The Travails Of An Ugly Woman – The Fallacy Of Inner Beauty

Nancy Figgins was born ugly, and despite all the hopes and best wishes of her parents, she remained ugly. Her long, feral, deviant nose; her lips, somewhere between lipids and African; and her hair – an untamed thatch of brambles and thickets – all made her the very antithesis of classic female beauty.  The standards of such have not changed in millennia, and since Egypt, Greece, and Rome, women painted, carved, and sculpted have all been models of perfect symmetry.

 

As she looked at herself in the mirror and turned her head this way and that to get the best possible angle, one which would provide the depth, the shadows, and the mystery of a truly unfortunate face which other perspectives were not.  She tried every possible cosmetic – those that darkened and those that lightened; those that accentuated and those that diverted attention – to no avail.  There was simply no way of adorning, modifying, or changing what was a homely, irreparably unattractive look.

‘There is hope’, said a beautician from whom she sought professional advice – a little tuck here, a little tightening there, the woman said, but even the digital images generated to suggest the final product, ordinarily powerful selling tools, could not hide the unevenness, grossly asymmetrical features, and lack of Golden Mean order.

 

Diana Vreeland was a profoundly ugly woman, but thanks to her talent and eye for fashion, her elegance and sophisticated, tailored image overcame the same unfortunate features that dogged Nancy Figgins.

‘If she can do it, so can I’, said Nancy, and at great expense, bought the closest thing to Armani, St. Laurent, and Chanel originals.  The dresses and accoutrements – simple pearl necklaces, brooches, and gold bracelets – only made her look clownish, a caricature of a Parisian model rather than a recreation of her.  The string of pearls somehow accentuated her clavicle; the bracelets slipped and slid over her meager wrists, the brooches reminded one of old ugly Queen Victoria herself.

What was a woman to do?

In the meantime, other women whose luck of the draw had been favorable looked like the wood paintings of the women of Fayum; the statues of Aphrodite, Venus, and Hera; the beautiful matrons of Sargent, Homer, and Fragonard.  The best of the lot were on the covers of Vogue, Elle, and Cosmopolitan – seductive, attractive young women of indefinable allure. 

What was it about Marilyn Monroe that has appealed to seven decades of men?  What innate desirability did she have, and could it be imitated and adopted.  Was there something to be learned from Marilyn that even a hopelessly homely girl like Nancy Figgins could apply and use?

Of course unless you are born with Marilyn’s natural, inimitable sexuality it is of no use to parse it for meaning and relevance; but Nancy Figgins tried.  Like everything else, it was more caricature than model.  Her lips lacked Marilyn’s sensuality, her body missed that deeply sexual fullness and irresistibility.  She was a Marilyn look-alike and a bad one, no better than the thousand pompadoured, sequined Elvises in Las Vegas.

 

She went tart, all red lipstick, eye shadow, mascara, décolleté, and spiked heels, but that, she found out, was dork meat and no way to meet the right kind of man.

Now, the Columbus Beauty Pageant, a beauty contest held every year in a small town in Mississippi attracted hundreds of live viewers and a few thousand more on local television.  The contestants were not exactly Miss American quality, but in the mold; and many did go on to regional and state titles. 

They were all largely the same, for the standards of beauty have not changed since the first human settlements – symmetry, good health, brightness, and pleasing, subtle sensuality have always been the hallmark of beauty – and one by one the young women walked with poise and confidence across the stage.  The judges could have picked any one at random and done the job.

Beauty, after all, is a commercial commodity; and the Asian Airlines have understood this implicitly.  Their stewardesses are all beauty queens, chosen for the same familiarly standard looks – beautiful women certainly, but without the flaws that traditional Japanese artists look for and create in ceramics, flaws that raise beauty from the ordinary to the extraordinary.  And for such proximity to historical standards of beauty, these Asian women are rewarded. 

Beautiful women have automatic points added to their resumes – as counterintuitive as it may sound, a beautiful nuclear physicist has a leg up on her homely, unattractive fellow-applicants.  Beauty is as beauty does, and beauty makes money.

