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus last week (3.13) called for a $2.1 trillion increase in federal spending at a time when the US is just emerging from a crippling recession, struggling to rein in a mounting and seemingly limitless debt, attempting to both reform the lending industry and to increase credit to break the logjam currently blocking economic progress.

Now, of course, liberals have always believed in Keynesian counter-cyclical deficit spending. But that was borrowing to brake against a downturn when certain conditions prevail: when the economy is shrinking; when debt levels are low; when there are plenty of shovel-ready projects waiting to be enacted; when there is a large and growing gap between the economy’s current output and what it is capable of producing.
Today, House progressives are calling for a huge increase in government taxing and spending when none of those conditions apply.

Perhaps the most astounding news of all is that these progressives want to take action that will certainly cripple the economy rather than stimulate it:

In this phase of the recovery, just as the economy is finally beginning to take off, these Democrats want to take an astounding $4.2 trillion out of the private sector and put it into government where they believe it can be used more efficiently.

Where does this financial and economic illusion come from?  How can progressives so defiantly adhere to an idealistic vision of human society that never existed and never will?

Perhaps it is because of their view of democracy; that is, that government not only represents the people but is constituted to act as their stewards, and to be the father and guardian of all.  Government should be a New Testament savior, helping people to see the error of their ways, and returning them to a state where all people are equal, share equally, and live innocently.  Government should also be an Old Testament God, raging at the superciliousness and arrogance of the rich, threatening to slaughter them if they do not bend to its will.

This vision of government was certainly not what Thomas Jefferson and the Founding Fathers intended.  America was first its people, second its communities, and only a distant third, its government. The Revolution and the rejection of royal government and decree were still very vivid in the minds of the signers of the Declaration of Independence when they penned their names.  America would have a government, they understood, but it would be secondary and subservient to the citizens of the new republic.

The Bill of Rights was such an important document because it codified the rights and obligations of the citizenry.  The “pursuit of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ meant that every new American would profit from the fruits of his labor and be free to do so.  His pursuit of happiness was meant not as license to follow individual, venal pursuits, but to toil for the common good and the commonweal.

Government did have its day when it acted according to the original conception of the nation.  It acted to reign in the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism, to stimulate the economy during the Great Depression, and to enforce racial integration.  It has a certain role, but a very limited one in the regulation of the private sector when competition in the marketplace is an insufficient self-regulatory mechanism.

There is no enshrined role for government to engineer change through aggressive social programs, to interfere in market choices, or to crowd out private enterprise.  Thanks to a strong conservative movement in the country,  Democrats have been forced to reconsider the role of government.  While no one denies that there is a role, a reconsideration of what that role should be has been a long time coming.

Progressives, however, are reluctant to give up their belief in a welfare state and the conviction that government has a distinct and premier role in reshaping individual behavior in a more liberal image.

How would ‘progressives’ pay for new and more extensive social programs, such as those suggested by Bernie Sanders (2016)?  By increasing taxes on the wealthy.

Today, especially after the recent tax increases, the total tax burden is already at historic highs. If you combine federal, state, sales and other taxes, rich people in places like California and New York are seeing the government take 60 cents or more out of their last dollar earned.

Democrats would make that weighty tax burden much, much heavier. In fact, the entire Democratic governing vision, from President Obama on down, is based on the notion that we can have a growing welfare state and pay for it by taxing the top 2 percent.

 
                       www.billmoyers.com 

Brooks writes of the significant problems with this approach.  First there are simply not enough rich people to fund the kinds of spending ‘progressives’ propose.  The Third Way has concluded that even by throwing every possible new tax on the wealthy the debt would quickly double.

Second, no one doubts that by raising the total tax burden to 80-90 percent would have unpredictable consequences, all bad. In fact lower taxes have shown to have the opposite and salubrious effects:

Edward Prescott, a winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, found that, in the 1950s when their taxes were low, Europeans worked more hours per capita than Americans. Then their taxes went up, reducing the incentives to work and increasing the incentives to relax. Over the next decades, Europe saw a nearly 30 percent decline in work hours.

Furthermore, the wealthy have many ways to avoid taxes and would certainly do so if they were to precipitously rise:

The rich tend to be more sensitive to tax-rate changes because they’ve got advisers who are paid to be. Martin Feldstein, an economics professor at Harvard, looked into tax changes in the 1980s and concluded that raising rates causes people to shift compensations to untaxed fringe benefits and otherwise suppresses their economic activity. A study last year by the economists Michael Keane and Richard Rogerson found that tax rates can have a surprisingly large influence on how much people invest in education, how likely they are to create businesses and which professions they go into.

Once progressive Congressmen feel the wind of  higher taxes among the wealthy in their sails, there is no stopping them.  Despite their promises to redistributed wealth, the demand for ever more resources for government spending requires extending the tax burden.  These representatives who live in an academic, and idealistic world, shut off from the lives of the real middle-class – the working poor – do not understand what they go through to make ends meet and how taxes hobble if not cripple their attempts to move up the economic ladder.

A small entrepreneur trying to start a restaurant has to scramble to get the family support and low-cost labor needed to get his business underway; but progressives choose to ignore the especial burden placed on them by higher minimum wages and obligatory health care. . They do not appreciate the vitality of the American IT industry which is catapulting the US economy back into prominence in world markets and creating jobs at home; or the responsiveness of the new US auto industry which is now making competitive, long-lasting cars after flailing on the brink of bankruptcy. They look at newly productive and wealthy firms as a source of revenue for an ever-expanding treasury.

By creating extreme, black-and-white categories – the poor or the rich; the advantaged and disadvantaged; black or white; gay or straight - progressives tend to miss the nuances and gradations of American society; but by so doing, they set up ready-to-fund programs.  It may be right never to lose sight of women's issues, but the continued loud but inconsistent demands for change no longer ring true.  Women are doing quite fine, thank you, outpacing men in law and medicine and never more present and influential in corporate America.  It is inconsistent to claim that women need more and more protection from men when feminism rightly refers to women's innate equality, strength, and parity with men.


               www.image.frompo.com

The Left clamors for radical gender reform when the country is finally coming around on its own to a more accommodating view of sexual diversity.  Applying 'racism' to every social conflict, and looking for injustice where only irresponsibility and social dysfunction are at work only harden conservative opinion. No one whether wealthy or middle-class wants to see a socialist-style redistribution of wealth which demeans individual enterprise and weakens the foundation of a market economy on which they both depend.

Americans have been in a low-tax, small government, private enterprise mood for decades now; and few want a return to the type of interventionist and expensive big government promised by the Left. It is true that government has grown even under conservative administrations, and it is high time to review all federal spending for appropriateness and efficiency.  However what few people want - except the Sanders supporters who misjudge the conservative zeitgeist of a profoundly conservative America - is a return to high taxes, increased government spending on patronizing social programs, and unnecessary and wasteful subsidies on both industry and agriculture.

The progressive budget in the House seems to have been written by people hermetically sealed in the house of government. They work in government. They represent public-sector workers. They seem to have had little contact with private-sector job creators and no idea about what factors might play in their thinking. It’s a reminder that while Republicans may embarrass on a daily basis, many progressives have lost touch with what actually produces growth and prosperity.