All of this was discouraging to Nancy to say the least, for she was not only unattractive but on the asymptote of the bell curve, the miserably homely one, as far from true beauty as can be.  With reason she wondered if there was hope; or would she always be at that awful point on the spectrum?

Would she do better as a man, she wondered, a possibility in an age of gender transition all was possible, and try she did, stopping far short of hormonal treatment or radical surgery.  It was far easier for a woman to become a man than vice versa – no lopping off of private parts, and only with a breast girdle, increased smoking for vocal roughness, and a tough guy attitude, you were home free.  She shuddered to think of the other way around.

In fact even the simplest cross dressing would have done the trick, for once in overalls, work shirt and shit-kickers she looked more like most of the men on a construction site; and as such she attracted only trailer trash and tough girls from New Jersey.  She was just as unattractive as a man as she had been as a woman, more so in fact.  She was an ugly man, one of the most unattractive.

There was now no other recourse.  Give it up, forget about beauty, feminine finesse and elegance, and male sophistication and just be her born, natural self neither this nor that.

Of all human traits, beauty is the most telling and the most valuable.  Slow learners can always find ways to make ends meet; clumsy people can find jobs which require no gracefulness or agility; but ugly people are sunk, without recourse and with little hope.  Better look in the mirror, take stock, and waste no more money on trying to change the course of the looks that were doled out at birth.

Artificial Intelligence - Happily, Reality Is Disappearing And Only Lawyers Care

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here and here to stay.  Within a generation not only will there be no distinction between what is real and what is not, what is truth and what is fiction, and what is virtual and what is substance. What's more, no one will care.  In fact we will prefer a virtual world in which we can create, define, and configure our own reality. 

Once the interface between mind and computer has become seamless - i.e. when our electronically mediated thoughts can roam as far and wide as the timeless, boundless world of electronic information, images, experiences, and sensations - no one will ever choose brick and mortar again.  Why would we exchange a world we have created, filled with the sights and sounds chosen from the limitless world of virtual possibilities, for the here and now?

Impossible! is the usual reaction to this inevitable scenario. Many cannot give up the idea that this place, this earth, this God-created life is more valuable - priceless in fact - than any electronic creation.  Those who object to AI, demand a halt on its development and expansion, and who worry about its of society have already missed the train. 

 

Beware, they say.  AI will scour the Internet for data to fuel its essays, scripts, and paintings.  It will steal from others, abridge copyrights, and worst of all, mine fake news, synthesizing, harmonizing, and packaging it into a seductive, irresistible package. 

AI products, the naysayers go on, will be like the phony credit swaps of Wall Street - bundled securities with triple A mortgages on the top of a mountain of junk, all sold at a premium.  The Internet is similarly filled with distortion, misinformation, and creatively deceptive content. AI mines it, homogenizes it, puts a few actually verifiable tidbits in the showcase window, and sells the whole corrupted mess of fantastical nonsense as the truth. 

Yet already society has moved to a post-verifiable world.  Even the most lame amateur understands what Browning, Kurosawa, and Durrell and a thousand trial attorneys already knew - perception is a subjective enterprise.  The Alexandria Quartet is all about events seen from four different perspectives, all sworn to be accurate but contradictory and wildly different.  Four eyewitnesses of a crime see it in four different ways - a black man at the wheel, an Asian, a white; two guns, no guns; a man in a fright wig, a woman; a Ford, a Toyota; green, metallic blue. 

 

Our memories are frail, and research has concluded that most of them do not describe things as they actually happened but are confections of our emotionally-driven need for them and the add-ons of others - what Uncle Harry said about the event at Aunt Leona's Christmas dinner not really what took place. 

No one cares about how much confabulation is in the stump speeches of politicians.  It is what they represent, what they mean and the rest is all just Sturm und Drang, vaudeville, and three-ring circus acts. 

A virtual world requires no governors, no brakes on imagination.  Reality need not interfere with fantasy.  The worlds created by our own minds, mediated by the computer to give access to the infinite variety of history will have no bounds.  Reality will be over and done with. 

There will be a new partnership in the coming AI world.  The machine - that great collector of data, the synthesizer, the sophisticated master of human cognition, insight, creativity, and brilliance - will allow for the elision from brick and mortar to virtuality.  People at first fearful of letting some robot take over their lives, will eventually be complaisant, then accepting, and then happy.  Let the real world disappear at the 'hands' of the machine, and let us roam within its virtual universe. 

But whoa! Not so easy and not so fast.  Rights and the truth must be protected.  AI is a cybernetic thief in the night, stealing at will, disregarding long-established norms of honest and propriety.  It a a fox in the henhouse, a wolf in the forest, a carrion bird on the veldt - a sniper, a sapper, a con artist.  

A writer who reflects on his reading of all of Shakespeare plays and as the Bard intended, sees the relevance of Lear, Richard III, Cleopatra, or Hamlet to contemporary life and creates a novel about driven, tormented, jealous-minded men is seen as brilliant, insightful, creative

An AI tool which does the same thing - scans and records every line of Shakespeare, and using intelligent programmed algorithms to extract meaning and relevance, and then writes a book about the incessant greed of modern life - is suspect.  It has stolen from Shakespeare.  Huh? 

The rub of it is that the AI generated novel is better than the old-fashioned one and is bought up in thousands. However the proceeds to the company that owns ChatGPT are considered ill-gotten gains

All of which means the vast money-making enterprise of the law begins work.  Copyright infringement! charge the phalanx of lawyers seeing gold in civil court. 'Treachery...insult to the American working man' shout Congressmen who rush to pass punitive laws on the expansion of AI.  We must do the right thing for the American people. 

Yet lawmakers are just putting their fingers in the dike, hoping to hold off the flood.  They are trying to put the genie back in the bottle, return to the 19th century of iron and steel, cogs and gears. Lawyers are just trying to make a killing before it is realized that information is no longer proprietary.  Everything is in the public domain. 

What's new about that? Nothing is private in our age of cookies when every keystroke, every conversation, every click of the mouse becomes someone else's.  Just like reality, the idea of privacy no longer has meaning. 

Yet there is still time, say lawyers and lawmakers.  Money to be made, elections to be won.  The courts are already filling up with frivolous copyright lawsuits, challenging AI companies, trying to turn back the tide.  Thieves, intellectual brigands, wolves in sheep's clothing, prosecutors shout. THERE IS SUCH A THING AS THE TRUTH! 

 

Of course this is all just whistlin' Dixie, blowing in the wind.  There is money to be made before the whole idea of what is changes to what might be.  Like every other innovation - the telephone, the car, the computer - Chicken Little, Sky Is Falling prophets warn of coming AI disaster but no one this time is paying attention. 

And just wait until genetic engineering has had its way with the human genome.  The post-human, altered generation, unrecognizable to past ones is on its way.  A double dose of reality bending. The lawyers and lawmakers will be busy. 

Filling The Last White House Diversity Slot - When A White Bass Boat Trucker Joined The Cabinet

It took Joe Biden almost the entire term of his presidency to finally round out the DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) bit of his agenda, but because the election was only a few months away and so many white, working class voters were abandoning him, he knew that he had to make a very visible statement of commitment, and so the search began for someone to be their representative in the White House. 

The position of Deputy Assistant, Labor Relations was to be filled by a man from this forgotten, aggrieved, and politically restive electoral group.  Biden had already made the gender issue the frontispiece of his administration.  He had originally intended to hire all women to his Cabinet, the kind of affirmative action program that would parallel the racial one, but was told by his inner circle that that would be too alienating and off-putting to male voters.  

 

It was one thing to consign men to the lower reaches as predatory animals without sense or sensibility in certain venues, position papers, and public utterances; another thing to remove them lock, stock, and barrel; and so it was that his cabinet had a smattering of men, window dressing, gender mannequins only. 

Second, the man had to be white, for the President had been increasingly seen as black-only.  He had so championed the black man and clearly intended to see him placed at the top of the human pyramid where he belonged. 

The recent paper, Race, Environment, And The Native Genius of the African written by a well-known Harvard professor, contended that because of the African's tribal, animist, and forest legacy, he was more integrated within the natural environment than the white man - 'a natural man' as the academic put it. 

Biden had made references to this paper every time a black man was appointed to a senior position in the White House. 'We're doing the right thing', the President said. 'The only thing'.

Needless to say there were many in the political opposition who disagreed with the President.  What had Africa ever accomplished, they asked? When compared to the great civilizations of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, it barely registered a blip.  What was this forest-based nonsense all about anyway?

White working class men took the President's words and appointments especially hard.  Not only were whites, white civilization, and white culture being derogated, dismissed, and forgotten; but the lower tiers of white society - the working classes - were especially slighted.

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There wasn't a day that went by without some prominent Democrat referring to them as bass-boat, gun-rack, pickup, tobacco chewing, toothless, sister-fucking cr--kers; and they were angry. 

So the election year decision to recruit at least one white, working class male to a senior White House position was taken, and so it was that Mayberry P. Lassiter joined the staff. 

How, out of all the millions of white, lower class, working men did the President find Lassiter?  It was one thing to pick potential appointments from a roster of high-achieving individuals - they fit well into familiar class, educational, professional, and academic categories and were easy to find; but someone from a Ford assembly line? What criteria would be used?  He would have no degrees to speak of, no accomplishments, and nowhere to be seen on the Internet. 

'I've got just the man', said one of the President's senior aides, and went on to explain how he had met Lassiter at a truck stop in Texas. The man was carrying a load of pig iron from Chillicothe to Galveston, and had stopped to fuel up and eat.  The Presidential aide would never have stopped in such a place, not his kind of people really, but had had car trouble which forced him off the road.

Lassiter he said, was exactly what he was looking for - an unshaven, tobacco-spitting, drawling, grit and oil stained specimen. As they sat next to each other eating steak and eggs, Lassiter told him about his day - overheating, shifting cargo, speed traps, rancid coffee, and fucking truck stop hookers.  Yet, through all this Lassiter was a mensch, a good hardworking American.  Why not him?

He had the right credentials.  Born and raised in red-dirt Alabama, one of seven, schooling limited, aspirations high but fulfillment low, trailer nomad, doper father and alcoholic mother but with the gumption to put that all behind him and make something of himself.  He started behind the wheel of a garbage truck, worked his way to short-haul scrap metal deliveries, and finally on to serious trucking.  When the aide asked him about his education, Lassiter said, 'I can read the road signs', and that sealed the deal. 

When asked if he wanted to meet the man, the President demurred.  Some things were best left to others, and so it was that Lassiter passed easily through the vetting process and was named. 

When he opened the official letter of invitation on embossed White House stationery, special delivery, he was sure it was a scam; but when a second, registered one was pushed through the mail slot along with coupons and bills, he paid some attention - not exactly top drawer attention, for by the time he got to it, the coffee rings and stuck-on cat hairs had made portions unreadable - but he got the drift, and via the post office, Veterans Affairs, the county clerk, he realized, as implausible as the suggestion was, that he was being considered for a Washington appointment.  The letter-writer reminded him of the truck stop meeting which had gotten the White House attention. 

'We've got to clean him up', said one recruitment deputy, a young gay black man who wanted to keep a COVID-era social distance from Lassiter, but who said, 'This simply won't do' and fussily arranged for a remake.   

Now, Lassiter for all his lack of sophistication was not stupid.  'We want a white working man to be represented in the President's color wheel', he was told, and quickly understood what was up.  He would get paid for just showing up, not unlike the rest of the diverse appointments made during the President's first term; and so he sold his beater pickup and his trailer, thanked J&B Trucking, bought a final round of drinks at his local bar, and waved goodbye to Lucinda. 

 

Needless to say Lassiter lasted only through the campaign and along with everyone else in the White House was let go after Biden's defeat at the polls. He had been hauled out and given a place beside the President in Detroit, Dearborn, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo.  'I am for the working man', said the President, 'just like this one', pointing to Lassiter and giving him an embrace. 

Lassiter went back to Alabama.  J&B took him back, wrote 'The Gentleman Trucker' on the door of his cab, and sent him off to Baltimore for gypsum.  He raised his salary thanks to Lassiter's newly minted credentials, and the whole episode turned out well for all concerned.  Not for Joe Biden, of course, who lost miserably to Donald Trump, but for just about everyone else.